Road to East Asia

Every October, Bei Dao is inundated with inquiries, asking if he is going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature that year. Among his admirers is Goran Malmqvist of the Swedish Academy, which administers the prize. Recently, the American Academy of Arts and Letters elected Bei Dao an honorary fellow. He is, by most accounts, China's leading writer today, whose poems have been translated into English, German, Swedish, and other languages. Meanwhile, there has been a rigorous debate among sinologists on whether his work lacks Chineseness and if it is only "translatable world poetry," since the publication of Harvard professor Stephen Owen's review of The August Sleepwalker (The New Republic, Nov., 19, 1990).

Angus Cleghorn, a Canadian "Americanist" who does not read Chinese, cannot participate in this debate. He is a test reader of Bei Dao, in the context of the modernism to which he has been compared. "Bei Dao's modernism, especially the Imagist qualities, makes the poems seem monumental while their sparseness makes them seem like leaves in the wind," says Cleghorn. "You want to hang on to them, but they do flutter." At times, they are reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, on whom he wrote his doctoral thesis at Simon Fraser University. "While Stevens freely freshens life, Bei Dao cherishes new moments, but they are minor chords tinged with sadness," he says. "There is no comedian gonging a major C." In a conversation with Road to East Asia, Cleghorn offers his insights into Bei Dao's most recent poetry collection, Landscape over Zero*. Highlights:

Wai: What are your responses to the major recurring images in Landscape over Zero?

Cleghorn: The recurring images form a code by which I interpret Bei Dao's poetry. This code may not resemble the author's intention. Each poem is a Landscape over Zero, and I take zero to be the blank page over which poetry is written, and the reader interprets.

So, getting to the images, I notice flames, wind, flight, and blossoms which function romantically as lyrical desire, irrepressible change, the search for novelty, and miraculous beauty. These images must contend with time and history. The poetry's protagonists often face mirrors, which might reflect their static selves, or the past as a mirror which we must not repeat, yet we do. Roads figure typically, although they appear more as records of the past than paths to utopia. Death, as in Stevens, is the contrast at the end of the road which makes beauty, life and poetry bountiful. In "Old Places," "death's always on the other side / watching the painting," which is the landscape over zero.

Wai: Yes, zero is "the blank page over which poetry is written, and the reader interprets." Reading a poem is similar to the interaction between human vision and the kaleidoscopic world. The question is whether the reader is, to use an expression from Richard Wilbur, a "giver of due regard,"1 perceiving the hidden truth underlying the elusive language. Anyone who thinks he or she has the definitive answer to anything is like Wilbur's SS Officer with a fixed vision.

Cleghorn:I couldn't agree more. Hidden truth belongs to New Criticism. And since the world, vision, poetry, and opinion are kaleidoscopic (as good as any metaphor), who's to claim the truth. Stevens (in "Life on a Battleship," "Prologues to what is Possible," and "The Sail of Ulysses") often depicts ship captains, like Wilbur's SS Officer, as egomaniacal truth claimers, violent in their quests to consume the world into their narrow visions.

Wai:In the original Chinese version, there is the word "degrees" attached to zero, i.e. the freezing point. Does the word "degrees" in any way change your interpretation of the poems? The titular poem reminds me of the opening lines in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland: "April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/memory and desire . . . ."2 Zero also recalls the blankness in Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" and chaos in his "The Idea of Order at Key West." If the perceiver does not add himself to barren reality or sees "Nothing that is not there," then all he sees is "the nothing that is."3 With "a pen blossoming in lost hope," Bei Dao adds himself to the blankness.

Cleghorn: I'd thought of zero degrees, forgetting to mention it. I'm glad you bring up the Chinese appendage because Bei Dao's landscapes add heat to zero just as they posit presence over nothingness (showing awareness of linguistic function, the split sign). The poems of Eliot and Stevens perform this pattern, one that is often tied to Eastern religions.

Wai:Yes, intellectually, I share your views. Emotionally, however, Landscape over Zero evokes immediately two lines (translated into four lines in English by me) from a Chinese classic that has been deeply etched in my psyche:




At the end of mountains and rivers
No path ahead
Amidst willowy shadows and floral light
Another hamlet comes into view

Images of "light," "darkness," and "blossom" recur throughout Landscape over Zero. To me, a bicultural reader, it is quintessentially Chinese and universally human. However, I appreciate your sensitive interpretation of the images. I would say, "bull's eye."

Cleghorn: Perhaps some of the appeal of Bei Dao's poetry derives from the "quintessentially Chinese and universally human" quality you mention. Pound certainly transposed that essence, and we just talked about Stevens and Eliot borrowing from the East too. Of course we're accustomed to pushing our "essential" and "appropriative" buttons; I suppose Bei Dao offers, rather than borrows, a cross-cultural poetry.

Wai: Stevens says that poetry provides "a freshening of life."4 It is this "freshening" experience, I think, the poet in Landscape over Zero, is looking for--both personally and poetically, e.g. diving down deep into the sea at midday.

Cleghorn: Yes, Bei Dao is committed to the challenge of the new. His poems depict numerous small novelties, but they tend to be curbed by the curse of time; bells ominously intone fatal history. While Stevens freely freshens life, Bei Dao cherishes new moments, but they are minor chords tinged with sadness; there is no comedian gonging a major C. Automatically, I think of China's repression of freedom as compared to the U.S. Although I don't often see politics inscribed in Bei Dao's poetry, his "Creation" ends with: "someone the country's discharged / passes through a stifling-hot midday nap / reaches a beach, dives down deep." The poet may be referring to his exile, his California beach, and then the depths of his dream world, which must contain his past. So I suppose I'm saying that "a freshening of life" often occurs in Bei Dao's poetry, but these moments are minor consolations that will not add up to the greater change that is necessary.

Wai: Other parallels?

Cleghorn: Bei Dao and Stevens use the wind as an uncontrollable force of change, yet a force which unites the lands it rushes over. "This Day," by Bei Dao, is a great poem. Stevens would agree with the first line because wind, like love, like metaphor traverses between things, covers the landscape, and counts past zero. The second line sounds especially like Stevens: "wind knows what love is/the summer day flashing royal colors . . . ." As wind blows over summer colors, it is change itself, and as such it carries fate: "the year's implications" are marked by the wounds of time.

As with Stevens, Bei Dao occasionally includes people in crowds (often as sheep). Like Stevens, Bei Dao displays tenderness towards the public, who are herded by larger forces. In Stevens' "A Duck for Dinner" (in Owl's Clover) citizens stroll through a park and "keep to the paths of the skeleton architect" who designed the park. Bei Dao's "This Day" continues with "someone bends toward a piano / someone carries a ladder past /sleepiness has been postponed a few minutes . . . ."

Human actions appear to be vulnerable. The piano reminds me of ephebe's rented piano in Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," which I think recalls T.S. Eliot's pianos, which often accompany domestic sterility. Stevens' ephebe, in what I see as a parody of Eliot's protagonists, looks from an "attic window" with a "rented piano," clutching the corner of his pillow with a "writhing, dumb,/ Yet voluble dumb violence (CP 384). This Eliot-like protagonist, as with Bei Dao's, is not far from sleep. His impotency breeds violence from "the enemy within," as in Bei Dao's "This Day."

Wai:Why do you take pleasure in identifying these parallels?

Cleghorn: I take pleasure in observing commonalities between poets, seeing them discover and take similar test drives. I prefer to read poetry that develops familiar epistemologies in its own language and style, as opposed to the scholastic method of colliding allusions. Which is why Four Quartets is a much better poem than The Wasteland.

Wai: In the poem "February," Bei Dao writes: "You need a form" to accommodate the imaginative power generated by "flames pale/leaping like leopards towards stars." The images remind me of Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar": "The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild" (CP 7).

Cleghorn: Stevens' jar colonizes the landscape of Tennessee, and so that poem asserts the danger inherent to form.

Wai:Yes, but the struggle between art and reality gives "motive for metaphor."

Cleghorn: In Dispatches, Thomas Herr compared "Anecdote of the Jar" to American military domination in Vietnam.

Bei Dao, after the words you quoted, says "in the cold morning / an awakened bird / comes closer to truth . . . ." Compare that with Stevens' "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself": "the scrawny cry" in March, which "Seemed like a sound in his mind" and "A new knowledge of reality," became "part of the colossal sun" (CP 534). Both poets acknowledge gaining truth from outside, which offers the forms that shape their poetically transformed worlds. In this sense, poetic form is the landscape over zero, the cognitive shape we make of language. I don't think form is dictated by typography, by the mobile armies of characters for which Pound and Williams are known. Their imprints reinvented the form of the poetic line as a unit of rhythm, but I think the form of poetry is an accumulation of images leading to a sense of a poet's landscapes.

In "Progress," Bei Dao writes: "the heavy rains of form change stone /into utter ruins." Static form, even in sculpture, decays through time. The poet's demarcations in time are shaped by readers: the children who ascribe form by reading between the lines. "I construct these our times / children using a password / penetrate the book's defenses."

Stevens' "A Postcard from a Volcano" offers a similar scenario: Children,/ Still weaving budded aureoles,/ Will speak our speech and never know, / Will say of the mansion that it seems / As if he that lived there left behind / A spirit storming in blank walls, / A dirty house in a gutted world, / A tatter of shadows peaked to white, / Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun" (CP 159).

Wai: In "The Answer,"5 an earlier poem, Bei Dao repeats the expression "I don't believe" a number of times. Stevens' response would have been, as he had written in one of his letters, "It is not possible to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else."6 I think such a belief in "something else" is what you call "potent romanticism."7 It would be good if you could select examples from different poems to illustrate your observations of Bei Dao's potent romanticism or lack of it.

Cleghorn: I've touched on Bei Dao's potent romanticism as a recurring minor note. He also resembles large R Romantics in his larger struggle to change history, which is curbed by a gloomy fatalism. His proclamation "before the judgement" in "The Answer" sounds defiantly French--the rebellious stance of Baudelaire. As with Baudelaire, the poet is trying to goad the "hyprocrite lecteur" into responding. Bei Dao's skepticism compels readers to question blue sky and thunder; we have to rethink them as "first ideas," Stevens would say. Notice Bei Dao's last two lines of his list of what he does not believe: "I don't believe that dreams are false/I don't believe that death has no revenge." They are double negatives, thereby cancelling each statement out, and perhaps creating an irony for the whole poem. This irony--the possibility of truth and its opposite -- is potent from the beginning of the poem: the "paper, rope, and shadow" are raw materials that can be interpreted as parts of writing. Baudelaire's Symboliste inheritor, Mallarme, has a similar poem, "Salut," which lists "solitude, reef, star" as markers in the writing process. All the elements listed in these poems must be believed for the poem to work. Yet Mallarme and Bei Dao point out that they are signifiers--the poet's concoctions- -and so those of us involved in poetry constantly traverse the boundary between nothingness and belief: the Landscape over Zero. In "As Far As I Know," we find that "there's an abyss beneath every word."

Wai: Of course, Bei Dao's poems are laced with the sentiments of an exile trying to understand pages of Chinese history that feature tyranny and dislocations. How does the poet blend these sentiments into his "potent romanticism"? Bei Dao's poetry, and so is Stevens', is definitely different from Sylvia Plath's, in Wilbur's words, "brilliant negative" ("Cottage Street, 1953," 68).

Cleghorn: I can't find Chinese history in the poems, perhaps because of my limited knowledge of it, perhaps because Bei Dao chiefly offers a vague presence of something weighty behind him. I do get a sense of humanity's inability to learn from history due to the fires of emotion. Potent romanticism, or poetry that works, does so because it engages the reader's imagination. Bei Dao demands that we use metaphorical linkage between almost every line. He is difficult at first, and the lack of punctuation forces us to decide where to break and where to link lines. Sylvia Plath leaves little room for the reader, and so the force of her work makes for a visceral claustrophobia, which is nonetheless romantic because of her heroic drama.

Wai: Does Bei Dao's disjunctive poetics resemble Ezra Pound's "luminous details" and T.S. Eliot's "objective correlatives"?

Cleghorn: Yes Bei Dao has something of Pound's luminosity, and of Pound's demand that we link the lines. But Bei Dao mostly uses universal images rather than historical details. Eliot's objective correlatives are, as I recall, images which provide an objective account of subjective experience. Eliot's more precise than Bei Dao, but that might be because I'm so accustomed to Eliot's western malaise.

Wai: Some Chinese poets have accused the likes of Bei Dao of concocting poetry in the same manner as a pharmacist fills a prescription in a Chinese drug store: picking different kinds herbs from different medicinal drawers and then mixing them together; it is a recipe for all seasons. That reminds me of Robert Frost, who calls Stevens a "bric- a-brac" poet.8 To what extent are these descriptions of Stevens and Bei Dao valid?

Cleghorn: Naturalists such as Frost present the world organically, as if poetry's design should mirror the natural world. With postmodernism and modernism, we have become aware of the artist's materials in composition. I don't know where Bei Dao gets all of his materials, but he certainly seems in control of them.

Wai: Well, Wilbur asks his "makeshift God" of the "opulent bric-a-brac earth to damn" the eyes of the SS Officer, for they scorched His creation. ("On the Eyes of an SS Officer," 348). Writers, at their best, can only imitate the archetypal act of creation.

Cleghorn: Yes, I partially answered this above with reference to Stevens' captains. Wilbur's request was answered through Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses.

Wai: What is the form that emerges from the montage of disparate images in Bei Dao's poems? I think the last line/stanza of each poem always kicks it together.

Cleghorn: Yes, disjunction tends to be played against coherence. I notice two related formal directions. First, the gains we make, no matter how small, when there is so much loss. Second, the challenge of the new versus the repetition of mirrors.

In Bei Dao's "Insomnia," the poet must get to the root of his desire before he can "unfold ethical landscapes." This is the objective of this volume. "As Far as I know" ends "searching out the story's detonation/ fuse." The poem "Story" states: "I follow the main plot / to where an author's conception began." Lyrical poets such as Bei Dao and Stevens see stories (or epics) as history's official versions of events. Because epics become official tales of culture, they lock human desire in paradigms. Lyrical poets, therefore, look for "The Motive for Metaphor," where "conception began" and where the fuse is lit.

Bei Dao speaks of the lyrical poet's search for "ethical landscapes" in "Borrowing a Direction," which also reflects the montage style. He still doesn't know what he's searching for: "the drunk passes through his echoes layer by layer." The lyrical quest is somehow pure even if it's borrowed, so pure in fact that the speaker knows that "the heart's a watchdog"; it can check "lyric's essence" by enforcing detrimental emotions, motives. While the heart can taint the lyric from the inside, accidents and wide open skies are two external factors that can change us; these merge in the "lightning" that the poet must face.

Wai: Maghiel van Crevel in his interview with me pointed out the fallacies of Stephen Owen's review of The August Sleepwalker. Your responses? Gary Snyder in his "foreword" to Abandoned Wine says, " . . . we are all dancing in and out of each other's dark and light. I suggest that we (late twentieth century cultural types of all backgrounds) join this performance without fear, and jettison worn categories and judgments, 'modern' and 'postmodern' or whutebba . . . ."9 What is your response to Owen's opinions, which have triggered off such a rigorous debate among the sinologists in this decade?

Cleghorn: Owen is critical of Bei Dao's intention as an international poet who writes for translation. I have no problems with that intention, if it's true. What bothers me about Owen's article is that he claims that Bei Dao has not earned the right to use certain words and phrases with authority. Owen mentions how great it is when a Western writer distills his intellect into crystal simplicity, but says Bei Dao has not earned that right yet--how dare Owen say that! Is he, the Harvard professor, the gatekeeper of English literature? No wonder people don't like intellectuals. Van Crevel noticed Owen's distressing sense of ownership too.

Wai: Richard Wilbur says writers belong to the timeless Republic of Letters. Nationality is irrelevant. After all, the Imagist movement was partly inspired by the Japanese haiku and Taoism in China. Aren't the image-based poems of the Misty poets inspired, in part at least, by their own heritage? Can you detect any Chineseness or alien-ness in Bei Dao's works?

Cleghorn: The clean minimal style of Bei Dao's poetry is something that I recognize from Pound's haiku translations, and Imagism in general. As far as Chinese alien- ness, the sparse connections between lines could be a result of translation, but I would have to know how to read Chinese to properly answer this question. I would like to read a review of Bei Dao's work by someone familiar with Chinese culture.

Wai: "A writer should always be in exile," Chinese Australian novelist says. "It will become increasingly obvious that exile, hybridity, and immigration will be the preeminent forms of cultural experience and expression in the next century. Stay- at-home nationalists will be pretty much outmoded." Do you agree with him? A professor says American literature can be put under one umbrella: "Americans cannot go home." He insists that Huck Finn, rather than Tom Sawyer, is the archetypal American hero. Commets?

Cleghorn: It's a lot easier to be away from somewhere and write about it. Look at Joyce. However, I admire writers who can write about where they live and make it relevant to the rest of the world. I suppose that's local writing. As for nationalists, I'm not interested in nationalist causes because they over-generalize and needlessly stir up blood in near racist ways. Canadian literary nationalism looks silly now. Our writers have been very successful in recent years without nationalism. It doesn't matter whether that takes the form of hybrid, immigrant, or traditional culture. Why outmode anybody? Tastes change.

Wai: According to Castro, "Bei Dao traverses the Modernistic canvas without compromising his honesty." Do you agree?

Cleghorn: Honesty? I'd have to know the fellow. Bei Dao's modernism, especially the Imagist qualities, makes the poems seem monumental, while their sparseness makes them seem like leaves in the wind. You want to hang on to them, but they do flutter. I wonder whether they are tantalizing because of their cross-cultural liquidity. Perhaps people cherish their cleanness in contrast to the horror of Tiananmen and difficult human rights issues. I find it odd that he is so esteemed, yet I can't find a volume of his poems in Toronto bookstores.

Wai: His books do not stay on the shelves at Robarts, though (the biggest library at the University of Toronto). Each time I want to borrow them, I have to put either a hold on the books or request a search for them. Currently The August Sleepwalker is classified as "missing" after a thorough search had been made.

Cleghorn: I returned that volume roughly three weeks ago. When I keyed in Landscape over Zero, it was designated missing.

Wai: Once Richard Wilbur's name popped up on the television game show Jeopardy. What impressed Wilbur was that "the contestant recognized who I was" (Time, May 9, 1988). Perhaps game show hosts and publishers could have worked harder to promote the public's interest in poetry. I had to order Wilbur's Collected and New Poems directly from the publisher. It was not and does not seem to be available in the bookstores, either.

Cleghorn: We could survey the number of withdrawals for certain books of poetry. It's obvious that they don't sell enough. However, Wilbur is an esteemed poet. Fans of poetry heap praise on beloved poets; they are read by a small audience. I wonder how small it is? Poetry seems to be gaining popularity: spoken word, hip-hop music.

Wai: From time to time, American poet laureate Robert Pinsky reads poetry on television (NewsHour with Jim Lehrer). On July 1, he selected two poems, in Lehrer's words, "to commemorate President Clinton's visit to China." They were "Ballad of the Old Cypress," by the legendary poet Du Fu, and "Vesuvius Volcano," a student poem posted on the wall in Tiananmen Square during the 1989 pro-democracy movement. I was touched. The transcript of both poems is available at this address:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poems/july-dec98/pinsky_7-1.html

Cleghorn: The city of Toronto has posted some poems in the subway; what a great idea! For once, commuters are being asked to think instead of buy. I think most people dig poetry, but that it is taught painfully. I don't know what some teachers do to it, but my students at Centennial come to class either craving it, or fearing it. I enjoy the challenge of easing these fears. It's only language at its most potent after all!

Notes

*Bei Dao. Landscape over Zero. Translated by David Hinton with Yanbing Chen. New York: New Directions, 1996. All quotations from Bei Dao's poems, except "The Answer," are from this edition.

1. Richard Wilbur, "The Eye," New and Collected Poems (San Diego: Harcourt, 1988) 57. Subsequent quotations from Wilbur's poems are from this edition. Page numbers and titles of the poems will be given within the text.

2. T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland," in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair (New York: W.W. Norton & Compnay, Inc., 1973) 459.

3. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. (New York: Vintage, 1982) 10. Subsequent quotations from Stevens' poems are from this edition. Page numbers will be given within the text.

4. Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited Holly Stevens (New York, 1966) 293.

5. Bei Dao, "The Answer," in The August Sleepwalker, translated by Bonnie S. McDougall (London: Anvil Press, 1988) 33.

6. Ibid., 370.

7. Angus Cleghorn, "Questioning the Composition of Romance in 'The Idea of Order at Key West,'" The Wallace Stevens Journal 22.1 (Spring 1998): 23-38.

8. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) 666.

9. Abandoned Wine: Chinese Writing, Today II, edited by Henry Y.H. Zhao and John Cayley (London: The WellSweep Press, 1996) 6.



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Editors and Writers: Jessica Martin, Brenda Lo, Kevin Hodgson,
Julie Shim, Shelly-Ann Gunness, Derrick Choy, Daniel Sun,
Hilaneh Mahmoudi, Megan Donnelly, Benjamin Bacola, Neena Gill
Founding editor: Isabella Wai
Answers Copyright © 1998 by Angus Cleghorn Introduction, questions, comments Copyright © 1998 by Isabella Wai

References to this document should be attributed to the appropriate author and fully documented.

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