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A Moderate Liberalist‌
(Final Version)
‌By Lu Zhaoyu‌
You may see me alone in my room,
Or witness my silence—yet I swear
I am a liberalist through and through,
And unwaveringly moderate.
I may have no friends, but surely
No enemies—for my only foe
Is myself, who always suspects
Me of peddling pretentious mysteries.
But freedom, in truth, is this simple:
You need not fight or grasp for anything—
Just relinquish all vanity, like Petőfi,
Who traded love and life for liberty.
Who could ever strip your freedom away?
Not even God, nailing Prometheus
To Caucasus; not even Rome,
Crucifying Christ upon the cross.
I don’t flaunt this label by choice—
It’s just that if you truly want freedom,
None can steal it. And freedom’s other trait?
It never imposes on others’ freedom.
‌ ostscript:‌
Too often, mankind treats freedom
As a seducer, not a discipline—
So we discard what’s within reach,
Even trample it, chasing some distant
"Freedom"—really just another name
For the vanity fair.
‌April 8, 2025‌
‌Translation Notes:‌
‌Tonal Balance‌ – Maintained the original’s oscillation between宣言 (declaration) and 反讽 (irony), e.g., "unwaveringly moderate" mirrors the paradoxical 不打折扣地温和.
‌Cultural Lexicon‌ – Preserved key references (Petőfi, Prometheus, Christ) without over-annotation, trusting the reader to detect intertextuality.
‌Rhythmic Adaptation‌ – Broke longer lines (e.g., 裴多菲’s stanza) into enjambed pairs for English cadence while keeping conceptual unity.
‌hilosophical Nuance‌ – Rendered 自持者 as "discipline" (Foucault’s self-mastery) and 名利场 as "vanity fair" (Bunyan’s moral allegory).
‌ostscript as Meta-Commentary‌ – Translated 备注 as "postscript" to emphasize its paratextual critique of the main poem’s thesis.
This version prioritizes conceptual fidelity over strict formal mimicry, aligning with Lu’s 《纯诗》 theory where "the idea’s purity transcends linguistic constraints." |
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