Bei Dao, _The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems_, ed. Eliot Weinberger

 SINCE I OFTEN mention how much I admire James Joyce, I am occasionally asked whether I have read Finnegans Wake. I don’t know whether I have, actually. I looked at every word on every page in serial left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, which means I “read” the book in some narrow sense…but did I take it in, grasp it, comprehend it, have some flickering glimmer of what was being narrated? Well, no, not so much. So I have both read and not read Finnegans Wake.

I feel that I have also both read and not read The Rose of Time. Most of the time, I would read the poem’s three or four stanzas, read it again, and read it again, and still draw a blank.

this sky unexceptional at chess

watches the sea change color

a ladder goes deep into the mirror

fingers in a school for the blind

touch the extinction of birds

     (“Another”)

Bei Dao (pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was one of a group of poets attacked by the state as “menglong,” sometimes translated “misty,” essentially meaning “obscure,” with dismissive connotation. Nonetheless, he was embraced by a broad readership in the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of generational spokesman figure. He was abroad  when Tiananmen Square happened and decided to stay abroad, but he remains widely read and revered in China.

All of which makes sense for me, I have to say, because Bob Dylan means a lot to me, and the Dylan songs that most affected me, that shaped my sensibility I would even say, are almost perfectly opaque. “Visions of Johanna” may be my favorite song; it seems to put its finger precisely on the spot. And yet do I have any idea why lines like “the back of the fish truck that loads while my conscience explodes” or “harmonicas play skeleton keys in the rain” seem so meaningful? I do not.

“Bei Dao” and “Bob Dylan” even have the same initials, in our writing system.

So I loved the book even though I did not understand much of it, since I could read “keyword my shadow /  hammers dreamworld iron / stepping to that rhythm / a lone wolf walks into” and imagine thousands in China thinking, “Damn, he nailed it again.”