Poetry in Expanded Translation: Audre Lorde, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Don Mee Choi

In this article, I discuss the politics and poetics of translation in the work of Audre Lorde, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, and Don Mee Choi, considering each poet's ideas about translation and translation practices, suggesting approaches to reading and thinking about their work in relation to translation and in relation to each other. I ask the following questions: in the selected poets' work, what are the relationships between the movement of people, the removal of dead bodies, and translation practices? How do the poets move between languages and literary forms, and what are the politics and poetics of their movements with regards to migration, dispossession, and death, as well as resistance, refusal, and rebirth? I select these poets because of the ways in which they confront relationships between the history of the English language and literature, imperialism and colonialism, racialisation and racism, gendered experiences and narratives, and their own poetic practices. These histories and experiences do not exist in isolation, nor do the poets attempt to circumscribe their approaches to language, representation, translation, and form from their lived experiences and everyday practices of survival and resistance. The selected poets’ work ranges in form, tone, and argument, but I argue that their refusal to circumscribe politics and poetics pertains to their subject positions and lived experiences as racialised and post/colonial women, and that this refusal is demonstrated in their diverse understandings of translation and translation practices.

Reading Experimental Writing

Bringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Etel Adnan, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

Contemporary Experimental Translations and Translingual Poetics

This chapter attends to the nuances and difficulties in reading and translating contemporary translingual poetry, by focusing on the German poet Uljana Wolf, who has traversed the language barriers between English, German, Polish, and Belarusian in conceptually and linguistically innovative ways in her multilingual and politically engaged poetry and poetics. The chapter argues that Wolf’s work criticises national and linguistic borders and ‘mother tongues’ both thematically and poetically, i.e. by way of neologisms, unusual syntax and prefixes, and by splicing a number of languages into the texture and prosody of what Wolf calls her ‘other-tongued’ German poetry. Such an approach to multi- and translingualism as a formal feature with political stakes and a concomitant rejection of an idealised originality, the chapter goes on to argue, also invites a similarly rigorous playfulness and multilingual alertness from a translator. Suggesting that translation is generative and dialogic, in its ability to forge conversations and transnational communities, Wolf’s experimental translational practice is contextualised by reference to other innovative English-language and translingual poets, such as Rosmarie Waldrop, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, M. NourbeSe Philip, and to the recent critical writing and anthologies of translation and anti-colonial discourses. In conclusion, the chapter argues that Wolf, along with these thinkers and poets, helps readers reconceive translation as a radically inventive and collaborative practice that complicates access to the ‘foreign’ it is usually supposed to facilitate.

Theresa, I Miss You (Arsenale Veneto)

This poem was written after a long day at the 2019 Venice Biennale. It is from a body of work—spanning research, writing, and performance—dedicated to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha's seminal autoethnography Dictée has been readily mobilized by the disciplinary demands of both Asian American and literary studies, becoming the beloved exception reifying the rule of the false (and racialized, and gendered) binary between expressivity and innovation. Meanwhile, Cha's visual, video, and performance work has remained relatively obscure. My project for Theresa wants to un-discipline her archive while interrogating my own marking as a “Korean” “American” artist. In order to write this introduction, I had to go into the rain in all white, to move through silence with a hand to my mouth. In addressing these texts and rituals to Theresa, I seek to acknowledge the exchange we make in communing with the lost.

Introduction

Arising from a period of intense social upheaval and technological innovation, late 20th-century writers and artists challenge inherited notions of subjectivity and experiment with new hybrid forms of autobiographies composed of both image and text. The introduction provides an overview of how disciplinary boundaries have become more porous, leading to a variety of transdisciplinary visual-verbal self-narrations. The chapter reviews key concerns from Autobiography Studies and Visual Studies and how they redefine image-text relations as a matrix or a network with many surfaces and axes of interaction. The introduction also explains the organization of the book: the work of eight writers-artists–Peter Najarian, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Julie Chen, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Carrie Mae Weems, Faith Ringgold, and Edgar Heap of Birds, moving from the most literature-based to the most art-based. In dialogue with historical trauma and its consequences, each author asks crucial questions about American identity.