Celebrating The Lantern and the Night Moths: Yilin Wang and Guests

This event is organized and co-sponsored by SFU’s David Lam Centre. We thank SFU’s Department of English, SFU’s Department of World Languages and Literatures, and SFU’s Global Asia Program as co-sponsors. We are also grateful for the support of the League of Canadian Poets and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Join us for a reading and panel discussion in celebration of Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang's debut book The Lantern and the Night Moths. The book features her English translations of work by five modern Chinese poets--Qiu Jin, Zhang Qiaohui, Fei Ming, Xiao Xi, and Dai Wangshu--alongside her personal essays on her journey as a translator and the art of translation.

“Yilin Wang’s translation is an intensely loving conversation with the poets she considers her zhīyīn—soul friends who know her sound, her song." -- Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng, poet and translator of Chronicles of a Village by Nguyễn Thanh Hiện

“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. Her short essays foreground the living, creative and relational nature of translation work itself.”—Larissa Lai, author of The Lost Century and Iron Goddess of Mercy

Yilin will be joined by two guest readers and poets—Isabella Wang and Dr. Joanne Leow (Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and Associate Professor in English). The event will be moderated by Dr. Melek Ortabasi (Associate Dean of FASS and Associate Professor in World Languages and Literatures).

Books will be available for sale.