A blog of fragments.
Translation, though sometimes idealized as essentially positive, is still subject to the invidious hierarchies and practices endemic to industries and empires. Rather than world-making endeavors, some view, practice, cite, and publish translations as implements of institutional authority, an extractive mode of knowledge production that aims to domesticate what lies beyond its own borders.
Yilin Wang’s The Lantern and the Night Moths stands distinguished from the material and discursive practices that constitute such normatively legible archives. This collection of five contemporary and modern Chinese poets—Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Fei Ming, Xiao Xi, and Dai Wangshu—and lyric essays on their translation by Wang is a beautiful project of world-making, drawing the work of these poets and their translator into generative proximity. Readers are not treated to a perfunctory survey of contextually deprived “important works” but a curated collection in living relation, animating the work of these poets (including Wang as poet translator) to speak to any readers alert to how one belongs to and makes sense of the world.
Many of these poems contain speakers who are adrift, marshaling explicit calls for recognition and being-with-others as well as subterranean movements across fragmented image and space. In Zhang Qiaohui’s “The Pagoda of a Thousand Autumns,” a pagoda appears as deity of light in the dark and then a mundane reconstruction in the morning, setting up the doubled structure of diasporic return to homeland: “the ancestral land is a deity / and also, a useless decoration.” Xiao Xi’s “the car is backing up, please pay attention” stages different modalities of noticing, whether mundane obstacles to dutiful drivers like “sprinting kids and cats,” the ethereal image of a “sorrowful face in the mist,” or a scrap of sound: “take heed of the sudden, uncontrollable sobs from the roadside.”
I was particularly delighted by poems like Qiu Jin’s “Inscription on My Tiny Portrait (in Men’s Clothes)” that are elaborated in a speculative mode: “In the future, when I meet my friends from bygone times, / I shall declare, I have swept the dust of the world away.” Such an enduring call of resilience, solidarity, and imagination is so affecting for me as a reader over one hundred years and a language away from Qiu Jin’s words, when queer futures still lie under a blade held aloft. Here, a lyric description of futurity is an active conjuring of companionship, drawing both reader and Wang’s accompanying essay into personal, political, and historical relation. In fact, Wang’s essay “Dear Qiu Jin: ‘To meet a Kindred Spirit Who Cherishes the Same Songs’” is a vital conduit for further channeling this relationality, delivering both contextual notes to help the reader properly attend to Qiu Jin’s poems and a deeply personal mediation of Qiu Jin’s life and work:
The essay implicates Wang as reader, translator, fellow poet, and kin to Qiu Jin, drawing a queer lineage across language and space and time. I was continuously impressed and inspired by how Yilin Wang creates a sophisticated project of diasporic kinship that navigates a topography of fraught sociopolitical histories and aesthetics to adumbrate a powerful relationality that must be sought out and imaginatively staged.
Moreover, Wang’s remarks traverse registers of explicit articulation, historical and cultural specificity, and the domain of artful silences inherent to poetry as a form: “Poems that appear enigmatic at first glance might be communicating in quieter and subtler ways, seeking to be experienced and felt rather than to be unpacked and rationalized. Isn’t the art of translating poetry also the art of translating those silences?” (54). Wang writes with such capacious perceptivity that it feels like no other could have better translated and presented these poems of being far from home, wandering out, drifting among strangers to glimpse something recognizable.
I also appreciated Wang’s insights into the circumstances and structures that determine how these works are received and effaced across cultural and literary spaces, such as the British Museum having stolen Wang’s translations for their “China’s Hidden Century” exhibition and Wang’s own diasporic positionality that they locate as being complexly generative to their work. Wang effectively pressurizes these poems into lush ecosystems of aesthetic production, material relations, and personal affects that invite the reader to wander and take in these worlds. How I wish to have impossibly been reading this book as a teenager visiting relatives in Korea and Japan who left me feeling like a stranger. How more of us should be invested in supporting marginalized writers and translators. That making kin and community, across languages and decades and borders, is an urgent social and aesthetic project. The Lantern and the Night Moths is a powerful collection that calls us to recognize translation as not just metaphor but material to making kin.