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language: Chinese (English tr. Yilin Wang)
country: China
year: 2024
form: poetry
dates read: 15.10.25
The Lantern and the Night Moths, translated by Yilin Wang, collects a brief selection of poems (five or six each) by five Chinese poets: the modernist poets Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, and Dai Wangshu and the contemporary poets Zhang Qiaohui and Xiao Xi. following Wang’s translations of the poems, presented with the original Chinese on the facing page, are brief reflections on translating each of the poets. some of these are poem-by-poem, others are more general short essays on the poets and their work or contexts.
the poets are presented in alternating modernist-contemporary order (Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Fei Ming, Xiao Xi, Dai Wangshu). broadly, I enjoyed the contemporary poets more than the modernists and the women poets (+ a question mark about Qiu Jin) more than the men. Wang’s translations are, on the whole, very good — I particularly appreciated that she varies her style, translating both the contemporary poet Xiao Xi and the modernist poet Fei Ming in a very contemporary, all-lowercase voice. I found this particularly striking — and refreshing — for Fei Ming, whose poetry is heavily influenced by and marked by allusions to Classical Chinese literature. it would have been easy for Wang’s translations to be staid and Classical in tone, but instead they feel fresh and approachable (in spite of the endnotes explaining some of the allusions). if none of Fei’s poems stood out to me individually, I nonetheless enjoyed them — and, indeed, all of the translations — collectively, as an aesthetic experience. I would read a full collection of poems by any of these poets.
there were a few small things that jumped out at me in the translations, mostly punctuation choices that didn’t align with the Chinese text and some misplaced commas, but also just that Wang and I have divergent approaches to translation in some ways — she seems to be more averse to repetition than I am, for example. this comes to the fore in her translation of Xiao’s “the car is backing up, please pay attention” — which, to be clear, I still really enjoyed — where she renders the Chinese verb 注意 zhùyì, which appears ten times in the poem, as “be mindful”, “watch out”, “take note”, “look out”, “be on guard”, “behold”, “pay attention”, “beware”, and “take heed”. in her commentary on the translation, she says:
This intense repetition results in a wonderfully rhythmic, emotional build-up in the source text, but would feel repetitive and even monotonous if replicated directly in English.
to which my response was — would it, though? I wonder.
I’m evaluating the collection mainly on the strength of the translations; the essays I’m a bit more ambivalent about. I appreciate their presence, and I do think they added to my enjoyment of the poems and the anthology as a whole. that said, I simply do not Believe In Poetry in the way Wang clearly does; I do not regard it as mystical or as a privileged literary form in the way Poets tend to, and so some of what she says falls very flat for me.
nonetheless, I definitely think this book is worth a read — it’s a well-selected and well-translated anthology, and our different attitudes towards poetry notwithstanding Wang’s essays do help bring the different poets together into a cohesive whole.
moods: hopeful, reflective