The prism of self-translation: poiesis and poetics of Yu Guangzhong’s bilingual poetry

The activity of self-translation may be seen as a mise-en-scène of the hybrid auctorial self, as well as an ideal stage for a reconstruction of meanings, through a second original. As a (re)creative paradigm, self-translation echoes the concept of poiesis as a ‘bringing into appearance’, according to Heidegger’s interpretation, namely as a crystallisation of the refracted facets of language and self. In this connection, the genetic approach may represent a tool to access the aesthetic world of the writer (the poietes) and to explore his (re) creative process. This paper discusses the case-study of the distin guished Taiwanese poet Yu Guangzhong (1928–2017), and his self translated poetry collected in Shouye ren 守夜人/The Night Watchman. Through a comparative reading of three selected bilin gual poems with their manuscript versions, this paper aims to investigate Yu’s poetics of self-translation, while observing through the multi-layered spectrum of a linguistic and cultural rendering.