I’m lucky enough to live with someone who reads Mandarin with some fluency. Together we were reading translations of 靜夜思, and I was struck by how much her attempts to literally translate it to me captured which these plain-English translations did not.

Wikipedia presents this translation of the third and fourth lines of the four-line poem:

举头望明月 低头思故乡

Looking up, I find the moon bright Then bowing my head, I drown in homesickness

My translator, let’s call her, casually read me this poem as I listened in an attempt to understand how this poem sounded as compared to more casual language. I asked simple questions. What does this word mean, literally? How about that one? There were many more realizations than this one, but I will focus on a single character:

望

This character is the verb in the line 举头望明月; in Wikipedia’s translation, it is the “find” in “Looking up, I find the moon bright.” In other translations it is “look” or other such words.

However, she described the word as a specific kind of seeing, not just seeing but “foresight,” as in seeing something which is destined, far away in the future, out of reach.

If you look up definitions online, you’ll find very simple translations which point in a similar direction — “望” does not mean “find” or “look” or even “see”, but it is translated instead as “hope” or “expect” or “look towards.”

There is a parallel in the first two characters of the third and fourth lines which is similarly lost in the above translation.

The third line begins 举头 (raise head).

The fourth line begins 低头 (lower/bend head).

The third line describes raising [your] head and looking hopefully forward at the moon, while the fourth line evokes thoughts of home / homesickness, something which I would say looks toward the past; a rough attempt to capture this would be to say that it parallels the previous line along so many axes, describing lowering your head and looking longingly backward at your hometown.

举头望明月 低头思故乡

Looking up, I find the moon bright Then bowing my head, I drown in homesickness

I don’t speak the language and I don’t know enough to judge the translation as a whole, but I do believe that through our amateurish look at this poem, we discovered a novel depth, a deeper truth, than I had been initially exposed to by the translation.

This is where the timeless way comes in: there are things that once discovered appear to be truths, impossible to refute or ignore. The author may have been aware of it or not; they may have intended it or not; but some aspects of what I’ve said above are not interpretation, they are facts.

The author is dead, but the truth is timeless.

~

[..] when I see you say you had ‘misunderstood’ and ‘incorrectly interpreted’ Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, I think “don’t let someone else tell you what correct is!” Down with gatekeepers! Art is not a puzzle!

[..]

I can’t help wondering what exactly ‘success’ is when we play games, and how that relates to poems. You seem to be equating success with progress through its challenges. What is success for the poem? Discovering author’s intent? But what if the author is dead?

Jack, Designing without correctness

In my post about The Road Not Taken, I used some terminology that I’m not sure whether I regret or not. ‘Misunderstood’ and ‘incorrectly interpreted.’ On one hand, I really agree with Jack. Down with gatekeepers — people who, from status, presume to claim to be the source of truth.

But maybe art is a puzzle, in the same way that any pursuit of real truth is.

The Bohr-Rutherford Model is a plainly incorrect representation of an atom, but sometimes we can only know that our interpretation is correct when we discover another, better one. Bohr-Rutherford was taught to me in school as if it were the truth, but it was only ever a stepping stone to a deeper understanding. Today, we still have an imperfect understanding of reality; physicists and mathematicians and biologists are still solving unsolved problems, discovering new truths, finding better explanations for things.

The author’s intent is merely a piece of history.

The artwork itself is a part of reality.

The poem guide to The Road Not Taken exposed deeper truths to me than I had been aware of before. I don’t value these because they came from a place of authority, but because they rang true to me personally. A walkthrough to guide me in my pursuit of truth, exposing something to me that had previously gone unrecognized. In videogames as well as in poetry, this is how I measure success.

~

As For The Process…

I have been leaning hard into ‘the death of the author’, in a lot of ways for my own mental health, to allow myself to engage with things on my own terms and feel comfortable and confident about my manner of engagement, and what I end up valuing from it.

I want my design process to leave artifacts that readers and players can pick up on and play with, play the same explorative detective game that I am playing, but one that ultimately has no clear or ‘correct’ answer.

Jack, Designing without correctness

Hey, Jack 🙂

I’m glad that you shot back right away. There’s a good feeling when a discourse fires up again in this place. I wanted to, out of stream, acknowledge this discussion of process and what you value out of it.

Lately I’ve felt strangely at peace with this idea that there is some infinite truth-space which I can move towards, but I genuinely can’t tell whether this is the death of ego or instead a blindness to it, like I’m believing there is a way to sense actual truth in art beyond myself when in fact I have simply identified my subjectivity as some objective thing!

Well, either way, I think it might be valuable to take on that belief at times. I find it’s more exciting to be an explorer, a detective, when I think there might be some big fuzzy ‘real’ answer and that I’m not just doing all this work for the sake of leaving behind footprints.

I like The Valley and what it represents — not the gameplay experience itself, which actually is a little bit like that kind of “no clear or correct answer” detective-play… but the process, which to me seems a beautifully documented and earnest pursuit of some distinct and timeless truth.