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Yilin Wang (editor & translator), The Lantern and the Night Moths: Five Modern and Contemporary Chinese Poets, Invisible Publishing, 2024. 120 pgs.
The Lantern and The Night Moths (灯与夜蛾) is a collection of beautifully translated poems written by five modern and contemporary Chinese poets; it is also the poet-translator Yilin Wang (王艺霖)’s philosophical musings on Chinese poetry and poetry translation. The book is divided into five sections. Each section is dedicated to a poet’s work, showcasing five to six poems in both their original Chinese version and the translated English version, presented side by side on the page. These carefully curated poems are followed by an essay in which Wang introduces each poet’s biography, historical and social contexts, her selection rationales, the challenges she encountered and the choices she made during the translation process, as well as her personal reflections on the works. The poems and essays complement each other harmoniously: the translations serve as enactments of Wang’s translation philosophy, while the essays provide nuanced insights into the poems and their contexts. Together, they offer a rich tapestry of affective experiences and thought-provoking reflections on Chinese poetry. As they challenge the dominant perception of Chinese poetry in the Anglophone world as being solely composed of classical works, they introduce readers to modern and contemporary poetry—rhymed and unrhymed, metrical and non-metrical—imbued with feminist, queer, trans, working-class, Buddhist, Daoist, and transnational diasporic themes.
Wang’s identity as a poet-translator living in the Chinese diaspora is apparent from the very beginning. The book’s prologue features a quote from Wang’s personal essay, describing poetry as one of her “rare lifelines” in the diaspora: “It’s the closest that I have ever felt to belonging.” In her essay on Zhang Qiaohui, she describes poetry translation as “the most meaningful way in which I have been able to maintain a deep connection with my mother tongues” (p. 37). Wang’s diasporic positionality shapes both her poetry selection and translation practices.
Wang selected five poets, some better known than others, most having suffered from marginalisation or misunderstanding due to their gender or poetic styles. These include three modern poets: Qiu Jin (秋瑾, 1875–1907), Fei Ming (废名, 1901–1967), and Dai Wangshu (戴望舒, 1905–1950); and two contemporary poets: Zhang Qiaohui (张巧慧, b. 1978) and Xiao Xi (小西, b. 1974). This eclectic selection reflects both the limitations of access—Wang often relies on luck or friends to obtain Chinese poetry books—and her personal preferences, shaped by felt affinities and connections with the poets and their works. For example, Wang describes encountering Qiu Jin’s poetry as akin to finding a zhiyin (知音), “a close friend, a kindred spirit, a queerplatonic soulmate who shares your deepest ideals” (p. 15). Given Wang’s feminist, queer, and diasporic positionality, it is unsurprising that three of the selected poets are women and at least two have lived or studied outside China. Translating these poets’ works allows Wang to contextualise her own experiences within a broader historical framework and to forge affective connections with poets who share similar experiences of marginalisation and displacement.
The book opens with six of Qiu Jin’s poems, all marked by a strong feminist stance. Some, such as “Pusaman: To A Female Friend” (菩萨蛮•寄女伴) and “Inscription on My Tiny Portrait (in Men’s Clothes)” (自题小照（男装）), lend themselves to queer and trans readings. Approaching Qiu Jin’s work from the perspective of “a queer femme and poet-translator of the diaspora” (p. 18), Wang critiques mainstream literary historians’ erasure of the poet’s gender and sexual subjectivity, firmly situating Qiu Jin’s work within feminist, queer, and trans literary canons. Wang’s essay on Qiu Jin is thus an eloquent reflection on feminist, queer, and trans translation. Also remarkable is Wang’s innovative use of English poetic forms, such as couplets and tercets, to translate classical Chinese forms, including regular and irregular verse. Rendered in elegant language with strong rhythms and vivid imagery, the English versions, though largely unrhymed, stand alone as unique works of poetry. The common argument that classical Chinese poetry is untranslatable finds a compelling rebuttal here.
Less well-known in the Anglophone world, Zhang Qiaohui is a contemporary Chinese woman poet whose selected poems explore women’s lives and intergenerational intimacies. Zhang’s visceral poem “The Raised Hand with the Whip Won’t Stop” (举着鞭子的手停不下来), about a maternity nurse’s life, draws attention to the pain and trauma of childbirth. In translating Zhang’s two-stanza poem 天一阁 into the four-stanza “Tianyige, the First Library Under the Sky,” Wang employs both alienation and domestication strategies to mediate cultural differences. In her accompanying essay, Wang recounts a Chinese folktale about Tianyige concerning Qian Xiuyun (钱绣云), a young woman barred from accessing books by patriarchal Confucian values. While the folktale is not explicit in Zhang’s poem, Wang’s annotation constitutes a feminist intervention: “I read, write, and translate poetry for women like Xiuyun” (p. 39), she asserts.
Fei Ming (冯文炳) is a modern Chinese poet whose work is deeply influenced by Buddhism and Daoism. His abstract, ambiguous poems resist straightforward interpretation, making translation an almost impossible task. Wang describes the challenge as translating not only the words but also the gaps, silences, and absences within the poems. To counteract the negative connotations of English words such as “emptiness,” Wang translates 空 as “ephemeral” and 虚 as “nebulous.” Reflecting on her decisions, Wang asks, “What is translation if not the gentle, rigorous art of embracing and pushing back against the constraints of language, in order to unsettle and remake?”
Another contemporary Chinese female poet, Xiao Xi’s works depict the struggles of the poor and marginalised in Chinese society—a woman selling sewing needles by the roadside, a man eating rice in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. Grounded in social realism yet lyrical in tone, these poems are aptly summarised in Wang’s translated title “Between Life’s Hardships and Poetic Beauty” (命运与诗意). Wang’s essay on Xiao Xi reads like a masterclass in Chinese poetry translation, illustrating her approach through specific examples: “As a poet-translator, I must also work with many limitations—like the linguistic constraints of Mandarin and English and the specific details of the source texts—but I nevertheless strive to challenge those boundaries in pursuit of my poetic ideals” (pp. 79–80). Readers are invited to “open our collective imaginations to other languages, literatures, and worlds” (p. 80).
The final poet introduced in the book, Dai Wangshu, is among the most celebrated modern poets in Chinese literature. Perhaps less known, however, are his critical essays on literary translation. A poet and translator himself, Dai contended that most poems are translatable. From Dai, Wang learns that “poetry isn’t what is lost in translation, but rather, what survives it” (p. 95). Dai becomes a role model for Wang, demonstrating how a poet-translator can expand the possibilities of poetry through translation. Like Dai, Wang critiques the marginalisation of poetry translation in the publishing industry, foregrounding the experiences of women, queer people, and diasporic individuals often overlooked by mainstream literary histories and Eurocentric publishing practices. For Wang, the diasporic poet-translator is a “survivor” who has “persisted against and even defied a publishing ecosystem riddled with structural biases” (p. 40).
Reflecting on Dai’s poem “Night Moths,” Wang identifies with its imagery: “Our fragile silken wings flutter as we take flight together, trailing the voices of the past across pages both familiar and new, guided only by the warm light of a lantern glimmering in the dark” (p. 100). This poetic gloss on the book’s title articulates Wang’s longing for language, belonging, and home, as well as her solace in finding kinship with like-minded poets. Ultimately, Wang’s translation philosophy envisions poetry as lanterns—illuminating and warming the lives of writers, translators, and readers alike.
How to cite: Bao, Hongwei. “Poetry Translation in the Chinese Diaspora: Wang Yilin’s The Lantern and The Night Moths.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 19 Jan. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/01/19/night-moths.
Hongwei Bao is a queer Chinese writer, translator and academic based in Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020) and Queering the Asian Diaspora (Sage, 2025) and co-editor of Queer Literature in the Sinosphere (Bloomsbury, 2024). His poetry books include The Passion of the Rabbit God (Valley Press, 2024) and Dream of the Orchid Pavilion (Big White Shed, 2024). [All contributions by Hongwei Bao.]