In a 2015 issue of the New England Review, I published two translations of poems by the excellent Sichuan poet Ya Shi. Like much brilliant poetry, Ya Shi’s work is impossible to paraphrase. My efforts feel incomplete, all my translations filled with infelicities, misinterpretations, and confusions. Still, though, in the translation of “Full Moon Night,” I made what feels to me like a mistake, a moment when my work as a translator loosened and a ghost slipped in.

attached to: Ya Shi