Chapter 3

“It Can’t Be All in One Language”

Poetry in the Diverse Language

Cosima Bruno
SOAS University of London

1 Premise

In this chapter I aim at exploring multilingual works by poets of Chinese

descent, whose experience, and actual use of language urge us to reconsider
the concept of language as unitary and of translation exclusively as an object.
The idea is to verify notions of language diversity, translation, nontranslation,
antitranslation, self-translation, which inevitably impact our understanding of
Chinese, Sinophone, and hyphenated literatures.
On the background of a nationalist agenda – be it from the PRC or the UK –
I will first outline the monolingual paradigm which treats a writer’s native lan-
guage as a solid indication of their nationality, and the writers themselves as
members of one language community only.
With reference to contemporary multilingual poetry by writers such as Mary
Jean Chan, Sarah Howe, Theophilus Kwek, Laura Jane Lee, Cynthia Miller, Jay
Gao, Victor Yip (and many more in mind), I will then try to detail how multi-
lingual poetry specifically pursues the tensions inherent in the monolingual
paradigm, undermining it through a certain use of languages.
I will discuss two main issues. Firstly, I will look at the multilingual poem
as a way to clarify hierarchies and power relationships among the languages
employed. Secondly, I will explore some of these poems as ensuing a new aes-
thetics that stimulates certain reactions from the reader. I will argue that the
multilingual aesthetics defined by some of these texts can be compared with
the modernist aesthetics that employs (an)other language(s) to “make it new”;
while some other texts have a different motivation, aiming at highlighting
and also work across difference in language, gender, race, identity and place.
Drawing from theoretical propositions indicated by Jan Blommaert, Naoki
Sakai, and Yasemin Yildiz, I will study how this new aesthetics defines a mul-
tiple linguistic entity that is impossible to homogenize, demanding translation
as its reading framework.

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2 Multilingual Poetry and the National Language

Languages – plural – divide. Hence the need for translation. While many the-
orists take as an implicit starting point the fact that national languages are
unitary, well-defined by an outer border, and therefore liable to be exchanged
through translation, I wish to challenge this assumption here, by looking at
the work of poets of Chinese descent who write in more than one language
at once.
In her 2012 book Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition,
Yasemin Yildiz argues that monolingualism is no longer a sustainable condi-
tion. It relates to European nation building in the eighteenth century, when
it had the aim of fixing a cultural identity to serve the purpose of the mod-
ern nation. We currently live in postmonolingual times, she argues. On a simi-
lar line, Naoki Sakai asks: “Is language a countable, just like an apple and an
orange and unlike water? Is it not possible to think of language, for example, in
terms of those grammars in which the distinction of the singular and the plural
is irrelevant?” (Sakai 2009, 73). Jan Blommaert argues that multilingualism –
by which he means that repertoire of language varieties, accents, registers,
genres, etc., needs to be studied as a matter of capital importance, it “should
not be seen as a collection of ‘languages’ that a speaker controls, but rather
as a complex of specific semiotic resources” (Blommaert 2010, 102), defining
“stakes for language in society,” “social barriers and gateways for social mobil-
ity,” and regulating through language (138).
Most of us agree that Chinese, as all national languages, is constitutively
multiple and heterogenous,1 and that the question of monolingualism (as its
opposite multilingualism) can be thought of as an artificial construct. Yet it

1 Historically, “modern Chinese” was officialized in 1932, following the fall of the Qing dynasty,
the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, and the numerous attempts to unify the
diversity of spoken and written languages and speeches that were thought of as unintelligible
to each other. As Lau Kin-chi, Hui Po-keung and Chan Shun-hing remind us, “the so-called
Standard Modern Chinese normalized the incorporation of Europeanized syntax and dic-
tion and other hybrid elements in the contending discourses of the building of a national
identity, the quest for modernization, and the promotion of class struggle and revolution”
(Lau, Hui and Chan 2001, 254). Modern Chinese was therefore thought of as a tool to pro-
duce transpersonal intelligibility, since linguistic multiplicity breaks the connection between
sound and sense. In the historical contingency of the imagined community of the Chinese
nation, among other nations, language diversity was to be rejected, because context-bound,
and thus representing an obstacle to citizens’ integration, and flawless knowledge in that
community. In the mid-20th century, Mandarin Chinese was chosen as the official language
of the People’s Republic of China, through a process of compulsory education in the whole

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is under the scheme of the exclusive partitioning of the national language,

and its discriminatory border, that multilingual aesthetics developed by poets
of Chinese descent is usually discussed. To be sure, an increasing number of
scholars recognizes the difference between a work written in one language and
a multilingual work. Notably, Rebecca Walkowitz argues that some contempo-
rary works are “born translated” and should not be analyzed under one single
linguistic category (2015). Steven Kellman, working on translingualism, asks
the important question of what difference it makes to the writer and the reader
to write in more than one language (2020, 5). Nevertheless, when exploring
the works of poets of Chinese descent, their multilingualism is often some-
what minimized, prioritizing one language over another. Yulia Dreyzis attri-
butes this attitude to the “enclosed, self-centered system” of Chinese poetic
tradition, for which “it seems impossible to imagine a bilingual poet working
simultaneously with two languages.” Dreyzis refers to Rey Chow, according to
whom “the habitual obsession with ‘Chineseness’” is a “reaction to the West”
and to “past victimization” (Dreyzis 2020, 491–492). While noticing a recur-
rent attitude, and proposing an agreeable argument, Dreyzis, however, inad-
vertently emphasizes the Chinese element of multilingual poetry, entitling her
essay “The Quest for Bilingual Chinese Poetry: Poetic Tradition and Modernity”
(italic added).
I will look at the ways migrant poets from the (ex) colonies of Hong Kong,
Malaysia, and Singapore dramatize difference among languages, so as to
understand the kind of difference at issue between the languages employed,
their hierarchy and status, and thus scrutinize the ways linguistic bordering
intersected with and intervened into political and social bordering, and vice
versa.
The key issue of course is not so much how many languages are present in a
multilingual poem, but the relationship between them. In particular, whether
a language is considered as standard, and another as a minority language;
whether standard languages are seen as dynamic fields or are denied historical
contingencies, whether one language is acquired in the family, and another in
the classroom, whether migration results in a change of language and what
that entails at the level of affects, etc. Along the way, I hope to plant some
pointers to go beyond such an important recognition of the power relationship
among languages and look at some of these poems as statements to the reader.

Chinese State. For a fascinating discussion of the essential role played by the foreign in the
production of national languages, see Berman (1984).

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“ It Can ’ t Be All in One Language ” 53

“Scrupulous Travesty” is a poem from the collection Travesty58, by Jay Gao.2

Gao here uses procedural digital-language techniques in order to rewrite the
ancient Chinese book of divination Yijing 易經. The exagramme dui 兑 in the
poem generates unfit, highly opaque translations, something that dislocates
English and seems to confirm untranslatability, while also portraying a culture
of spam:

The time allocated for running scripts has expired

duì
兑
“Open”

Other variations include opening “the joyous, lake” up and

“usurpation”
Both its inner and outer trigrams are
The time allocated
for running scripts has
expired.

duì) open = ( The time allocated

for running scripts is
now.) marshland.
…
Gao 2022

Gao’s multilingualism includes machine language of technological malopera-

tion, as well as pinyin, Chinese characters, foreignizing English, and Wade-Giles,
his writing showing translation as ineffective and full of gaps, exacerbated by
the incongruous layout. Gao seems to indicate that in a multilingual commu-
nity, whether or not a language prospers or decays depends on the social hab-
its of its speakers, and on whether or not proficiency in a particular language
implies socioeconomic benefits.
Cynthia Miller’s “Glitch Honorifics”3 appears like a three-dimensional poem,
in which the poet explains Chinese honorifics, as in a glossary formed by a
series of boxes, slightly overlapping each other, without compromising

2 Gao is a poet, fiction writer, critic and translator based in Edinburgh. His debut poetry pam-
phlet is Wedding Beasts (2019), followed by Katabasis (2020), Travesty58 (2022), Imperium
(2022), and Bark, Archive, Splinter (2024).
3 Cynthia Miller is a well-reputed Malay-American poet, whose poem “Glitch Honorifics”
appeared in her 2021 debut poetry collection Honorifics.

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legibility. The honorifics in question are given first in a non-standard transliter-

ation (presumably to mark it as Hokkien) and then in non-simplified Chinese
characters. To that, follows a personal explanation of the terms, which draws
from the poet’s personal and familial background. In a note appended to the
poem, Miller explains:

Like Heptapod B from the film Arrival, I wanted to visualise the entirety
of a concept, past and present at once. Central to the plot is Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, a theory of linguistic relativity that asserts language liter-
ally shapes how you see the world … The Hokkien that my family speaks
is a Southern Chinese language, originally from Fujian, that incorpo-
rates Bahasa, English, Mandarin, and a smattering of other dialects like
Teochow and Hakka. It’s a local Rojak dialect, from a colloquial Malay
phrase meaning ‘mixed’, and would probably be incomprehensible to
someone from the mainland. The unease lurking behind both ‘Honorifics’
and ‘Dream Opera’ is a frustration that I can understand a little but not
speak, and therefore find no entry into that world. Easier to exist in an
uprooted ‘elsewhere.’ (Miller 2020)

Similarly, Hong Kong poet Laura Jane Lee4 uses Chinese characters and trans-
literations, as in the poem “爹 deh” (father):

you gave me my name:

chu ching,
clear pearl
which in your heavy farmer’s accent
sounded like
suu ching
lost-it-all
Lee 2020

Such a multilingual strategy that conflates Chinese characters, translated, for

the benefit of the monolingual reader, both into pinyin and into English, by
apposition, creates a visible internal tension. These trilingual texts point in two

4 Laura Jane Lee was born in 1998 in Hong Kong and currently lives in Singapore. She writes in
English and Cantonese. Miller is also the founder of KongPoWriMo and Subtle Asian Poetry
Collective, and the author of the pamphlets flinch & air (2021), and chengyu: chinoiserie
(2020), published under her former name Rachel Ka Yin Leung.

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directions: on the one side they wish to legitimize the language of privacy and
on the other side they avoid relegating it into absolute difference, through the
use of translation into English. These single words constitute brief exchanges
of a Chinese and a Chinese deviant pronunciation, simulating cultural verisi-
militude, soon disrupted by the translation into English.
Are the Chinese characters in these poems sufficient to call them Chinese,
or, better still, to call them Sinophone poems? What does the use of italic
imply?
The persona in Laura Jane Lee’s poem receives her name from her father,
an identity that she not only needs to translate, but that she also sees as
misinterpreted by the standard language. The Sinophone transliterations
distinguish the characters in their not standard usage. Standard Chinese
and mother tongue develop pidgin and creole languages, world Englishes,
code-switching and code-mixing, borrowing, interference, etc. But in Laura
Jane Lee’s poem, standard Chinese is brought into the poem’s linguistic rep-
ertoire through the misinterpretation of the father’s minor language, while
the transliteration of the characters remains non-standard. The evocative,
affective quality of the name Clear Pearl is disrupted by the inaccurate and
diminishing translation of standard Chinese. Without even physically being
in the text, standard Chinese is however the language of authority, it is offi-
cial and normative.
Theophilus Kwek’s poem “Dead Man Savings Won’t Go to Wife”5 portrays
strangeness by a defamiliarizing translation of Chinese idiomatic segments
given in italic: yijianrugu 一见如故 (your first glance was that of an old lover’s);
biyishuangfei 比翼双飞 (wings touching as we flew); qianjinmaixiao 千金买笑
( for my smile); aiwujiwu 爱屋及乌 (I loved the house and the crows that nested
there); zhiyinnanmi 知音难觅 (one who knows my voice is hard to find). At the
end of the poem, we learn that these segments are given as “loose translations
of Chinese idioms for love.”
I see this kind of multilingualism as working in a modernist fashion, that is
“to make it new,” a challenging practice of linguistic defamiliarization, borne
out by the aim of revolutionizing literary language. We can find this defamil-
iarizing use of multilingualism in Pound’s poetry, and more generally in mod-
ernism’s literary theory. For the modernist writer, multilingualism consists

5 Theophilus Kwek, “Dead Man Savings Won’t Go to Wife,” in Moving House (2020, 15–16). Kwek
is a writer and editor based in Singapore. He has been shortlisted twice for the Singapore
Literature Prize and won the New Poets’ Prize for his pamphlet The First Five Storms, pub-
lished in 2017. He is also the author of many essays on migration and citizenship.

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of several artistic languages (e.g. plastic and sonorous), and different forms
of expression and linguistic approaches; it is aimed at counterbalancing the
inaptitude of verbal language to match and change the world. Pound deliber-
ated that no single language is quite enough and that “it can’t be all in one
language” (Pound 1975, 583), hence the need for different languages and for
different modes of expression to be used comprehensively, so as to achieve a
more thorough understanding of reality. Thus, the modernists’ use of transla-
tion and multilingualism had the specific aim of innovating literary language.
Whether they use italics or not, these poets write in a multilingual format.
Where do we draw a line with the foreignness of a language? How can we
resolve to call this writing just “Sinophone,” or “English,” or “Chinese”? Sakai’s
words keep lurking into my mind: “the unity of a language is represented
always in relation to another unity. It is never given in itself, but in relation
to another,” “nothing starts until we come across the foreign” (Sakai 2009, 83).

3 Nontranslation

The relatively recent experimental practice of leaving words untranslated and

unexplained in literature creates a multilingual aesthetics that was defined by
Apter (2003) as “nontranslation” and that can work as a form of resistance to
or accommodation of alterity.6
The poetry collection Flèche (2019), by Mary Jean Chan,7 has its title and
those of the sections in French. The title in French could induce the readers to
think that the book is in that language, but when they open the book, they will

6 As Emily Apter discusses in relation to Spitzer’s multilingual writing, the multilingual text
is a nontranslation that “is not an argument against translation per se but, rather, a bid to
make language acquisition a category imperative of translatio studii. A profound respect for
foreignness as the sign of that which is beyond assimilation within language itself.” Emily
Apter (2003, 278).
7 Mary Jean Chan were born and raised in Hong Kong and currently live in Oxford, where they
also work as senior lecturer in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University. Their collection
Flèche (London: Faber & Faber, 2019) won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry, and was
shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation
International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection
Poetry Prize. In 2021, Flèche was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Chan’s poems have been
translated into multiple languages, including Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Galician,
Greek and Romanian. Part of the observations made on Chan and Howe, below, are also
published in another essay of mine: Cosima Bruno (2024, 319-331).

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“ It Can ’ t Be All in One Language ” 57

soon recognize that the language used is mainly English, with some Chinese.
The poet early on explains the use of English as due to the postcolonial con-
dition of the persona. In the “Preface,” we find a footnote, in which the poet
refers to the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, which stipulated the cession of Hong Kong
to the British Empire as a Crown colony, in the aftermath of the First Opium
War. Further down the volume, at a glance, we can see a few Chinese charac-
ters embedded in English sentences, like in “Written in a Historically White
Space (I)”:

The reader stares at my 皮膚 and asks: why don’t you write in 中文? I
reply: 殖民主義 meant that I was brought up in your image. Let us be
honest. Had I not learnt 英文 and come to your shores, you wouldn’t be
reading this poem at all. Did you think it was an accident that I learnt
your 語言 for decades, until I knew it better than the 母語I dreamt in?
(Chan 2019, 43)

Through a more minute reading, we can notice that while the English here
functions as basis, morphologically, syntactically, and grammatically coher-
ent, the Chinese characters have all specific meanings of otherization, that is
a collision between the subject and the intended monolingual reader: “skin” (
皮膚), “Chinese” (中文), “colonialism” (殖民主義), “English” (英文), “language”
(語言), “mother tongue” (母語). Similarly, the title of the collection, as well
as of its three sections – “parry,” “riposte” and “corps-à-corps” – are all French
terms used in fencing to indicate dueling techniques. As general framework of
the collection, fencing sets a text world in which two persons of the same sex
synchronically duel with one another, providing a consonant setting for both
the theme of queer lovemaking (further emphasized by the double entendre
created by the homophony between flèche and flesh), and that one of the inter-
cultural translational battle, where the body is site of the border and boundary
between I and you, Chinese, English, French, mother tongue and language of
Empire.
We can conclude that the French and the Chinese words in Flèche do not
have the purpose of just marking different languages for the sake of portraying
a multilingual context – which could be done by using any Chinese character
or French word. For Chan, multilingualism is there to mark a differential iden-
tity. Writing in English is the result of a power relationship, where the colo-
nized uses the language of the colonizer. But English is not just a matter of
necessity; it is the medium to build her struggle and talk back to the colonizer:

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Let us be honest. Had I not learnt 英文 and come to your shores, you
wouldn’t be reading this poem at all. (Chan 2019, 43)

What is Chan’s mother tongue? In postmonolingual fashion, and under the

guidance of Blommaert, Chan’s multilingual battle can be considered as having
no mother tongue, even though they state they dreamt in their mother tongue.
All languages used are languages of translation, in relation to which the sub-
ject is positioned further out. The co-presence of these languages marks the
untranslatable space between the states of being of the persona, and grounds
their critique of differential power relations. French, English, and Chinese can
mediate or be illegible according to the linguistic proficiencies of the readers;
for both reader and writer, however, language becomes cause of slippage and
instability. Language is the token that gives access to or shuts the body out of
“conditional spaces” (Chan 2019, 63). Chan’s cartographies, like those of their
Shanghainese mother who migrated to Hong Kong, are invariably marked with
social, political and racial alterity:

Your spot given

To a worker’s child
Chan 2019, 51

The heteroglossia of the fragment “worker’s child,” marked with italic to indi-
cate they are voiced, subvocalized fragments, from the “foreign” language of
Maoist speech, emphasizes alterity. This is the native language from which
Chan also departs. Chan’s native language is not their mother’s Shanghainese.
Their native language, the language to which they were exposed since child-
hood may be Cantonese, or the equally colonizing standard Chinese and
English. To borrow Yildiz’s words, we can state that Chan’s collection situates
itself in the “postmonolingual condition,” “writing beyond the concept of the
mother tongue.” At the same time, Chan also engenders a “postmonolingual
mode of reading” which is “a mode of reading that is attentive to both multilin-
gual practices and the monolingual paradigm” (Yildiz 2012, 21).
Chan transposes the friction among colonizers’ languages in their
border-crossing poems. They use English as a language acquired by birth into
a colonial social setting, marked by a dynamic of economic and/or cultural
power relationship. English is not the mother tongue, but it is learned through
education, migration, and travel. Their poetry not only reflects a certain social
condition that is multilingual (the migrant author happens to be writing and
living in the translingual environment of a multilingual city), it also entertains
a one-to-one discussion with the reader.

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In a colonial context, the desire for language possession, for close-to-native

proficiency of English, places the premium language as capital, in Bourdieu’s
terminology. This is visible in Eric Yip’s “Fricatives,”8 which reveals a different
type of multilingualism, operating by absence:

To speak English properly, Mrs Lee said, you must learn

the difference between three and free.

Yip construes alterity within a monolingual text, while also playing with the
word “free,” which may be read as bearing extra meaning from the perspective
of a colonial language.
From her mixed cultural background, Sarah Howe9 plays with orientalism
in her collection Loop of Jade (2015), which takes Jorge Luis Borges’ 1942 essay
“The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” as its interface. John Wilkins was a
seventeenth-century philosopher, who attempted to devise a universal scien-
tific language, based, according to Borges, on an ancient Chinese taxonomy of
animals, entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Borges lists 14
taxonomical categories allegedly discovered by the translator Franz Kuhn and
concludes that all attempts at describing the universe through one language
are arbitrary and futile. Howe adopts the same 14-category structure as alleg-
edly the Emporium had, presenting autobiographical yet fantastical poems
full of orientalist images that define a liminal incantatory world of real and
imagination, as childhood memories and transmitted family stories usually do.
In the poem “Crossing from Guangdong,” for example, translational processes
overlap generations, places and worlds, where the Whitehall and the Cenotaph
are found in the streets of China.
Howe’s is a multi-layered meaning in constant flux, continuously trans-
lated, with no path connecting the particular to the universal, the known to
the unknown. Her Cantonese mother’s tongue and her Shanghainese grand-
mother’s tongue entangle with each other. The Cantonese in:

8 Hong Kong poet Eric Yip speaks Cantonese and Mandarin, and writes in English. He was
the youngest National Poetry Competition at 19, as the author of “Fricatives,” written while
studying at the University of Cambridge. Eric Yip, “Fricatives,” Varsity 21 April (2022),
https://www.varsity.co.uk/arts/23534.
9 Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and a Chinese mother, who
migrated to the UK when Sarah was seven years old.

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60 Bruno

Yut, ye, sam, sei. …

… I hear
again your voice …
Howe 2015, 3

and an old woman met by chance on a bus in Datong could have well been
her grandmother, who she never met, speaking in a dialect she does not
understand.
Languages, texts and places are continuously crossed and translated, with-
out pretense of an exchange, or an orderly resolution. This is effectively articu-
lated in the poem “(l) Others,” which starts with a quotation from Genesis and
carries on reflecting on the matter of genetic inheritance:

I think about the meaning of blood, which is (simply) a metaphor

and race, which has been a terrible pun.
*
From castus to chaste, with a detour for caste.
English, 廣東話, Français d’Egypte, ‫מאמע־לשון‬ ַ : our future children’s
skeins, carded.
*
…
The spiralling path from Γένεσις to genetics. Language revolves like a ream
of stars.
Howe 2015, 46

The poem further refers to Gregor Mendel’s universalistic theories of inheri-

tance, which immediately evokes the risk of Mischlinge Laws, while “ream of
stars” is a luminous image describing language as emanating in somewhat par-
allel ways – an apt figure for the simultaneous, multiple national and linguistic
identity portrayed in multilingual writing.
Written mainly in English, the poems are liberally inclusive of many lan-
guages, repeatedly repositioning the reader as inadequate and outsider, gen-
erating a critical distance from dominant ideas and truth claims about culture
and language, nation, history. Howe seems to remark that personal experience
and affect are impossible to convey, they cannot translate into a language of
truth, instead they can only lead to the classification of stereotypes. Her use
of multilingualism here is ontological, ethical and aesthetic. It works as a con-
tinuous, viral, defamiliarizing, and yet essential translation. She borrows and
refutes texts (Borges, Chinese songs, Pound), showing that cultural difference

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“ It Can ’ t Be All in One Language ” 61

can become commodified in a late-capitalist system in which these discourses

circulate.
I consider the aesthetics defined by these latter texts as having a slightly dif-
ferent purpose from that one encountered in Kwek, Lee, Miller, and Gao. I find
these texts bearing a stronger ethical weight towards changing, updating, and
upgrading the monolingual reader.

4 Final Remarks

I contend that we must continue to define these works as “multilingual,” with-

out prioritizing any of the languages used. I also contend that we can use trans-
lation as our reading model.
Calling these texts “Sinophone” only mitigates the problem of the monolin-
gual paradigm and of the unitary national language, because the Sinophone
still looks for an identifiable language in relation to nationality, regional or cul-
tural origin. So, despite the opening up to linguistic diversity in the notion of
Sinophone, multilingual poetry does not belong to a single system and needs
to be considered on a broader linguistic scale, which recognizes languages as
operating in relation (often in discordance) with each other, and not in isola-
tion from each other.
The dynamic alternating national languages in multilingual poetry are usu-
ally not examined as acts of translation from one language into another.10 But
if not translation, what does the switch from one language to another entail?
Translation begins from an attitude of perceptiveness and responsiveness
to something that addresses us and cannot be ignored. As Susanne Klinger
states in relation to post-colonial writing, “source and target language come
into contact – and often merge with one another – not only in the process
of creating the text but also in the reality portrayed in this text, as this reality
itself constitutes an arena of past and ongoing translation” (Klinger 2013, 113).
This act of translation reaches beyond the model of an exchange between two
monolingual systems of two unitary languages. It involves forms of transposi-
tion within a linguistic system, or between idiolects as well as between lan-
guages. This model of translation foregrounds the presence of one language
within another, not to smooth over its differences but to emphasize both its
particularity and its ability to engender new stories and new readings.

10 In fact, Reine Meylaerts laments the fact that multilingual writing constitutes a blind spot
in Translation Studies (2010, 227–30).

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62 Bruno

The excerpts above are from multilingual poems because from the start the
poets present different proportions of languages in the same textual space.
They complicate the global hegemony of the dominant language, by way of
a translative act that accounts for their different proportions of languages. If
monolingual translation can be thought of as a bridge that takes a national
language or national culture to another in temporal and spatial sequence, the
multilingual text cannot be thought of as a bridge, but as a translation that
continuously switches between one or more linguistic nations, alternating
themselves in the same textual space, at the same time. In precisely their lin-
guistic asymmetry and inequality, these multilingual poems can convey the
irreducible heterogeneity of linguistic and cultural situations, in which trans-
lation can never simply be communication between equals. Although still
expressing a desire for the capital of English, translation in the multilingual
text demystifies, rather than mystifies the dominant language.
Multilingual poetry does not signal exhaustive translatability or transpar-
ency, as we would find in monolingual translations, rather it conveys partial
opacity or illegibility of writing in multiple languages. The reader of the multi-
lingual text either knows the languages the text is written in or knows one lan-
guage and not the other. For the latter kind of reader, the multilingual text may
feel defamiliarizing, but, I argue, not necessarily alienating. To such defamiliar-
izing text the reader may react with curiosity towards the portion of text he or
she does not understand, or may succumb to ignorance. In each of these cases,
however, reading the multilingual poem is for the reader a moment of realiza-
tion, in the cognitive comparative processing of different languages, which we
may call “translation.”11 As Blumczynski (2016, 40) reminds us, quoting Berman:
“It is the drive to translate that makes the translator a translator … This drive
may arise of its own or be awakened by another person” (Berman 2009, 58).
In the multilingual text, we find not a relationship between a multilingual
translator and a monolingual reader, but something, instead, like the multilin-
gual writer and reader as translators.
These multilingual poems show a kind of linguistic relativism that enables
us to see others and, within some limits, to communicate with them. In this
way it reassesses our ethnocentrism, by adding (rather than substituting)
more than one culture, more than one material structure, as well as emo-
tional sphere, in other words, more than one symbolic system. Even if the
English-language persona superimposes itself on all the others, or if we cannot
retrieve an original unitary persona, in the multilingual poem there are the

11 Brian Lennon argues in favor of this understanding of the reader of what he calls “strong
bilingual or plurilingual text” (2010, 75).

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seeds of other languages, idioms that are private and public, forms of experi-
ence that present not one but two, three, four personae.
The multilingual poem thus discredits the authoritarian impersonal truth
of a national language in its claimed accessibility to all, posing the question:
how do those who do not share the same language declinate and communicate
their own experience? It is through a language that shows the relation to other
languages, that is in a multilingual language.
In the cracks of multiple language-worlds, we find not the transparency of
the monolingual translation, but multilingualism in translation. As Lennon
considers, in the multilingual text “translation is already, and in advance,
denied – but also, in an important way, already performed” (2010, 74).
Multilingual poetry ensues from complicated relations of proximity to
and distance from the writing languages. From the perspective of the writer,
multilingual poetry is often produced by migrants and exiles, with a translin-
gual experience and actual multilingual use of language. Performing multiple
speeches, rubbing deviant against standard idioms, these multilingual poems
constitute a dynamic form of cultural porosity that communicates at the elu-
sive point of discontinuity (Sakai 2009, 72), mistranslation, and incompatibil-
ity. These multilingual poems mark cultural difference, incorporating a variety
of languages, they represent different centers of power, including forms of ver-
nacular, familial, standard and vehicular languages, as well as translation and
transposition of literary references and myths, single words, sentences, or brief
segments of dialogues.
I have started by looking at the kind of multilingualism used in these poems:
what languages (French, English, machine language, Mandarin, Chinese famil-
ial vernacular, Hokkien, Hebrew, Cantonese, Maospeak); what kind of mark-
ers (italic, in-text translation, pinyin); what kind of words; what status, what
accent and form? Along the way, I have distinguished two kinds of aesthetic
use of multilingualism, to conclude that these texts radically change the way
the reader shares and develops knowledge. Here we are not in the presence of
a specific decoding of a message contained in a visible text and reformulated
in another language. We are instead in the presence of a process that compli-
cates and facilitates intercultural relations and the transmission of knowledge.
Thus, translation in this chapter has been conceived as a practice of writing
and reading with many implications for views of culture, and personal and
collective identity.12 In all of these works we can recognize similar thematic

12 Readers less familiar with this conception of translation and wishing to find out more can
consult comprehensive studies on this by Ricoeur, Blumczynski, Hermans, Tymoczko,
Geertz, Gentzler and more.

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64 Bruno

preoccupations arising from a multilingual consciousness in the intercultural

space of migration. These writers live in translation, as their multilingual life
experience is embedded in their writing, and their crossing national languages
is emotionally involved in a form of self-transformation.
Language is translational, and translation is not just a text but also a nec-
essary process of the diverse society that generates interpersonal relations
with who is not us, and for whom we may feel fascination, suspicion, conflict,
hostility.
These poems are multilingual in their internal linguistic diversity. Reading
them together makes them doubly multilingual, because they enact the differ-
ences between Chineses, as well as their individual differences from the stan-
dardized national English language.

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