In Praise of Swimming86 (ca. 1917)
Surely if I lived two hundred years, I’d thrash a wake of three thousand miles.87
86 This couplet is all that Mao himself could remember in later years of a longer poem on the same
theme. See Mao’s note to his poem “Changsha” of autumn 1925. These “author’s notes” (zuozhe zizhu)
are to be found in all recent Chinese editions, including Mao Zedong shici duilian jizhu (Annotated
Edition of Mao Zedong’s Poems and Couplets) (Changsha: Hunan wenyi chubanshe, 1991) (hereafter
Poems and Couplets), which, as indicated in the “Note on Sources and Conventions” (above, p. xliv),
we have taken as our basic text for Mao’s poetical writings. (We also follow that source in dating this
couplet.) Mao’s notes are not commonly reproduced in English versions of his poems, but all of them
relating to poems written before October 1949 will be included in our edition. “Changsha,” and the note
containing this couplet, will appear in Volume II.
87 A reference to the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, which Mao had studied in 1913 (see note 217
to the “Classroom Notes” and the accompanying text). The relevant sentence reads: “When the P’eng