My spouse, who reads Chinese, says that Mao's poetry isn't bad in the original, at least the early stuff. It's pretty conventional, she says, but quite able. Writing poetry is something that a persion of his class, education, and background would have been expected to do at the time. (Janis tells me.) He's no Virgil, though.
Actually it is hard to think of a great revolutionary, snce Marx, who was also a great imaginative writer. Trotsky was a great stylist, but of course he wrote nonfiction.
--jks
>
> >Mao of course wrote Chinese rather than Latin -- and he happened
> >to write quite good poetry in Chinese. So did Ho in Vietnamese
> >incidentally.
>
> >Carrol
>
>
>Yes, yes, and Stalin liked to read several newspapers a day. Years ago I
>house-sat for a friend who had some of Mao's poetry, as well as an album of
>the music of the Cultural Revolution, and I must say I found it all sterile
>agitprop. (Some of the songs were amusing, but all essentially ended
>praising the Great Leader as He reached to Heaven.) Around the same time,
>C-SPAN televised an RCP celebration of Mao, complete with poetry readings.
>Now *that* was hilarious! I wished I'd taped it so I could add a laughtrack
>and give it as a gift to friends: "The Maoist Poetry Slam."
>
>DP
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