24 October 2024, 10.30am - 12.00 pm
Classroom 22 (Cendana), Yale-NUS College
Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875-1907) was a Chinese feminist revolutionary, national heroine, martyr, and writer. In this discussion session, Chinese diaspora poet and translator Yilin Wang will introduce Qiu Jin as a historical figure and contextualise how feminist authors in Qiu Jin’s era tend to be discussed. Yilin will explain her approach to translating Qiu Jin’s work and take us through close readings of her translations of Qiu Jin’s poetry, many of which are featured in Yilin’s acclaimed anthology The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024). In this session, Yilin will focus on poems that reveal Qiu Jin’s attitudes towards gender roles, crossdressing, and queerplatonic relationships.
Yilin Wang 王艺霖 (she/they) is a writer, a poet, and Chinese-English translator. Her writing has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, The Ex-Puritan, The Toronto Star, The Tyee, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the editor and translator of The Lantern and the Night Moths (Invisible Publishing, 2024). Her translations have also appeared in POETRY, Guernica, Room, Asymptote, Samovar, The Common, LA Review of Books’ “China Channel,” and the anthology The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories (TorDotCom 2022). She has won the Foster Poetry Prize, received an Honourable Mention in the poetry category of Canada’s National Magazine Award, been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, and been a finalist for an Aurora Award. Yilin has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a graduate of the 2021 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Find out more at www.yilinwang.com.
Note that Yilin will be joining us for this session virtually.