Returned Strangers

Bei Dao is the contemporary Chinese poet most widely translated in the West, and has been fortunate in his English-language translators:The August Sleepwalker(\990) and Old Snow (1991) translated by Bonnie S. McDougall; Forms of Distance(\994) and Landscape Over Zero (1996) translated by David Hinton; Unlock (2000) translated by Eliot Weinberger and Endure:Poems by Bei Dao (2010) translated by Clayton Eshleman and Lucas Klein.Nowadays, People around the world have different ideas about Bei Dao and his poems. Some Western critics have charged that this is a kind of airport poetry, written for translation in an easily digestible, international style. On the other hand, there are Chinese critics who maintain that where his work once spole directly to the people——yesterday's obscurity has apparently become today's transparency——it is now deliberately difficult in order to appeal to sophisticated Western poetry-readers. The argument, again, is that his writing for translation.In the first and sencond chapter, I would like to specify how these translations exhibit and change Bei Dao's work. Have they helped Bei Dao to establish his place in today's World Literature? Is there something concerning cultural logic behind all these translations? I hope I could offer some answers for some of the often-heard criticism of Bei Dao as an "un-Chinese" poet and argues for a context of postcoloniality and transnationalism within which to place BeiDao and his poetry. In the third chapter, I would like to discuss the idea of place and belonging as related to making of Bei Dao's emerging transnational identity that is both culturally and territorially non-specify. In Conclusion, with the helf of David Damrosch and Franco Moretti, I would provide some new concept of World Literature and find out how contemporary Chinese Literature adapt to this "World Literature"...