Poetry
The Answer
回答
Bei Dao · 1976
Synopsis
A poem in the first person, which opens by setting baseness against nobility, the one serving as a pass for the vile, the other as an epitaph for the noble. The speaker refuses, through a hammered refrain, to believe what he is taught, down to the blue of the sky. He says he comes into the world with only paper, a rope and a shadow as baggage, and sets himself up as the mouthpiece of those who cannot speak, facing an order that holds a thousand challengers under its feet and whose thousand-and-first he wants to be.
Context
The poem was written after the suppression of the April 1976 gatherings in Tiananmen Square, according to The China Project, and was taken up from demonstration to demonstration, up to the tributes paid to the doctor Li Wenliang. In 1978, the author and Mang Ke put up the pages of Jintian on the Democracy Wall, and critics called “obscure” the poetry that the journal published. Britannica mentions it in the selection of poems published in China in 1986. Bonnie McDougall translated it into English in 1988 in a collection by the author, Eliot Weinberger later under the same title.
Who it is for
A short poem, to be read in one sitting; its author has several collections available in French, translated by Chantal Chen-Andro.
Prizes and reception
PEN America regards it as the resistance anthem of the Chinese democracy movement since the demonstrations of 1976.
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