Translational (De)construction in Contemporary Chinese Poetics

Abstract

In his essay ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, Derrida presents us with an epistemological puzzle: the dilemma of considering in tandem the event and the machine. Derrida’s question is: how can we reconcile a thinking of the event and that of the machine at the same time, in other words, both what happens/arrives and what is a calculable, machinelike repetition? What if Derrida’s ‘machine’ takes the form of a computer program that performs translation tasks? How could we then contemplate the relationship between this translation machine, or machine translator, and creative writing as a textual event? To consider these questions, the article presents the case of a linguistic experiment that involves a textual event and a machine translator. The textual event in question is the bilingual poetry collection Fenhongse zaoyin/Pink Noise, ‘written’ by contemporary Taiwanese author Hsia Yü (b. 1956). Specifically, the article taps into ideas from deconstruction to illustrate the discursive operations between creative writing (as an event) and (machine) translating in this bilingual collection, with a view to understanding how the machine as translator participates in the negotiation and dissemination of meaning in bilingual writing.