Three poems

Abstract

Mang Ke, born in 1950, was a Young Pioneer (the Chinese Communist Party youth organisation) when he was fifteen. He started to write poetry when he was twenty. During the Peking Spring of 1978-9 when there was some liberalisation in the arts and literature, he and Bei Da founded Jintian (‘Today’), a literary magazine. It carried many poems by unknown young Chinese writers, especially the collection entitled A New Poetry. By mid 1979, most of the leaders of the Peking Spring had been arrested and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for ‘counter-revolutionary activities’. Jintian was banned at the end of 1980 and members of the group dispersed and went ‘underground’. The following are some of Mang Ke's poems from a collection called Jiumeng (‘Old Dream’), written in 1980.