Bei Dao

Bei Dao (Chinese北岛, Pinyin at Dǎo, real name: Zhao Zhenkai Chinese赵振 开, Pinyin Zhao Zhenkai; born August 2, 1949 in Beijing, Republic of China) is a Chinese essayist and poet.

Life

In the 1970s he began to write poetry first, and later, in 1974, also a short novel entitled waves (波动Bodong ). Consisting of some friends - - Subject Due to the political situation of the time of the Cultural Revolution, this kind of literature in secret and was a selected readership was. After the political relaxation in late 1978 founded Bei Dao along with Mang Ke芒克the literary magazine "Today" (今天" JINTIAN ") that its operation had to stop in 1980 at the urging of the government. 1985, Bei Dao guest of West Berlin festival Horizonte Festival of World Cultures ( No. 3, 1985). In 1988 he traveled to Europe, where he was stranded due to the Tiananmen massacre. Only in 2002 the return to China, he was granted again. In February 1989, Bei Dao called for the release of Wei Jingsheng in an open letter to Deng Xiaoping, who was signed by 40 leading intellectuals and unleashed a broad campaign for human rights. In 1990 the magazine " JINTIAN " in Norway was by him and other poets revitalized and has since acted as a mouthpiece for the Chinese in exile and in the country itself.

Bei Dao in particular takes for his poems an important place in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. Most of his poems express intimate and often dark emotions, describe nightmares or design richly illustrated fantasies in a modern style, which has sometimes been criticized for his " obscurity ". Bei Dao style, therefore, is from the Chinese literary criticism often called " fog seal " (朦胧诗Menglong shi, also: obscure poetry, Menglong lyric, hermetic seal ) refers. His poems are - positively formulated - " webs of unexpected images, which can be many interpretations come to mind, instead of suggesting a single, only correct for the reader ".

2005 Bei Dao received the Jeanette Schocken price.

Work

• The Book of Loss - poems from the Chinese and with an afterword by Wolfgang Kubin; Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2009 ISBN 978-3-446-23283-9
• God's Chinese Son - Essays, from the Chinese and with an afterword by Wolfgang Kubin; Weidle Verlag, Bonn 2011 ISBN 978-3-938803-37-0