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Poet of daily life, Bai Hua comes close to the masters of the Song dynasty who, like him, found poetry everywhere. Within small things he traces before our eyes, a low voice sings — a voice that speaks of what good poetry brings: truth. After the megalomania of the twentieth century in countries like Germany, the Soviet Union and China, poetry has become the only haven for truth. Truth does not lie or sell, and neither does poetry. Such truth had to be learned and expressed through bitter years of silence; Rilke is a good example of such honest writing, and Bal Hua as well. China’s hope lies here, nowhere else.
—Wolfgang Kubin
Subtle and compelling, Bai Hua is among the best in contemporary Chinese poetry.
—David Der-wei Wang
In pacing and imagery Bai Hua’s poems are meditations on the acceleration and slowing of time as it is lived, and as the poet experiences time being measured out in wild particularities; the particulars arise in the poems like stresses in a line of an incantation.
One of the greatest pleasures of Wind Says is SzeLorrain’s consistent sensitivity to the consonant and liquid transitions between spoken phonemes in Chinese and in English, so the English words seem to resound the sensual texture of the original’s musicaliry. As a fine poet in her own right, her skillful attention to the sounds of English shows how wonderfully it can be done.
—Frank Stewart, The Poeii Behind the Poem: Translating Asian Poetry into English
作者簡介
Considered the central literary figure of the post-“Misty” poetry movement of the 1980s, Bai Hua was born in Chongqing in 1956. After graduating from the Guangzhou Foreign Languages Institute, he taught at various universities before starting work as an independent writer. His first book, Expression (1988), received immediate critical acclaim. A highly demanding writer, Bai Hua has composed only about ninety poems over the past thirty years, and from the late 1990s until 2007, he wrote no poetry at all. However, during this more than a decade of silence, he remained a prolific writer of prose and hybrid texts. Bai Hua has received the Rougang Poetry Award and the Anne Kao Poetry Prize. |
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