Poems of Mao
11. Tapoti [Summer 1933]
Tapoti [Summer 1933]
[a tsu, to the melody The Pusaman Amazons, Pusa Man]
[translated by Nancy Lin]
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Who’s dancing in the skies with this colorful band?
After a shower, the sunset’s glow:
The Pass and hills, with their verdured gushes!
A fierce battle raged here once.
Bullet-ridden – those village walls.
They’ve hollowed the site,
The fairer to look upon today!
Notes [by Nancy Lin]
Tapoti: a picturesque hill town some 50 li north of Juichin, the headquarters of the main Red base. Mao took several inspection trips to the vicinity in summer 1933 while Chiang Kai-shek, failing in his fourth ‘encirclement’ campaign in March, was hectically preparing for the fifth. This poem was written during one of those inspection trips.
The poet, on passing Tapoti, dwelled with a painter’s eye on the rainbow scene over the hill and recalled the fierce battle he fought on the spot against Chiang’s pursuing troop back in February 1929 when he, at the head of a Red contingent from west Fukien, was engaged in opening up new rural bases in southeast Kiangsi. The last line, characteristically, niches his thought in the present with a swift turn.