Who is sewing with needle and thread?The heart also needs autumn clothes.Heed the tearful beckoning of weaving merfolk,heed the breath of falling tree leaves!Wind seeps into every vein and artery,eavesdropping on the heart as it withers and breaks.A poet once stated: the heart is a qín.Who else knows the archaic songs,“Bright Spring” and “White Snow”?For the solace of the true connoisseur and kindred spirit who has died,someone has hung it from the tip of a tree branch,to lift up the ethereal melody—the once carefully savoured, and now, departed tune.Yet the refined instruments of Wú strings and Shǔ wood have shattered,leaving only echoes of chords, reminiscent of those splendid years. 秋夜思谁家动刀尺?心也需要秋衣。听鲛人的召唤，听木叶的呼息！风从每一条脉络进来，窃听心的枯裂之音。诗人云：心即是琴。谁听过那古旧的阳春白雪?为真知的死者的慰藉，有人已将它悬在树梢，为天籁之凭托——但曾一度谛听的飘逝之音。而断裂的吴丝蜀桐仅使人从弦柱间思忆华年。
Autumn Night Reflections
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“Autumn Night Reflections” from THE LANTERN AND THE NIGHT MOTHS: by Dai Wangshu, translated by Yilin Wang.
Published by Invisible Publishing on April 2, 2024.
English Translation Copyright © 2024 by Yilin Wang.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Dai Wangshu (1905–1950) was a poet, editor, translator, and leading figure in the Chinese modernist literature movement. His books include My Memories and Troubled Times. With an interest and education in French literature, he was influenced by the work of French poets such as Paul Fort and Francis Jammes, as well as by ancient Daoist texts and Táng dynasty verse. His writing blends archaic allusions and diction with modern poetics to explore themes such as love, death, and nostalgia.
Yilin Wang (she/they) is a Chinese diaspora poet and Chinese-English translator. Her debut book The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024) is the first book of translations from Chinese (Mandarin) to win the John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canada in the 40-year history of the prize. Her words and translations have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Room, Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere. She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, the ALTA Virtual Fellowship, and the Dwarf Stars Award, and has been a finalist for Canada’s National Magazine Award, the CBC Poetry Prize, and the Aurora Award. She has an MFA from UBC and is a graduate of Clarion West. www.yilinwang.com.
Picton, Ontario
Canada
“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
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