I’m delighted and honored to share that my debut book The Lantern and the Night Moths recently won the 2024 John Glassco Translation Prize from the Literary Translators Association of Canada (LTAC). The prize is given annually to a debut translation into English or French by a Canadian translator. Notably, my book is the first work of translation from Chinese and from any Asian language to win the prize in the 40-year history of the prize.
Thank you to the LTAC, to the entire jury, and to Alina Doricheva (Ukrainian translator of San Mao), who helped the jury assess my translations of the Chinese texts. Thank you to my publisher Invisible Publishing, editors Kess and Chenxin, and everyone who helped make this book a reality.
Here’s the jury’s citation in English:
“The Lantern and the Night Moths is an impressive undertaking: 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.”
— The 2024 John-Glassco Prize Jury: Jeannot Clair (chair), Susan Ouriou, Lida Nosrati, Katia Grubisic
For more info, see the announcement of the prize in Quill and Quire and Pancouver.
