Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Sinica Leidensia, 86)

174 chapter four

«Local Accent» is a conspicuously constructed text. The original carries
its mechanical repetition of the first-person singular pronoun through
to the last of lines 1-3-5-7-9, and doesn’t have I in line 10—where
the translation cannot do without it. A word-by-word translation of
lines 9-10 reads I at the phone line’s other end / have now heard my fear. If
unzipped, the poem’s two interlocking sequences in lines 1-3-5-7 and
2-4-6-8 fail to connect:

I speak Chinese to the mirror a park has its own winter

I put music on in winter there are no flies

I make coffee, at my leisure flies don’t know what your homeland is

I add some sugar your homeland is your local accent

Launched by the exile marker of speaking Chinese to the mirror, the
first sequence acquires meaning beyond the inane description of a cozy
household scene only by alternation and contrast with the second. For
all the poem’s ingenuity—the repetition of I, for instance, may well be
read as purposefully awkward—one wonders whether its effect is not
diminished when the tension is explicitly resolved in lines 9-10, as the
local accent takes center stage: at the other end of the phone line / I can hear
my fear.
Something similar happens in the equally oft-quoted «He opens his
third eye....» (Ҫⴕᓔ㄀ϝাⴐ⴯), written around the same time as
«Local Accent», soon after June Fourth.^63 The first two stanzas con-
tain vintage Bei Dao imagery, strong enough to carry the none too
concrete notion of freedom, which the poem calls the golden lid on
one’s coffin, sealing the image of a he that is fixed in place aboard a
ship, in an underwater cabin, like ballast. The poem ends on a solemn
one-line stanza that reads

the word’s exile has begun

Not only has the compound word ⌕ѵ, meaning ‘(go into) exile’ or
more literally ‘wander in escape,’ acquired somber connotations over
time, the character ѵ ‘flee into hiding, die, perish’ by itself posits a
terrible vision of exile.^64 While the potential of a new beginning also
lends the ending to the poem a defiant tone, its declarative, explana-

(^63) Bei Dao 1991: 24, 2003a: 106, 2003b: 160. Cited in Kubin 1993, Lee (Leo
Ou-fan) 1995, Zhang Zao 1999 and 2004, Lin Xingqian 2001, Song Lin 2002, Yi-
ping 2003, Yang Siping 2004, Li Dian 2006 and Tang Xiaodu 2006.
(^64) Lee (Leo Ou-fan) 1991: 212-213.