Midnight's Gate: Essays - Softcover

Dao, Bei; Fryslie, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811215849 ISBN 13: 9780811215848

Publisher: New Directions, 2005

Synopsis

Twenty essays about Bei Dao's life in exile since Tiananmen Square."Knowledge of death is the only key that can open midnight's gate."Bei Dao Bei Dao has gained international acclaim over the last decade for his haunting interior poetic landscapes; his poetry is translated and published in some twenty-five languages around the world. Now, in Midnight's Gate, Bei Dao redefines the essay form with the same elliptical precision of his poetry, but with an openness and humor that complements the complexity of his poems. The twenty essays of Midnight's Gate form a travelogue of a poet who has lived in some seven countries since his exile from China in 1989. The work carries us from Palestine to Sacramento. At one point we are led into a basement in Paris for a production of Gorky's Lower Depths, the next moment we are in the mountains of China where Bei Dao worked for eleven years as a concrete mixer and ironworker. The subjective experience deepens and multiplies in these essays, filled with the stories of ordinary Chinese immigrants, as well as those of literary, artistic, and political figures. And it all coheres with a poet's observations, meditations, and memories.

About this title

About the Author:

Bei Dao, born in Beijing in 1949, has traveled and lectured around the world. He has received numerous international awards for his poetry, and is an honorary member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Bei Dao, now a U.S. citizen, is currently Professor of Humanities in the Center for East Asian Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Christopher Mattison has translated and edited numerous works from Russian and Chinese to English. In 2010 he moved to Hong Kong where he is the Director of the Sustainability of Memory and Artifacts (SOMA) Project at City University of Hong Kong.

From Publishers Weekly:

The writings in this volume by the internationally known Chinese dissident poet are called "essays," but read more like amalgamations after the fact of diary entries sorted by subject. They cover his many travels, from his native China—where he toiled as a concrete worker and iron mixer—to the California home he later inhabited and far-flung poetry conferences he has attended over the years. The pieces seem like the haphazardly arranged memories of a rootless man. And while most seem to have sprung somewhere in the distant past from a consideration of people who have crossed paths with the author over the course of his career, the book's title is taken from the most anomalous piece, which passionately discusses a trip he took as a member of a delegation of the International Parliament of Writers to visit an embattled Palestinian writer and his land. Chinese prose is very different in tenor and organizing principles than English, and translations can end up rather flat, so it's hard to say whether the weaknesses of this volume stem from the original composition or its translation. While it's occasionally insightful and contains a moment or two of sly wit, the prose remains strangely affectless and so completely unaffecting. (May 27)
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0811215849
• ISBN 13: 9780811215848
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 255
• Editor: Mattison Christopher