Cultural Untranslatability of Heteroglossia

Abstract

Heteroglossia, the simultaneous coexistence of a variety of languages in a single language, is a widespread phenomenon in world literature, especially in the literature of the culture that enjoys or suffers from a multilingual environment for social, historical, or cultural reasons. However, the translation of heteroglossic literature has largely remained an under-researched topic. This chapter explores the (un-)translatability of heteroglossic literature with the examples of heteroglossic poems written by ethnically Chinese poets in colonial Hong Kong. Historicizing Hong Kong heteroglossic poetry inevitably engages the chapter with the city’s colonial and cultural contexts. Primarily written in the colonized’s language (a Sinitic language, be it Chinese, Cantonese, or their combination), the verses of these poems are embedded with phrases in the colonizer’s language (English). This chapter takes a historical approach to examine the poetic influences Hong Kong’s heteroglossic poetry received in different times and discusses a variety of forms of the untranslatability of heteroglossia knotted into the colonial context in Hong Kong. The chapter postulates a general hypothesis that the more deeply heteroglossia is tied to its context, the less translatable it becomes. The chapter argues that it is often the cultural untranslatability, rather than the linguistic untranslatability, that makes heteroglossic literature appear untranslatable.