Translingual Poetry and the Poetics of Translingualism : Sinophone verses, Thirdspaces and “Thirdlanguagings”

The literary Sinosphere – that is, that universe of cultural production inhabited by a wide variety of tongues, cultures, and ideologies – can be conceived as a multifarious galaxy of literary phenomena, bound by the gravitational force of translingualism. Then what is the relationship between translingualism and Sinophone literature, especially in the less explored field of poetry? In this chapter, by arguing that the literary Sinosphere is intrinsically translingual and translational, and that Sinophone poetry is the genre that epitomizes translingual and translational writing as an individual practice, I focus Sinophone poetry as a site of creative construction of languages, or what I will refer to as “thirdlanguaging”. To substantiate this phenomenon, which draws upon the domain of space, I propose three fields and poetics, namely by Ouyang Yu 歐陽昱 (b. 1955), by Hsia Yü 夏宇 (b. 1956), and by minority poets. These case studies diverge not only because they symbolize three different contexts of the Sinosphere—in terms of space and the dissimilar relationships between mother tongues and other tongues—but also in illustrating various manifestations of the poetics of creation and translation.