Worlding Hong Kong Poetry: Revisiting City at the End of Time (2012) and The Flying Coffin (2007) in the Context of Globalization

Abstract

David Damrosch, in his seminal work What is World Literature?, defines world literature as a distinctive type of literary production and circulation. It is by no means a fixed phenomenon but a process of reading globally and a process of world-making. In the process of circulation, translation has a prominent role to play. This essay highlights world literature as a process of recognizing the worlds involved in both original texts and the renditions, and poetry as heterogeneous cultural space where dialogic relations between text and world are recognized. Ye Si’s (Leung Ping-kwan) expanded bilingual translation, City at the End of the Time (2012) and Luo Feng’s (Natalia Chan) The Flying Coffin (bilingual translation, forthcoming) will be a case in point. As a poet whose oeuvre are widely translated and circulated, Ye Si is often hailed by critics as a conspicuous public intellectual with a keen eye for everyday subtleties, poetic discovery, and political intervention. Luo Feng, in a similar way, also explores the complex nature of everyday life within the gendered space of the city through her poetry. The ordinary world, alternative to the colonial dreamscape of Hong Kong as an economic miracle, offers an indispensable cultural space for poets to reflect upon Hong Kong as a postcolonial and global city. Adopting Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and Martin Heidegger’s idea of “worlding”, this essay aims to explore questions germane to the poiesis of literature in making the world. By “dialogism”, I mean both to divide (dia-) and to gather (-logos); and by “worlding”, I refer to a dynamic interplay of referential responsiveness to the dense network of associations. This essay discusses firstly the three worlds created in the two poetry collections, namely the world of materialism, the world of tradition, and the world of forms and examines the self-reflexivity of these poems in transcending fixed boundaries. Secondly, the discussion focuses on the dialogic relations between language and the contexts where it inhabits in the process of translation. I argue that the rendition mediates between the poets and the world on which they tread, and actualizes a process of reading globally. The mundane has become what can be called an “historical optic” through which larger history can be registered. And in this case, the idea of Hong Kong has to be opened up and “the world” has to be made when themes such as urbanization, globalization and diaspora have seeped into their literary imaginations of Hong Kong.