By Shelly Bryant

The Lantern and the Night Moths: Five Modern and Contemporary Chinese Poets in Translation
Selected and translated by Yilin Wang
Invisible Publishing (2024) / 112 pages / SGD 25  

In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Yilin Wang collects and translates the work of five poets: Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Fei Ming, Xiao Xi and Dai Wangshu. The book is not only a marvellous collection of poetry in both the original and translation, but also of an insightful series of reflections on the translation process and its impact. It even includes a perspective on the well-publicised disagreement between Wang and the British Museum over the institution's use of her translations without her permission – indeed, without so much as bothering to ask. This documentation of that conflict is welcome, as it simultaneously highlights both the more personal and the more businessy aspects of the job of a literary translator. In this section, as in her other notes and her translations in The Lantern and the Night Moths, Wang shows herself to be insightful, measured and extremely skilled – definitely a voice worth listening to.

The notion of finding a voice worth listening to in any text we might encounter is an experience Wang discusses at length in her notes on the translations. She aptly entitles the first set of notes in the volume "Dear Qiu Jin: 'To Meet a Kindred Spirit Who Cherishes the Same Songs,'" a move that hints at the personal nature of the notes. Addressing the poet she has translated, she writes, "In your poem, 'Púsāmán: To a female friend,' written over a hundred and twenty years ago, the moon casts its light on a different kind of yearning – the search for a zhīyīn 知音. Literally, 'the one who can truly understand your songs,' a zhīyīn is a close friend, a kindred spirit, a queer platonic soulmate who shares your deepest ideals. If I had lived in the same era as you, amidst the tumultuous sociopolitical changes of the late Qing dynasty, the backdrop against which your feminist views emerged, might we have crossed paths and even become each other's zhīyīn?"

Based on my own experience as a literary translator, I can imagine that many critics would zero in on the translation of zhīyīn ("the one who can truly understand your songs") Wang offers here and challenge just how literal it is. While I think it's quite precisely accurate (literal or not), I also think that asking the question at all is to miss the point of what Wang has so skilfully done. She uses this somewhat direct interpretation as a starting point from which she then very succinctly traces the nature of her entire interaction with Qiu's poetry, drawing our attention simultaneously to the poem's historical context and its connection to our contemporary situation. This is a translator who is profoundly connected to the two worlds she is standing between here – the world of the text and the world of her readers – and she very ably brings her readers from one into the other, and in the rest of the notes (this and all the others in the book), she offers a nuanced description of how she achieved this.

For any literary translator, I believe that Wang's reflections will produce a resounding "Yes!" in recognition of this process. And when the reflection moves to her conflict with the British Museum, we read of the battle against "gaslighting and micro aggressions" and the support of a community committed to fair dealing. Wang writes to Qiu, "The long overdue resolution wouldn't have been possible without the help of countless people and communities – radicalized folks, fellow writers, editors, translators, readers, academics, museum professionals asexual and aromantic organisers, and even members of the BTS Army – all of whom rallied to spread word about the incident and supported us along the way". As I read those words, I am confident that the "Yes!" in response to Wang's record of her intimate connection to Qiu Jin through the diligent, focused work of translation will reverberate well beyond the small circle of literary translators, echoing through all of the communities she mentions, and many others as well. The act of literary translation so deftly recorded here is, clearly, a very intimate one between two skilled poets, but it is also performed for a larger community, and the act of translation has had a profound impact on areas which, I am almost sure, never entered the translator's mind as she worked, any more than they did the mind of the poet she was translating.

I will refrain from examining each set of notes in this book, though the temptation to do so is very real. But I will say that these reflections touch on many topics that will resonate with readers – addressing the complex relationships we have with the languages we speak (especially the "unofficial" dialects), intergenerational familial ties, gender and sexuality, diasporas, biases, ambiguity and clarity, the spoken and unspoken, and questions of faith. And that just scratches the surface, really. The notes are short but rich, not satisfied with just offering insightful commentary, but instead seeking to provoke thoughtful reflection in the reader.

In the translations themselves, there are instances of true brilliance. Each poem can easily be read as an English poem alone, and it will be a rewarding experience. For those who are able and inclined to read the poetry in both languages, the Chinese version of each poem is included. This too allows for deeper thought on the hows and whys of Wang's approach to translation. For instance, in her translation of Fei Ming's "to wander out", we find the line "so this is poetry that speaks to how a poet is,–––". This is a beautiful example of a line that reads well in English, especially with the enigmatic use of punctuation at the end. It is made all the more interesting by being placed among lines that have a somewhat more mundane sound: "I'm strolling along the street, / my heart astonished by a record of humankind" before, and after, "here comes a friend heading straight towards me, oh a stranger;" both of which read as a sort of interior monologue. The middle line about "poetry that speaks to how a poet is" feels slightly out of place in the observations about crowds on the street, and the choice to retain the Chinese version's long dash at the end of the line serves to call our attention firmly to this line as the centre of the overall piece. It is also a very interesting rendering of the Chinese line, which is more directly translated, "this is poetry about the poet."

In an experiment, I asked for an AI version of the line, and it spat out, "This is what the poet's poem says," or alternatively, "This is the poet's poem." When I pointed out its error, the AI (graciously!) acknowledged that, "This is poetry [precisely] about poets/the poet" was a much better, more nuanced reading of the line – though falling short of acknowledging that its own reading had clearly missed the mark. Similarly, I would say that the translation, "This is poetry [precisely] about the poet," though accurate, lags as far behind Wang's "so this is poetry that speaks to how a poet is,–––" as the AI's inaccurate version does my accurate-yet-clunky, more literal offering. I say this not so much as a commentary on the limits of machine translation or even of literal translation, but rather as a means of examining just how far beyond the bare-bones literal meaning Wang's translations go – and I mean that in the best of ways. Her work, here and throughout the volume, does what merely solving the problem of accuracy in the AI version of the translation fails to do: it breathes new vitality into the poems, allowing them to enter their new world of English writings as fully functioning, living texts.

This neatly sums up the beauty of the translations in The Lantern and the Night Moths. Wang is a translator who takes ownership of the poetry in the same way than any diligent reader should. Poetry – any text, really – is not some stony, lifeless entity incapable to adapting to its surroundings, but living words that take on particular shape when they enter the specific environment of a singular reader's mind. Wang's translations are a record of how these poems have been shaped by the intimate experience of her mind casting careful attention on them. This interaction brings us lines that are often poignant, sometimes even breathtaking. She writes, "like a youth betting on their nimbleness as they leap and snatch / flowers from up high", and, "when the hands of the clocks are no longer moving / the repairer of time is already on their way here", and, perhaps my favourite, "I think, therefore I am a butterfly…".

This is a book full of such treasures. Pick it up. You'll be glad you did.

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