HOPE

HOPE

Lu Xun, 1925.1.1

Huiwen Zhang tr. 2012; revised 2013.3

My heart is exceptionally lonely.

Yet my heart is very much at peace: no love or hatred, no mourning or joy, and no color or sound.

I am probably old.  My hair is already pale; is that not a very clear thing?  My hands are trembling; is that not a very clear thing?  Thus my soul’s hand is surely, too, trembling, its hair, too, surely pale.  

Yet this is a thing of many years ago.

Before this, my heart, too, brimmed once with the bloody singing voice: blood and iron, flame and poison, restoration and revenge.  Yet suddenly this all became empty, only now and then, having no alternative, did I deliberately stuff it with self-deceiving hope.  Hope, hope, using this shield of hope to rebel against that attack of the dark night in the emptiness, although behind the shield was still the dark night in the emptiness.  Yet just this bit by bit exhausted my youth.

Before, did I not know that my youth had already gone?  But I believed that the youth outside my body still existed: stars, moonlight, dead falling butterflies, secret flowers, owls’ ominous words, cuckoos’ weeping blood, laughter’s elusiveness, love’s soaring dance.  Although a desolate, illusory youth, yet after all: youth.

Yet now: why so lonely?  Is even the youth outside my body, too, all gone?  Are the world’s young people, too, all aging?

I have no choice but myself to wrestle the dark night in the emptiness.  I lay down the shield of hope, I hear Petǒfi Sándor’s (1823-1849) song of “Hope”:

Hope is what?  A prostitute:

Bewitching all, devoted to all;

Wait until you sacrifice considerable treasure – your youth

– she abandons you.

          This great lyric poet, Hungarian patriot, for the sake of his fatherland died on the spear of the Cossacks, already 75 years ago.  Tragic is his death, yet more tragic, that to this day his poetry has not died.

          But miserable is life!  A man as daring and valiant as Petǒfi eventually, facing the dark night, stopped walking and gazed back at the boundless East.  He said: 

          Despair is as hollow and deceptive as hope.

          If I still have to filch life in this un-bright, un-dark “hollow deception,” I must then still seek that elapsed, desolate, illusory youth, but most likely outside my body.  For once the youth outside my body dissipates, the setting sun inside my body, too, will fade away.

Yet now there are no stars and moonlight, no dead falling butterflies, not even laughter’s elusiveness or love’s soaring dance.  Yet the young people are very much at peace.

          I have no choice but myself to wrestle the dark night in the emptiness.  Even if I seek in vain the youth outside my body, I have nonetheless to cast from inside my body the setting sun.  But where again is the dark night?  Now there are no stars, no moonlight, not even laughter’s elusiveness or love’s soaring dance; the young people are very much at peace, and in front of me there is not even, either, a real dark night. 

Despair is as hollow and deceptive as hope!

 

Interpretation Click Here!