Poems of Mao
29. Reply to a Friend (1961)
[Poems of Mao is back, now that the good people at Internet Archive have restored the web-site, after it suffered a cyber-attack by some bit-con digital-criminal hacklers. And now, we can borrow books again from that library.]
Reply to a Friend
[a shih in seven-word regular, Chi Lu]
[translated by Nancy Lin]
Silver clouds flutter over the Nine Mounts
As the Princesses stride the wind
Down the airy blue.
That twig of bamboo
Still speckled with their thousand tearstains,
And the myriad blossoms of roseate glow
Now over the rippling folds of their gowns!
Billows of Tungting Lake
Surge in whirls of snow against the horizon.
Songs the Long Islanders sing –
How they set the earth reverberating!
I’d often dream then of the cosmic vast,
Where the land of fuyun glory
Shall ever bathe in morning sunshine.
Notes [by Nancy Lin]
Commentators have disputed over several points in the poem. The poet has given the following elucidations:
“A friend refers to an old schoolmate in Changsha.
Billows of Tungting Lake alludes to the Big Leap Forward in Hunan Province.
Long Island means Changsha, which was evolved from a sandy delta. Many people have lived in Changsha without knowing the history of the locality.
Dream of the cosmic vast, modeling after Li Po’s line of ‘dream of Wuyueh’, represents just roving fancies of the moment.
Land of fuyun glory comes from a line by Tan Yung-chih, a Tang dynasty poet: ‘Myriad miles of autumn wind over the land of fuyun’; it refers to Hunan Province.
Fuyun here is hibiscus mutabilis, not lotus which blossoms in summer.”
[Reported comment, Feb. 4, 1964]
The Nine Mounts and the Princesses: The Mounts are in south Hunan, also called the Hills of Tsangwu, where the legendary Emperor Shun is said to have died while taking his inspection tour in the region. His two consorts O-huang and Nu-ying (both daughters of the defunct Emperor Yao, hence traditionally referred to as the Princesses) hurried to the bank of the Hsiang River to lament over the death of their lord, so much so that the near-by bamboo trees were permanently stained with their copious tears and grew to be spotted bamboo as known today.
The poem, starting with an imagined visit of the Princesses and ending up with a dream of a universe of sunshine, is another sample of the poet’s characteristic of talking politics in terms of symbolism of myth and nature.
It may be of added interest to note the recent reported remark of Mao’s that while writing the first stanza, he was thinking of Yang Kai-hui, his martyr-wife; and ‘roseate glow’, alluding actually to Morning Glow (Hsia-ku), was Yang’s pet name.
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