Hsia Yü’s Translingual Transculturalism from Memoranda to Pink Noise

Abstract

THE TAIWANESE POET Hsia Yu (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.),1 although increasingly anthologized in America, is far better known in Asia - especially Taiwan, Mainland China, and Japan. Here she enjoys a cult-like following, owing in large part to her reputation as a sinophone poet with a global view, a quality still rare in Greater China or the Chinese diaspora, where most poets writing in Chinese remain relatively insular culturally. She has also developed a reputation for being unpredictably adventurous and creative, and for possessing a seemingly unlimited capacity for poetic experimentation. This adventurism forms the foundation for a translingual, transcultural poetry that goes well beyond the mixing of languages found in more conventional multilingual, polyglot poetry to include the invention of new languages unique to the poet herself, as well as forms of language poetry in which Chinese demonstrates linguistic elements never before exhibited. These characteristics of her work have been received with great enthusiasm by readers and scholars looking for sinophone writers who seem more 'modem' or contemporary, a longing that has grown in intensity over the past one hundred years, beginning with the May Fourth Movement.2The wide distribution of Hsia Yu's work and her growing fame have inspired many scholarly studies in both Chinese and English that attempt to place her work in an international literary framework such as feminism or postmodernism. In some cases, these studies have engaged in debate over whether her writing qualifies, in fact, as poetry.3 Oddly, however, despite the recent blossoming of Chinese transculturalist literature,4 Hsia Yu has yet to be studied from a transculturalist or translingualist perspective, despite receiving highly enthusiastic notice for her cosmopolitanism and internationalism. Fred Moramorco, writing in Poetry International, declares that Hsia Yu's poemsseem to want to devour the world as they record it. Hers is a rich, sensual, and absolutely international sensibuity that is as much at home writing about Salsa and Che Guevara as it is writing about the Qing Dynasty or Old Cathay.5Ou-fan Lee take[s] heart in her accomplishments which give the much misused term 'world poetry' a cultural distinctiveness and an individual imprint.6 Beyond such apt generalizations, however, Hsia Yu's contributions to translingualist and transculturalist literature have yet to be studied. This essay attempts to begin to fill this void by presenting a partial survey of the poet's radical experiments in language and culture from her first publication in 1983 to her 2007 masterpiece, Pink Noise, and by reading her work as an example of translingual, transcultural poetry according to theories put forth by Mikhail Bakhtin, Mikhail Epstein, and Steven G Kellman.Having completed her education at National Taiwan Academy of the Arts in drama and film, Hsia Yu burst upon the Taiwan poetry scene in 1983 with Memoranda,7a self-published collection of poems and poetic memoranda whose brassy and iconoclastic tone struck a deeply sympathetic chord in Taiwan's younger readers as they stood poised on the expectant edge of the country's entry into our alleged culture of global capital.8Since then, she has published four more collections, including Salsa (1999), Fusion Kitsch (2001), and Pink Noise (2007), which, perused in chronological order, give ample evidence of the poet's obsession not merely with language, but with the idea of new, constructed language that can speak to all people all around the world, as well as to the single solitary self. An historical overview of her work also shows the poet's evolution from experimentation with Chinese in myriad forms - including highly idiosyncratic, self-constructed versions of her native tongue - towards the emphatic translingualist transculturalism of the trilingual (English-French-Chinese) Pink Noise, in which three imperial languages and their cultures not only coexist but also complement and confront each other. …