Dog Barking at the Moon: Transcreation of a Meme in Art and Poetry

This essay explores the dynamics of transcreation in art and poetry, focusing on the image of a dog barking at the moon in four Taiwanese poems. By putting them in connection with each other and with other texts from different times and artistic traditions, I wish to contribute to a dismantling of the “influence paradigm,” move beyond contestations over the comparative approach, and demonstrate a critical method that recognizes the enduring fascination for the meme but equally appreciates change, approximation and adaptation, rather than closed-off conversion from a source text to a target text

Thinking Other People's Thoughts: Brian Holton's Translations from Classical Chinese into Scots

Brian Holton (b. 1949), the only currently working translator of classical Chinese poetry into Scots, is here approached biographically, through his personal history and his career in translating and publishing. Holton's collection of his own translation materials, including drafts, proofs, scores, translations, notes, lectures, correspondence, and journalistic writings, has been made available to the author. As a voice of history, Holton's life and work constitute a subjective narrative that enters into debate, discussion, and interpretation with larger narratives, spheres of diffusion, and power relations. Hence the discussion touches on such matters as as language policy in education and national literatures, and issues of centre and periphery, foreignization and domestication

Breaking Language Down: Taiwan Sound Poetry and its Ways of Saying

This paper explores the appearance and rapid development of a genre that crosses the boundaries between art, music, drama, and literature, and that is being variously called ＂sound poetry＂ (聲音詩 shengyin shi), ＂language art＂ (語言藝術 yuyan yishu), or ＂text-sound art＂ (文本聲音藝術 wenben shengyin yishu). I argue that Taiwan sound poetry develops as an alternative genre to Chinese poetic tradition, forging a disorienting aesthetics that is disruptive of conventional ideas of artistic quality. I conceptualize this phenomenon in its unique history and politics, extrapolating some key features that include: a poetics that strives not for semantic extension or enrichment, but that radically aims at ＂semantic abjection＂; intervention in Taiwan language politics and translingual context, through its contribution to a ＂culture of the ear＂; a shift of attention from textual semantics to performance with audience/users' participation; strategic denial of a genealogy rooted in the Chinese tradition, with sound poets' pronouncements about their poetics as being an entirely Western import; double nature as local, Sinophone, and global

Writing in London. Home and Languaging in the Work of London Poets of Chinese Descent

This essay discusses literary works produced in London by poets of Chinese descent who are foreign-born or London native. Some of these works are written in English, and some in Chinese. The aim is to discuss poetry that has emphatically or reluctantly embraced the identity narrative, talking of home and belonging in substantially different ways from each other, according to each poet’s individual relationship with movement, migration, and stability. Therefore, through the use of the phrase ‘London poets of Chinese descent’, I do not aim at tracing a shared sense of identity, but instead I am interested in using London as a method for an oblique reading that recognises the variety of angles and approaches in these poets’ individual experience, history and circumstances that can range from occasional travel to political exile