我曾經有兩隻舌頭
一隻中文一隻英文
我曾經有兩顆心臟
一個東方一個西方
而如今我無所有
唯有再度去流亡

I used to have two tongues
one Chinese and the other English
I used to have two hearts
one east and the other west
but I have nothing left now
only this instinct to wander again
(Ouyang Yu, Erdu paoliu 二度漂流/“Second Drifting”)

For a dialogic (re)imagination

Self-translation can mirror an unsettled life between, and across, identities, and such tension may result in a constant self-differentiation, a modus vivendi exemplified by a hybrid and polyphonic aesthetic production.

If translation “serves as a way of continuing to write and to shape language creatively, [and] can act as a regenerative force”,1 self-translation demands a “dialogic (re)imagination” of worlds through words, an idea which echoes that of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Kristeva, formulating the concept of intertextuality, later wrote that Bakhtin intended the dialogue not only as the language assumed by the subject, but also as the writing in which we read the other.2 Moreover, if in self-translation, “the empathic author-translator relationship produces a new text with its own artistic value”,3 it must be acknowledged that the process and the product of this practice is marked by what Genette4 referred to as “transtextuality”, whereby meanings, in the semiotic process of cultural and textual signification, are redistributed. Therefore, self-translation, along with dialogism and the textual transcendence of texts,5 evokes “bridging”, a twofold concept which portrays both the interliminal space of the difference and the movement to transcend that difference. Thus, the author who becomes a translating, and a translated, subject wanders back and forth across this space, while performing his poetic transformation.

That is the case with Ouyang Yu 歐陽昱 (born in 1955), the contemporary Chinese-Australian poet who was born in Hangzhou and who is now based between Melbourne and Shanghai.6 Ouyang is an accomplished artist who straddles the border between two identities, and, in fact, he now divides his time in China, as a scholar and Professor,7 and in Australia, as a writer and translator. His “in-betweenness”8 also results in a transcultural9 aesthetic, a realm where the individual creatively gives voice to a polyphonic self, in other words, “a complex web of tensions produced its multilingual dialogue within itself”.10

In this respect, Ouyang’s bilingual poetry collection Ziyi ji 自譯集/Self-translation11 represents his own manifesto of a hybrid cultural identity (hunza wenhua shenfen 混杂文化身份). The collection,12 which first appeared in 2012 in a digital version published by an Australian editor, consists of ninety-six poems, originally written in Chinese and then rendered into English. Ziyi ji 自譯集/Self-translation appears particularly interesting for several reasons. Firstly, it is a bilingual text, an unusual form which minimizes the risk of marginalizing the original–in a mere chronological sense–and grants the second version the dignity of a “new original”.13 The writer, then, makes a claim for a hermeneutic view of translation as the primary form of a creative act. Accordingly, the bilingual text implies an egalitarian relationship between the two languages. Secondly, it represents a creative translingual practice, as the collection embodies the cultivation of a polyphonic and transcultural self in the poet’s journey across languages, as a resistance to monologism.

Hence, this paper aims at observing the dialogic (re)imagination through self-translation, from a double perspective. Primarily, by making the assumption that the Chinese and the English versions of the poems collected in Ziyi ji 自譯集/Self-translation are linked by a strong transtextual relationship, a stereoscopic reading allows us to perceive the prismatic refraction of thoughts. Then, a second focus placed on the verses characterized by bilingual creativity, whereby the presence of the other language may be intended as a symbol of migration or exile, as well as an attempt to extend the communicative potential of a language.

The author in-between

Ouyang Yu is a prolific and versatile writer, who has authored more than one hundred books in both Chinese, his mother tongue, and in English, his second language. In 1996, he co-founded the only Chinese literary journal in Australia, Yuanxiang 原鄉/Otherland,14 and by that time his literary career began, when his first English-language lyrical collection appeared.15 Since then, he has been working in a variety of fields and genres, as a critic, scholar, translator, essayist, novelist and poet.16 His literary work has appeared regularly in most major Australian and many overseas literary journals, and he is now a prizewinning, translator, novelist and poet in both China and Australia.17 However, his literary success has not come without cost.

As with many other Chinese artists and intellectuals, Ouyang decided to leave his motherland and to move to the West after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Before he left, he completed a master’s degree in Australian and English Literature at the East China Normal University in Shanghai, where he had earlier graduated with a degree in English and American Literature. Then, two years later, in 1991, Ouyang moved to Melbourne to undertake a doctorate at La Trobe University, where he researched the portraits of “Otherness” and Chinese migration in Australian fiction. He has devoted many works to the narratives of identity forged by migration and bilingualism, as well as to the complex dynamics of intersubjectivity, and still reflects on the sense of frustration felt by the Chinese who are rejected by the native community. The disenchantment with reality, produced by the kind of social, cultural, and intellectual marginalization he personally experienced in the extraterritoriality, convinced him to reconsider China and the West:

What has happened is perhaps no more than a changed state of mind and a changed perception of freedom. After twenty years, one becomes disillusioned about the kind of freedom once earnestly sought and disaffected with the possibilities available to intellectual migrants in a Western democracy. […]
When writing in their own chosen language, Mandarin Chinese, is not supported and when they have little access to publication and no likelihood of ever being awarded a grant or a literary prize, there is little incentive. What is worse is the fact that since they are Chinese, albeit Australian citizens, they cannot go anywhere without being recognized as such and discriminated against as such.18

According to the author, the obstruction to a full acceptance of the hybrid identity is still symbolically marked by the dilemma of literary awards and editorial censorship,19 driven by a market which welcomes exoticism, in place of multiculturalism. As an engaged critic, Ouyang discerns that:

To be considered a Chinese Australian artist is dangerously convenient. You may forever hover around the edge of the centre, giving the mistaken impression that you are part of the centre.20

Feeling pigeonholed and dismissed by an Orientalist cultural milieu,21 in Saidian terms, the writer chose to figuratively and concretely retrace his steps. In 2005, he took up a three-year contract (on a half-year basis) at Wuhan University as a Professor of Australian Studies. In so doing, he chose a path of “in-betweenness”, of bridging the motherland and the “Otherland”. Yet, neither of the two countries feels like home, but instead produce a deeply felt sense of displacement, ascribable to their faults and failures.22

Henceforth, acknowledging that “Freedom […] must travel on a third road”,23 Ouyang has framed his own “Third Space”, to quote Edward Soja,24 where his hyphenated identity may find expression. Self-translation and bilingual creativity indeed enact this hybridity, by concurrently epitomizing a life dwelt between the interstices of two dominant cultures, and the attempt to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries. Ziyi ji 自譯集/Self-translation stands as an unsettling testament of a transcultural self, and lyrically displays the aporia of a perpetual displacement.25

Echoing the Other: transtextual readings

The ninety-six poems collected in Ziyi ji 自譯集/Self-translation are connected by a strong transtextual relationship. It may be useful to underline that, from a quantitative perspective, the English versions tend to retain the same number of stanzas and lines with a similar structure, except for those poems where Ouyang creatively transforms the visuals. Moreover, symmetry is often achieved on the rhythmic, syntactic, and lexical levels.

Beginning a closer reading of the poems, a meaningful trait may be observed from a semantic and cultural perspective, where an echo of the “Other” seems to bridge the material gap. Thus, self-translation liberates the verse from its foreignness and relocates it in a more familiar environment. This occurs in poems such as Molei he 墨累河/“The Murray River”,26 and Liufangzhe de ge 流放者的歌/“Song for an Exile in Australia”, as well as in Huanghun 黃昏/“Dusk in a Wuhan Suburb”, and Huanghun 黃昏/“Dusk in Shanghai”. In the first poem listed above, the location, the Murray River, is explicitly mentioned in the original version’s title as well. Worthy of note, however, is that in the English titles of the other three poems the poet feels the need to clarify the location where the scene is depicted. In fact, in the third and fourth poems mentioned above, the inclusion of Wuhan and Shanghai in the English titles may appear arbitrary to the Chinese reader, considering that no specific reference to these two oriental cities is made in the Chinese version. This strategy evokes both the poems’ self-standing nature and their double reading.

The transtextual relationship is further corroborated by a complementarity between the Chinese and the English versions when one seems to live in the Other. This remarkable phenomenon is evident in poems such as Wuti 无题/“No Title”: 27

無題
當英語潮水般湧來之時
我已失去了記憶
五千年的結構一夜崩潰
我的舌頭如陰莖一樣僵直
一片悠久的空白
如大腦如這國家.
我的眼睛飛越澳洲
在夢中含糊地低語
那是原始人的嘟嚷
那是現代人的夢囈
在百科全書的叢林中穿行
群蟻的文學使人窒息
我已經不會說國家
更不會說彆扭的政治
我很快連父母兄弟
也都一併忘記
唉，這無邊無際的英語
那鋪天蓋地的感覺
在全世界幾十億人中
只剩下我一個自己

No Title
When the English language comes flooding in
I’ve lost my memory
The 5,000-year-old structure collapses overnight
As my tongue straightens like a penis
In a time-honoured blankness
Like the brains, like this country
My eyes are flying over Australia
Murmuring, confusedly, in a dream
It’s the mumbling of the primitive
It’s the dream-talking of the modern
Walking through the encyclopaedic bush
One is stifled by the literature of swarming ants
I’m no longer able to pronounce the word ‘nation’
And even less able to talk about the twisted politics
Pretty soon, I’ll forget my parents
And brothers altogether
Alas, in this boundless English
That sensation of heaven and earth being swept
I am left alone with myself
Amidst billions of the people in the world

The enduring restlessness of the distressed bilingual self is manifest in the Chinese verse and in the English one, self-translated in Australia. The spiritual exile bequeaths a sense of barrenness pervading the distressed mind, reflected in the body. Interestingly, the mother tongue and the motherland are never mentioned but replaced by allusions (wuqian nian de jiegou五千年的結構/“The 5,000-year-old structure” and zhe guojia 這國家/“this country”), while Yungyu 英語/“English” and Aozhou 澳洲/“Australia” appear in both versions. Self (“this country”) and Other (zhe wubianwuji de Yingyu 這無邊無際的英語/“this boundless English”) coexist within the lines of the poem as well as inside the poet, who portrays his own in-betweenness and non-belonging. The lack of metaphorical distance between the two, again, allows a double reading of the work: in Chinese, the poet feels dissociated from his homeland, whereas in English he wanders and becomes lost.

“Doubleness” is indeed an essential feature of the nomadic poet, who transposes his meditations on the displacement into a lyrical dimension. In Yong ju yixiang 永居異鄉/“Permanently Resident in an Alien Country” the plurality of meanings conferred to the “here and now” recurs:

我和我的故鄉28
儅在電視上見面
而我未來的家園
是漂浮在空中的城堡
我沒有自己的土地
[…]

my old country and me
we see each other on tv
and my future home is
but a castle floating in air
I have no land of my own
[…]

This type of ambivalence results in a circular interpretation of the lines, or better, in a transtextual reading which reveals the poet’s hyphenated identity. Self-translation, as a dialogic (re)imagination, plays then the part of a creative reconciliation of decentred thoughts.

Bilingual creativity: translingual dialogue

Generally speaking, it is extremely hard to quantify the degree of creativity against perfect adherence achieved under the constraint of a censorious superego.29 However, there is no doubt that translingual creativity inhabits the collection, and that “translingual” describes Ouyang Yu as a writer, since he creates texts in more than one language, one of which is not his primary one.30

In the collection, twelve poems are marked by bilingualism, meaning that Ouyang Yu transplants foreign terms into an artificial (linguistic) soil, thereby negotiating a subjective polyphony with an uprooted self. Hence, “translingualism” etymologically depicts the phenomenon of words moving and living across languages, in a cultural in-betweenness that even translation cannot solve. For instance, in poems such as “Life” and “The Rain”, the adoption of foreign terms such as “yuan” and “wutong”, which could have easily been replaced by their English counterparts, displaces the scene.

Life
Only these few yuan31 now
To buy shorts for my boy a shirt for my wife
And rice for meal a poison coil for mosquitoes
And, yes, a cattail leaf fan and a sleeping mat
Oh, I have to sell my life to buy it back again!

The Rain
the leaves of the wutong tree32 soughing
the wind sound asleep in the green
dripping, chirping
one dimple after another on the water
the umbrella slipping pit-pat by
the leaves of the wutong tree soughing

As a perceptive writer, Ouyang Yu intentionally paints imageries which have splashes of exoticism. This alienating effect is even more impressive in the Chinese verse,33 where the unexpected shift of writing systems bewilders the reader on a semantic and graphic level, as occurs in Molei he 墨累河/The Murray River, Wo de zuguo 我的祖國/My Country, Tie di feixing 贴地飞行/Flying Close to the Earth and in Yihou 以後/In the Future.

墨累河
[…]
而我驅車經過Tailem Blend
[…]
墨累河
在Mildura
提供了一個游憩的去處
[…]

我的祖國
這男友是一朝鮮人
和她公共guestwork在日本
[…]
這一夜我多抽了幾支extra mild萬寶路34
[…]

贴地飞行
[…]
那种比SARS更能杀死的好毒
每一个病人比任何时候都穿得更好
[…]

以後
[…]
誰也不喜歡誰
就像查遍Facebook
[…]

The translingual creativity also stands as a disruptive strategy that may be understood as a yearning to surpass the univocity of monolingualism, and can be seen as a mise en scène of the poet’s Third Space. For instance, in the English-language versions of My Two Women/Wo de liangge nüren 我的兩個女人 and The Double Man/Shuang xing ren 雙性人, two poems offering multifaceted reflections on identity, Ouyang adopts Chinese terms that need to be explained through paratextual references that “crucial signpost to regulate ‘the textual traffic into and out of a text’”.35

My Two Women
[…]
My previous woman was called hua
And my current woman was called ao
For the sake of freedom
Both can be abandoned
Note: hua: China; ao: Australia

The Double Man
my name is
a crystallisation of two cultures
my surname is China
my given name Australia
if I translate that direct into English
my surname becomes Australia
my given name China
I do not know what motherland means
I possess two countries
or else
I possess neither
my motherland is my past
my motherland is my present
my past motherland is my past
my present motherland is my present
when I go to China
I say I’m returning to my home country
when I go to Australia
I say I’m returning to my home country
wherever I go
it is with a heart tinged in two colours
although there is han jian in Chinese
there isn’t ao jian in English
I write in Chinese
like Australians do in English
our motherlands have one thing in common:
they’ve both lost M
I have nullified my home
I have set up a home
in two hundred years’ time
I shall be the father of the double man
Note: han jian: Chinese traitor; ao jian: Australian traitor.

It is worth shining a light on the lines 28-31 of Shuang xing ren 雙性人, where resorting to using a mixed code restates the awareness of the Other:

雙性人
[…]
我用中文寫字
就跟澳洲人用英文
我們mother有個公共的特點
那就是失去了M
[…]

Therefore, the interpretative practice is not only based on the extra-referential content, but also on the process of signification.36 The translingual and multilingual creativity give voice to the dynamic and composite self, thus encouraging the poet, as well as the reader, to confront the Other.

Amidst this contest, self-translation turns into the practice of realizing a schizophrenic identity. In fact, if bilingualism condemns the author to live in-between, self-translation and bilingual creation act as a device to draw the author’s own mirrored portrait. The last three poems of the collection (Shuang 雙/“Double”; Wo de bei’ai 我的悲哀/“My Sadness”; and Liang tiao lu 兩條路/“The Two Roads”) exhibit the poet’s playful attitude towards his languages, as a mimicry of his own self and his own Other. Among them, the latter poem best illustrates Ouyang Yu’s aesthetic and ethical search for expressive freedom, in his Third Space. The last of the five stanzas37 composing Liang tiao lu 兩條路, the first part of the poem, wavers between Chinese and English:

沒有taken的路其實已經taken
已經taken過的，不一定是必經的路
你別無選擇，你選擇很多
[…]

The same pattern is applied to the last stanza of “The Two Roads”, which fits perfectly with its Chinese/English counterpart:

The road not 走has actually been 走了
One 走了的, not necessarily the one one wants to take,
You have no choice, you have many choices

Languages are (re)imagined, interwoven and embedded into one another, forging a thick transtextual and translingual dialogue. It is not without merit that self-translation is considered to be the most creative expression of translation38.

Conclusions

When in 1968 Roland Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author”, along with an epistemological change, he also postulated the end of the author as a repository of truth and defined the liberty of the reader towards the text. Apparently, self-translation, “as a reinterpretation of the original and the creation of a new original”,39 challenges the theorist’s notion of text and subverts his idea of the reader as the only actor entitled to signify. By enabling the writer to “recreate the original” with all the consequences that this entails,40 self-translation asserts the sovereignty of the author over his own work.

With this in mind, several general observations emerge. In the first place, in Ouyang Yu’s experience, self-translation means sacrifice, anguish and loss.41 Nevertheless, as many other self-translators, he presents his works as originals, thereby attempting to substantiate his “double” essence and unveiling a surconscience linguistique that symbolizes the multilingual writer:42

在中国占主导地位的严复的“信达雅”理论，一放到自译中，就站不住脚了。作为原作者的译者，是不必对自己讲什么“信达雅”的。对他来说，就是“创”字当头，使翻译真正成为再创造。43

Yan Fu’s theory of "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance",44 which is dominant in China, once applied to self-translation becomes groundless. As a translator of the author’s voice, one does not have to negotiate "faithfulness, expressiveness and elegance". For a self-translator, it is the word "creation" that becomes preeminent and makes translation genuinely turn into a re-creation.45

Self-translation truly embodies a legitimization of the authorial power, namely the authority to draw on the artist’s hyphenated self, a practice which traverses linguistic creativity.

It is important to note that poetry self-translation, which occupies a peculiar status in the domain of self-translation studies, as well as an open field of possibilities,46 seems to represent the ideal medium to disclose an expository portrait of the exiled subject. Depiction, through poetry, appears more impressive than a narrative, yet without eschewing the intrinsic dynamic evolution of a migrant identity. Hence, if the seduction of translation lies in the chance to trace the Other in the self,47 it may be said that the seduction of self-translation lies in the hermeneutic constitution of the multilingual self.

In this “second-degree writing”48 that recodifies meanings and forms, the bilingual author negotiates the mimetic function within the ethics of translation with his creative needs: re-creations are prompted by the dilemma of the in-betweenness and shaped by the dialogic (re)imagination. In Ouyang’s poetics, the interpenetration of languages and cultures results in transtextuality and translingualism, namely the perpetual wandering across worlds and between la langue de la raison and la langue du cœur.49