Poems of Mao
33. Winter Clouds (December 26, 1962)
Winter Clouds
[a shih in seven-word regular, Chi Lu]
[translated by Nancy Lin]
Snow –
Pressing through the winter clouds –
Breaks into swirls of hoary catkins.
Buds and blossoms
Have one and all shrivelled and fallen.
Blast after blast of icy waves
Pour furiously from the skies.
But out of Mother Earth,
The vital breath
Begins softly stirring!
True warriors will hunt down tigers and leopards:
Never shall the brave quail before a bear.
A world of whirling snow
Is the winter plum’s joy.
Flies die frozen, so it should be!
Notes [by Nancy Lin]
1962 was a year of precipitated developments. Khrushchev’s proposal for a world-wide joint rule with the U.S. brought about the Anti-proliferation Agreement in August. His vilify-China campaigns culminated in the concerted attacks from the platforms of the conferences of five European Communist Parties in November. China took up the gauntlet. On December 15, Peking published its first formal political-theoretical tract in denunciation of modern revisionism and followed it up with a powerful barrage of six others in three months. The first round of the Great Polemic had begun.
Written in the opening weeks of the Polemic, the present poem and the next have primarily this situation in view. The indifferent mixing of vernacular parlance and classical allusions is particularly effective in delivering the satiric punch desired.
I’d like to add an additional Note:
According to an earlier China-Soviet agreement, China would supply the Soviet Union with uranium, in exchange for the Soviet Union providing China with technical assistance in nuclear weapon research. But when Khrushchev stopped assisting the Chinese nuclear program in 1959, Mao launched Project 596 [i.e. the 6th month (June) of ‘59] to proceed independently with China’s nuclear research.
Then, with this US-Soviet agreement of August 1962, it was agreed that nuclear weapon states would NOT transfer weapons or technical information on producing nuclear weapons, to non-nuclear weapon states. This meant establishing the nuclear weapon states’ club [i.e. the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the French Republic] in order to prevent any other states from acquiring nuclear weapons [i.e. China].
This also occurred at a time when discussions were being considered about launching a conventional and/or nuclear weapon attack on China’s nuclear research facilities to stop China from developing an atomic bomb.
China would conduct a successful test of a nuclear explosion on October 16th 1964, and the North Atlanteans would have to go back to the old drawing board.
An additional, additional note regarding the date of the poem: December 26, 1962. December 26th was Mao’s birthday, and in 1962, he would have turned 69!