Several months ago, I pre-ordered Yilin Wang’s new book The Lantern and the Night Moths, which collects Wang’s original translations of works by five modern and contemporary Chinese poets as well as several essays by Wang reflecting on her selections. (The official release date for The Lantern and the Night Moths is April 2, 2024, but my copy showed up way early. Since I enjoyed reading it so much, I thought I’d write a review to shout about it to the internet!)
The Lantern and the Night Moths features poems in Chinese (standardized Mandarin), with English-language translations on the corresponding facing page. The poems are grouped by author, featuring:
- 6 poems by Qiu Jin (秋瑾; 1875 – 1907);
- 6 poems by Zhang Qiaohui (张巧慧; 1978 – present);
- 5 poems by Fei Ming (废名; 1901 – 1967);
- 6 poems by Xiao Xi (小西; 1974 – present);
- 5 poems Dai Wangshu (戴望舒; 1905 – 1950).
After each set of poems, Wang includes a personal essay examining each of the works she translated and selected for this collection, tying the poems back to her own experiences as a genderqueer femme, a member of the Sino diaspora, and a translator (including the challenges she faced translating some of these poems + her fight to receive proper credit and compensation for her translations displayed at the British Museum).
As a queer poet and language-lover, I thoroughly enjoyed The Lantern and the Night Moths. I’m nowhere near fluent in Chinese, but I had fun reading the English poems and comparing them to the original Chinese versions (particularly in instances like Zhang Qiaohu’s “Dialect” — I can read enough Chinese to appreciate how well Wang conveys the rhythm and imagery from the original piece). Wang skillfully carries forward Qiu Jin’s frustration with gender norms and the status quo of her time throughout six distinct poems, bringing us the fierce (and lonely) voice of a Chinese feminist revolutionary with lines like these: “Don’t speak so easily of how women can’t become heroes — alone, I rode the winds eastward, for ten thousand miles.”
I resonated with the wistful yearning present in Wang’s translations of in Fei Ming’s poems “the floating dust of the mortal realm” and “stars”, both of which present the reader with poignant imagery (and could even be considered speculative poetry!). I couldn’t pick a favorite among Wang’s translations of Xiao Xi’s poems: they’re all delightful, juxtaposing the mundane and frustrating with precious moments of humanity, determination, and persistence.
Each of Dai Wangshu’s poems that Wang featured in this collection carries undercurrents of loss and/or transformation: a stirring butterfly; a lingering spirit found in chimney smoke as “the fading footsteps of the hundreds of generations [pass] by”; hearts and traditional musical instruments both shattered; night moths helping a phoenix rise; and a “strange and peculiar comet pausing in space as I please […] so no one can calculate my trajectory, or see through my logic.”
I highly recommend The Lantern and the Night Moths to readers interested in:
- overlooked contemporary and modern poetry,
- works translated from Chinese to English,
- studying contemporary and modern Chinese literature,
- feminist poetry,
- revolutionary poetry,
- queer poetry and/or reading poetry through a queer lens, and
- translated poetry in general!
If you’d like to pre-order a copy of The Lantern and the Night Moths, click here!
MOLO WRITES 