The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems

About Bei Dao

Bei Dao (the pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was born in Beijing in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution he worked as a concrete mixer and blacksmith for eleven years. Forced into exile after the Tiananmen Massacre he lived in Europe and the US until 2007 then settling in Hong Kong until only recently moving back to Beijing. He has been hailed as the soul of post-Mao poetry (Yunte Huang) and praised for his intense lyricism (Pankaj Mishra). Bei Dao has received numerous awards for his poetry all over the world and founded the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong. His photography and paintings have been exhibited in China Hong Kong and Japan. New Directions publishes ten of his books. Eliot Weinbergers books of literary essays include Karmic Traces An Elemental Thing The Ghosts of Birds and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz Pazs In Light of India Vicente Huidobros Altazor Xavier Villaurrutias Nostalgia for Death and Jorge Luis Borges Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.