An Inexhaustible Locomotive: Poems of Dissent and Repose

Alex Mormorunni reviews Bei Dao’s “Sidetracks” and Eliot Weinberger's “The Life of Tu Fu.”

By Alex MormorunniMarch 3, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Poetry

BEI DAO (北岛) is the nom de plume of Zhao Zhenkai, a Chinese poet-dissident. In the 1970s and ’80s, Bei Dao’s twin passions for political activism and the written word were conjoined in collections of politically ardent poetry. Then, each of these passions was marred by personal tragedy: political exile from China, and then a debilitating stroke that robbed him of his lyric faculties and led to a 12-year hiatus from publishing poetry. The hiatus ended in 2022 with the publication of his magnum opus, a long poem of 34 cantos, which Jeffrey Yang translated into English under the title Sidetracks, published last May. The retrospective stability of Bei’s later life has allowed him to reflect on a tumultuous lifetime of loss and oppression and distill these private memories into his best work.

Bei Dao was born, unsuitably given his later political disposition, in 1949, the year that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established. In 1978, Bei co-founded the underground literary publication Jintian (“Today”) with fellow poet Mang Ke (芒克). Bei Dao’s most famous poem “回答” (“The Answer”), which addressed the 1976 Tiananmen Square incident, was published in Jintian’s first issue. It gained notoriety after it was pasted upon the politically significant Democracy Wall of Xidan (西单民主墙). Jintian was needled relentlessly by CCP censors throughout its publication run and eventually banned for subversiveness. The censorship efforts were so extensive that Bei was forced to pen his only novella, “Waves” (1985; English translation, 1989), in secrecy, in a darkroom under the pretense of developing photos. Despite the Party’s censorship, Bei’s poetry and prose played an instrumental role in galvanizing the movement that culminated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

When the violence at Tiananmen unfolded, Bei was in Berlin at a literary conference. The inflammatory nature of his previous work led the CCP to bar Bei from returning to China. Bei remained prolific in exile, publishing five poetry books in the 11 years following Tiananmen: Old Snow (1991), Forms of Distance (1994), Landscape over Zero (1995), At the Sky’s Edge: Poems 1991–1996 (2001), and Unlock (2000).

Bei was ultimately granted permission to return to China in 2006, but he suffered a debilitating stroke while vacationing on a Hong Kong beach with his family. His capacity for language was shattered. Indomitably an artist, Bei began experimenting with visual art while recovering in the hospital. In an essay for The Paris Review, Sidetracks translator Yang describes how painting transferred Bei’s “lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images.” Bei pursued his new art forcefully. The poet’s paintings pattern wide white canvases with small black circles. These works resemble monochromatic versions of Yayoi Kusama paintings, dots on a die, or, given their painter’s condition, indecipherable characters on a page.

Sidetracks marks Bei’s return to his original craft. It is a long poem, different from but as moving as his work of decades past. It is unmistakably a product of reminiscence (Bei is now 75) and a search for the spiritual importance of art, which became a focus for Bei as his traditional avenue of expression was shuttered following his stroke.

In reading Sidetracks, one wonders about the author’s emotional state. He was exiled for allegedly fomenting the protests that climaxed in the largest massacre in recent Chinese history. The protests were justified, and the blood was on the CCP’s hands. Still, Bei’s ink was all over Tiananmen. Doubtless, being a lyrical catalyst for the bloodshed in Beijing is a difficult burden to carry. Bei’s struggle to grapple with Tiananmen runs through Sidetracks as a refrain:

     show us the way     to learn how to grieve in revelry
     and in grief to learn how to sing silently     silently
     on the way out of the square looking back
     the tide laps the night into a giant wave

Given his physical setback and the emotional toll of galvanizing, at least in part, a protest that led to a massacre, one might wonder why Bei continued to write poetry. But turn the coin: in grappling with his personal burdens, how could he not?

Bei is considered a leader among China’s “Misty Poets,” a label derived from their vague and often inscrutable style. Explaining the group’s aesthetic approach, Chinese literary giant Lu Xun said, “By definition, creation is sociable. Yet it can be satisfied with merely one single reader: an old friend, a lover.” The solipsistic references that dot Bei’s poetry, sure to be understood by few but his old friends and lovers, make clear that poetry is, for him, largely an individual pursuit. Fortunately, Sidetracks is appended with a notes section that helps readers demystify the poems. The clearly individual intent of his art is seemingly at odds with his reputation for being a dissident.

Bei has historically bristled at the “political poet” label. The inspiration for his poetry is often political, as he makes clear in Sidetracks: “revolt gives poetry an inexhaustible locomotive.” But form is more important than content to Bei; he is a poet first and a dissident second. Though his work has had a notable political impact, his self-perception doesn’t accord with the common perception that has resulted from this impact. Given this fact, it is unsurprising that he has stated a dislike of his commodification by the West as an exemplar of anticommunist dissidence.

Sidetracks recounts the years of Bei’s life immediately preceding his exile and the many years that followed it. Like Joyce in exile, Bei’s muse remains his homeland. The poem is a portrait of a period in the artist’s life, but Bei’s is a life that revolves around Chinese politics. While luminous explorations of the nature of art dot Sidetracks, most of the work peers homeward, examining the fallout of Tiananmen and the nature of oppression and resistance in exile. Consequentially, while Sidetracks is an aesthetic triumph, it is also a deeply political autobiography.

In Sidetracks, Bei’s lyric descriptions of political repression are similar in structure and tone to his pre-exile work, and their relevance to contemporary politics remains. This is unsurprising because, as Bei writes in Sidetracks XXIV (quoting Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish), “on the matter of freedom / the pace of poets and politicians are not the same.” These familiar tracts provide the best point of comparison with Bei’s earlier work. In many respects, they have become more lucid with exile and age.

Before his exile, Bei worked closely with other misty poet-dissidents, such as Shu Ting (舒婷), Duo Duo (多多), and Yang Lian (杨炼). This cluster of masters is only a recent shelf in a poet-dissident tradition, whose substrate stretches millennia into the Chinese past. Tu Fu (杜甫, in pinyin Dù Fǔ) is among the most influential of this class of poets, and his ancient poetry remains relevant to modern China. Perhaps this is why Bei’s longtime translator, the emphatically political author Eliot Weinberger, selected Tu as the subject for his most recent work.

Last year, Weinberger published The Life of Tu Fu, a collection of 58 poems. While Weinberger is the author of these poems, they all assume the perspective of the legendary Tang dynasty poet. Each poem follows the next temporally, the collection spanning Tu Fu’s life to form a fictionalized autobiography in verse. Weinberger is renowned for his novella-length literary tracts on geographically eclectic topics. He has written artful studies of traditional Mexican crafts, the Prophet Muhammad, and American and Chinese poetry. PEN fittingly described Weinberger as a “Post-National Writer.”

The Life of Tu Fu makes many direct references to Tu Fu poems—for instance, Weinberger’s verse that reads “She knows he won’t come back from the army, but patches the clothes he left just in case” is a thinly veiled allusion to Tu Fu’s “Pounding the Clothes”: “You won’t return from the front. / I clean the laundry stone in autumn.”

Songwriter Harlan Howard described country music as “three chords and the truth,” and Weinberger’s poems present their themes with a similar simplicity of structure and message. Weinberger demonstrates an incredible command of rhythm. His poems often build up nicely to the sharp impact of a well-placed short sentence, delivering his truths. The overarching themes in the collection are those of Tu Fu’s original poetry: the bliss of nature, and the pains of war. When these themes are done well, Weinberger is brilliant:

     The war goes on: I live among deer
     I sit out in the moonlight and moonlight shines on my knees.
     I sit out even when it rains.

     I thought of the sage Wang Hui-chih who was appointed to the Ministry 
     of Mounts. Asked what his duties were, he said he did not know, but 
     people were always bringing him horses. Asked how many horses, he said 
     a sage doesn’t think about horses.

The narrator speaks with a muted, distant voice throughout the collection as if recounting the news of the world through 10 feet of water. As Weinberger suggests in Poem 44, this melancholy tone derives from the narrator’s emotional suppression:

     The only people I meet are people I’ve never known.

     I thought of Chuang Tzu: “Be careful not to disturb the human mind.”

     You’ll weep for reasons other than the war.

Here, Weinberger recreates the aloofness of the sage that defines the voice of the original Tu Fu. This voice becomes a device to strengthen Weinberger’s message against war; the narrator hesitates to speak too deeply about the conflict surrounding him, as though the topic stings to touch. The reader feels the narrator is pained by the violence around him, despite this never being made explicit. Communicating the emotional challenges of wartime through the narrator’s tone is a brilliant and subtle device. Unfortunately, not all aspects of the work are approached this deftly.

Decreasing subtlety often attends advancing age in artists. One may have expected that age, like the sun as the day progresses, would have dissipated Bei’s mist, making his lines increasingly clear. It has not. For Weinberger (also in his mid-seventies), however, it appears to have done so. Aside from his usage of the narrator’s tone to carry his theme, most of The Life of Tu Fu is quite explicit. In some places, this is nice; Weinberger’s clear themes pare away any frills and leave us with his heart’s core. In others, Weinberger emphasizes his themes at the expense of art. For example, Poem 30 proselytizes so blatantly that it teeters on corniness: “Parrots are more intelligent than people: they know they’re in a cage. // Better to go back to sleep.”

Sidetracks and The Life of Tu Fu were both published by New Directions, the first US publisher of many great foreign names (e.g., Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, W. G. Sebald), and Weinberger has long served among the company’s translators. New Directions has a knack for spotting authors who, when well translated, become beloved in the United States. Though Weinberger and others have historically translated Bei well, he has not, somewhat surprisingly, seen widespread popularity in the States. If there is one work that could secure him the acclaim he has long been due, it is undoubtedly Sidetracks.

Bei Dao and Eliot Weinberger share more than a publishing house. Both also overlap significantly in the poetic traditions that inspire them. Bei Dao writes, “I am the jailer who guards over my whole life / letting the key’s fleet steed pass through the keyhole of light.” This is a reference to a classic work of Chinese literature that Weinberger cites as well: “Life’s so short, said Chuang Tzu, it’s like watching a white colt run by through a crack in a fence.” While the poems of Weinberger and Bei are both practices in self-reflection, each poet also unmistakably delivers a political message and focuses seriously on victims of political violence. Bei carries this out beautifully in Sidetracks III:

     youth shatters like ancient porcelain
     freedom tears off the old bandage
     the heart is an engine of madness
     roars turn into hushed murmurs
     military marches     without borders

Given the artists’ advanced age, it is perhaps unsurprising that both The Life of Tu Fu and Sidetracks address aging explicitly. Weinberger, through Tu Fu, writes: “The body grows weaker, but gazing at the mountains remains the same.” Simple appreciations for the natural world such as this are found in both Weinberger’s and Bei’s reflections on aging. In these reflections, each poet also searches for the reasons why they write. Both appear to conclude that their work is essential to their impact on the world and intertwined with how they experience it. From Weinberger: “I write poems about what I see, for things pass so quickly.” Bei, who toiled his way back to writing from the brink of death, pens a line with a similar message in Sidetracks XXII. This he delivers in his staccato voice as if it were a message through a wire: “shut diary is a gravestone.”

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Editor’s note: The article originally stated that “回答” (“The Answer”) was penned in response to the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, rather than the 1976 Tiananmen Square incident.