Poets of the Chinese Revolution

While poetry for sure has, as T. S. Eliot noticed, a stubborn relationship to nationalism, the list of revolutionaries who are also poets is long and robust. This book collects the work of four Chinese poet-revolutionaries Chen Duxiu, Zheng Chaolin, Chen Yi, and Mao Zedong. All of them were using poetry’s long traditional formalism and conventions so as to wrestle with and better understand the upheavals of the Communist revolution. The complications of their work have for too long been overlooked in the endless debates about poetry and politics that define our contemporary moment. There is much that is crucial in these beautifully done translations.

Interpreting revolution broadly and translating poetry generously, this volume introduces and deepens the seemingly heretical idea that political radicalism and cultural traditions can sustain a productive historical dialogue. Each of the four "red" poets draws on classical forms and imageries to produce utterly new senses and sensations of China and political possibility through the twentieth century. Achieving the almost miraculous, Benton's translations are faithful, rhythmic, and idiomatic in all the ways one would hope of a poetry collection. A pure pleasure, and a pure inspiration.

Gregor Benton and Feng Chongyi’s edited collection of translations of the poetry of the Chinese Revolution offers a fascinating glimpse into an understudied body of what the editors call “Red poetry in the classical style.” Invoking forms of cultural authority long associated with the practice of governance, these poems translate the lived experience of political upheaval, disappointment, and despair into classical poetic idioms in an era when such traditions were subject to increasingly intensive criticism. As a result, these poems present a radically unfamiliar lyric history of the Chinese revolution. Accompanied by lively editorial contextualization, a generous annotated selection of the poetry of Zheng Chaolin, in particular, is a revelation--offering measured but pointed political commentary on everything from rapidly shifting political circumstances inside China, to Soviet science fiction novels and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis. In Benton and Chongyi’s hands, an intimate, impressionistic, and extraordinarily affecting biography emerges of this neglected dissident poet who spent much of his life in prison for a singular commitment to a “revolution without breaks or interruptions.