Introduction: Sinophone Poetry as an

Interlingual Space

Simona Gallo and Martina Codeluppi

The title of this book encapsulates not only the key concepts that have inspired
and steered our work – “Sinophone poetry,” “mother/other tongues,” “creation,”
and “translation” – but also some foundational questions on our agenda, start-
ing with a crucial one: “What is Sinophone poetry?” We believe that dwelling
on some preliminary observations about the core elements at play is the most
suitable way to introduce this edited volume.
Originally conceived by Shu-mei Shih as the “study of Sinitic-language cul-
tures and communities on the margins of China and Chineseness” (Shih 2004),
the concept of the Sinophone has been described as underscoring “issues
and controversies pertaining to multiple identities, ethnicities, languages, and
cultures” (Tsai in Shih, Tsai, Bernards 2013, 17) on the margins of China and
Chineseness (Shih 2004). Their polyphonic, place-based, and multifarious
nature can be investigated through a wide range of academic discourses and
across a variety of fields (Shih 2011). Despite its ideal openness, this theoreti-
cal framework, along with its boundaries, has been subject to discussion and
revision, in an effort to eschew an ideological posture that may engender new
forms of hegemony and new ethnocentrisms, for the sake of a more inclusive
outlook – especially when it comes to literature. Sinophone literature, pri-
marily envisioned as the literature written by Sinitic-language writers outside
China and across the world (Shih 2004), has also been approached by scholars
from multiple perspectives, by either emphasizing its multilingual and poly-
scriptic nature (Zhang 2014, 13), and cultural hybridity, or else avoiding the
exclusivity of the ethnographic, linguistic, and political connotation (Tsu and
Wang 2010; Tsu 2010; Chiu and Zhang 2022).
With all this in mind, we have decided to adopt a translational and trans-
cultural attitude toward the Sinophone and the Sinosphere, envisaging the
latter as a kaleidoscope of linguistic and cultural articulations. Our purpose
is twofold: on the one hand, we wish to shed light on some of the manifold
translingual phenomena (see Kellman 2000; 2019) that are taking place in the
Sinophone literary world, and which are often triggered by creativity; on the
other hand, we aim to contribute to de-marginalizing the translational field,
which still appears rather peripheral in the already prosperous nexus of meth-
odological stances.

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2 Gallo and Codeluppi

Speaking of the “margins” of critical discourse, what certainly comes to

the fore is contemporary Sinophone poetry. While contemporary Sinophone
literature has been widely surveyed over the last decade, most research has
concentrated on fiction, whereas poetry – especially in its creative and transla-
tional dimension – has not yet been investigated thoroughly and thus deserves
further scrutiny. In this book, Sinophone poetry admittedly constitutes a genre
encompassing hybrid, polyphonic, and polymorphic literary practices inher-
ently bound to translingualism1 and, therefore, to translation. Accordingly,
Sinophone writers can be described as translingual writers juggling between a
metalingual consciousness and a “postmonolingual identity” (Yildiz 2012), and
as subjects attempting to traverse borders (national, cultural, and linguistic) by
means of literary creation.
But how do contemporary Sinophone poets deal with multilingual creativ-
ity? To whom are they speaking? How does a translator of poetry identify this
unique form of expression and recode the intertext? The literary practices
of negotiation between the self and the Other(s), between native and for-
eign, and between first tongues and second tongues, along with the poetic
renderings of such transactions, ultimately designate the core issues of this
edited book.
Mother Tongues and Other Tongues: Creating and Translating Sinophone
Poetry discusses the creative process and product of poetic translation both
as the translingual author’s reaffirmation and as the interlingual transla-
tor’s empowerment. It aims to spark a dialogue on the complex yet stimulat-
ing binomial of poetic “creation and translation,” against the background of
cross-culturality, in the domain of the contemporary Sinosphere. Drawing
attention to authors either writing from outside Mainland China – in Chinese
or in other languages – or based in the PRC but belonging to cultural minorities,
as well as authors living in “in-between” and sensitive areas, this book encom-
passes a multiplicity of aspects concerning a wide range of issues in the cre-
ation and translation of Sinophone poetry. Starting from a view of Sinophone
poetry as an interlingual space, it investigates theoretical and methodologi-
cal perspectives, the field of translingual practices, and accounts of first-hand
experiences. It is organized into three interlaced parts, introduced below along
with the thirteen chapters.
Part 1, titled “Thinking, Writing, and Translating the Sinophone,” introduces
Sinophone poetry and its translational implications from a theoretical point

1 The charismatic and influential notion of translingualism, offered by Steven Kellman (2000;
2019) in the context of World literature, condenses a multiplicity of experiences across lan-
guages and identifies that are both the product and the underlying process of negotiation.

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Introduction 3

of view. It begins (Chapter 1) with Lucas Klein’s critical review of two main
shortcomings in the field of Sinophone Studies: the lack of attention towards
poetry written in Sinophone areas and the challenges of its translation. He
adopts a Sinophone Studies-informed perspective and substantiates his dis-
cussion by surveying the translational poetics of four anglophone poets from
the Sinophone region – Chris Song, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Joshua Ip, and Wong
May – as well as their engagement with issues of locality, translationality, and
Chinese traditions. He then probes Shu-mei Shih’s vision of diaspora and its
“expiration date,” by asking whether Sinophone poets’ translational poetics
can represent a sense that they are at such an expiration date or not. Chapter 2
contains Chris Song’s reflections on the theoretical borders of the Sinophone
and its diaspora, with a specific focus on the case of Hong Kong poetry. To
present “Sinophone Hong Kong literature,” and especially the “southbound
writers” (Nan lai zuojia 南來作家), Song reads Hong Kong poet Wong Man’s
黃雯 autobiographical poems alongside his migration route. He historicizes this
poet’s writings in political contexts and studies his bilingual practice through
the lens of “biliterate modality.” This is an influential approach through which
to read Sinophone Hong Kong writers’ bilingual poetry and explore their links
with issues of cultural identity and cultural hybridity in multifarious historical
contexts of Hong Kong, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on nostalgia.
Cosima Bruno, in Chapter 3, offers another shift in perspective: she explores
the concept of “one language” in relation to translation, to review some theo-
retical and practical propositions offered by scholars, poets, and translators
who deal with heteroglossic texts. Bruno scrutinizes the ways in which linguis-
tic bordering has intersected with and affected political and social bordering,
and vice versa, by looking at multilingual Sinophone poetic texts, and espe-
cially at the ways migrant poets dramatize difference among languages, so as
to understand the kind of difference at stake between the languages employed,
their hierarchy and status. Her essay therefore undertakes an analysis of the
aesthetics defined by lyrical works that pursue the tensions inherent in the
monolingual paradigm and the mother tongue. Echoing the previous chapters’
theoretical discussions about positioning and describing Sinophone poetry
through the lenses of language diversity, translation, and self-translation, in
Chapter 4 Simona Gallo contributes to the debate on the relationship between
multilingualism and the lyrical Sinosphere, envisaged as an intrinsically trans-
lingual and translational domain. By assuming that Sinophone poetry epito-
mizes individual practices and constitutes a site of creative construction of
selves, Gallo introduces the concept of “thirdlanguaging” as a paradigm of sub-
jective re-location through language. She draws upon three case studies cover-
ing different contexts, and dissimilar relationships between mother tongues

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and other tongues, to illustrate how this “thirdlanguaging” shapes various

manifestations of the (Sinophone) poetics of creation and translation.
Part 2, “Translation, Contamination, and Foreign-language Writing,” con-
tains four chapters that continue the exploration of Sinophone poetry by
scrutinizing its multilingual practices, along with the issue of translation.
It opens with Justyna Jaguscik’s investigation of the poetics of translingual-
ism in the context of Sinophone lyrical writing (Chapter 5). Her discussion
draws upon three contemporary female voices from the literary Sinosphere
that express postmonolingual lyrical subjectivities and advocate inclusive
paradigms: texts written by Amang and Tsai Wan-Shuen, who grew up in
multilingual Taiwan, and by the US-based author Jami Proctor-Xu, are read
in an attempt to reveal the creative potential of the negotiation of multiple
linguistic affiliations, which is fulfilled through translation, disruption, and a
(“transgressive”) freedom to live across one’s mother tongue and other tongues.
In Chapter 6, Martina Codeluppi engages in a close reading of 回家 Letters
Home: a bilingual collection of poems by Jennifer Wong – an author born in
Hong Kong and currently based in the UK – which employs the metaphor of
homecoming to represent in-betweenness. Her discussion further brings into
focus the issue of composite cultural identities connected with a new linguis-
tic dimension. As a synecdoche for the Sinophone diaspora in the Western
Anglophone world, Wong’s poetry – Codeluppi contends – represents a jour-
ney through mother/other tongues that goes back to a non-dimensional limbo,
where places and languages are translated, hybridized, and thus recreated. In
Chapter 7, Rebecca Ehrenwirth also questions traditional ideas of cultures as
ethnically closed areas and spotlights another diasporic context, located in
Southeast Asia, namely Sinophone literature in Thailand. After sketching the
main developments and current trends in Sinophone Thai literature, the chap-
ter sheds light on a contemporary form written in Chinese by the Sinophone
community in Thailand, namely “small poetry” (xiaoshi 小詩). Ehrenwirth
illustrates how “small poetry,” with its limited number of characters, condenses
in miniature form the in-betweenness of these writers: an ambivalent condi-
tion, well embodied by a translingual and transcultural poetics, that mirrors
both an act of resistance against the loss of roots and the pitfall of a ceaseless
non-belonging. In Chapter 8, Valentina Pedone shifts the discussion to Europe
by considering some amateur Sinophone authors who are active across Italy
and China. Relying on a framework of Mobility Studies and Sinophone Studies,
Pedone scrutinizes the translingual and transnational textual practices of these
Sino-Italian writers who publish their works in both countries, as well as online,
performing their hyphenated identities in accordance with their place-based
readerships. Pedone gives an account of the lyrical quandary emerging from

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Introduction 5

the conflict between nostalgia for the mother(land) and “obsession” with the
other, engendered by the fear of exclusion. Another relevant debt owed to
self-translation and collaborative translation comes to the fore in Chapter 9,
where Nicoletta Pesaro undertakes an in-depth analysis of the case of Ming Di
明迪, a “cosmopolitan Chinese poet” based in Los Angeles, and closely con-
nected to her mother tongue and homeland, who locates herself within “World
literature,” thereby avoiding both a politicized approach and the narrowness
of a purely linguistic or geographic perspective of the Sinophone paradigm.
Ming Di continuously blends lyrical creation and translation, embodying the
role of a prominent mediator between the Sinophone and Anglophone liter-
ary worlds. Her theories and practices of co-translating and self-translating
her own works are discussed from sociological and linguistic perspectives,
and introduced by Pesaro as a valuable paradigm of trans-creation, not to
mention an opportunity for Ming Di to make her multiple identities visible
through lyrical writing and to recognize her Others. With Chapter 10, Joanna
Krenz steers the volume away from a synchronic conceptual framework and
broadens the spectrum of Sinophone poetry and translation, by focusing on
the interaction between the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi 白居易 and Daryl Lim
Wei Jie. Born in Singapore to a family of mainland-Chinese immigrants, but
raised and educated in an Anglophone environment, Lim considers English
his mother tongue, while trying to connect to Chinese and its lyrical legacy.
Against the backdrop of a translingual, transcultural, and trans-epochal cor-
respondence, Krenz examines Lim’s experimental translation of several poems
by Bai Juyi. She then examines the process of identity construction undertaken
by this contemporary Sinophone poet-translator by bridging remote spatio-
temporal realities, as well as his dehegemonization and dehomogenization of
the Chinese-language cultural heritage through creative translation.
“Experiences from the Sinophone,” the third and conclusive Part of this book
(3), brings forward authentic first-hand experiences in the field of writing and
translating Sinophone poems. In Chapter 11, Ying Chen, a Chinese-Canadian
author who dwells among Chinese, English, and French, describes her cre-
ative efforts to build a “cultural mosaic” through poetry devoted to a cosmo-
politan society of migrants. By means of a “hybridized” language, she portrays
this experience as a medium for looking into Chinese ethnicity and other-
ness, but also as an endeavor to carefully preserve a valuable cultural and lin-
guistic ecosystem that appears much broader than “simple” bilinguality, and
to promote translingual and transcultural communication also by means of
translation. Next, in Chapter 12, Ming Di addresses the topic of minority lan-
guage poetry from the People’s Republic of China as a new poetry scene she
has been documenting as part of an experimental project. In an attempt to

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answer questions like “What makes a minority poet a minority poet?” and
“Do minority poets write the same Chinese or a new Chinese?”, she tackles
the issues of an in-betweenness stemming from a “double” mother tongue,
and of what is gained or lost through translation. With such issues in mind,
she provides a conspicuous number of case studies, organized according to an
anthropological approach, to investigate the interaction between diglossia and
(self-)translation and creativity. The thorny relationship between foreignness
and rootedness is pursued in the closing Chapter 13, in which the scholar and
poet Mai Mang describes his own experience of self-translation from a twofold
perspective: as a way to explore, penetrate, and bring to the fore the multiple
identities of the self, along with its polyphonies, but also as a tool to prove the
worth of a kind of poetry that crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries, be
it in the East or the West, in contrast to a hegemonic, Western-centric “World
literature.” The author’s discourse on the epiphanic encounter with the unseen
other(s) thus coalesces in a discussion about the universal language of poetry,
with all its different voices and silences.
The thirteen chapters, like the book itself, spring from the need to answer
a number of questions concerning the Sinophone poetic field – questions
evidently revolving around the relationship between different tongues, cul-
tures, and practices of translation and creation. Even though these chapters
draw multiple trajectories and proceed along different routes, they do not
lose themselves in a centrifugal disarray or cacophony of voices. On the con-
trary, their interwoven coordinates compose a harmonious symphony based
on recurring notes, which include issues like heteroglossia and (un)translat-
ability, translingual or transcultural creolization, borders and border-crossing,
subjectivity and otherness, ethnicity and roots, migration and routes, localiza-
tion and displacement, center(s) and peripheries, identity and difference(s),
along with many others. The multifariousness of arguments, underpinned by a
heterogeneous collection of case studies, further corroborates our preliminary
assumption, that is to say, the lyrical Sinophone is not a monolingual space,
and should rather be conceived as a galaxy where a wide range of interlinked
phenomena take place. Hence, it deserves to come out of the margins.
This book attempts to tackle the issue of marginality surrounding Sinophone
poetry and its translational gist by pursuing a twofold strategy, namely by draw-
ing attention to authors whose work, for a number of different reasons, has not
yet attracted significant scholarly or commercial attention, and by engaging in
multiple approaches to properly represent the countless manifestations defin-
ing the lyrical Sinophone. All this considered, we hope that Mother Tongues
and Other Tongues will help to further enrich the critical, multidisciplinary dis-
course on contemporary Sinophone poetry.

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Introduction 7

Works Cited

Bernards, Brian and Chien-hsin Tsai. 2013. “PART III. Introduction.” In Sinophone
Studies: A Critical Reader, edited by Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai and Brian
Bernards, 183–190. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chiu, Kuei-fen, and Zhang Yingjin. 2022. The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures
as World Literature. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Kellman, Steven G. 2019. “Literary Translingualism: What and Why?” Polylinguality and
Transcultural Practices 16 (3): 337–346.
Kellman, Steven G. 2000. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press.
Shih, Shu-mei. 2004. “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition.” PMLA
119 (1): 16–30.
Shih, Shu-mei. 2011. “The Concept of the Sinophone.” PMLA 126 (3): 709–718.
Shih, Shu-mei, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards, eds. 2013. Sinophone Studies: A
Critical Reader. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tsai, Chien-hsin. 2013. “Part I. Issues and controversies.” In Sinophone Studies: A Critical
Reader, edited by Shu-mei Shih, Chien-hsin Tsai and Brian Bernards, 17–24. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Tsu, Jing. 2010. Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Tsu, Jing, and David Der-wei Wang, eds. 2010. Global Chinese Literature. Leiden –
Boston: Brill.
Yildiz, Yasemin. 2012. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New
York: Fordham University Press.
Zhang, Yinde. 2014. “Transnational Chinese Literature and the Sinopolyphone
Perspective.” Diogène 246–247 (2–3): 222–234.

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8 Gallo and Codeluppi

Figure 0.1
Zhang Huan 張洹. 2001. “Family Tree” 家譜 (1/9).
Chromogenic print.
Courtesy of Zhang Huan

Figure 0.2
Wilson, Robert. 2005. “Gao Xingjian”. In
Robert Wilson Video Portraits.
Courtesy of Robert Wilson and
Gao Xingjian

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