“The Answer”: The Exile Poet and Traumatised Memories

I am posting here what Yichun Zhang sent me about Beidao’s “The Answer”:

On 17 March 2022 we read Beidao’s “The Answer,” a political lyric poem. We used Sawako Nakayasu & Hai An’s translation. Another version of it can be found in “100 Chinese Modern Poems” translated and edited by Pang Bingjun, John Minford, and Sedn Golden (Foreign Translation and Publishing Corporation of China, first edition, December 1993).

Beidao (1949- ), original name Zhao Zhenkai, was born in Beijing, and now lives in Hong Kong. He is one of the most influential Obscure Poets (menglong shiren) in the late-1970s China. In 1978, Beidao, Mengke and other poets founded a folk poetry magazine Today.Beidao’s poems are cold and discursive, with strong critical and ideological energy, always exploring and even interrogating the truth and value of mankind, the times, and even the self in paradoxes and ruptures. Beidao once said, “A poet should build his own world through his works, a world of sincerity and uniqueness, a world of righteousness, a world of justice and humanity.”

“The Answer” was written in 1973, but officially published in 1976. The late 70s and early 80s happened to be the era when the Cultural Revolution in china had just ended. In the poem, not only do the speaker not believe in the disorder and chaos of the world, nor do the speaker believe in all the established rules and natural laws, but there is always a desire to re-organise the world. However, the powerlessness of the subject in reality suggests a heroic and disoriented figure who has to squeeze his or her expression into the spiritual space.

The first sentence (“Contemptibility is the passport of the /contemptible, /Nobleness an epitaph for the noble.”) uses repetition as a strategy to produce a contrasting and distancing effect. If contemptibility does not benefit the contemptible, how can contemptibility exist? Knowing that nobleness does not bring real benefits but deprives one of life, why there are people still choosing nobleness? Beidao also refers to people’s tendency to attribute multiple dilemmas to one specific larger contradiction. He is aware of the violent nature of the world, and is one step ahead of others in understanding that there is no way to eradicate this violence. Here we are facing the reality of the reversed world: a nation stripped of all dignity and morality, suffering from hundreds of death and stories of betrayal. In the spirit of the late 1970s, there was little ecstasy and revelry, but more scars and pain.

 

THE ANSWER

 

Baseness is the secret knock of the base

Integrity the epitaph of the noble

Look how the gilded sky drifts full of

The inverted crooked reflections of the dead

 

The ice age has past,

So why are there icicles everywhere?

The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered

Why do a thousand sails contend for the Dead Sea?

 

I came into this world

Carrying only paper, rope, a silhouette

To speak aloud before the trial

A voice that has already been judged

 

I tell you, world

I–do–not–believe!

If a thousand challengers lie trampled beneath your feet

Count me as number one thousand and one.

 

I don’t believe the sky is blue

I don’t believe in thunder’s echoes

I don’t believe that dreams are false

I don’t believe in death without retribution

 

If the sea is destined to breach the dykes

Let all the water of bitterness flow into my heart

If the land is destined to rise up

Let humanity choose a new summit for existence again.

 

A new turning point and flickering stars

Embroidered now across the unobstructed heavens

These are the pictographs of five thousand years

These are the staring eyes of future generations.