The Magpie at Night takes its title from one of Li Qingzhao’s surviving poetic fragments: “The feelings I make into poems / are like the magpie at night, / circling three times, unable to settle.” A woman poet from the Song dynasty, Li (1084-1151 CE) was recognized for her mastery of the classic ci form, and is described in this newly published, wide-ranging collection as an “indomitable voice . . . [that] still sings to us across the centuries” by translator Wendy Chen. In this complete series of poems commonly accepted to be written by Li, Chen brings about this singing in Li’s wondrous sense of listlessness, in recurring motifs of dreams, and in the clarity of awareness: “I wake to face / the candle’s red bloom.”
Here, I speak with Chen about her translation of The Magpie at Night, a process involving familial recitations, happenstance, and wounds towards encounters with true selves.
Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?
Wendy Chen (WC): It is inventive, playful, and an homage to the writer and the original work. The process of translation itself is like figuring out how to unlock a puzzle of language, while exploring its possibilities.
TT: For readers unfamiliar with the work of Li Qingzhao, can you describe what it was like to hear her work recited for the first time?
WC: In my family, recitations of classical Chinese poems were a part of the everyday fabric of conversation. The older generations would recite these poems as commentary on contemporary issues or events in our daily lives. In this way, I was raised to see these poems in dialogue with whatever might be happening, and Li’s work was no different. Hearing her recited in this way allowed me to see the continued relevance of her work, and how it could speak to a modern audience of readers who might also be grappling with desire, grief, longing, homesickness, resentment, and love.
For example, one text of hers that always spoke to me is “Emotions”:
. . . I compose poems, refuse talk,
Shut my door.The fragrance of incense, beautiful thoughts
rise in this empty room.Within stillness, I encounter my true selves:
Mr. Nonexistent, Sir Void.
“Emotions” captures the energy and possibility of the act of creation in these last two astonishing lines. For Li Qingzhao, the void is not a space of despair, but rather possibility—a space that the speaker-writer claims as her “true sel[f].” As a writer, I fell in love with how the poem evokes the creative process with such clarity.
TT: What was your journey from your first translated poem to this complete collection of Li’s ci and shi works?
WC: I started translating Li’s ci and shi somewhat by chance. In college, a fellow classmate put out a call for translation submissions towards an anthology of world literature; I was intrigued by the opportunity and decided to translate one of Li’s ci. Translating that first ci (“A Cutting of Plum Blossoms”) was incredibly rewarding, and the process made me fall even more in love with her work as I immersed myself in the language and imagery. I was captivated by the ways that scent mixed with image in the opening lines:
In autumn, the scent
of the red lotus fades
from bamboo mats . . .
After that anthology was published, I was amazed by the response and interest I received. Over the years, I translated her ci and shi one by one, publishing them here and there in various literary journals. In my MFA program, my professor Brooks Haxton encouraged me to take my translations more seriously and to assemble them into a collection. He was incredibly generous with his time and spent hours looking over my translations with me. Without that encouragement, this collection would not have existed.
After I graduated from my MFA program, I revised The Magpie at Night several times—sometimes retranslating poems—and gave my manuscript time and space to fully develop. My agent, the incredible Sarah Bowlin, submitted the manuscript to publishers in 2022, and we received a passionate offer from my editor Rohan Kamicheril at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (FSG). Now, over a decade after translating that first poem, The Magpie at Night is finally landing in the hands of readers. I couldn’t be more thrilled!
TT: In your foreword, you give a historical context of Li’s poetry as existing within the traditions of a male-dominated field, her two marriages, and the different phrases of her literary oeuvre. You also described that you resisted reading the poems as purely autobiographical. Can you speak more about how to read Li in her role as a Song-dynasty Chinese female poet of great renown, and how you engaged with her writing process as one of imagination as well as experience?
WC: As Ronald Egan argues in The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China, reading Li’s work through a purely autobiographical lens does a disservice to her in not fully recognizing her creative power. This is, of course, a larger commentary on the ways that society diminishes female genius. Certainly, as a writer, I know that artists draw inspiration from their own lives—but not exclusively so. While Li’s work does reflect on her experiences as a writer and living through war, she also imaginatively plays on and subverts common narratives about female subjects and subjectivity in her work. I hope my introduction to The Magpie at Night both complicates and contextualizes her life and work for readers unfamiliar with both.
TT: The poems are organized somewhat chronologically, but are not in any strict order. From one poem to the next, how did you intuit their placement?
WC: I very much relied on my experience in putting together a collection of original poems in order to assemble The Magpie at Night. Where is my reader starting out at the beginning of the collection, and where do they end up? Overall, I tried to tell an emotional story with the organization of the collection, starting with poems that felt more passionate and youthful and ending with ones that seemed more reflective, meditative, and from an older perspective. From poem to poem, I also thought about larger images and themes. I wanted the placement of the poems to highlight the ways that certain images, themes, emotions, and ideas emerged, re-emerged, and developed throughout.
TT: What are some challenges you encountered in translating the text from Classical Chinese to English, and what were your solutions?
WC: Translating Li’s work into English taught me how to be a researcher as well as a translator and writer. There are many interesting challenges with translating these kinds of texts. For example, certain characters may be missing from the text, leaving gaps and creating fragmentations.
Certain characters also may have disputed meanings. Classical Chinese poetry is also extremely intertextual, referencing other works that may or may no longer exist. As such, each text required a large amount of preparatory research before I could even begin any attempts to translate it.
TT: You are a poet, novelist, translator, and editor. How has translating Li shaped your creative process?
WC: Learning and practicing the art of translation has allowed me to have a deeper relationship with language. Translating taught me to interrogate my positionality to the languages I know and write in. When I translate, I ask myself what my relationship to a particular word is, and why. I think about the associations, assumptions, connotations that I bring to a particular word, and the energy of that word to the ones around it. Translating has made me a better writer.
Creatively, when you move meaning across the borders of language, that’s also when exciting things happen. In Deformation Zone, Johannes Göransson describes translation “as a wound through which media enters into a textual body. The wound of translation makes impossible connections between languages, unsettling stable ideas of language, productive ideas of literature.” As a writer, I have been more intentional about playing around with the space of the wound in my work, and using that space to generate new ideas and directions.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers around the world?
WC: Thank you to everyone who has read and supported my work over the years! I hope my translations are able to bring to life a writer from so long ago, and that The Magpie at Night inspires my readers to become translators themselves. Translations play such an important role in exposing readers to diverse voices and perspectives—work that has become more urgent than ever to do in the United States.
Whether you think of yourself as a translator or not, we are all practicing small and large acts of translation on a daily basis—such as code-switching or translating language from one field to another. Paying attention to those acts of translation allows us to pay closer attention to the ways we reach across borders to connect with others. For, after all, despite whatever the powers-that-be want us to think, borders are always permeable, porous, and rife with possibility.
Wendy Chen is the author of the novel Their Divine Fires (Algonquin) and the poetry collection Unearthings (Tavern Books). Her poetry translations of Song-dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao are published in a collection titled The Magpie at Night from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is the editor of Figure 1, associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Quarterly, and prose editor of Tupelo Press. Her poetry, translations, and prose have appeared in Freeman’s, A Public Space, Lit Hub and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry from Syracuse University and her PhD in English from the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.
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