Kathryn Hu | Leader, Philosopher, Visionary

‘Debasement is the password of the base,’

It only took reading the first line to realize that the English version wouldn’t be enough. English translations of Chinese works often seem stilted – there are certain parts of the language that just cannot be transferred seamlessly and captured in their entirety – and ‘The Answer’ was not an exception to the rule. 

Despite language difficulties and differences, there were some things I was able to gather from my first read. While I didn’t know what any of the first stanza meant, I took note of the shift from the first stanza to the second – where he starts asking questions I identified as rhetorical. I understood the role of the third stanza (it’s how he leads into the fourth and fifth stanzas where he challenges the world), but didn’t know what it meant on its own. My understanding ended there. The last two stanzas, like the first two, where code I couldn’t even begin cracking in my first read. It was the combination of obscure vocabulary and extremely figurative speech that did me in. 

With my first read, based off of the three stanzas I could decipher, I gleaned that he was challenging the world. Why? I didn’t know. To what? I also didn’t know. 

‘回答’

My mom, who rescued me from my own illiteracy

My second read was neither entirely English nor entirely Chinese. It was a combination of the two – reading the Chinese version to get the full experience, and then comparing it to the translation to gain a fuller understanding. Later, I had my parents answer some questions about vocabulary and vernacular. As I suspected, there was indeed a lot lost in translation. And to my relief, I was able to decipher more because I’d found what was lost. 

First, and perhaps most importantly, the title: the word answer refers to a response and not a solution. There’s not meant to be obscurity in which definition of ‘answer’ he is referring to, and this is important to know. The entire basis of the poem rests on the assumption that readers know that this is a response, an answer, to someone or something. 

The translator, in an effort to concisely capture meaning and retain structure as best they could, uses atypical language. Words like ‘debasement’ and ‘epitaph’ aren’t used in day to day English speech, but their Chinese counterparts are not obscure. Because of this translation choice, I had a really hard time figuring the first stanza out. Reading the Chinese version cleared a great deal up.

My cousin, who has apparently also read this poem, is somewhere in this photo I think

卑鄙, debasement, has a more correct connotation if translated as dishonorable. And in the second line, nobility refers not to status, but to righteous morality. Furthermore, there’s a very obvious parallel structure that Bei Dao employs in the original. It’s things like these that get lost in translation. And while the meaning of the first stanza can still technically be found, the flow (syllable count in this case) is still lost and the overall reading experience is more difficult than meant to be. 

The third and fourth stanzas present more detrimental misses in translation. 

In the third, to maintain structure, the translation has awkward phrasing. ‘To proclaim before the judgment / The voice that has been judged:’ can be more clearly phrased as ‘in order to, in front of the judgment, be the voice of the judged:’ I didn’t understand the English version at all, and this is a more direct translation that I found for myself after reading the Chinese. I believe it better emphasizes the speaker’s point: that he is representing all of the judged. 

For the fourth stanza, the issue relates to tone. In the Chinese the first line is this: ‘告诉你吧，世界’. And though the objective meaning was found in translation, the tone – absolutely necessary to understanding the poem as a whole – is not there. His phrasing is confrontational, rude almost. He’s scoffing at the world and doing so fearlessly. It wasn’t until I read the original version that I was able to gather this. Upon gaining this clearer understanding of the speaker’s relationship to the world, the rest of the poem begins to fall into place. 

‘I don’t believe the sky is blue’ okay???????

The latter half of the fourth, the entire fifth, and the sixth all support his initial declaration. The last part of the fourth reiterates his challenge. The fifth begins with literal disavowals– the sky’s color and thunder’s sound – but moves into more figurative ones, something I realized during the second read. The sixth is less straightforward. 

Without a clear grasp of the speaker’s purpose up until this point, the sixth stanza seems like a random return to nature. But it actually connects the two parts of the fifth stanza – the first where the speaker references the physical world, and the second where he transitions to discussing more abstract concepts. The sixth stanza mixes the two together, referencing nature figuratively as a conduit to further express his position against the world. Once again, the translation’s word choice made the stanza unnecessarily difficult to decipher. But the general idea is that regardless of what the world throws against the speaker and, consequently, mankind, since he is their representative, they will not only accept this result – as they don’t futilely try to stop water’s flood – but triumph in the face of it – as they create new peaks if need be. 

Throughout the poem, the speaker goes up against the world and its laws of nature (a symbol of the establishment that crushes the mediums of dreams – art and literature). He ends the sixth stanza on a note of hope, and continues this into the last. He brings the poem back to the first stanza with another mention of the sky. But while at the beginning the sky was covered with the ‘shadows of the dead’, it’s now decorated with ‘glimmering stars’ that represent 5000 years of Chinese literature, history, and art for future generation’s enjoyment. But there’s space for more in the ‘unobstructed’ sky, space for 5000 more years of human creativity.