Yilin Wang’s co-created book The Lantern and the Night Moths, out from Invisible Publishing, is composed of her translations of five Chinese poets and her essays on translation. Their translation of a poem by Qiu Jin and their essay on translating her work have been excerpted at Words without Borders. Yilin had already given a number of interviews about translation and poetry. Each of these interviews casts light on the many aspects of her work: Wendy Chan ties together translation, poetry, and relationship with language; Tamara Jong highlights the care and engagement that are necessary to translation; Min Chao offers portraits of each of the writers in the anthology and of the translator, and asks questions that lead to an exploration of the ties between them; and Jael Montellano leads a personal conversation around cultures, languages, and the work of other poets. Throughout these interviews, we see Yilin’s concern for a poetic rather than academic understanding of the poems, a concern that reaches into their manner of answering questions as well. Even with these interviews being available to us, they agreed to answer a few questions I had for them.
Jérôme Melançon: I want to open by sharing how grateful I am that you accepted my invitation to sit down virtually for this dialogue. I’ve been aware of your work and your advocacy for some time, and as I hope I made clear in my review of The Lantern and the Night Moths, I immensely enjoy your work as a translator and the way you think about this task. After our short exchange on Bluesky, I felt that we might have more to discuss, and you pointed out that you have more to say about these translations.
In addition to being lively and dynamic, The Lantern and the Light Moths breaks with a very, very long legacy of poets from European-descended cultures translating Chinese literature without proficiency in the language. Ezra Pound is only one very notable example among many. Do you feel the weight of this legacy? How do you react to it?
Yilin Wang: Yes, I absolutely feel the weight of this legacy. I actually started translating Chinese poetry in part after encountering some older, dated translations of Classical Chinese poetry by white poets, like those of Ezra Pound. I found their approach very problematic, because of the ways they projected their Orientalist fantasies onto Chinese poetry. This legacy of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation has perpetuated many stereotypes and misunderstandings, yet had a crucial influence on the emergence of modernist poetry in English. So when I was working on my book, which is focused on Chinese modern and contemporary poetry that also draw influence from and sometimes subvert classical poetry, I tried to approach translation in a different way. I ended up including brief essays that discuss other ways of approaching translation which are more grounded in lived experiences, the body, feminism and queerness, Chinese literary theory and philosophy, and diaspora identities.
JM: I assume that many people who are not regular readers of Chinese poetry in translation first gained a strong awareness of your work as a translator through your advocacy and the wave of support you received. When the British Museum used your translations of Qiu Jin without attributing them to you, you insisted that you be recognized and compensated for your work, and made your way through what seems like every imaginable barrier the Museum could place in front of you. This is of course a repetition of the thefts and extractive work that created much of the collection of the British Museum. To save you the work of summarizing this lengthy episode in your life, I can point to your website where you explain the long process of reclaiming your work and defending the need for the recognition of the work of translators.
To this last point – this advocacy was not only for your benefit. As you mention on your website, you created a precedent in pushing one of the grandest institutions in the European art world (at least in its self-presentation) to develop a policy to clear translation rights – even as it depends on translation and contextualization for most of its exhibits, and continually seeks to make this work disappear, since tracing “acquisitions” and the situations of artists calls its very existence into question.
Can you tell me more about the meaning of this fight in relation to translation, in relation to the reception of Chinese literature and art? Is it a matter of re-appropriation following the expropriation of your work and voice? And what have you learned about translation in the process?
YW: On top of everything that happened, I feel it is extra ironic that my translations were used by the British Museum without permission for an exhibit on the late Qing dynasty, given the fraught history of that time period. For example, the same exhibit also featured a painting of a dog called Looty, which was taken by the British Captain John Hart Dunne in a looting of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.
After I initially spoke up about the British Museum using my work without permission, they did not immediately credit me but rather removed both my translations and the original Chinese poetry from the exhibit. It was clear that even though the exhibit featured the words of Qiu Jin, a staunch feminist who wrote many poems protesting against imperialism, they did not understand the significance or the context of her work. The erasure of her voices and mine really added insult to injury, so I felt it was really important to force the British Museum to take actions to correct what happened.
For me, the incident not only illustrates the invisibility of translators in museum and academic spaces, and how our work is often underappreciated, unacknowledged, and exploited, but also the ways that the creative works and voices of Chinese women poets in particular have long been historically silenced, appropriated, and mishandled by western institutions. The writings of Chinese women and femmes have been historically very underrepresented in Chinese publishing, and this gender imbalance is also perpetuated in what types of work get chosen for translation. Qiu Jin’s work has thus faced erasure along the axes of language, ethnicity, and gender, and for me, the barriers I encountered when dealing with the British Museum was truly a demonstration of all of that.
The British Museum’s eventual admission that they did not even have a copyright clearance policy for translations truly shows their fundamental and systemic failure to consider the work of translators and texts written in non-English languages. What happened is one example of the erasure and biases that translators of color and of marginalized genders face in publishing, museums, and academia, and in the society at large.
I have always felt that it is important to translate Qiu Jin’s work, given the power of her work and the themes she delves into, but everything that unfolded with the British Museum has made this work even more urgent and personally significant.
JM: Given your recognition of the role of the translator and this legacy of improficient translation, I’m curious to know about the translations that have helped form your approach to translation. And are there translations you’d recommend, whether it is because you learned from them, or simply because you appreciate them?
YW: I have learned a lot from reading other translators’ writings on translation and language. When it comes to the ethical issues of bridge translation, I think a lot about Jen Calleja and Sophie Collins’ article in Asymptote and Mona Kareem’s article in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. While I was writing the essays for my book, I also read through several wonderful chapbooks put out by Ugly Duckling Presse, and especially enjoyed Mirene Arsanios’ Notes on Mother Tongues and Sawako Nakayasu’s Say Translation Is Art.
When I first started out with translating Classical Chinese poetry, I also read Eliot Weinberger’s book Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. While I personally don’t agree with some of the commentary, I did find it a very helpful exercise to compare and to close read the various translations included in the book, which helped me as I experimented with and developed my own approaches and aesthetics. I also recommend folks check out the inspiring work of other contemporary Sino diaspora translators such as Fiona Sze-Lorrain, May Huang, Hongwei Bao, and Jeffrey Yang.
JM: I’d love to know more about the approach and aesthetics you just mentioned. How would you describe them? How do you understand the role of aesthetics in translation?
YW: My approach and aesthetics vary depending on the poet and poem I’m translating, but over the past five years, as I translated a number of classical and modern Chinese poets, I have gradually developed a general process that works for me.
I typically begin by identifying poems that I wish to translate by going through various publications like journals and anthologies, looking at lists of Chinese poets on different websites, and considering reading recommendations from others.
Once I decide to translate a text, I then annotate it carefully while researching any relevant historical and cultural contexts, intertextual references, and scholarly editions. Research is especially important for classical poetry because it tends to be very dense and full of allusions.
After that, I begin translating, creating multiple drafts, beginning with a closer “literal” translation of each word or line, and then rewriting and revising as needed to bring out the different layers of meaning in the poem. Each revision is a new adaptation, and often, I find myself delving deeper into the poem as I refine my understanding of the original through my translation.
When it comes to aesthetics, I find that many older translations of Chinese poetry tend to have issues such as using exoticizing language, domesticating the text too much to the point that many of the culturally specific images and allusions are lost, or being too literal and inadequately capturing the poetics and beauty of the poetry. So it’s very important for me when I translate to try to preserve a lot of the stylistic features and cultural details as well as the emotional impact. I frequently turn to tools like glosses, footnotes, and translator’s notes to achieve this. I pay special attention to imagery and word choice, and read my translations aloud multiple times. I also lean into my background as a writer, and try my best to preserve the beauty of the language by drawing on the poet’s toolkit.
When a translator translates literature, especially something like poetry where so much attention is paid to language, they are always making decisions. And so it’s very important for a translator to reflect on their approaches to translation and make those choices more deliberately, with an understanding of how and why they are making those choices, and what effects those choices may have.
JM: You speak of The Lantern and the Night Moths as your book. I love that approach! It goes against the tired idea that the translator’s work is – and ought to be – invisible. You show instead that it is made invisible, and you seek to let it be visible instead. Given this visibility, to what point might a translated poem also be the translator’s poem?
YW: I think of The Lantern and the Night Moths as a book that I co-created with the poets Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. It also wouldn’t exist without the help of the team at Invisible Publishing, whose work I deeply appreciate.
The book is a very unusual project because I was not commissioned by a publisher or an author to translate a book that already exists in Chinese, which tends to be the common practice. Instead, it’s self-initiated, and I was heavily involved from the beginning, starting with selecting which poets and poems to include, and then working on and revising the translations, and finally writing the accompanying essays on the poets and the translation process.
This was also my publisher’s first time publishing a bilingual anthology of poetry, and the publisher did not have experience working with Chinese poetry in translation, so I was deeply involved in the whole editorial and production process. I appreciate that they were flexible, allowing me to use a piece of cover art that I commissioned, letting me choose fellow translators Kess and Chenxin as my editors, and also helping me to bring aboard my typesetter and Chinese proofreader Jasmine to ensure that the Chinese texts are presented appropriately.
Beyond these typical stages of the publication process, I also had to deal with the British Museum’s theft of my work while I was writing my essay on translating Qiu Jin’s work. I also served as the go-between contact for the two contemporary Chinese authors, both of whom don’t speak English, to assist with contracts and payment, which is additional invisible labor.
So as you can see, I was deeply involved in this project as an author, translator, and editor. So much time and effort go into a project like this. I remember reading a post from Anton Hur once that argues that a translator should be credited as a co-author and co-contributor. I tend to agree, especially for literary translation. A translation is always an interpretation, one version, and it’s as much the translator’s work as the author’s.
JM: The book’s description mentions that the poems you chose can be read as so many ars poeticas, and that each of the poets subverts their poetic tradition. How do you bridge this poetic praxis they develop and the art of translation on which you reflect in your essays? Do you place yourself within this tradition of subversion, through these translations and your own poems?
YW: The writings of the poets that I have chosen span the past 120 years collectively, and many of the poems reflect on the poet’s relationship with language, place, and art-making. The poets also explore themes of tradition and modernity, often by engaging in conversation with and expanding or subverting Classical Chinese poetic traditions.
When I translate their work into English, I also think of myself as expanding the possibilities of poetry in English, whether by introducing readers to voices that are new to them or by broadening readers’ understanding about poetry. I am also subverting assumptions and stereotypes people may have about classical or modern Chinese poetry, and the legacies of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, whose writings about Classical Chinese poetry informed the emergence of modernist poetry in English.
So for me, translation is definitely an act of subversion and of reclamation. And when I discuss translating poetry through feminist and queer lenses, or through focusing on the struggles and longings of the diaspora, I hope also that I’m expanding existing conversations about how to translate Chinese poetry, and offering additional entry points and food for thought for other translators who may wish to do similar work.
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a Chinese diaspora writer, poet, and Chinese-English translator who lives on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (known colonially as Vancouver, Canada). Her debut book The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024) is the first book of translations from Chinese and from any Asian language to win the John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canada in the 40-year history of the prize. Her writing and translations have appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Room, Canthius, Arc Poetry Magazine, Words Without Borders, The Tyee, the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022), and elsewhere. She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, the Dwarf Stars Award, and the ALTA Travel Fellowship, and has been a finalist for Canada’s National Magazine Award, the CBC Poetry Prize, and the Aurora Award. She is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Learn more about her at www.yilinwang.com.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), 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), in addition to several published and ongoing translations of poems, academic texts, and archival documents. He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this, notably on settler colonialism in Canada. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
