The Lantern and the Night Moths: Five Modern and Contemporary Poets Selected and Translated by Yilin Wang

Reviewed by ​Jérôme Melançon

(Invisible, 2024)

One of the pleasures of reading poetry in translation from a language not understood is the feeling of being guided and cared for by an enthusiastic translator. When the mediation is clear and enjoyable, it is possible to experience some aspects of the worlds out of which the poems emerged and now live. The task is demanding: the translator must let readers experience the mystery of new signification that poetry produced and retain the difference in the traditions of poetics in each language, without making the source language and culture mysterious and foreign.
 
In less fortunate cases, the translator’s voice can substitute itself for that of the poet in an attempt to contain a whole world. As a semi-regular reader of Chinese poetry and philosophy in translation, with an uneven knowledge of Chinese histories and cultures, I have become accustomed to the weighty presence of a translator and of their culture of reception. I was grateful then to see Yilin Wang navigate the relatively recent history of Chinese-language poetry by turning her back to the history of its translation and appropriation into European languages and bringing forward elements from Sinophone poetics and translation theory.
 
Wang uses a few devices to ensure that the poems reach us as poems, rather than as cultural or historical artifacts. One is the preparation of a side-by-side translation that includes the formal qualities of the original without weighing down the translation into contemporary English. Another is the inclusion of essays in which she addresses the poets through us and recounts her exchanges with their poems, making us conduits instead of receptors. The most powerful is her choice to often use a language that transforms English into a vessel instead of a tomb for the poems she translates—I had the feeling of having them read out loud to me.
 
Yet another device is present in her essay on Qiu Jin, which was granted by the bad intentions of others: Wang was able to build on the experience of having their work stolen and appropriated by the British Museum. In this doubling down on colonial practices, the Museum used their translations without attributing them or paying for rights in order to add to an exhibit featuring appropriated artworks (and mistakes!). In these actions, we find the perpetuation not only of theft and destruction of the cultures from which elements are torn, but also the bad-faith justification of showing what is hidden—the Museum’s logic is that all means are justified in making Chinese art available to the British public. In fighting the Museum, Wang led an action that was protective of their own rights and practice, which was also an anti-colonial action. By integrating this action into their poetic work, they placed it within our material lives as well as within their own and those of the poets and their primary publics. Care for Qiu Jin’s work and their work, and so for poetry itself, entailed a willingness to be active in an ongoing struggle as well as to keep the poems alive by breathing new spirit into them.
 
Including Qiu Jin, Wang selected five poets for this collection. The reasons for her choices are better found in the book than summarized, but it is worth pointing out that she expresses no concern for canonization, only one for the unity of feeling that is found within the poems, and that the translator experiences for them. Thus many of the poems are explicit reflections on the updating and transfiguring of tradition, a theme that Wang carries into her essays as well. Yet as strong as the essays and choices are, as carefully as they all observe and fold this line of questioning into their language(s), it would be reductive to read the entirety of these translations as preoccupied with poetic and cultural filiation.
 
With Qiu Jin (1875-1907), who lived in a period of great modernization, we find poems that are from another era, at least in their form and in the expectations they defy. She expresses a longing that Wang reclaims, that for a zhīyīn, “the one who can truly understand your songs,” a person with whom to be close, share, create kinship, all without regard for the norms of relationships (so forming “queerplatonic” relationships) —perhaps someone with whom to bring forth transformation. Each poem also sketches renewed possibilities for women, desires for other kinds of lives. Wang arranges the poems in such a way as to create a narrative arc. In the first, “A River of Crimson: A Brief Stay in the Glorious Capital,” Qiu writes that she is “Not a man in the flesh, / unable to walk amongst them; but the heart exceeds, more fierce than a man’s!” And in the last poem, “Reflections” we read from Qiu that “I awaken the spirits of women, hundreds of flowers, abloom.”
 
The six poems by Zhang Qiaohui (born in 1978, at the beginning of the period of reform and opening up) hold together generations and the presence of the past in the future. The poems present concrete relationships to a mother and a grandmother, an encounter with a woman, a peaceful co-presence with others in a single location, and a concern for physical places, gravesites known and unknown, ruins, or buildings. Zhang brings us to physical places, introduces us to people, showing us directly and in its full ambiguity the relevance of the past at the same time as letting us see the difficulty of its implantation through markers and decorations in the present and future. Perhaps above all, in these poems we see the inevitability of our failings in dealing with the remnants of other pasts and of our own pasts. “Remnants” holds a calmly dizzying array of words to express facets of the passage of time and of the pain it inflicts, as well as a single image to centre the continuation of life: “Wounded by pruning, / the morning glory blooms anew / with a light-blue flower.”
 
The poetry of Fei Ming (1901-1967), who died as the Cultural Revolution was well under way, allows us to take a step backward in time, between the two previous authors. Fei Ming is concerned with the new meaning that new forms of poetry can bring to Daoism and Buddhism. Here the translator’s notes are particularly helpful to help unfamiliar readers grasp something of the signification of the imagery and cultural references that act as engines for the poems. A “timely and wondrous rain falling upon ephemeral mountains” can then take on a much more immediate meaning than a “peach-blossom shore,” whose meaning we need not guess. And the work accomplished through the transfiguration of the image of the fish in water appears in its fulness on a second, more informed reading.
 
In contrast to the other selected poets, Xiao Xi (b. 1974) offers poetry that seems to flow by itself, without the support of forms and expectations, looking at the past as if it could be found without its structures. The descriptions—of a merchant, the sea, the wind, a restaurant, a lake—are immensely careful, precise, rounded out, held, and held out to us. The most amazing of these descriptions is the movement of a car over the ground, as its tires roll over various natural objects that did not put themselves in its path, meant to let us find ethical guidance in our dealings with others.
 
Dai Wangshu (1905-1950), who died immediately after the first consolidation of the communist regime following the revolution, closes the collection. With the iridescent wings of a man seeing himself as a butterfly, with instructions (or descriptions) such as “When dawn arrives, watch the mist meander above mountain peaks,” we find the beauty and peace we expect from classical Chinese poetry. These themes are knowingly brought to the contemporaneous reader: in “To Answer the Visitor with Classical Imagery,” Dai satisfies the reader looking for their past or perhaps even for exoticism, but speaks it in a renewed breath. He goes further in “Autumn Night Reflections” and breaks one enchantment by pointing out that we are simply reminiscing. Yet Dai and Wang both create another enchantment by forcing us to accept these verses as speaking to a human need in the world as it currently is, to take up the possibility “To be joyfully immersed,” to be soothed by poetry and, through it, by the connection to the world that is beauty.
 
With this collection, Yilin Wang offers all at once a way into Chinese poetry that takes care of the translated poems; a path in Chinese poetry for those who already have some familiarity; but also poetry of her own through the sharp and measured use of her voice and a contribution to the poetics of translation. In the concluding sentences of two of the essays, she outlines other forms of the longing for relationships and writing she finds in Qiu Jin:

​“[...] what is translation if not the gentle, rigorous art of embracing and pushing back against the constraints of language, in order to unsettle and to remake?”
 
“Let us open our collective imaginations to other languages, literatures, and worlds.”

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​Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He sometimes translates poetry for periodicities as well as other text in other places, and is currently working on translations of books by Denise Desautels and by Phyllis Webb. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome