The Lantern and the Night Moths

Winner of the John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canada

“the lantern light seems to have written a poem;
they feel lonesome since i won’t read them.”
—“lantern” by Fei Ming

The work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.

In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.

Wang’s translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang’s personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.

Yilin Wang 王艺霖 (she/they) is a writer, a poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, The Ex-Puritan, The Toronto Star, The Tyee, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the editor and translator of The Lantern and Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024). Her translations have also appeared in POETRY, Guernica, Room, Asymptote, Samovar, The Common, LA Review of Books’ “China Channel,” and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022). She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, received an Honorable Mention in the poetry category of Canada’s National Magazine Award, been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and been a finalist for an Aurora Award. Yilin has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Find out more at www.yilinwang.com.

Praise for The Lantern and the Night Moths

“The Lantern and the Night Moths is an impressive undertaking: Yilin Wang has selected five deserving and startling poets and honours a complex tradition, language, and culture even while claiming space in a wider, English-language readership for Fei Ming, Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Xiao Xi, and Dai Wangshu. Wang’s renderings eloquently and faithfully convey tone, rhythm, and register, yet the translator-poet also walks confidently alongside the original poems and authors, expanding into the possibilities of the target language to better allow the images and evocations in the source texts to draw their English breath. The short essays that accompany each selection are vulnerable, insightful explorations of the ‘powerful act of intimacy,’ as Wang puts it, that is literary translation. An enormous amount of work has gone into this book and Yilin Wang offers up a translation that is both generous and responsible.”—John Glassco Prize jury citation

“The Lantern and The Night Moths (灯与夜蛾) is a collection of beautifully translated poems written by five modern and contemporary Chinese poets […] The poems and essays complement each other harmoniously […] Wang’s translation philosophy envisions poetry as lanterns—illuminating and warming the lives of writers, translators, and readers alike.”— Hongwei Bao, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

“If translation is not merely an academic and literary profession, but a communal, spiritual act of ushering works into their next lives, then Wang offers us lanterns of possibility in her anti-colonial translation ethics, a sense of dedication and care in which the living, departed, and faraway can accompany one another.”—Jane Shi, The Malahat Review

“Wang’s prose is searching and instructive, while inviting the reader into an intimate conversation between the poet and the translator. [And the] translations cover an astonishing range… The Lantern and the Night Moths is an embarrassment of riches, as exceptionally alert to beauty as to the structures of power that regulate its dispersion.”—Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Books, The Poetry Foundation

“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. […] In the translations themselves, there are instances of true brilliance. […] Pick it up. You’ll be glad you did.”—Shelly Bryant, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

“An exceptional book of translations and literary criticism [and Wang’s] accompanying essays (one per poet) make for a rich but accessible reading experience. The Lantern and the Night Moths is a wholly impressive work that is sure to appeal to many audiences.”—Annick MacAskill, Quill & Quire, Starred Review

“There’s an immense range in the poems themselves, themes of identity and longing/belonging emerge [as well as] so much that is deeply personal in [Wang’s] essays. She includes thoughtful biographical information about the poets and discusses the fascinating art and craft of translation.”—Book Riot

“The voices of these poets who lived through China’s modernity from the beginning to the present moment, given life for an Anglophone audience by Wang’s careful work and keen commentary, are not only a collection of poetry translations and essays, but a lively and continuing conversation. The Lantern and the Night Moths speaks not only to fellow travellers straddling the two disciplines of poetry and translation regularly declared worthless, unnecessary, and obsolete, but also to a global community who bear the scars and triumphs of this construct called modernity.”—L.J. Lee, Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation

“I also personally feel that for queer audiences, The Lantern and the Night Moths is especially affirming and uplifting. […] To have my struggles echoed and experienced by poets who lived decades or centuries removed from me is validating in profound and powerful ways.”—Justin Ancheta, The Ex-Puritan

“For anyone who is interested in exploring the range and complexity of Chinese poetry— rigorously and respectfully translated—Wang’s collection answers that question while revealing much about the culture, the ideals, and the past and present that have shaped Chinese thinkers. And for those who read the language, it is a profound exploration of how translations can give poems second lives and, in Wang’s words, reach kindred spirits and touch new readers in various corners of the world.”—Grace Lau, Rungh

“While I loved getting to know five amazing Chinese poets, The Lantern and the Night Moths made more of an impression on me as an ode to the complexity and beauty of translation. Wang shares the thoughts and struggles she had while translating each poem, places where she could have made different choices and what spurred her to use the final one she chose, and meditates on the beauty of each poem. This is a carefully written and considered labour of love for Sinophone poetry. The poems are lovely, and it is a treat to read these works that were previously inaccessible to anglophones who couldn’t read Chinese. This is a gift Wang is sharing with us: the work of these poets, their stories and context in which they wrote, and her relationship with these works as she translated them.”—Alison Manley, The Miramichi Review

“Yilin Wang intimately shares the act of translation that comes from a profound connection with one’s mother tongue—each poem blooms before one’s eyes, a wonderful encapsulation of autumn moon and winds, of yearning for home. Wang reincarnates the language of diaspora, blending her personal experiences with the story of poets, while dissecting the history of the classics of poetry.”—Elena Luo, book reviewer and bookstagrammer (@elena.luo)

“I’ve been reading this book slowly, savoring each poem, delving into the translator notes and realizing how much I have missed by not attending to Chinese poetry. … Sometimes, one anticipates a book and finds it to be satisfactory. The Lantern and the Night Moths exceeded my every expectation.”—Erica Friedman, founder of Yuricon

“Yilin Wang’s translation is an intensely loving conversation with the poets she considers her zhīyīn—soul friends who know her sound, her song. In her careful, poignant selection and translation, these poets write the music of misty longing. Some search for wisdom. Some yearn for the lost home. Some listen to the way pages rustle, cicadas sing. Some watch crimson dust drift. Some sip dew when parched, dine on petals when hungry. Some marvel under a bright net of suns endless in number. Wang’s earnest, heart-rousing translation shows us how the most ephemeral streak of brightness or sound, like the frail light of a lantern, or the swift flicker of butterflies, is writing and translating the poetry of our lives.”—Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, poet and translator of Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện

“The Lantern and the Night Moths is a spectacular communion of languages, poetry, and time. Yilin Wang’s translations of Fei Ming, Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Xiao Xi, and Dai Wangshu are extraordinary as she courageously traverses the unsayable spaces between Chinese and English with the gentleness and rigour of only the most skilled and loving translator. Erudite and attentive to the granularity of words and things, Wang shows us—with exceptional generosity—the many ways that poetry can reveal, remake, unsettle, seek, survive, and call us back home.”—Gillian Sze, author of Quiet Night Think

“The Lantern and the Night Moths, translated by Yilin Wang, is an evocative anthology of modern and contemporary Chinese poetry. This collection reflects the translator’s deep connection to her roots and the universal themes of longing and identity. Through these translations, Wang resurrects overlooked voices, particularly of women poets, and celebrates the enduring power of language and poetry. This work is not just a book of poems; it’s a journey across linguistic and cultural landscapes, offering a poignant look at the human spirit through the lens of the Chinese diaspora.”—Jack Saebyok Jung, co-translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works, winner of 2021 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Literary Work

“This is the collection of Chinese poetry in translation that I have been waiting for. The translations are exquisite and moving, and more than that, they have been carefully selected by the poet–translator Yilin Wang to speak to the concerns, observations, and shared emotional experiences of Chinese poets and a wide-ranging Chinese diaspora. This is not a well-meaning Orientalist project, but rather one that gets at kinships over time and space among Chinese and Chinese diasporic poets, as well as their allies and cousins. In addition to her translations, Yilin Wang offers important short essays on the work of her chosen poets, the reasons for her selection and the practice of translation. These essays foreground the living, creative and relational nature of translation work itself. Heart in hand, the poet–translator brings Chinese poets to my doorstep in ways that I have been longing for but never experienced until now.”—Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century and Iron Goddess of Mercy

“Poetry is what survives translation. Here, in the pages of Yilin Wang’s The Lantern and the Night Moths, it not only survives, it thrives, shining all the more brilliantly, persistently, and heroically. Vivid and moving, Wang’s beautiful translations and reflective essays grant us entry into the poems of Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Fei Ming, Xiao Xi, and Dai Wangshu, while also helping us understand the difficult choices and challenges that lie at the human heart of the translator’s work.”—Neil Aitken, author of Babbage’s Dream