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PARTISAN REVIEW
struct a poem with more sustained power, such as the following
(translated by Bonnie McDougall with my minor revisions):
Labor
Hands encircling the earth
Peace
In
the land where the king is dead
that old rifle sprouts branches and new shoots
and becomes a cripple's cane
Motherland
Cast on a shield of bronze
she leans against a darkening museum wall
Life
A net
Orthodox critics of such poems object to the extreme brevity of
the sections, and to the shreds of sentiment that weave a fabric oflife
as seen through the poet's subjective consciousness. And they com–
plain of dark moods. Three lines from a poem by Gu Cheng have
triggered a fierce reaction:
The junk with sails of mourning,
Slowly passes by,
And unfolds the dark-yellow cloth for corpses
Some older poets consider these lines a disgrace to the glory of
the Yangtze River, which is a national symbol. As the senior poet
Gong Liu remarks: "Who has ever heard Indians utter a libel against
the Ganges, or Egyptians against the Nile? Even Americans com–
pare the Mississippi to a motherly river."
Like most older or middle-aged poets, Gong Liu was silenced
for twenty years as a rightist; but he was also probably spared the
pain of witnessing corpses drifting down many rivers as the Red
Guards battled each other during the early "armed struggle" phase of
the Cultural Revolution in 1967-68. The imagery of mourning and
death which pervades Gu Cheng's poem bespeaks a sentiment of
condolence for the passage of a whole idealistic generation.
If
Gu in
