Ode to Peng Pai
The South China Sea has a tide, and its voice is Peng Pai; Haifeng has a son who answers with his life.
I. The Red Palace
Tonight!
On Asia’s southern edge,
the ancient sage’s palace has suddenly turned red!
The crescent pool is red,
the stone steps red;
three hundred and eleven pairs of muddy feet
come from salt fields, fishing ports, and rice furrows,
and make the Hall of Great Accomplishment,
unmoved for a thousand years,
tremble beneath their tread!
The old gods have stepped down!
Workers and peasants mount the altar!
Their hands once held plows, cast nets,
and pressed their marks beneath deeds of land;
tonight they raise the great seal of the Soviet,
as though the earth, for the first time,
has stamped its own name
upon history!
Peng Pai stands in the hall.
The South China Sea is in his eyes,
a storm within his coat;
yet outside the hall,
counterrevolution’s guns are being loaded
one by one in the dark.
II. Fusang
Who still remembers nine years ago,
the farther shore across that narrow ribbon of sea?
Fusang has chrysanthemums and battleships,
but also the red flag of the Heiminsha,
the ink of the Heimin Shimbun,
and the throats of socialists who refuse to fall silent
beneath the police’s iron hooves!
Kōtoku Shūsui’s blood has already dried;
Sakai Toshihiko’s type is still hot;
Ōsugi Sakae’s wind of freedom
is racing through Tokyo’s streets!
They once cried out to the common people of Japan and Russia:
Workers of every nation,
do not kill one another
for the emperor and the tsar!
They hid The Communist Manifesto
inside a thin sheet of newspaper,
and let the specter of Marx
step past the censor’s vermilion seal
into Fusang’s long night.
Those people were not Peng Pai’s teachers.
They were distant thunder east of the sea,
the echo the oppressed of one country
left for a young man of another.
Waseda’s bell rings.
Young people sit around a table,
daring to call their society “The Cosmos”;
daring to declare to this decrepit world:
Build the most rational new society!
Build! Build!
Dismantle the irrational state!
Recast the irrational society!
The Japanese call to that young man from Haifeng:
Hōhai!
Hōhai!
Hōhai!
How could Fusang’s tongue know
that what it called upon
was a South China Sea not yet risen!
A narrow ribbon of water—
the sea did not sever the dreams of two peoples;
it carried Tokyo’s dawn bell
to the crest of Haifeng’s tide!
III. The Returning Tide
Peng Pai has crossed the sea and come home.
He sets a gramophone
beneath a great banyan tree.
The black disc turns!
The brass horn sings!
The tenant farmers come,
the fishermen come,
barefoot women and children come too.
The song suddenly stops.
Peng Pai stands and says:
Democracy,
come down from Tokyo’s printed type!
Take off your leather shoes, bare your feet,
come walk the ridges of Haifeng’s fields!
Here your name is peasant association,
your name is rent reduction,
your name is the laboring people joining hands
to cross the river of suffering together!
You are the tenant farmer’s head—
before the landlord,
raised to the sun for the first time!
The land deeds begin to burn.
Hundreds upon thousands of man-eating sheets
curl and blacken in the flames;
the acreage burns, the red seals burn,
the tears of generation upon generation burn!
That fire is no mere fire—
it is all Hailufeng’s Energy,
released in an instant
from the paper ashes of the old world!
The ancient embankment
has already heard the tide.
IV. The Immortals’ Dwellings
Tonight, however, the tide sounds far away.
The gentry’s hoofbeats
close in from every field;
the great seal cast today
may fall into the mud tomorrow;
the palace glowing red today
may be only dust tomorrow.
Peng Pai knows.
Yet he smiles.
He says:
After you have eaten your fill tomorrow,
you will all be like immortals,
returning to your own mountain dwellings!
Returning to your own dwellings—
Chishan is a dwelling,
Lufeng is a dwelling,
the cabins of Shanwei’s fishing boats are dwellings;
every thatched hut that lets in rain,
every heart that will submit no longer,
is a Mount Kunlun for the gods of workers and peasants!
Who says this is an adjournment?
The Red Palace has suddenly broken apart!
It splits into three hundred and eleven fires,
crosses the crescent pool, crosses the city gates,
and races into countless villages!
One hall stands empty,
but countless thatched huts light up together;
one great seal is lost,
but countless palms become seals;
one association flag is torn,
but countless ragged coat fronts
become flags in the wind!
An army can occupy a palace,
but it cannot arrest the tides.
V. The Sea’s Name
Peng Pai opens his arms.
Ah! Ah!
He has suddenly grown vast!
The Red Palace cannot contain him,
Hailufeng cannot contain him,
nor can Asia’s long night
contain him!
He cries:
I am the sea!
I am the congress that ten million streams
hold in secret in the dark!
Every river cut off in its course
meets the others again within my breast;
every voice pressed down
finds its height upon my waves!
If I fall,
ten thousand villages will rise together!
If I fall silent,
the South China Sea will cry out for me!
If my name is erased from paper,
boundless acres of seawater
will write it across the sky again!
Listen, Asia!
Listen, dawn bell of Fusang!
Listen, monsoon of Hindustan!
Listen, tides of the islands of the southern seas!
Haifeng—this red-hot heart—
is beating within Asia’s chest!
With every beat,
the axis of the old world tilts another inch;
with every beat,
countless bowed heads
rise another inch toward the sun!
The east is whitening.
The gods have returned to their dwellings,
the Red Palace lies utterly still;
yet the South China Sea’s great black tide
is gathering again deep beneath the earth!
From this moment—
Peng Pai
is the name the sea has given itself;
Péngpài—to surge—
is the verb the people have finally learned!
Waseda once called him:
Hōhai!
Tonight, all Asia answers:
Peng Pai!
Surge!