The Lantern and the Night Moths

In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Yilin Wang translates selections from five modern and contemporary Chinese poets: Qiu Jin (1875–1907), Zhang Qiaohui (1978–), Fei Ming (1907–1967), Xiao Xi (1974–), and Dai Wangshu (1905–1950). The book includes translated poems and essays on each of the featured poets. Wang’s prose is searching and instructive, while inviting the reader into an intimate conversation between the poet and the translator. In the epistolary essay on Qiu Jin, a feminist and a revolutionary, Wang writes:

In your poem, “Púsāmán: To a Female Friend,” […] 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 queerplatonic soulmate who shares your deepest ideals. If I had lived in the same era as you […] might we have crossed paths and even become each other’s zhīyīn?

The reader is privy to the translator’s longing, doubts, and distress, though Wang is never given to the confessional form. In an essay on Zhang Qiaohui, Wang notes, “a poet–translator of the diaspora is also a survivor; they have persisted against and even defied a publishing ecosystem with structural biases, rules, and hierarchies.”

These translations cover an astonishing range. Wang flits expertly between Qiu Jin’s resolve—“To often abandon needlework for a love of rhyming dictionaries. / To always strip off hair ornaments to pay for books,”—and Fei Ming’s elusive tone: “the fish is actually the water in full bloom. / the lantern light seems to have written a poem.”

Wang’s anthology is an embarrassment of riches, as exceptionally alert to beauty as to the structures of power that regulate its dispersion. “I see myself in the moths” fluttering through Dai Wangshu’s poem “Night Moths,” writes Wang, “ 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.”