Towards a Material Poetics: Text, Translation and Technology

1. Lee Tong King The University of Hong Kong Towards a Material Poetics: Text, Translation and Technology The Case of Chen Li

2. Question • How do text, translation, and technology intersect and interact in contemporary poetics? TEXT POETICS TRANSLATION TECHNOLOGY

3. Point of departure • electronic literature; cyberliterature • Katherine HaylesHow We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012): “the Age of Print is passing” – the printed book has lost its privileged status as “the default medium of communication” (ibid.: 249, n.1) • advent of electronic literature prompts a rethinking of the textuality of print literature

4. Point of departure • digitized print literature - another burgeoning form • ‘new’ definition of media translation by Hayles (2003: 263): “the transformation of a print document into an electronic text as a form of translation, which is inevitably also an act of interpretation” that involves gains and losses.

5. Point of departure • a distinct breed of textuality that is not only electronic but also embodied • engenders a new form of literary criticism that emphasizes the physical embodiment of texts as much as their conceptual content • materiality of literature • role of media translation (Hayles’s definition) in the constitution of literary materiality

6. Point of departure • Brian Stefan (2007:121, cited in Hoover 2012:li): cyberpoetrycovers two distinct types of writing: • 1. poetry written with the aid of advanced computing technologies, using such multimedia tools as “the internet, or graphics programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop, or animation/audio/interactive programs, such as Flash – in their creation and presentation”;

7. Point of departure • 2. poetry that is not written with the aid of digital media but is “informed by new ways of thinking brought about by the way digital technology has impacted our world”, including “recombinant poetics that can be done without the computer, such as William S. Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ fictions, concrete poetry, and various Oulipo practices that address the language as replaceable physical matter rather than ‘necessary expression’”

8. Concerns of this presentation • material poetics: how literary works invoke visual, aural and kinaesthetic participation – embodiment; multimodality • manipulation of language as material signs • role of technology (digital and non-digital) in enactment of cross-medial literary experience • translation as both concept and practice

9. Chen Li 陳黎 (b.1954)

10. Chen Li 陳黎 (b.1954) • one of the most active practitioners in Chinese experimental poetry • has won several accolades, most recently the 「2013 台灣文學獎」圖書類新詩金典獎 for his poetry collection「朝／聖」 • embodies the spirit of the literary avant-garde, as exemplified in his penchant for tuxiangshi图像诗or concrete poetry and deconstructionist poetics, as well as in his extensive use of multimedia resources

11. Translation in Chen’s oeuvre • translation as theme: • translingualism-in-writing • interlinguality: writing through translation • intermediality: the printed poem and its media ‘translation’ • intersemioticity: creative transpositions

12. The translingual signifier • concrete poetry (aka ‘visual poetry’): operates on fonts, patterns and typography, where “the arrangement and properties of the words on the page are integral to the meaning of the work” (Morrison 2010: 152). • it seeks to fulfill the sensuous aesthetics of a literary text by invoking the visual, sonic and kinesthetic potentialities of the verbal sign.

13. The translingual signifier • of particular interest here is how translation and the translational operate to foreground the sensory qualities of a literary text. • Chen Li consciously exploits the space between multiple languages and language representational systems in making his aesthetic point • the translingual signifier: a sign that inscribes within itself a crossing of languages

14. The translingual signifier • ‘inscription technology’: any discursive device that “initiate[s] material changes that can be read as marks” (Hayles 2002: 24). Includes the computer, telegraphy, film, video and the printed word. • in this view, the formal properties of a literary text, by virtue of their being an inscription, always point back to their own materiality

16. The translingual signifier • the aural-visual signifier ㄇ • the Zhuyinrepresentation注音符號of the Chinese sound/morpheme mo摸(literally ‘touch’) ㄅㄆㄇㄈbopomofo ㄅㄆㄇㄇbopomomo 摸摸

17. The translingual signifier • the aural-visual signifier ㄇ • ㄇis a pictorial translation of a goalmouth, which is in turn a metaphor for a woman’s vagina (Chen, personal communication). Lines 36-39: “I give you [a] goalmouth/give you [a] ㄇ/you raise my leg/to send it into/ [the] gate…”

18. The translingual signifier • here ㄇis both an icon of the vehicle of the metaphor and a phonetic representation of the Chinese word for ‘touch/caress’, hence affording the phrase geiniㄇtwo simultaneous interpretations: ‘give you a goalmouth’ and ‘let you caress (me)’. • the use of a phonetic symbol (an instance of inscription technology) causes slippage (a translational effect) between language representational systems and between pictorial and auditory signification

19. The translingual signifier • the use of lexis from indigenous languages creates a translingual text through code-switching and translation. • Line 29: the use of Duo LuoMan哆囉滿 in place of the modern name Hualien for the Taiwanese prefecture inhabited by several indigenous peoples. • Lines 13-14: the word e luan鵝鑾 is the Pai Wan (an indigenous tribe in Taiwan) equivalent of the Mandarin fan (‘sail’).

20. The translingual signifier • 它張開鵝鑾，我張帆 ‘It opens [its] e luan, I open [my] sail’ • translational and also translingual: the second clause denotes the same act, albeit with a different agent and with the key noun rendered in Mandarin rather than the Pai Wan language.

21. The translingual signifier • In Lines 25-26, the poet shifts to the Ya Mei tribe, playing on the phonetic similarity of the lexical items for ‘yam (plural)’ (sosoli) and ‘breast’ (soso). 趁黑，摸摸紅頭嶼的芋頭，摸兩下他們說是 sosoli, 快摸一下，啊soso，變成我的乳房。 (Caress the yam of Hong Tou Yu, caress it twice [and] they call it sosoli, caress it once quickly, ah soso, [it] has become my breast).

22. The translingual signifier • the comic humour intended here is caused by a slippage between the phonetics of two close-sounding indigenous words and between their starkly different equivalents in standard Chinese. • code-switching reveals the chasm between indigenous and dominant cultures and also the need for translation, which is what happens in this line. • this translational interplay between languages with different symbolic power also indexes the dialectic between various cultural identities in Taiwan.

24. The translingual signifier • a tribute to the Japanese writer HachikaiMimi 蜂饲耳 (b.1974), whose last name bears the Chinese character for ‘ear’. • 耳阝(the radical for ‘ear’)  ‘B’  bee 蜂 • 耳/B/Bee, with the three components bound in an uncanny relation inflected with translation and graphemic transposition.

25. The translingual signifier • ‘Our Concertgebouw’: concertgebouw is the Dutch word for ‘concert hall’ (also the name of a famous concert hall in Amsterdam). • the composite signifier耳/B/Bee does not refer to an extrinsic signified: it points back to itself, setting up a reflexive translingual/translational network between the title and body text.

26. The translingual signifier • a piece of word technology that “mobilizes reflexive loops” between the sound-image conjured up by the poem and “the material apparatus embodying [it] as a physical presence” (Hayles 2002: 25). • ‘technotexts’: literary texts that “strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate” (ibid.).

27. Intermediality • the computer has been a major agent in Chen’swriting since the early 1990s. • the various MS Word functionalities (copying, pasting, insertion and page layout adjustment), picture viewer, media player and the automatic translator have all had an impact on his method of composition (Chen 2011:232).

28. Intermediality • many of his shape poems, for instance, were inspired by the ease with which one could manipulate text documents in all sorts of ways with a Word processor. These include the “precise calculation [and] arrangement of the number of rows and columns” (ibid.) • digital technology allows him to “quickly assemble a poem or the preliminary shape of a poem” 很快圍堵出一首詩，或詩的雛形 (ibid.)

29. Intermediality

30. Media translation • Katherine Hayles “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality”: “I propose regarding the transformation of a print document into an electronic text as a form of translation, which is inevitably also an act of interpretation” (2003:263) • following Dene Grigar, Haylesmaintains that “the adage that something is gained as well as lost in translation applies with special force to importing print documents to the Web” (ibid.).

31. Media translation • “Translating the words on a scroll into a codex book, for example, radically alters how a reader encounters the work; by changing how the work means, such a move alters what it means” (2003:264). • on electronic textuality: “navigational functionalities are not merely ways to access the work but part of the work’s signifying structure” (ibid.)

32. Chen Li’s ‘media translation’ • illustrations and colour codes are added to the electronic versions of several of his collections. • Little Barbarian Treaty 1731,whose subject matter is a historic treaty between an indigenous tribe in Taiwan and the Qing Dynasty of China, comes with a scanned image of that treaty. • the print version ofthe same poem in Chen (2011: 71-72) does not come with the image

34. Chen Li’s ‘media translation’ • musical accompaniment, an auditory add-on that is obviously exclusive to the digital platform. • hyperlinking possibilities and intertextuality • routes of travel within and without Chen’s website give rise to a layered reading, whereby more than one text/language/mode/genre engage in dialogue and expound on each other • an alternative mode of engaging with literature and potentially a different perspective on the concept of reading

35. Chen Li’s ‘media translation’ • Hayles (2003: 278) calls ‘Work as Assemblage’: “a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and remediate one another” • the cross-media translation undertaken here projects a different image of his literature – one that is more intertextual, intersemiotic and sensorially sophisticated – from the entirety of his works available in print.

36. Interlinguality • translations of Chen’s poems available in French, Dutch, Japanese, English and German. • Chen’s translations of the works of other poets into Chinese (with Chang Fen-ling). Among the poets translated by Chen include Pablo Neruda, Harold Pinter, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath and Hachikai Mimi. • by constructing himself as both poet-translator and translated poet, Chen weaves an intercultural fabric through his website, thus providing an added layer of multilingual texture to his cyberspace enterprise.

37. Interlinguality “In 1979, I translated his [Neruda’s] “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” (The Heights of Macchu Picchu), a long poem in Canto General. The theme of death and birth, of oppression and rising, and the idea that poets should be sufferers’ spokesmen have since been deep-rooted in my heart. In this poem Neruda piles up a litany of 72 noun phrases, which inspire[d] me to boldly juxtapose 36 noun phrases in “The Last Wang Mu-Qi,”a long poem written the next year about a mining calamity. Later in the poem “Taroko Gorge, 1989” I appl[ied] the technique of cataloguing, listing 48 names of places in the Atayal language, and in the poem “Flight over the Island,” I list[ed] 95 names of mountains of Taiwan deriving from different languages. All these can be seen as an extension of Neruda’s writing techniques.”

38. Interlinguality • “I often tell others that I am not the real author of this poem. I was simply possessed by “Chinese characters”: one morning I woke up, turned on the computer, took five minutes to key in and duplicate those four characters, and then it was completed. In my prose “The Delight of Animations”, I mentioned “Konflikt” (Conflict), an animation made by the Russian animator Garry Bardin (1941- ) in 1983. A green match troop comes into conflict with a blue match troop; they burn each other to death. This animation never crossed my mind when I was writing “A War Symphony.” Not until a female artist in Taiwan re-presented it [translator’s note: here referring to War Symphony] in [the] form of animation did it occur to me [that my poem resembles Konflikt]. You may say my poem translates Bardin’s film.”(Chen 2012, n.p.)

40. Garry BardinKonflikt

41. 戰爭交響曲 A War Symphony

42. Interlingual translations • 兵乒乓丘 • Chang Fen-ling’s translation: non-translation • ‘A man’‘Ah-man’ ‘Ah-men’ ‘Amen’ • Bruno’s translation

44. Intersemioticity • separate section devoted to audio-visual material. It contains several of Chen’s works intersemiotically translated and performed in various modes. • 《家具音樂》(Furniture Music)：mp3 file, a You Tube video clip with subtitles (i.e. the poem), the Chinese text of poem (appearing in the layout as it was published in print) and a PDF file containing a copy of Lu Yan’s handwritten musical manuscript and notations.

45. Intersemioticity

46. Intersemioticity • 《滑翔練習》(Gliding Exercises): poem inspired by a work by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), which Chen translated into Chinese as 《在我們同睡過許多夜晚的……》 • based on his Chinese translation, Chen splits the first line of the poem into different constituents, which in turn form the first words of each stanza of his new poem.

48. Intersemioticity

49. Intersemioticity 在音樂創作上，先運用如滑翔般的一長串半音下行音符，呈示出瓦烈赫原詩句的主題，在後面的每段開頭，則以字詞在主題句中所對應的音高開始，並隨著詩意作音高、音色、音樂情感上的改變。此曲使用了大量半音階、大小二度與轉位音程、全音音階等素材，試圖透過種種音樂要素的變化，來呈現出這首詩作的意境與情感。 In the musical composition, an extended string of semi-tones progressing downward in what seems like a gliding movement presents Vallejo’s theme. Each of the following paragraphs is headed by a high note that corresponds to a word in the theme sentence, and modulates its pitch, timbre and emotion according to the emotive quality of the poem [shiyi]. The piece makes extensive use of chromatic scales, second intervals, inverted intervals and perfect intervals to create musical alternations that express the mood and emotion of the poem. (from Chen Li’s Literary Bank)

50. Intersemioticity • multiple reception channels crossing semiotic and linguistic borders. • a poem has in effect proliferated itself into various incarnations on several sensorial planes through intersemiotic translation • to what extent does a musical transposition of a poem count as its translation? what kind of equivalence may be posited between a written text and its cross-semiotic transcreation?