In Between the Lines: Yang Lian's Poetry through Translation, Cosima Bruno uses linguistic translation to read Yang Lian's poetry. By “read” I mean excavate, a deep exploration of what Ezra Pound described as the “treasure” to be found in each poem. Bruno does this by holding three things in view at once: the original texts by Yang Lian, and two English-language versions of those texts, versions that in their difference from one another alert us to what is most valuable in the originals. The nature of Bruno's reading, in other words, is rigorous and heuristic, a mode of learning as much as we can about Yang Lian's poetry and the phenomenology of translation.

The reading of multiple translations to get closer to an original poem is certainly not a new strategy, and most would agree that a translator is nothing if not an excellent reader. What distinguishes Bruno's work is how deeply it delves into Yang Liang's work. She does so by means of triangular comparison, closely examining two differing versions at once. The authors of these other versions are incidental to the conversation, though it should be noted that a full “Portrait of the Translators” appears at the end of the book in an appendix. Bruno's book for the most part refers to the translators simply as “Translator A” and “Translator B.” This is not to say that Bruno has diminished respect for the tools she uses to accomplish the task of exploring Yang Lian's poetry. On the contrary, she adopts what she calls a chiasmatic approach, a methodology drawn from classical rhetoric expressed graphically as A:B = B1:A1. In terms of translation, Bruno explains, this amounts to a reading in which

But her work goes (at least) one step further than this, adopting a triangular rather than bilateral approach, with the stress of analysis placed squarely on the differences between the two translations. In this respect Bruno is following other translation theorists who specifically compare the “shifts” in differing translations. These shifts, more evocatively described by Philip Lewis as “clusters of textual energy” (p. 72), are in Bruno's words “like a warning sign that says ‘Attention! Something is happening here’” (p. 20). Bruno's analysis is thus trained on precise textual differences: it is a micro-examination of function words, grammatical classes, pronouns, attributives, and the like, so that features of the poetry we might otherwise overlook become the main focus of her analysis.

The structure of the book is also worth noting. After the first two chapters, which provide a description of her methodology and a thorough, quite well-composed review of translation theory as it relates to poetry, Bruno moves through two chapters of analysis according to her triangular approach. The conclusions that follow these chapters are longer than one might expect, and they are in many respects the heart rather than the tail of the work. It is not until the final chapter that Bruno offers some of her most cogent and compelling opinions about the phenomenology of translation, literature, and the art of reading. If the preceding chapters are at times a bit tedious in their attention to detail, the “Conclusions” chapter more effectively explores the subject of poetry broadly, and thus also of Yang Lian's poetry in particular. If the analysis chapters could have incorporated this level of insight, the book as a whole would have been stronger.

The key question I found myself asking of Bruno's book is: why did she choose Yang Lian for this project? Wouldn't Bei Dao have worked just as well, or Xi Chuan? Is there any relationship, in other words, between the poetry and the method? In a broader definition of translation—one that involves cultural as well as linguistic translation—there are additional implications to such a study. Bei Dao's work in particular has a history where the word “translation” is concerned, and Yang Lian is not far from Bei Dao in terms of cultural time and place. I am not suggesting that Bruno might be unaware of the particular issue of “world literature,” or the argument that, in Bei Dao's case at least, the poetry is not worth translating, as it was written in a translated language to begin with. I can only assume that Bruno has decided not to dignify that conversation with her own discussion—a respectable position, and one that goes some way towards recognizing the importance and accomplishments of this generation of writers on their own merits. That said, I personally find that an opportunity was lost in not contextualizing Yang's work in his cultural milieu, an occasion to engage in the question not just of linguistic translation, but of cultural translation as well. Perhaps this is a topic that could be addressed in the author's next book.