China's Battler Poetry, Zheng Xiaoqiong, and Hypertranslatability

Abstract

China's battler poetry (dagong shige 打工詩歌), also known in English as migrant worker poetry, projects images of China as the workshop of the world in the age of global capitalism. The recent product of a world-renowned tradition in which poetry has been a social practice as much as an art since antiquity, it speaks to a wide range of readers, in China and elsewhere. This article first offers some reflection on the interlingual translation of battler poetry. Extending the discussion to cultural translation, it then considers how foreign audiences can come to see a single author as the “face” of an entire genre, in this case Zheng Xiaoqiong. Next, it proposes the notion of hypertranslatability, and it shows how this helps explain the ubiquity of Zheng in foreign work on battler poetry to date. The article mostly dwells on material in English, but the subject matter is such that the argument may hold for material in other languages as well.