SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter aims at exploring translation in relation to the concept of “one language”, reviewing theoretical and practical propositions offered by scholars, poets, and translators, who deal with heteroglossic, translingual texts. By looking at Sinophone poetic texts that exceed one language, the chapter hopes to gain insights into specific notions of language diversity, translation, non-translation, anti- translation, and self-translation, which inevitably impact our understandings of Chinese, Sinophone, and hyphenated literatures. On the background of a nationalist agenda – be it from the PRC or the UK – Bruno first outlines the monolingual paradigm, which treats a writer’s native language as a solid indication of their nationality, and the writers themselves as members of one language community only. She then tries to detail how some contemporary multilingual poetics by Sinophone writers (such as Mary Jean Chan, Sean Wai Keung, Theophilus Kwek, Cynthia Miller, or Nina Mingya Powles) specifically pursue the tensions inherent in the monolingual paradigm and the mother tongue. The author argues that the aesthetics defined by these texts considerably differs from the modernist use of the other language(s) to “make it new”, having instead the motivation of highlighting and working across differences in language, gender, race, identity and place. In other words, drawing from theoretical propositions indicated by Naoki Sakai, Jan Blommaert, Elin-Maria Evangelista, and Yasemin Yildiz, the chapter examines how this new aesthetics defines a multiple linguistic entity that is impossible to homogenize.