Landscape over Zero (New Directions Paperbook, 831) [Paperback]

Pei-Tao (Author), Bei Dao (Author), David Hinton (Author, Translator), Yanbing Chen (Author, Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1996 | Series: New Directions Paperbook, 831

Often reported to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and recently elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bei Dao is China's pre-eminent contemporary poet. The poems in "Landscape Over Zero" reach new heights of cinematic fusion as he contemplates the fractured landscapes amongst which he has lived since his enforced exile from China in 1989. But now there is a glimmer of possibility that a new home can be gained and love renewed.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Escaping his native country after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Bei Dao currently teaches at the University of California at Davis. In his fourth collection, he continues his exploration of existential themes and political redresses in a distinctly frantic and compressed expressionistic style that is transposed onto the structure of traditional Chinese verse. In the original pictograms (which rely on vigorous nouns and verbs and forgo punctuation altogether), the poems could well be successful. But their translations in this bilingual edition they have not been fine-tuned to the nuances of English. Instead, they possess a raw and amateurish quality, as if they'd be penned by a highly emotional teenager ("gathering sobs look up/ scream out/ in their God's amnesia"). Bei Dao's own imagistic, surreal bent, however, contributes to the overall obliqueness ("hurry a lion into the cage of music/ hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse/ moving in parallel nights"). Fortunately, for patient readers, there are flashes of odd, ephemeral, stream-of-consciousness beauty ("night birds singing together/ you set smoke drifting free/ toward a place where song vanishes") that almost redeem this unexpectedly awkward work.

Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

'One of the great poets of our time' - Michael Hofmann'Bei Dao's genius and his menace consist in a seamless merging of metaphor and politics; his is a guerrilla battle fought at the level of language' - Nate Johnson, Chicago Tribune --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 103 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; First edition. edition (October 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121334X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811213349
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,541,367 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Due credit to the translators, please, October 23, 1999

By 

J.P.Seaton - See all my reviews

This review is from: Landscape over Zero (New Directions Paperbook, 831) (Paperback)

Without the brilliance of David Hinton and Yanbing Chen we wouldn't know, we couldn't know how great Bei Dao is. Bei Tao may be China's first Noble Laureate in Literature. If so he'll have these fine translators to thank for making his work so convincingly available in a major Western language.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars With the Intensity of a Star, April 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Landscape over Zero (New Directions Paperbook, 831) (Paperback)

Bei Dao's poems gleam like white dwarfs. Each poem bears the intense pressure of its own inner light. They are compressed songs, wrestling with terror and beauty, politics, metaphor, home, exile. The poems exist in that moment of being on the verge, an expectancy. They exist in that moment of waiting that can only be human hope, ready to glow despite the forces that try to thwart it.