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Nicolas Nelson's avatar

Hi, writing coach and editor here, who is also conversant in Mandarin and studied Chinese culture at university (and in person while living in Taiwan and on a sadly-brief visit to the mainland) :

"None of the poems are any good" **in English.**

The examples you give here actually sound like decent Chinese poetry. It is meant to evoke both a specific moment experienced through the senses, and an emotion connected to that moment— this isn't meant to be narrative poetry, and any rhyme or rhythm or clever word choice that might create interesting ambiguity or double-entendres would of course be lost in translation.

So I really can't say whether any of these Chinese poems are good without hearing them spoken in Mandarin, or at least seeing the characters (I probably wouldn't be able to read them all anyway without help from Google Translate). They might indeed sound like flat, wooden attempts at real Chinese poetry.

But they might also be quite powerful, in their own cultural and linguistic context.

I have no comment about the personal hygiene or sexual proclivities, except to say that they undoubtedly changed over the course of his life; like the poems themselves, the description you quote is a momentary snapshot (whether or not it's a true one, in any sense of the word, I have no idea).

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