Changsha
(To the Tune of "Spring in Qin Garden")¹

(Autumn)

I stand alone in the autumn cold,
Where the River Xiang flows northward,
At Orange Island's head.²
I see a myriad peaks all red,
Dyed through and through by serried woods;
On the wide stream's limpid blue-green waters,
A hundred boats battle the current.
Eagles strike at the endless void,
Fish hover in the shallow bottoms,
All creatures strive for freedom under the frosty sky.

Baffled by this immensity,
I ask the vast expanse of earth,
Who, then, controls the rise and fall of fortunes?

Hand-in-hand with all my companions, I roamed this place in the past.
Now I call to mind those glorious years and days of old.
School friends just in the prime of youth,³
We were then at life's full flowering;
With the scholar's idealistic fervor,
Upright and fearless, we spoke out unrestrainedly.⁴
Pointing the finger at our land,
Impassioned exhortations we wrote,
Counting as dung and dust the high and mighty of the day.
Do you still remember,
How we thrashed about⁵ in midstream currents,
Making a wake that stayed the speeding boats?

This poem was first published in the January 1957 issue of Shikan. We have translated it
from Shici duilian, pp. 14-17.
1. On the convention of "tune title"(cipai), see above, the note to Mao's 1923 poem
for his wife, Yang Kaihui. Qin Garden refers to the garden of Princess Qin Shui of the
Western Han dynasty.
2. Orange Island is a narrow strip of land to the west of Changsha, in the middle of
Hunan's largest river, the Xiang. Mao and his youthful companions frequented the place to
enjoy the scenery and to swim in the river.
3. This is very likely an allusion to the third of Du Fu's famous "Eight Autumn Meditations" (Qiuxing bashou). Mao uses the same four characters as Du Fu to refer to his youthful
schoolmates: tongxue shaonian. The lines in question from Du Fu have a cynical tone to them
-he writes toward the end of his life of his former companions having done well for
themselves, in contrast to his own "failure" with regard to worldly concerns. A. C.
Graham's translation, in Poems of the Late T'ang (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, p. 53)
reads: "Of the school friends of my childhood, most did well. /By the Five Tombs in light
cloaks they ride their sleek horses." William Hung's translation in Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952, p. 235) reads: "Most of my
schoolmates are now in prominence; I can imagine their fine raiment and fast horses in the
neighborhood of Ch'ang-an."
4. Here Mao alludes to the Zhuangzi, the chapter called "Tian Zifang." Burton
Watson's translation of the passage in question (The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 231) reads: "The Perfect Man may stare at the
blue heavens above, dive into the Yellow Springs below, ramble to the end of the eight
directions, yet his spirit and bearing undergo no change...." Mao uses here the term huijin,
rendered by Watson as "ramble," which also means to command in a lordly manner. We
have translated this as "unrestrainedly," since commentaries on both the Zhuangzi and
Mao's poem indicate this sense.
5. Mao's own note to this line explains that "thrashing about in the water" here means
to swim. The note also refers to a poem of that time, of which he remembered only two
lines when he came to write the note to this one. These two lines have been translated in
Volume I as a couplet written circa 1917, "In Praise of Swimming."