Most poems in this beautiful cycle begin with an epigraph composed in the style of a quotation from a Chinese poem, though one is taken from an actual poem by Bo Juyi. The poems present loving and attentive glimpses into Chinese nature and people. The cycle begins and ends with poems about poetry. The first (poem 543) describes the loving preparation of brushes, ink tablet, and a "small thick volume," where "the ivory-white rice paper page / is blank," for writing a poem. In the last (poem 561), the poet imagines how, centuries later, her "beautiful polished white bone" will be found in the Gobi desert by a child who "will take it to her father / to make her a flute / to sing a song."

Mary Vezey once wrote: "I know that I translate well (I can judge), and I love it very much."[44] She had an exceptional feel for languages and the gift of fully retaining lexical and semantic precision, rhythm, rhyme, and structure. On one draft, she scribbled that her translations were actually "transmutations — that's what these should really be called." She has the honour of being the first to traaslate Gumilev and Blok into English, and continued to translate Russian symbolist and acmeist poets throughout her life. She also translated many emigr6 poets. In the 1960s-1970s, she turned to translating some contemporary Soviet poets, such as P. Antokol'skii, E. Evtushenko, N. Zabolotskii, B. Okudzhava, N. Sidorenko, V. Soloukhin, as well J. Brodskii, but these translations have not been preserved. Her translations from French (Paul Verlaine, Blaise Cendrars), German (Heinrich Heine, R.M. Rilke), and Italian (Tosti) into Russian did not survive either, except for Paul Verlaine's poem "La ciel est, par-dessus la toit" (poem 570).

She also translated Korean poems of the XIII–XIX centuries into English from Russian translations in the collection Koreiskie shestistishiia (Korean Six-line Poems), published in Alma-Ata in 1956. These six-line poems (sidjo) appealed to her, because, as is pointed out in the Russian introduction to the original collection, they "present an aphorism expressed in images (…), paint a picture of nature in which the main thing is the mood, the feeling of the lyrical hero (…), (and) combine utmost laconism with exceptionally fine poetic instrumentation."[45] To some extent, this observation applies to her poetry as well.

The poetry of Mary Custis Vezey, which evolved from Russian symbolism, American imagism, and some thematic closeness to Chinese poetry, sings with the quiet and sad voice of an exceptional poet who saw life as a tragic contrast between the possibility of a different life and reality. The title of the present collection is chosen from a poem in the cycle "My China," where the poet describes strong, barred, and guarded gates, and says: "But I prefer a moongate in my wall— / an open gate that has no use for looks. / Come, let us walk right through and see the pines / shedding dark needles on the moonlit steps!" (poem 550). This truly reflects the essence of her personality and poetry.

This collection presents all the poems and translations by the poet that I succeeded in finding. They are numbered; the dates are Mary Vezey's, occasionally followed by her own question mark. In undated, unpublished poems, if the dating is my guess, it is given in square brackets.

Part One reproduces her three books: Stikhotvoreniia (Poems), Harbin, 1929; Stifdiotvoreniia II (Poems II), Shanghai, 1936; and Golubaia trava (Blue Grass), San Francisco, 1973, in their entirety. In Golubaia irava, the poems reprinted from the two earlier collections are omitted, but indicated in the appropriate places with the number assigned to them in this book and the first line.

Part Two presents unpublished poems written in Russian and not published in any of her collections, They are given in chronological order, and their publication in Emigre periodicals and collections, whenever known, is listed in the footnotes.

Part Three presents unpublished poems in English in chronological order and includes the cycle "My China."

Part Four consists of unpublished translations. It is divided into five sections: translations from English into Russian, from French into Russian, from Russian into English, from English translations of Chinese poetry into Russian, and from Russian translations of Korean poetry into Russian.

I thank Olga Tourkoff for materials from her mother's archive and for permission to publish the poetry.

I also thank Philippa Wallace Matheson for her excellent work on the typography of this book, and for many improvements in the Introduction and in the notes.

I am also grateful to Veronica Ahrens-Pulawska, Globus Bookstore, San Francisco, for her support and help in collecting and copying Mary Vezey's poems; to Jean Beckner, Special Collections Librarian, Pomona College, and to Beverly-Jene Coffman, Office Manager of the Office of Public Relations, Pomona College, Claremont, for materials on Mary Vezey's education and publishing at Pomona College; to Elena Chernyshev, Sydney, Australia, for the artwork in this book; to Dr. T. Jelihovsky-Wisely, Sydney, Australia, for materials about her friend, Mary Vezey; to Boris Thomson, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, for his help in working on this publication and for his Foreword; and to Steve Upton, USA, specialist on foreign education in China, for materials on the North China American School in Tongzhou.

Olga Bakich Toronto March 2005

1928