My rendering of Ivan V. Lalić’s ‘An Inventory of Moonlight’ is a geographical and cultural recontextualisation. As an English poet in Hong Kong, I felt an immediate affinity with Lalić, who also wrote in a country which looked both East and West at a time of political upheaval and social change and whose work spanned different cultures and poetic traditions.
I translated Lalić’s ‘equinox’ into ‘yin-yang’ to symbolise not just the personal light and dark of the narrative, but also modern China, whose meteoric economic rise has come at huge social and environmental cost. In my rendering, the traditional romantic image of a pearl moon over the Yangtze River is ‘gritted’.
I followed the mesmerizing braided form of the original because it seems to embody the process by which we reconstruct memory to move beyond loss and, to my mind, aptly reflects the Buddhist concept of reincarnation too. It was important to me that the moon/ poem begin ‘whole’ with full rhyme in the first stanza, be disassembled, then reassembled, changed, at the end.
I went for bold imagery, even allowing myself the stock image of the phoenix, which felt right in this context. The hungry ghosts come from Chinese tradition where the ‘souls’ of those killed in unfortunate circumstances may be appeased by being honoured and fed, often with peaches.
Pearl moon
gritted by salt and blistered air
over city’s sodium flare
on yin-yang fringe of Yangtze Delta.
Smouldering moon: a loom caught fire
in a garment factory razed
to the ground last year.
That factory blazed like a torch
as workers crawled with scorched rats
through smoke-choked warrens
to locked gates.
A factory of children
turned into hungry ghosts
with flaming mouths. They rise
like a phoenix from ashes, recycle
the ancient scripts in tears of quartz.
Quartz stones hurtle soundless as deeds
through the shattered greenhouse of my dreams
when I long to wake
in a garden of love with reflecting pool,
steeped in opiate haze of late afternoon,
blossom already aflame on a tree –
a peach tree stirring in the wind, murmuring
the names I’ve given you, the nameless ones,
remembering
the razed factory, the grit, the ghosts,
quartz phoenix tears, flaming blossoms,
yesterday, today, this evening, lit like a torch
on the yin-yang fringe of the Yangtze Delta
over city’s sodium flare
gritted by salt and brutish air,
a smouldering moon.