Creolization, Translation, and the Poetics of Worldness: On Wu Ming-Yi's French Translation

Creolization, Translation, and the Poetics of Worldness: On Wu Ming-Yi's French Translation

This article attempts to provide a reflection on both the practice and the ontology of translation through a discussion of my experience translating Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-Yi's fiction. In some of his works, Wu Ming-Yi, like some other authors (such as Wang Chen-ho) before him, uses a mix of languages, including Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Hokkien, and even fictional languages. Faced with such a flood of languages, the translator often finds herself/himself at wits' end and must develop original strategies to respond to this challenge. The strategy I suggest for the translation of Wu Ming-Yi's Shuimian de hangxian (Routes of Sleep) into French is that of “creolization.” This contribution seeks to offer a new experimental translation method in order to preserve the interactions between the different languages present in the original text, and I will also discuss the potential limitations involved in this method. I will try to show that what is revealed by creolization as a translation strategy is that the translation act is not so much a communicative transmission or a transfer of “equivalent” contents as the actual practice of the translation of a particular poetics. I conclude by contesting the idea that Wu MingYi's fiction belongs to a formulaic “world-literature,” arguing instead that it corresponds more to what Edouard Glissant calls a “tout monde” literature and that its translation can contribute to the development of a “poetics of Worldness.”