Fan Youfei
on translating Haizi
“Spring, Ten Hai Zi” is the last poem Hai Zi ever wrote. He was suffering from severe schizophrenia, with symptoms of hallucinations, and often had trouble sleeping at that time. Twelve days after finishing the poem, he lay on the tracks and let the train - the representation of modernity - end his life.
Hai Zi is known for his ability to put powerful, plain words into poetic form, and his language is known for its abstraction and obscurity. It is not that his language is sophisticated, but he often uses defamiliarization techniques to give simple imagery deeper cultural meanings while achieving linguistic simplicity. When translating the poem, I used alliteration to make the English translation more consistent. I also added subjects to unclear sentences and clarified the referents of pronouns to make the poem more understandable.
It is almost impossible to avoid compromises when I translated Hai Zi. In this poem, “Hai Zi (海子),” the poet’s pen name, is the most difficult to translate. In Mandarin, there are three differently intoned pronunciations of “海子”: third + neutral tone, which literally means “lakes in the Mongolian and Tibetan Highlands” in mandarin and also means the poet’s pen name; second (through tone sandhi) + full third tone, meaning “child of the sea”; and second (through tone sandhi) + neutral tone, meaning a personal name. Depending on its position in the sentence, Hai Zi’s name is commonly, if not invariably, pronounced in the second + neutral tone, which sounds the same as “孩子”, the word for “child” in mandarin. For Sinophone readers, the first time they hear “ten Hai Zi,” they will easily hear “ten children.” The use of homophones is an essential point of the poem. Children represent nature, originality, possibility, and many things Hai Zi longs for. In addition, the imagery of “children being resurrected” is uncanny and eerily attractive. However, in my opinion, translating it as “ten children Hai Zi” will unnecessarily spoil the poetic beauty. In the original Chinese text, the two meanings are conveyed simultaneously within the same sound that creates a poetic ambiguity that cannot be translated fully.
about the author
Haizi (海子) is the pen name of the Chinese poet Zha Haisheng (查海生). He was born in 1964 and was raised in a farming village in Anhui Province. He was admitted to Beijing University at the age of fifteen and began writing poetry during college years. When he was twenty, he started teaching at China University of Political Science and Law. Between 1984 and 1989, he wrote about 200 poems and several epics, and he traveled to Inner Mongolia and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. He died of suicide in March 1989 by letting himself run over by a train at Shanhaiguan, Great Wall. Haizi’s books published posthumously in China include Earth (1990), Poems of Haizi (1995), and The Complete Poems of Haizi (1999). He is now one of the most renowned and influential contemporary poets in China.
about the translator
Fan Youfei is a third-year undergraduate at Nanjing University and was an international guest student at the University of Pennsylvania (23’). She majors in English literature and translation and is currently studying English, French and Old English. She is a poet, a theater lover, and she enjoys translating the beautiful works of her beloved writers.
photo by Aiyana Nosizwe Mate
