Poems of Mao

37. Chingkang Mountain Re-ascended (May 1965)

Chingkang Mountain Re-ascended

[a tsu, to the melody Water’s Music: the Prelude, Shui-tiao Ko-tou]

[translated by Nancy Lin]

I have long wished

To soar above the clouds,

Re-ascending Chingkang Mountain.

Here I am,

From a thousand miles away,

Back among haunts of old:

Now transformed – a visage all new!

Everywhere –

Orioles carol, swallows dip,

Springs gush and gurgle,

Steep roads thrust to the skies.

Huangyangkai crossed:

No terrains, however forbidding,

Could challenge our sight.

Thundering storms,

Battling standards:

Humanity on the march!

Thirty-eight years have swept by

At a mere snap of fingers.

And now we can go

Up to the ninth heaven to pluck the moon,

Down in all five seas to catch turtles.

Talking and laughing,

We’ll return with songs of triumph.

Nothing is impossible in the world:

The knack is to keep surmounting.

Notes [by Nancy Lin]

Written in May 1965 when Mao was re-visiting the Mountain on an inspection trip – 38 years after he established there the first rural base of Red power. The poem is a song of the Chinese people’s victory in those stirring years of revolution and reconstruction, but still more, a clarion call to fight on as the concluding lines indicate.

[see Poems of Mao #3 – Chingkang Mountain (Autumn 1928) to recollect Mao’s earlier visit to Chingkang Mountain in 1927]

Huangyangkai: the most imposing of the five strategic passes leading up to Chingkang Mountain, where four successive attacks by Kuomintang troops were repulsed in August 1928.

Moon-plucking, presumably alluding to the high aspirations and endeavors of building up new China, is derived from lines by the Tang poet Li Po:

‘Full of wild fancies, we let soar our daring thoughts,

Ready to pluck the moon in a flight up the blue sky.’

Turtle-catching: ‘Catching a turtle in an urn’ is an ancient saying, meaning an adversary cornered and easily caught. The epithet as used in the poem alludes ironically no doubt to the forces of reaction the world over, particularly Soviet revisionism.

[next - 38. Two Birds: A Dialogue]