Review of The Lantern and the Night Moths for Exchanges

I was delighted to work with Exchanges, the University of Iowa’s literary translation journal, to publish a long-form review of The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024), Yilin Wang’s collection of translated modern Chinese poetry and essays. It was an amazing experience to publish with a journal I admire for an author and work I’m excited about, and my awesome editor helped me push the review far beyond my original vision to an even better place of engagement with and information on the book.

You can read the review on the Exchanges website or the reproduced text below:

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The Lantern and the Night Moths

Edited and Translated by Yilin Wang

Invisible Publishing, 120 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Review by L.J. Lee

The preservation of the ephemeral and easily-forgotten is an explicit goal of The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024), a selection of poetry by five modern and contemporary Chinese poets translated by Chinese-Canadian writer and translator Yilin Wang. The collection, accompanied by Wang’s original essays and notes, spans the first glimmers of the 20th century to the present. It passes through the turmoil of China’s Republic years, the exciting anxieties of the New Culture movement, and the imagery, dilemmas, and yearnings of 21st-century life.

Yet Night Moths takes a branch off the most-travelled paths across the vast landscape of modern Chinese poetry, offering a different scenery. In making the selections, Wang deliberately avoided the most famous and translated modernist poets, stating “I also step around the latest, bestselling, and most renowned Sinophone literary works to seek out poetry that has been overlooked.” Also, “By experimenting with recreating [the] work [of underrepresented poets] in English, I hope to expand existing understandings of Sinophone poetry in the Anglosphere.”

These are ambitious goals for a first collection, and the result of Wang’s design principle is a work that is less familiar, more female, and more eclectic than a conventional collection covering the same eras. You will find no poems in these pages by mainstays like Xu Zhimo, Bei Dao, or Ai Qing. The emerging and acclaimed women poets Zhang Qiaohui and Xiao Xi are published for the first time in English translation, and the anti-Qing Dynasty rebel Qiu Jin receives focus as a poet in addition to the historical figure she is conventionally known as. Wang’s self-assurance as a curator and translator of poetry is on full display, as is a confidence that this different view of Chinese modern and contemporary poetry is more than worth experiencing—and remembering.

Fortunately, the poet-translator does not simply leave readers unmoored in waters that may be unfamiliar even to the well-versed. Wang ably guides the reader, not only intellectually but also emotionally, in essays and commentary included at the end of each poet’s section. The varied approaches of these notes add further levels of understanding and reading pleasure: the commentary on Qiu Jin’s poetry is an intimate epistolary essay addressed to the poet, who is Wang’s personal hero as well as scholarly and literary subject; the short notes for each of Zhang Qiaohui’s poems explore diasporic yearnings and the fleeting nature of memory in a format that loses nothing for its brevity. Fei Ming, meanwhile, is treated to an intensely researched intellectual and spiritual history, entwined with process notes for the difficult task of translating his infamously enigmatic work. Poem-by-poem notes on Xiao Xi go over the challenges of translation in the context of contemporary history and references. The final essay on the eminent early 20th-century poet and translator Dai Wangshu doubles as a partial biography that draws from his times to better understand our own.

There is a sense of urgency in this project of remembrance and celebration, as so much writing is forgotten and lost in the interplay between memory and oblivion. In an anecdote shared in the translator’s note to “Soliloquy” by Zhang Qiaohui, Wang’s wàipó (maternal grandmother) was drafting a memoir which she promised to show her grandchild the next time they met. After wàipó’s death, however, Wang searched for the manuscript in vain. What happened to it, and what story might it have told? The answer is locked in shadows, much like the matrilineal history such a manuscript may have revealed to a grieving grandchild. A driving force in The Lantern and the Night Moths is episodes like these: the reality that women’s voices and stories are disproportionately forgotten, lost, and erased.

If perception is the great resistance to oblivion, books may be the preservation of perception into a hope of eternity. These books may find their way to someone’s bedside and become a repository of their happiness, as Dai Wangshu said of his own books. They may also be lovingly collected by eclectic routes ranging from ethnic grocery stores to the luggage bags of friends, like Wang’s own hard-won collection of Chinese-language books. Books, after all, are a communion with their writers, and with the people who helped put the books in the reader’s hands, from booksellers to generous friends. “the lantern light seems to have written a poem; / they feel lonesome since i won’t read them,” Fei Ming writes in “lantern.” To be unread is loneliness, a fading out from the shared memory of community.

A translated book, then, is the ultimate defiance against ephemerality, not only preserving the existence of a work but also expanding its reach to other lands and other peoples across the distance of language and context. Surprising things emerge when this crossing is made: In the translation of Dai Wangshu’s poem “Night Moths,” for instance, the poet’s shadow has been “abandoned . . . in grave darkness.” Two lines down, the poem ends with “that day I transformed into a phoenix,” juxtaposing “grave darkness” with the common Western image of a phoenix coming back to life from the ashes.

Yet those familiar with the cultural conventions involved may realize that the original Chinese word fēng 凤 , meaning the male of mythical noble birds, does not traditionally have the connotation of periodic death and rebirth despite commonly being translated into English as “phoenix.” Wang’s translation, refracting language and mythical reference through layers of subtly unmatched imagery and double meaning, lends the poem a new reading in English while staying true to the Chinese original by foregrounding the association of yōuàn 幽暗 (deep darkness) with the underground and graves. One suspects Dai would have approved, as a culture-spanning poet-translator himself who wedded Zhuangzi to Descartes in the verse “I think, therefore I am a butterfly…” in the poem “I Think.”

At other times things are dropped in the crossing, echoing in the crevice between worlds. A reader of both languages might mourn the loss of Qiu Jin’s pun and rhyme in “A River of Crimson: A Brief Stay in the Glorious Capital,” where under Wang’s hand, the lines

became the following:

There was also the choice, freely acknowledged in the translation notes, to abandon the repetition of zhùyì 注意 in Xiao Xi’s “the car is backing up, please pay attention,” in favor of using different wording for the many nuances of the word: “be mindful of,” “watch out for,” “take note of” and more. Those who love the cadence and wordplay of the originals may object, but we who have taken the leap between languages know there is no such thing as having it all.

Knowing these limitations all too well, Wang calls the poetic translation process “cultivating the inexpressible,” where “every iteration bears testimony to that which has been lost, and even more importantly, all that courageously endures.” Yet Wang rejects the facile narrative that poetry is “untranslatable,” citing Dai Wangshu’s 1944 essay Brief Fragments on Poetic Theory that a poem, so long as it goes beyond superficial wordplay, should always be translatable into other languages. Wang calls the power of literary translation “infinite” and demonstrates it in projects such as five different translations of Song dynasty poet Li Qingzhao’s poem, undertaken with Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li.

If remembrance is key to continued life in a community of memory, what does it mean when translated poetry is indeed recorded and perceived but the translator is unnamed, as though there never was one? How fleeting, ephemeral, and forgotten is the translator of poetry whose carried-over words ring in the center of Empire like a disembodied echo! Of course, the translator was and is not lost to inevitable, self-effacing invisibility, but rather actively erased, as the British Museum did in its uncredited, unauthorized use of Wang’s Qiu Jin translations—a disregard it only corrected after a much-publicized legal campaign. This story recurs around the globe, backed by the dismissal of translation as easy and easily-replaced work that is nevertheless somehow good enough to be used. The exploitation is sometimes framed as a favor to the translator conferring prestige and visibility, as the British Museum’s early correspondence with Wang implied. Subtler forms of consent violations and disrespect abound every day, such as publishing translations without proper contracts.

All this buildup is now set to spike to a crescendo of exploitation and erasure as never before, with the product of untold of hours of translators’ labor scraped into large language models that prognosticators smugly promise will make us obsolete. Though the form may be new, the foundations of the rhetoric that translators are superfluous and outdated have been laid over decades: Even Dai Wangshu, living in a period when literary translation was highly regarded and prized by writers and scholars, criticized the publishing industry’s devaluation of poetry translations in his day, matching Wang’s observation of today’s mainstream Anglophone and Sinophone publishing spaces.

Yet, as Wang points out, “many poet-translators continue to work from the margins, as persistent as ever.” The voices of these poets who lived through China’s modernity from the beginning to the present moment, given life for an Anglophone audience by Wang’s careful work and keen commentary, are not only a collection of poetry translations and essays, but a lively and continuing conversation. The Lantern and the Night Moths speaks not only to fellow travellers straddling the two disciplines of poetry and translation regularly declared worthless, unnecessary, and obsolete, but also to a global community who bear the scars and triumphs of this construct called modernity, and to workforces around the world increasingly consigned to the shadows of corporate and technical glitz. In this time, the words that Wang imagines Dai Wangshu speaking across the expanse of time resonate above all: “Don’t worry, poetry isn’t what is lost in translation, but rather, what survives it.”

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L.J. Lee is a professional legal translator from Korea, writer of historical fiction and occasional translator of classical Chinese poetry. Her essays and translations can be found at https://ljwrites.blog/ and she is on the Fediverse as @ljwrites@writeout.ink. Her short story about palace espionage, romance, and queer community in 18th century Korea is coming out this year on the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast.