June Fourth Elegies
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
Liu Xiaobo died in 2017, the first Nobel Laureate to do so in detention since 1935. Liu was a pre-eminent Chinese literary critic, professor and humanitarian activist. After his hunger strike in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 he became a thorn in the side of the Chinese government, helping to write the Charter 08 manifesto calling for free speech, democratic elections and basic human rights. He was arrested and convicted on charges of 'incitement to subversion', and sentenced to eleven years in prison. The following year, 2010, during this fourth prison term, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 'his prolonged non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China'. Neither he nor his wife was allowed to travel to Oslo, and the Chinese government blocked all news stories of the prize and intimidated Liu's friends and family.
June Fourth Elegies is a collection of the poems Liu Xiaobo wrote each year on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. An extraordinarily moving testimony and an historical document of singular importance, it is dedicated to 'the Tiananmen Mothers and for those who can remember'. In this bilingual volume, Liu's poetry is for the first time published freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, but could not visit Sweden to collect it: he was then, and remains, in prison in China for the human rights activism that began with his part in the demonstrations of 1989 at Tiananmen Square and continued, in and out of jails and labor camps, for the next 20 years. Each spring whether incarcerated or "at home in Beijing" Xiaobo wrote a poem to commemorate the Tiananmen victims. Those raw, yet reflective, sometimes nightmarish elegies make up the bulk of this bilingual edition, put into clear English by the poet Yang (Vanishing-Line), whose extraordinarily useful afterword puts Xiaobo's sharp and sometimes allusive lines into both Chinese literary and historical context. Xiaobo rebukes his nation, "used to memorializing tombs as palaces," and his "city of near perfect/ shamelessness." He also casts a harsh eye on himself: "Self-consciousness is disaster's survivor," he reflects; "I'll strive to feel astonishment or shame." "Even if I have the courage/ to be jailed again," Xiaobo writes, "it isn't courage enough/ to excavate memories of the dead." Yang also includes other works by Xiaobo: an outraged essay about "the road of resistance I've chosen" and the materialism of modern China, penned in 2000; at the back, five quiet love poems to Xiaobo's wife, herself now under house arrest.
