172 chapter four
dragging you back. The image operates—and this is how the poem fits
seamlessly into Wang’s oeuvre at large—not as something substituting
for reality, but rather in natural conjunction with the “realist” scenes
noted earlier. This happens in the oppositions of foggy London and
the driving rain on the outside, and the homeland and the soil on the
inside. The exile markers in the poem and its author’s biography turn
⊹ೳ ‘soil, clay, earth’ into an evocation of that other archetypal ex-
ile marker: еೳ ‘native soil.’ «Soil» thus derives its quiet forcefulness
from literary sophistication. That is, it does so from the suggestion of
exile’s connotations, rather than their declaration.
Bei DaoWhen avant-garde poetry from China first appeared in Western trans-
lation and scholarship in the early 1980s, Bei Dao occupied a central
position, in line with his domestic prominence. To date, he is probably
still the most widely translated modern Chinese poet, with Yang Lian
a close second. As is true for Yang, Bei Dao’s translators have con-
tributed much to the critical discourse on his work. Scholarly studies
with attention to exile in Bei Dao’s poetry include essays by Jiangjiang,
Wolfgang Kubin, Ouyang Jianghe, Michelle Yeh, Yang Xiao bin, Leo
Ou-fan Lee, Lin Xingqian, Ronald Janssen, Yiping, Yang Lihua,
Zhang Hong, Yang Siping, Zhang Zao and Tan Chee-Lay, and a
book-length monograph by Li Dian.^59 The majority find common
ground in the observation that the exile experience has spurred Bei
Dao’s development as a poet from a relatively public to a more sub-
jectivized, interiorized voice that is profoundly aware of the powers
of language beyond its “neutral” representation of historical realities.
Just like Wang Jiaxin’s, Bei Dao’s oeuvre contains both declara-
tive and suggestive moments, and they make for very different types
of poetry.^60 The declarations are especially fit for satisfying what
(^59) For Bei Dao’s individual books of poetry in Chinese and for bilingual English-
Chinese editions, including those not cited here, see Van Crevel 2008a; Bei Dao
1988 is a monolingual English-language edition. Jiangjiang 1990, Kubin 1993,
Ou yang 1993b and 1996a, Yeh 1993b and 1996b, Yang Xiaobin 1994, Lee (Leo
Ou-fan) 1995, Lin Xingqian 2001, Janssen 2002, Yang Lihua 2003, Yiping 2003,
Zhang Hong 2003: 63-106, Yang Siping 2004, Zhang Zao 2004: ch 7, Tan
Chee-Lay 2007, Li Dian 2006; other scholarship includes Malmqvist 1983,
McDougall 1985, Tay 1985, Zhuang 1993: ch 6 and Jiang Ruoshui 1997.
(^60) Cf Li Dian 2006: 39.