This essay is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s translation series, with art by Juyon Lee. Read its companion piece “醉花陰 | Drunk in the Shade of Flowers.”

What, in actuality, is lost in translation? Meaning? Voice? Sound? How does a translator choose what to lose and what to preserve from the original work? How, then, does the art of loss shape and intertwine itself with the process of translation? In answering these questions, I found translating Song dynasty woman writer Li Qingzhao into a collection titled The Magpie at Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) provided me with an understanding of the art of loss that allowed me to hone my abilities as a translator.

Considered one of the greatest Chinese writers in history, Li Qingzhao defied cultural expectations by writing, publishing, collecting art, and gaining the recognition and respect of her male contemporaries for her craft. Living almost a thousand years ago, she was a prolific and public writer at a time when women were discouraged from writing. Despite the criticism she received, Li Qingzhao continued to defy social expectations, even choosing to divorce her second husband, who was abusive, and offering to mentor young woman writers. 

When I first encountered her work in college, I was immediately captured by her voice and imagery. Her voice has a captivating oracular quality that also holds within it a sense of great intimacy. Li Qingzhao also has a command of musicality and rhythm that has taught me so much about writing poetry. In terms of her imagery, I am often astounded that I can encounter images I have never read before that are still emotionally riveting to a modern reader. In one poem, Li Qingzhao might evoke the “pear blossoms … dipped / in the moon’s first / slanting light.” In another, she might compare the speaker to being “thinner than a yellow flower,” gesturing toward the emotional frailty of the speaker.   

Over the last decade, as I’ve gradually translated her poetry into a full collection, the voice and imagery that first drew me to her poetry guided my translation practice. This was especially important when I realized how much of the original work would be lost in translation. 

Loss functions in the project on several levels. Some qualities of the work have been lost to time, and thus are missing in both the original classical Chinese and English. Other qualities have no easy equivalent in English due to differences between the two languages. And lastly, I have had to make intentional choices about what to lose in order to highlight and preserve the qualities that were the most important to me: her voice and imagery.  

One of the qualities that has been lost to time is the music of Li Qingzhao’s poems. Li Qingzhao is best known for her cí (lyrics), which is a genre of poems set to musical scores. Anyone could write lyrics to these scores, which were established and predetermined forms. For example, a poet might write a cí to the tune “As in a Dream” or “Complaint Against a Prince,” which would have been familiar to other poets as well. Poets might also write several different lyrics to the same tune. These musical scores, however, have been largely lost to history. Thus, our experience of Li Qingzhao’s cí must be experienced through this initial framework of loss. 

While translating Li Qingzhao’s poems, I listened to modern-day musical adaptations of her cí. Although these reimaginings might vastly differ from the original scores, listening to her cí sung aloud by a voice was an incredibly moving experience. The music highlighted so much of the rhythm and rhyme scheme of the original poems, bringing both to the forefront in a way that is lost when just reading the Chinese characters. Although I could not hope to replicate this experience in my translation, it reinforced my desire to emphasize the musicality of her cí through word choice, alliteration, assonance, or consonance. For example, in the following lines from “Drunk in the Shade of Flowers: Chongyang Festival,” I alliterated d and f sounds and echoed long e sounds in “east” and “sleeves” to create a sense of internal rhyme.

Dusk. I am drunk by the fence
that lines the east,
my sleeves filled with delicate fragrance.

Focusing on the oral qualities of the poetry shaped every decision I made as a translator for Li Qingzhao’s work. With every translation, I read the poems aloud in English, relying on my ear to guide the music. 

Cí were generally written from the point of view of women—though the authors of these poems were typically men. Familiar subjects and common themes included lost love, separated lovers, grief, longing, desire. Women singers would perform these cí in entertainment halls for the amusement of well-off men. This aspect of performance was crucial to the experience of the cí, as they contributed to the fantasy of female interiority as imagined by men. 

By the time Li Qingzhao was a teenager, her cí were already being performed and celebrated in these entertainment halls. This was, of course, not only a challenge to the social norms of her day, but a challenge to the conventions of the cí form. Here was a woman writing from the point of view of women, about women’s interior spaces and thoughts. Thus, the embodiment and performance of the cí form would have highlighted the subversiveness of Li Qingzhao’s choices as a woman writer. When women performed and sang Li Qingzhao’s cí, they were expressing a woman’s artistic creations in the public sphere rather than performing a male fantasy. However, as the musical scores have been lost, so too have we lost our sense of the physicality associated with the performance. In The Magpie at Night, my awareness of this loss guided how I wrote the introduction to the collection in order to contextualize Li Qingzhao’s work for the reader.

Another loss that I dealt with are the aspects of cí that are impossible to translate from classical Chinese to English, such as its tonal patterns. There are four main tones in classical Chinese—flat, rising, falling and rising, and falling—in addition to a neutral tone. English, on the other hand, is not considered a tonal language. What is particularly incredible about cí is that these lyrics are not only set to music, but also set to predetermined tones and character count. Poets would compose their lyrics according to the tonal patterns associated with each song. Writing a cí was, therefore, a demonstration of one’s technical abilities of language and craft. When a cí was performed, the music, tonal patterns, and character count intertwined in a magical harmony. This effect would be lost in translation, even if the original musical scores were preserved. However, the haunting echo of this harmony is still present in Li Qingzhao’s cí, which made me all the more determined to preserve that quality in my translation. I did so by focusing specifically on rhythm, and being particularly careful about my line breaks and syllable count in order to highlight that rhythm. Take the following line in Chinese from “Butterflies Long for the Flowers: Gathering of Kin on Shangsi Festival”: 花光月影宜相照. Its gloss translation would be: “flower light moon image suitable one another illuminate.” In my translation, I split up the line into three sentences in English.

The light of the flowers. 
The image of the moon.
Each shone on the other. 

I wanted to slow down the experience of these images for the reader through the creation of three separate sentences. I was also intentional about creating sentences of equal syllable count in order to emphasize the harmony and mirroring between the flowers and moon through the consistent rhythm.

All these various aspects of loss brings me to my third point, which is the choices I made of what translatable qualities to lose in the original in order to emphasize other important qualities of her work. In consciously deciding what I was willing to let go of, I could better hone in on the effects I wanted my translations to have on a reader. Loss, in effect, guided my translations. For example, I chose not to translate the rhyme scheme of the cí in favor of prioritizing Li Qingzhao’s imagery and voice via rhythm and musicality. I was also concerned that carrying over the rhyme scheme would make her work feel dated to a modern ear more used to free verse. 

Another quality of the original work I lost was the lack of pronouns in Li Qingzhao’s poetry. This is common in classical Chinese poetry, which often does not explicitly name a speaker or subject—though one might certainly be implied. If I faithfully preserved this quality in my English translations, Li Qingzhao’s poetry would feel awkward and unnatural. Thus, I opted to include pronouns in my translations to better convey the sense of a speaker. I also wanted to enhance the sense of a voiced or bodily presence in the work, a nod to the performative qualities of the genre. 

These decisions of loss are never easy to make, but ones that all translators must come to terms with in order to proceed with their work. Loss is a part of all translations and critically important in shaping the process. There is no one perfect translation, after all. Rather, all translations are a record of a translator’s reading experience of that work in a particular moment in time.