Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
To Westerners, whose association of poetry with government belongs to the long-distant era of the literate and literary courtier, the fact that the most powerful politician and revolutionary of twentieth century China is also among its finest modern poets may seem stranger than it does to the Chinese. Mao Zedong was born in Shaoshan, Hunan province, in 1893 to a family of well-off peasants. He worked on his father's farm, attended schools, and was educated in Changsha at the First Provincial Normal School, where he encountered revolutionary writings. In the winter of 1918–1919 he worked in a Beijing library, where he was strongly influenced by future Communist leaders Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. Mao was present in Shanghai in 1921 at the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, and he participated in the 1927 peasant uprisings in Hunan. He spent several years with the Communist guerrillas in Jiangxi and other border areas, and after Nationalist armies forced the Communists to flee on the disastrous Long March of 1934, he became the supreme leader of the party. He eventually led the Communists
to victory, and after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, he became its chairman. Despite challenges from inside and outside the party, Mao remained China's most important politician until his death in 1976, after which party moderates, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, took over from the Gang of Four, Mao's political coterie.
In his 1942 “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” Mao stated that literature is always political, that its true purpose should be to fire up the masses with revolutionary fervor, to celebrate revolution and the people (not the subjective consciousness of the author), and that it should be judged on utilitarian grounds. This was the basis for the development of Social Realist literature and was the authority upon which writers who didn't fit the revolutionary model were criticized, censored, or worse. Mao's own poetry was written in classical forms, though he advised his readership not to emulate him in this. Its content is heroic, visionary, and revolutionary, and it dramatizes the historical events that led to the new republic.
The following poems by Mao Zedong
were translated by Willis Barnstone
and Ko Ching-po.
I stand alone in cold autumn.
The River Xiang goes north
around the promontory of Orange Island.
I see the thousand mountains gone red
and rows of stained forests.
The great river is glassy jade
swarming with one hundred boats.
Eagles flash over clouds
and fish float near the clear bottom.
In the freezing air a million creatures compete for freedom.
In this immensity
I ask the huge green-blue earth,
who is master of nature?
I came here with many friends
and remember those fabled months and years of study.
We were young,
sharp as flower wind, ripe,
candid with a scholar's bright blade, and unafraid.
We pointed our finger at China
and praised or damned through the papers
1
we wrote.
The warlords of the past were cow dung.
Do you remember
how in the middle of the river
we hit the water, splashed, and how our waves slowed down the swift junks?
China is vague and immense where the nine rivers
1
pour.
The horizon is a deep line threading north and south.
Blue haze and rain.
Hills like a snake or tortoise guard the river.
2
The yellow crane is gone.
Where? Now this tower and region are for the wanderer. I drink wine to the bubbling water
3
—the heroes
are gone. Like a tidal wave a wonder rises in my heart
Wind and clouds suddenly rip the sky
and warlords clash.
War again.
Rancor rains down on men who dream of a Pillow
of Yellow Barley.
1
Yet our red banners leap over the calm Ding River
on our way to Shanghang and to Longyan dragon cliff.
The golden vase of China
2
is shattered.
We mend it, happy as we give away its meadows.
Over the earth
the green-blue monster Kunlun who has seen
all spring color and passion of men.
Three million dragons of white jade
soar
and freeze the whole sky with snow.
When a summer sun heats the globe
rivers flood
and men turn into fish and turtles.
Who can judge
a thousand years of accomplishments or failures? Kunlun,
you don't need all that height or snow.
If I could lean on heaven, grab my sword,
and cut you in three parts,
I would send one to Europe, one to America,
and keep one part here
in China
that the world have peace and the globe share the same heat and ice.
A hard west wind,
in the vast frozen air wild geese shriek to the morning
moon,
frozen morning moon.
Horse hooves shatter the air
and the bugle sobs.
The grim pass is like iron
yet today we will cross the summit in one step,
cross the summit.
Before us green-blue mountains are like the sea,
the dying sun like blood.
The scene is the north lands.
Thousand of
li
sealed in ice,
ten thousand
li
in blowing snow.
From the Long Wall I gaze inside
and beyond and see only vast tundra.
Up and down the Yellow River
the gurgling water is frozen.
Mountains dance like silver snakes,
hills gallop like wax-bright elephants
trying to climb over the sky.
On days of sunlight
the planet teases us in her white dress and rouge.
Rivers and mountains are beautiful
and make heroes bow and compete to catch the girl— lovely earth.
Yet the emperors Shi Huang and Wu Di
1
were barely able to write.
The first emperors of the Tang and Song dynasties
were crude.
Genghis Khan,
2
man of his epoch
and favored by heaven,
knew only how to hunt the great eagle.
They are all gone.
Only today are we men of feeling.
1
Mauve waters and green mountains are nothing
when the great ancient doctor Hua Duo
1
could not defeat
a tiny worm.
A thousand villages collapsed, were choked with weeds,
men were lost arrows.
Ghosts sang in the doorway of a few desolate houses.]
Yet now in a day we leap around the earth
or explore a thousand Milky Ways.
The golden vase of China
2
is shattered.
We mend it, happy as we give away its meadows.
And if the cowherd
2
who lives on a star
asks about the god of plagues,
tell him, happy or sad, the god is gone,
washed away in the waters.
On our small planet
a few houseflies bang on the walls.
They buzz, moan, moon,
and ants climb the locust tree and brag about their vast dominion.
It is easy for a flea to say
it topples a huge tree.
In Changan leaves spill in the west wind,
the arrowhead groans in the air.
We had much to do and quickly.
The sky-earth spins and time is short.
Ten thousand years is long
and so a morning and an evening count.
The four oceans boil and clouds fume with rain.
The five continents shake in the wind of lightning.
We wash away insects
and are strong.
*
Changsha is the capital of Hunan, Mao Zedong's native province. The city is on the east bank of the Xiang River, which flows north into the Yangtze. Mao studied in Changsha at the First Provincial Normal School of Hunan from 1913 to 1918.
1
In September 1915 Yuan Shikai wanted to become emperor of China. Dang Xiangming, the warlord then controlling Hunan, supported Yuan and banned all opposition to him. Nevertheless, Mao published a pamphlet (“the papers”) opposing the restoration of the monarchy.
*
The Tower of the Yellow Crane sits atop a cliff west of Wuchang in the province of Hubei. There is a legend that the saint Zian once rode past the area on a yellow crane, thought to be an immortal bird. Another legend holds that Fen Wenwei attained immortality at this spot and regularly flew past on a yellow or golden crane. The tower commemorates these events and has become a pilgrimage site for scholars and poets.
1
The many tributaries of the Yangtze that flow nearby.
2
Literally, “snake or tortoise
grip
the river.” The allusion is to Snake Hill and Tortoise Hill, which face each other on either bank of the Yangtze. The Tower of the Yellow Crane is located atop Snake Hill.
3
The Song dynasty poet Su Shi wrote a poem in which he drank to the moon's reflection in the river while recalling old heroes (see “Recalling the Past at the Red Cliffs, to the Tune of ‘Charms of Niannu,'” in this volume). The implication is that, like the yellow crane, the old heroes are gone.
*
The full title is “War Between Jiang and the Jieshi Group.” While Chiang Kai-shek was fighting with other military leaders of Guangxi, Mao and Zhu De accomplished their plan of setting up a base in north Fujian province. In the same area the Red Army took Shanghang at dawn on September 21, 1929. Longyan—Dragon Cliff—was taken earlier in the year.
1
Yellow Barley or Golden Millet. There is a Tang dynasty story of a poor scholar, Lu Sheng, who meets an immortal, Lu Weng, in an inn in Handan. Lu Sheng complains of his harsh life, and Lu Weng lends him a pillow on which he can sleep and dream of good fortune. In his sleep all his ambitions appear to come true: honor, wealth, power, marriage to a beautiful girl, and old age. When he wakes up, the innkeeper, a Daoist friend, is cooking a meal of golden millet for him. The Pillow of Yellow Barley suggests the ambitious dreams of men.
2
Mao compares China to a golden vase shattered by the warlords. He is speaking of land reform and redistribution.
*
The Loushan (Lou Mountain) Pass is in the north of Zungi county in Guizhou province. It was a strategic position between Guizhoun and Sichuan. The winding road makes for an arduous climb up the highest peak of the Loushan range. The Red Army took the pass twice in 1935. The occasion of this poem was the second storming of the pass during the Long March.
1
Shi Huang, first emperor of the Jin dynasty, ruled from 247/6 to zio bce. Wu Di, emperor of the Han dynasty, ruled from 140 to 87 bce.
*
Mao Zedong's Note: “After reading in the
People's Daily
of June 30,1958, that in Yujiang county the parasitic leech called the schistosome had been eliminated, my head was so filled with thoughts that I could not sleep. As a slight breeze came and blew in the dawn, and early morning sun came and knocked at the window, I looked at the distant southern skies and happily guided my pen into composing a poem.”
1
A great doctor of the Three Kingdoms Period (220–264), equivalent to Asclepius or Hippocrates.
2
Genghis Khan was the famous Mongol conqueror who ruled from izo6 to 1227.
2
Here the cowherd, being the name of a constellation, is symbolic of a god who was originally from earth and who continues to watch over his homeland (based on the traditional legend of “The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl”).
Xu Zhimo, also known as Xu Zhangxu, was a poet and essayist born into a family of bankers and industrialists from Haining, Zhejiang province. He studied at Shanghai's Huijiang University, Tianjin's Beiyang University, and at Beijing University from 1915 to 1918. He left Beijing University before completing his undergraduate degree and went to the United States, where he studied at Clark (BA in history) and Columbia Universities (MA in economics) and was introduced to modern Western poetry. In 1920 he studied political economics in England at King's College, University of Cambridge, where he began to read the British romantic poets and write a new form of vernacular poetry. On this and subsequent trips to England, he came to know such important literary figures as E. M. Forster, I. A. Richards, and Thomas Hardy. Xu Zhimo fell in love with a friend's daughter and abandoned his pregnant wife, Zhang Youyi, eventually divorcing her. When he returned to China in 1922, he taught at Beijing University and Qinghua University. In 1923 he founded the Crescent Moon Society, and in 1924 he was the translator and guide for Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore on his visit to China and Japan. With Wen Yiduo and Rao Mengkan he founded the Crescent Bookstore as well as the
Crescent Monthly
, an essential organ for the Crescent Moon Society School of poetry. He is the author of
Zhimo's Poems
(1925),
A Night in Florence
(1927), and
The Tiger
(1931), and his collection
Wandering in Clouds
was published posthumously in 1932. He is well known for his love affairs (he had to leave China in 1925 because of an affair with a married woman, whom he later married); in 2000
The April of Humanity
, a popular Taiwanese television drama series focusing on Xu's love life, aired for the first time. He loved to fly and wrote an essay on the joys of flight, but on November 19, 1931, he flew a small plane in heavy fog from Shanghai to Beijing and crashed into a mountainside near Jinan, Shandong.