The Ludification of Culture

To speak of ludification is to look upon play as a theoretical construct. Here, play does not denote a frivolous or non-serious disposition in contrast with the ethic of work, as in the expression ‘work hard and play hard’. On the contrary, play partakes of work. In its classic definition, play describes ‘a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary life” as being “not meant”,Footnote ² but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly’ (Reference HuizingaHuizinga 1955[Reference Huizinga1938]: 13). To engage in play is therefore to adopt a perspective that transcends the structures and routines of ordinary life, to temporarily immerse oneself in time–space configurations outside the mundane realm. It also means to participate in a specific mode of relation with people and objects in the real world (Reference Salovaara and StatlerSalovaara & Statler 2019: 152), one that promotes the ‘reconstruction and deconstruction of pregiven identities and the construction of new playful identities’ (Reference RaessensRaessens 2006: 55).

In this view, play is manifest in domains of culture conventionally thought to be unrelated or antithetical to leisure and entertainment. Some examples are as follows.

1. a. Service marketing: where play, in the form of gamification (Reference Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and NackeDeterding et al. 2011; Reference DeterdingDeterding 2012), occurs as ‘a process of enhancing a service with affordances for gameful experiences in order to support users’ overall value creation’ (Reference Huotari and HamariHuotari & Hamari 2017).

2. b. Organizational management: where gamification arises within open-ended, non-instrumental conversations ‘between and among people and their environment’ (Reference Salovaara and StatlerSalovaara & Statler 2019: 151).

3. c. Game studies: where computer games most obviously exemplify play, though the concept of games can also be applied to non-digital practices (e.g., sport, children’s play) that embody a gamic perspective: ‘Anything can be turned into a game (even a game can be turned into another game quite easily) and so the determining factor is not the activity but the way one thinks about it, and how one labels it’ (Reference AarsethAarseth 2017: n.p.).

4. d. Education: where teaching and learning are couched in game-like tasks on virtual platforms (Reference Raessens, Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino and SchrapeRaessens 2014: 94) as exemplified, for instance, by the language learning mobile application Duolingo.

5. e. Politics: where political campaigning adopts a playful stance, gaming elements are inducted into decision-making processes by politicians, and comedians become politicians, possibly bringing over traces of their former public personae (Reference Raessens, Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino and SchrapeRaessens 2014: 94).

6. f. Warfare: where the military develops game-like simulation programs for training purposes, or where the lay understanding of war is increasingly associated with PlayStation (see Reference Raessens, Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino and SchrapeRaessens 2014: 94).

7. g. Mobile communication: where texting, twittering, or instagramming on mobile platforms and applications exhibits a heteroglossic playfulness through the use of emoticons, abbreviations, and invented spellings (cf. Reference Raessens, Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino and SchrapeRaessens 2014: 94).

8. h. Film: where the narrative structure of modern cinema takes on gamic elements, while video games are increasingly inflected with a cinematic aesthetic (Reference LarsenLarsen 2019).

9. i. Literature: where play is involved in ludic digital literature (Reference EnsslinEnsslin 2014), but also more generally in ergodic (from Greek ergon, ‘work’, and odos, ‘path’, ‘way’) literature. Ergodic texts require readers to commit ‘non-trivial effort’ – any form of reading labour beyond linear eye movement and page turning – to traverse the text (Reference AarsethAarseth 1997: 1–2), such as making choices that would take them on different pathways within a narrative.

This non-exhaustive list shows that play has a pervasive presence in our daily lives as both affect and motif, engendering what Reference RaessensRaessens (2006, Reference Raessens, Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino and Schrape2014) calls the ‘ludification of culture’. It is as if a ‘playful specter is haunting the world’ (Reference Frissen, Lammes, de Lange, de Mul, Raessens, Frissen, Lammes, de Lange, de Mul and RaessensFrissen et al. 2015: 9), such that we might in hermeneutic terms be witnessing a ‘gamification of existence’ in which play becomes an ontological mode of our experiential world (Reference Salovaara and StatlerSalovaara & Statler 2019: 151).

The ludification of culture is perhaps most palpable in the contemporary media, whose programmable and networked affordances have intensified the sense of play in mediated cultural productions. It is on this basis that Reference Raessens, Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino and SchrapeRaessens (2014) proposes a ‘ludic turn’ in media theory, where concepts and dichotomies from game and play studies (e.g., playability, gaming apparatus, ludoliteracy) offer a ‘new interpretative framework’ for media studies; this framework serves to highlight ‘the important characteristics of and issues in the field of digital media culture and to prepare the ground for new perspectives and action plans’ (110). Within this ludic turn, play figures as a heuristic tool ‘to shed new light on contemporary media culture, as a lens that makes it possible to have a look at new objects and study them in a particular way’ (96).

Translation-as-Play

The question for us is this: can we similarly develop a ludic perspective in translation theory, one that sheds new light on contemporary translation culture, enabling us to understand new textual and semiotic objects as translations and to study them as such?

If ludification entails creativity, one might say the seeds for such a turn have long been sown, for the idea that translation embodies creative expression is a well-attested one in the research literature. Scholars working within the tradition of descriptive translation studies have made a rigorous case for translation to be recognized for its pivotal role in cultural productions across languages and cultures, maintaining that it should be treated on a par with all literary and aesthetic practices (Reference Perteghella and LoffredoPerteghella & Loffredo 2006; Reference Bassnett and BushBassnett & Bush 2007; Reference Boase-Beier, Fisher and FurukawaBoase-Beier et al. 2018; Reference BassnettBassnett 2019; Reference MalmkjærMalmkjær 2020).

Loosely inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial scholarship, this line of inquiry is based around the central idea that translations are not derivative copies but original compositions in their own right. It has enlarged the ambit of translation to encompass a cluster of related communicative modalities to which re-, cross-, inter-, or trans- prefixes are attached. It has also empowered the figure of translators by highlighting their proactive, agentive role ‘in shaping texts’ and ‘contribut[ing] to fundamental changes in diverse cultural systems’ (Reference TymoczkoTymoczko 2014: 189). In more activist contexts, translation involves experimenting with semiotic resources in ‘prefigurative’ practices of exploring alternative ways to imagine society, or drawing on the classical resources of one’s culture to develop a critical, shared, ‘aspirational’ idiom of the streets that ‘embod[ies] a communitarian ethos that is missing from the imported vocabulary’ of foreign scholarship (Reference BakerBaker 2020: n.p.).

In this connection, play can serve as a lubricant in negotiating the tensions between original and translation. It proffers a conceptual route out of irreconcilable dualities by opening up to the possibilities of creative and critical intertextualities across languages and cultures. It transcends a zero-sum (all-or-nothing) conception under which the translator is either submissive to or subversive of the original text and its author. Instead, play spotlights the liquidity of the source–target interface, from which translational identity formations are engendered.

One notable attempt to use play as a conceptual handle on translation comes from Vicente Rafael. In examining the politics of the vernacular in postcolonial Philippines, Reference RafaelRafael (2016) stages translation-as-play as a multilingual practice from below against the backdrop of imperial oppression with English as a top-down institutional apparatus. For Rafael, play eschews the simple opposition between hegemonic and subaltern languages by reformulating their polarized relationship ‘into a kind of indeterminate, ceaseless displacement and dislocation that prevents any particular power relations from congealing’ (197). It is through such reformulation that play transforms normativized identities, thereby gaining its politico-ethical force:

In Rafael’s case study, play is instigated through the tactical use of Tagalog slang, minted ‘from the grammatical weave and jagged shards of vernacular languages, creole Spanish, and American English’ (43). This brand of youth language is aporetic (from aporia). Rather than a transparent vessel that contains and conveys meaning, aporetic language is ‘irreducibly material’, allowing its practitioners to ‘shake it, lump it together, and roll it out over and over again’ (13). It does not entail translation in the conventional sense, for there is often no semantic or etymological relation between vernacular and English words (69). Nor does it instance habitualized codeswitching, since it actively appropriates aural-oral slippages between English and Tagalog into new, contingent morphologies. Rather, the two languages are ‘juxtaposed in the mode of call and response: kiskis returns as kiss, gasgas calls forth gash, luslus yields loose, sispsip breaks into sip’ (69). In circulating these slang words, users of the vernacular ‘carnivalize’ the relation between imperial and subaltern languages and mobilize translation-as-play by virtue of ‘being alert to the materiality of languages, beginning with their sounds’ (69). It is in this light that ludic translation can be understood as a mechanism in ‘democratizing expression’ as part of postcolonial language insurgencies (44).

To be sure, the experimental poetics showcased in my study does not have the political resonance of these Tagalog interventions. Nevertheless, the argument that translation-as-play is a method to democratize expression and level the ground of linguistic transaction, such that ‘no one is permanently on top, no one is permanently at the bottom’, resonates with how the dyadic relation between source and target, author and translator, can be reconfigured through ludic translation. This is particularly the case with overtly performative modes of translation, where the distance from one language to another is mediated not through relations of semantic equivalence but through relations of semiotic analogy grounded in the materialities of representation. Such a translation involves not so much a point-to-point correspondence in meaning but, to borrow Rafael’s terms, the dialogic mobilization of communicative resources from one language to return, call forth, yield, or break into those from another.

Beyond Words

Translation-as-play can be conceived in terms of slippage between language codes, as in Rafael’s Tagalog examples above; it can also engage resources from other modes and media. Research in translation has made substantial inroads in this direction, moving beyond verbal texts into multimodal and transmedial productions, thereby shifting critical attention toward translation as an intersemiotic experience between and across the domains of text, (moving) image, sound, choreographed action, and sensory experience (Reference Campbell and VidalCampbell & Vidal 2019).

Media theorists have used translation as a trope to understand semiotic transformations across media. In this usage, the term ‘media translation’ takes on a different valence than the rendering of media-related texts (e.g., journalistic writing) from one language into another. From a media studies perspective, the term refers to the intermediation of texts, which means the transposition of texts from one medium into another,Footnote ³ as in the digitization of print literature into an interactive archive (Reference HaylesHayles 2005: 89). Following the McLuhanian maxim that the medium is (at least part of) the message, media translation always results in a different work. In Reference HaylesHayles’s (2005: 90) words, a shift in media platform, which has to do with how a text signifies, changes the way readers navigate around the text, with direct implications for what it signifies.

In this connection, the cybertextual practice of John Cayley demonstrates the dynamic of literary writing in networked and programmable environments, an enterprise further complicated by his invocation of translation as a metadiscursive trope. In a piece titled translation,Footnote ⁴ Cayley uses an algorithmic technique called transliteral morphing to enact a visual transitioning between languages on the level of the alphabetic letter. By exploring the analogy ‘between the discrete nature of alphabetic languages and the discreteness of binary code’ (Reference HaylesHayles 2006: 12), Cayley probes the nature of translation on the level of the grapheme. In visually performing translation as corporeal shifts in ‘abstracted underlying structures supporting and articulating the “higher-level” relationships between the texts’ (Cayley, cited in Reference HaylesHayles 2006: 12), Cayley artfully deconstructs the idea of translation as a lexico-grammatical and morphosyntactic process.

Metadiscursively, Cayley’s translation thus foregrounds translation of a different order, although translation in the usual sense is still there in the background. Set in transliteral morphing are two sets of text in three languages, namely Walter Benjamin’s ‘On Language as Such and On the Language of Man’ and snippets from Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, in their original languages (respectively German and French) and two other language versions (English and French for Benjamin, German and English for Proust). As a result of the program’s algorithmic operations, these texts and languages weave in and out of the screen in constant flux, making the reading process feel ‘always a bit foreign, uncertain, and vulnerable’ (Reference RaleyRaley 2016: 124) – all attributes of ludic representation. What comes up on the reading interface is visually discordant and wholly unpredictable, although users can slightly manipulate the interface by means of particular key combinations; for example, pressing shift-d (or -f, -u, -e) allows the German (or French, romanized Ukrainian, English) text to surface on the screen.Footnote ⁵ This interplay between chance and intervention contributes to the ‘algorithmic magic’ of Cayley’s brand of translation, as realized in ‘the fragmented quality of the texts, the limited mechanics, and the nonintuitive relation of cut-up codex to versified lines’ (Reference RafaelRayley 2016: 124).

The ludic does not necessarily involve sophisticated media technologies. Drawing on a Gadamerian hermeneutics of play, Reference Salovaara and StatlerSalovaara and Statler (2019: 151) maintain that in workplace settings, gamification describes ‘much more than just the instrumental masking of work tasks as games’. It refers to ‘any organizational situation in which open-ended, non-instrumental “conversations” occur between and among people and their environment’; such conversations comprise a back-and-forth modulation, or ‘play movement’, defined as ‘a constant yet undefined movement that circulates and maintains operations’.

Adapting the idea of play movement to a translation context, we might venture to say that ludification, of which gamification is an instantiation, is any process that involves an open-ended, non-instrumentalist, and dialogic interplay across languages, modes, and media. This conception underlies the AHRC-funded network Experiential Translation: Meaning-Making Across Languages and the Arts, which aims to study translation both intersemiotically and interlingually, with a view to developing ‘enhanced literacies capable of fostering individual and community agency and engagement’ in an interconnected world. The motif of play is implicit in the network’s emphasis on intersemiotic translation as a method ‘of creation and communication’ as well as ‘for learning and teaching, collaboration and participation within multilingual, multicultural and multimodal settings’.Footnote ⁶

In this scheme, translation is construed in terms of a heterogeneous, affective phenomenology, as the synergistic mobilization of resources from different languages, modes, and media to orchestrate new aesthetic experiences, highlighting ‘the role of individual imagination and artistic creation in education and arts institutions’. In practice, this can take the form of translating a poem into different language versions – each of which may be multilingually constituted – as well as resemiotizing it in tandem in visual, acousmatic, tactile, or kinetic forms, or any combination thereof.

To experience translation is also to radically experiment with it. Earlier, we mentioned how semiotic experimentation is part of prefigurative expressions of social movement agendas. In literature, an illuminating, if extreme, example is offered by Clive Scott, who adopts an embodied, synaesthetic practice to dramatize the reader-translator’s psycho-physiological and multisensory engagement with poetry. Scott’s translation philosophy is decidedly anti-interpretative (Reference Bruno, St André and Peng2012: 11), based on a reading stance that is phenomenological as opposed to hermeneutic:

The ‘fruitful participation’ that phenomenological reading generates is a whole-body experience involving, of course, lexical items and grammatical structures, but also typographic or paralinguistic features like typeface, font size, margin, line spacing, and punctuation. Functioning as an ensemble, these various elements ‘activate cross-sensory, psycho-physiological responses prior to concept and interpretation’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 11). With this approach, reading is not about extracting meaning as if it were a readily available essence encapsulated in signs. By the same token, translation is not about linearly transferring any such meaning-essence that originates in a source text and finds a resting place in a target text. Rather, it is an ergodic process that ‘deepens the experience of contact [with the source text] by diversifying it, by indicating the ways in which it can further diversify’ (Reference ScottScott 2018: 77). It is a ‘creative motion’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 14) that dwells vertically within the liminal zone of experiential contact between translator and text.

Immanent to Scott’s programme is a strong element of ludification, based on a mode of reading generated by ‘a play of possibilities and probabilities’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 46), where uncertainty is introduced into the translation process. Hence, the outcome of a translating act is always in flux, contingent as it is on all the surrounding circumstances, including the availability/accessibility of media resources (e.g., coloured paint; see Clive Scott’s translation below) and the translator’s psycho-physiological condition at a particular point in time and in the sociocultural habitus in which they are embedded.

On this intersemiotic and embodied construal, translation goes beyond language as such. It performs a synaesthetic morphism, ‘a sliding across languages or linguistic material, across the senses, across the participating body, in order to achieve an ever-changing inclusivity, a variational play’ (Reference Scott, Campbell and VidalScott 2019: 89). As an experimental site that registers the ‘kinaesthetics of reading’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 12), namely the translator’s perceptual response to the stimulus offered by the source text, translation expands and self-multiplies, opening up to develop ‘its own multimedial discursive space’ (Reference Scott, Campbell and VidalScott 2019: 89). In so doing, it places the source text ‘at the cutting edge of its own progress through time’, imbuing an original work with new potentialities and articulating it toward ‘its possible futures, its strategy of textual self-regeneration’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 4).

Scott’s experimental approach manifests in jarring forms, standing in stark contrast with straight translation. Whereas straight translation is based on the hermeneutic decoding and recoding of meaning, that is, on communication, experimental translation circumvents meaning, aiming instead at performance – ‘both performance in the text, and performance of the text’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 5). Performative translation entails dialogic engagement with the source text through the translator’s body, with a view to creating multimodal variations on that text in ‘excess of the signifier’:

Instead of focussing on linguistic signs, Scott’s approach gives premium to paralinguistic modalities, such as typography, punctuation, varied spacing (e.g., scriptio continua), diacritical marks, page layout, and bibliographical design. The reading interface is often messy, provocative, and palimpsestic, composed of not just linear configurations of words but also layers of graphic inscriptions, such as doodling (in pen and paint), handwriting, crossing out, overwriting, sketching, and colouring (Reference ScottScott 2012: 30). There is a flamboyant playfulness to these paralinguistic interventions, which are a form of non-trivial effort (Reference AarsethAarseth 1997) on the translator’s part, furnishing the linguistic dimension of the translation with rich multimodal textures.

As an illustration, Figure 1 shows Scott’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Bohémiens en voyage’ (Gypsies on the road) from Les Fleurs du Mal. As the title suggests, Baudelaire’s poem has to do with nomadic journeys. Scott first translates the French text into a straight English version, titled ‘Travellers Travelling’, using it as a backdrop to a multimodal canvas. The first visible shift from the original poem lies in the layout: the translated words are arranged in five columns and segmented at abrupt junctures, creating a vertigo that induces the reader into a ‘stuttering, tumbling orientation’ (Reference Scott, Campbell and VidalScott 2019: 101).

Figure 1

‘Travellers Travelling’. Translation of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Bohémiens en voyage’ by Clive Scott.

Reproduced with permission from Clive Scott.

Visual modulation is effected through a variation in font type, featuring Wide Latin, Bauhaus 93, Old English Text, Broadway, Gill Sans Ultra Bold, and Engravers MT. Each of these fonts translates a distinct perceptual response or verbal consciousness reflecting the translator’s interpretation of the original French wordings. A typographical metaphor for expressing ‘a nomadism of utterance’, font variation encrypts ‘psycho-perceptual shifts and voco-rhythmic modulations’ (Reference Scott, Campbell and VidalScott 2019: 101) in the translator’s reading. For instance, a bold typeface may indicate a forte; a wider font, a largo; and lower case with italic throughout, a staccato.

The English translation is then overlaid with scribblings and doodlings in pastels or enamel paint, registering verbal associations triggered by Baudelaire’s poetic imagery. Colourings are added, with yellow representing the sun and dark red representing the earth, in line with the nomadic theme. All of these embellishments are meant to convey the poem’s environmental ambience, to effectuate ‘a cinematic unfolding of days of nomadism through landscapes of changing pigments’ (Reference Scott, Campbell and VidalScott 2019: 101).

Clearly we are looking at a very marked specimen of translation here, one akin to automatic writing in its randomness, chaotic texturing, and non-replicability. Whereas Baudelaire’s French poem is a piece of written text, Scott’s translation is an artefact created at the intersection of writing and art. The familiar mode of interlingual translation, although present in the form of a fluent English version of Baudelaire, is literally relegated to a back seat on the canvas space. What comes to the fore instead is a multisensory infusion of verbo-graphic expressions, which textualize the translator’s subjectivity, ‘compels it … to generate a certain distance from itself, to put itself in the hands of other forces (formal, rhythmic, typographical, etc.)’ (Reference ScottScott 2018: 33). Through its exuberant use of both linguistic and paralinguistic resources, this kind of translation produces an aesthetic remainder (cf. Reference VenutiVenuti 2013) by signifying in excess of the source text.Footnote ⁷

As compared with straight translation, Scott’s experimental translation is open-ended, highly ergodic, and aggressively multimodal. The translator’s semiotic input, which crosses the boundary between language and paralanguage, between writing and art, impacts on the translation outcome. Each time the same work is translated, even by the same person, a new piece is born, because the precise combination of resources is contingent on the psycho-physiological response of the translator to the work in question at a particular point in time. Translation then becomes a site of potentialities governed as much by chance as by skill. Rather than pointing centripetally toward the source text, translation serves as a prosthetic, directing the source text centrifugally toward its possible, as-yet-unseen shape. A centrifugal translation advocates that

It is easy to see how such a translation praxis can be controversial. Many a reader will find Scott’s work untenable and disconcerting, not least because his translations are a genre shock. On the face of the page they are haphazard, such as to be virtually inscrutable to anyone other than the translator himself. Reading appears all but impossible. And if read at all, such translations would generate multiple experiential interpretations depending on the reader’s sensory engagement with them, in turn influenced by such factors as the reader’s intellectual profile and aesthetic disposition.

Yet I think the beauty of Scott’s approach lies precisely in its radical idiosyncrasy in throwing open a ludic and, to my mind, compelling modality of translating poetry. What this mode of translation communicates is the singular experience of embodied reading, which ‘capture[s] the individual reading metabolism in all its intricacy, and the perceptually dynamic, multisensory experience we so easily forget that reading is’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 30). The focal point of such translation practice is therefore not to transfer the meaning of a text as a well-defined essence from one linguistic domain into another – a procedure easily frustrated by experimental forms like concrete poetry, as we will see. It is instead to engender a synaesthetic experience based on a specific, personalized reading of the original text and to perform that experience through the textual body of the translation. This means that, rather than the reading of translation with all its assumptions about meaning transfer, we are faced with the translation of reading (Reference ScottScott 2011b).

While I do not go as far as Scott in pursuing a radical visuality in translation, his emphasis on the materialities of language nonetheless informs my own method in translating concrete poetry. In particular, the mobilization of the paralinguistics of writing as affective devices is congenial to my emphasis on semiotic resources rather than linguistic codes in translating experimental texts. It reinforces my proposition that translation is a value-adding intervention that augments a source text through the investment of resources across different repertoires and media. Scott’s argument that translation should aim to deepen and diversify one’s multisensory contact with a pre-existing work is especially relevant to concrete poetry, a literary form where visual-aural patterning prevails over semantic-hermeneutic meaning.

What is offered here is a conceptual route for us to think away from author-centric, language-based paradigms of translation toward a ludic model in which translation is a multimodal response to a prior work. In practice this means to

The paradoxical turn in the last statement above is pertinent to our ludic ontology of translation. A not-Baudelaire translation of Baudelaire is one that fully extrapolates the signifying potential of his work into the semiotic framework of the target language, into the terrain of play. Yet this is not a translator-centric view at the other extreme end of the pole, in which the translator displaces the author as the new Author, a view that banishes the original text while rebranding the translation as a new Original. On the contrary, even if a prior work is translated beyond all recognition, its spectre continues to linger in its new guise as an undercurrent. It is in this sense that Baudelaire can be said to be present, via translation, in his notness – an intriguing idea to be taken up again later in relation to the poet whose work I engage with.

Memes and Memesis

To think of translation as play is not tantamount to saying that there are no limits to how one can innovate. Play always presupposes constraints (Reference Raessens, Fuchs, Fizek, Ruffino and SchrapeRaessens 2014: 107) and although literary translation cannot be said to be governed by rule-based gamic systems (Reference Deterding, Dixon, Khaled and NackeDeterding et al. 2011), as in chess or football, the source text nonetheless serves as a semiotic anchor to restrain an anything-goes attitude. This means, whatever improvisational agency we ascribe to translation, the bottom line remains that it pivots back to a prior work at the same time as it draws that work forward, as it were, into a new linguistic or medial space. In Reference GenetteGenette’s (1997[Reference Genette1982]: 214) vocabulary for transtextuality, this prior work is a hypotext to which translation is hypertextually connected by way of transposition.

From the perspective of contemporary translation studies, Genette’s framework is at once relevant and conservative. Relevant, because it sets out a spectrum of hypertextual practices, encompassing parody, pastiche, travesty, caricature, transposition, and forgery, that accounts for how translation is continuous with other transtextual rewriting practices, such as adaptation, appropriation, and imitation (Reference HutcheonHutcheon 2013; Reference SandersSanders 2016; Reference ChanChan 2020). Conservative, because Genette’s view of translation proper is ultimately negative, attending to how literary texts are ‘adversely affected by the inevitable flaws of translation’ (Reference Genette1997[Reference Genette1982]: 215). Corollary to this view is the advice that the ‘wisest thing for the translator would no doubt be to admit that he can only do badly, and to force himself nevertheless to do as well as he can, which often means doing something different’ (217; original emphasis).

Although ‘doing something different’ does resonate with the construct of play, we need a performative account operating on a different vocabulary to positively acknowledge the innovating potential of translation (which Genette is apparently hesitant to do), though without going to the other extreme of fetishizing its creative autonomy. Such an account, I suggest, can be grounded in the concept of memes, a term coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976.

Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes; they are units of cultural transmission that propagate themselves ‘by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation’ (Reference DawkinsDawkins 2006: 192). In order for a cultural unit to become a meme, it must be ‘sufficiently distinctive and memorable’ (Reference DawkinsDawkins 2006: 195), such as to facilitate its decontextualization from the material or cultural environment in which it originates and recontextualization in a different material or cultural environment. Memes are everywhere around us, manifesting as ideas (circulating by word of mouth or other media), images, architectural styles, fashion statements, or popular melodic leitmotifs that can be invoked to conjure up a particular sensibility.

The proliferation of internet memes with the advent of social media has brought renewed attention to the theoretical idea of memes. Internet memes, however, differ from Dawkins’s usage in that they are playfully altered by individuals as they disseminate and develop, whereas Dawkins’s memes evolve naturally in accordance with the principles of Darwinian selection. For Dawkins, the usage of the notion of memes by internet aficionados and academics is tantamount to a ‘hijacking’ of his original term (Reference SolonSolon 2013).

My appropriation of the term, while riffing off Dawkins’s, falls more in line with the internet-hijacked version. More specifically in respect of literary translation, I understand memes as the conceptual economy of a work, with the potential in them to be re-entextualized in a different work. Memes embody the abstract aesthetic logic, conceptual motif, or structural principle of a work – its DNA, if you will, to follow through Dawkins’s genetic metaphor. They are instantiated in the material signs (words, icons, moving images) we see on a reading or viewing interface (page, screen, stage, installation) and are therefore recoverable on the basis of that final product we see, namely the literary piece. Importantly, memes are mobile; they have the capacity to traverse languages, modes, and media, and in that mobility lies their memic performativity, or memesis.

The concept of memesis – compare: mimesis – connects closely with how semioticians understand memes in relation to mobile communication. Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris and Blommaert (2015: 36) understand memes as ‘multimodal signs in which images and texts are combined’. These signs undergo ‘intense resemiotization’, a process whereby ‘original signs are altered in various ways, generically germane – a kind of “substrate” recognizability would be maintained – but situationally adjusted and altered so as to produce very different communicative effects’ (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 36). The iterative production, resemiotization, and dissemination of internet memes are part of a social semiotic practice in which social media users foster membership identities and generate conviviality within virtual communities through phatic acts of communication (such as liking and sharing posts).

For example, ‘Keep Calm’ (a productive phrase embedded within the template structure ‘Keep Calm and XXX’) and ‘lolspeak’ (a pidginized English generated with the ‘lolcats’ meme) are quintessential internet memes; both are instantiated in varied forms, across diverse discourses and artefacts. They are also ludic: humour is always the point. Varis and Blommaert explain how social media users apply memic resources such as these, while playfully tweaking them to generate manifold versions. These versions are affiliated through their ‘memic intertextual recognizability’: ‘The visual architecture and speech act format of the “original”, thus, are the “mobile” elements in memicity here: they provide memic intertextual recognizability, while the textual adjustments redirect the meme towards more specific audiences and reset it in different frames of meaning and use’ (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 37).

Therefore, memes do not just replicate, or mimic, themselves as they disperse across social media. They are continually adjusted along their trajectory, reoriented ‘towards more specific audiences’ and re-entextualized ‘in different frames of meaning and use’, often to ludic effects. At the same time, however, memes also call out to their earlier sources through their intertextual, substrate recognizability, defined as the ‘visual architecture and speech act format of the “original”’ (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 37).

It is through such interplay between imitation and transformation that memes ‘operate via a combination of intertextual, or substrate, recognizability and individual creativity’, in which individual users supplement existing memes with an ‘accent’, with the aim of achieving virality with the accented memes (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 40). In other words, memes perform themselves through a translational dialectic between originating versions and their re-entextualized and resemiotized versions. There is a fractality to this process, as the latter versions themselves can become originals generating further memic (translated) versions. The intertextual or substrate recognizability between memes and their creative variants – their translational relationship – assumes different gradations. These range from a ‘purely responsive uptake’ ensuing from the ‘maximally transparent refocusing of existing memes’ (a straight translation, as it were) to an ‘active and redirected re-entextualization and resemiotization’ (a creative transposition) based on the making of vastly different memes ‘less densely connected to existing ones’ (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 36, 40).

This semiotic understanding of how internet memes spread virally and generate ludic creativity through re-entextualization and resemiotization fosters my conception of literary memes in translation. As mentioned earlier, literary memes are the abstract and mobile ideas or motifs enregistered in the actual signs deployed in a text. Like social media memes, they can be decontextualized from a prior constellation of signs and then reconstituted in a different constellation of signs. They can also be resemiotized, involving an alteration of their modal properties or media environment, as when a print text is transposed into a digital art installation and imbued with performative elements not available or not utilized in the original. What Varis and Blommaert call intertextual or substrate recognizability can then be understood as degrees of similitude or difference between original and translated memes, where the spectrum from minimal to maximal resemiotization maps loosely onto that from straight translation to creative transposition. I am of course aware that internet memes belong to a different order of things than literary memes, which are the interest of this study. Yet there are grounds to see them as analogically related: from a semiotic perspective, both partake of some form of communication involving the creation, circulation, and consumption of multimodal texts.

What memesis proffers is a method to consider experimental poetry on a different scale level than prototypical approaches to literary translation. To read-and-translate poetry in terms of memes as opposed to signs (words, phrases, expressions) is to circumvent the specificity of linguistic form often fetishized by those who subscribe, sometimes uncritically, to the Frostian cliché ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’. It is to fully acknowledge the potential of translation and translators to innovate, to add value to a piece of literary communication by re-articulating or elaborating upon it in a non-linear, centrifugal fashion. It is also to expand the remit of translation to include versions of a pre-existing work which do not treat its linguistic material directly, or which re-mediate its original form in an entirely different mode and medium, but which nonetheless maintain intertextual recognizability with that work on a substrate, memic level.

In this connection, memesis dovetails with Reference TymoczkoTymoczko’s (2014) account of translation as a cluster concept. The cluster concept enables translation theory to encompass a range of scale levels under its purview, from translations that zoom into specific wordings to those that zoom out to the level of the text as a whole. Memesis operates nearer the latter end of the spectrum, instantiating the frame of transcreation. Although Tymoczko is primarily interested in the categories of representation, transmission, and transculturation, she mentions in a footnote that ‘[t]he concept transcreation, characteristic of translation in India and also used in Brazilian discourses about translation, might be another productive frame of reference, illuminating many though not all translations’ (Reference TymoczkoTymoczko 2014: 135n31).

Tymoczko’s passing mention of transcreation becomes a crucial link for us. Transcreation is intimately associated with the experimental translations of the de Campos brothers – Tymoczko explicitly notes this Brazilian connection (see quotation above) – and with concrete poetry in particular. Sitting at the intersection of translation and writing, transcreation refers to

Based on this definition, transcreation, with its attendant emphasis on the performative signatures of translators, is clearly amenable to the idea of translation-as-play. This study rides on Tymoczko’s observation that transcreation can serve as a ‘productive frame of reference’ for illuminating translation and seeks to test her hypothesis on concrete poetry. Using the construct of memes (and memesis), it teases out in empirical detail what happens to an original work within a transcreation frame and theorizes on how a ludic approach to translation can contribute to a nuanced and productive understanding of untranslatability.

Ludic Translation: An Overview

Drawing on the concepts reviewed above, the basic elements of ludic translation may be set out as follows.

1. a. As a theoretical lens, ludic translation designates a mode of relation between source and target texts: an open-ended, non-instrumental,Footnote ⁸ and dialogic relation in which translation constitutes an experimental and experiential response. Specifically, a pre-existing work provides an initial stimulus to which translation returns, calls forth, yields, and breaks into, and where the translator’s sensory proclivities, intellectual aptitude, aesthetic disposition, and even personality are brought to bear on the event. The process is ergodic, entailing non-trivial effort on the translator’s part.Footnote ⁹ Any source text presents a translator with potentially different pathways. The pathway taken by the translator is influenced by the material and non-material circumstances surrounding the translating act, including the availability of resources in the target repertoire and their accessibility to the translator at any given point in time-space. Ludic translation is therefore marked by a contingency, where chance and probability play a vital role. There is a vulnerability to it; it is susceptible to failure. Ludic translation entails risk, which must be factored into the economy of translation itself.

2. b. On the level of practice, ludic translation does not catch on words; it catches on memes, defined as the logical concept or general idea that makes a text ‘tick’. A ludic translation approaches an original work obliquely, transcreating its memes by way of re-entextualization and resemiotization, using discursive, paratextual, and other cognitive-perceptual modalities to enhance the performative value of translation. Ludic translation leverages the slippage within and across languages, modes, and media; it appropriates, accentuates, even invents differences instead of erasing or suppressing them. It represents a productive embrace of uncertainty,Footnote ¹⁰ creating a semiotic excess or aesthetic remainder through the use of gambits, including on-site improvisation. This means a translation can add value to, and even outperform, a pre-existing work through a tactical investment of multimodal resources found in the target repertoire.

3. c. In terms of its implication for translation, ludification releases us from the top-down constructs of equivalence and fidelity, facilitating a democratization of expression across languages, modes, and media, while still insisting on a degree of intertextual or substrate recognizability between source and target texts. This gives rise to a new ontology of translation as a centrifugal process that extrapolates an original work toward multiple potential realizations, which together network into a more expansive macrotext. Ludification thus opens up the ambit of translation to draw in new objects of study, such as hyper-performative or digital re-mediations of literary writing. This can drive new pedagogies across the boundary of translation, creative writing, and visual art. It also provides us with a gamic angle on the question of untranslatability, which can be perceived anew as integral to translation: a site of chances and probabilities, trials and errors, rewards and risks, as well as possibilities, including the possibility of failure.

The next section will illustrate these elements at work in the context of concrete poetry in translation.

A Methodological Note

Apart from the first set of examples around the poem ‘A War Symphony’, I draw on my own English translation of Chen Li’s poems to make a case for ludification. Inspired by the work of Clive Scott, I consciously adopt the persona of a ludic translator in practice at the same time as I theorize on my own thinking and output as a researcher. As ludic translation entails brainstorming as part of its trial-and-error process, my translations are a collaborative effort between myself and either a research assistant or a doctoral student. In line with the ludic theme, my co-translators and I imagined ourselves to be playing a semiotic game as a team and trying to ‘win’ by resolving a concrete poem in the most economical and aesthetically intuitive way.

The aim of my exposition below is to theorize by way of exemplification – that is, to bring the theoretical strands addressed in the previous section in convergence with my own translating experience – and, conversely, to flesh out the empirical details in my application of the idea of translation-as-play to experimental texts. Much of this section is thus written in the style of a praxis account of how I approach concrete poetry as a practitioner, akin to an introspective TAP (think-aloud-protocol) account. Other than the section ‘Orchestrating Untranslatability’, my translation analysis is largely anecdotal and personal. It foregrounds the specificity and situatedness of the translating act – complete with its whims and bloopers. And although in most cases I do showcase my completed translations, the real analytical interest lies not in the finished products but in the processes, including any stalemates and mishaps, behind their making.

Herein lies the twofold methodological intervention of this study. First, by focussing on the individual translator, I give premium to the singularity and idiosyncrasy of translating. Specifically, in using my own translations as the primary basis for theoretical reflection, I seek to resuscitate the autobiographical dimension in translation. This is meant as a corrective to prevailing methodologies that privilege the general, the objective, and the empirical, hence sidelining the particular, the subjective, and the anecdotal. In a provocative piece on research methods in applied linguistics, Jerry Won Lee maintains that ‘[t]here is something of a cyclical and self-affirming pattern in applied linguistics research in which assumptions of what counts as knowledge guides methodological considerations, while methodological choices in turn play a role in establishing what counts as knowledge’ (Reference LeeLee 2022). He argues that an alternative methodological and epistemological framework, one that recognizes individualized, idiosyncratic phenomena as legitimate knowledge, is needed to engage with topics ‘premised on a disposition that is amenable to “difference,” particularly with respect to the potential in that which has been and continues to be neglected or dismissed by dominant research paradigms in applied linguistics’ (Reference LeeLee 2022). The same can be said of the field of translation studies, which has increasingly and extensively looked toward social science as a source of methodologies. A harking back to more intuitive inclinations in humanities research would serve to balance this social-scientific slant.

Second, as mentioned earlier, my focus is on explicating process, even though this usually culminates in some kind of translation product in the end – a virtual reward for playing the translation game, if you will. In my theoretical vision, uncertainty, blockage, failure, and risk are integral rather than inimical to the translating process. They are always already part of the game and need to be fully taken on board in theory rather than treated as undesirables. It is therefore important to regard all the translation outcomes I arrive at as preliminary, contingent, and imperfect. This is meant as a corrective to tendencies in the field to make observations and projections based on neat, final outcomes as opposed to messy and to-and-fro processes.

Orchestrating Untranslatability: ‘A War Symphony’

An apt place to begin is Chen Li’s highly acclaimed and widely translated poem ‘A War Symphony’ (Figure 2).Footnote ¹¹ The piece has been seen as a classic case of the untranslatable Chinese poem, notably by Chen Li’s wife and translator Chang Fen-ling. In her introduction to The Edge of the Island, an anthology of Chen’s poems in English translation, Reference Chang and LiChang (2014: 17) justifies her decision to present ‘A War Symphony’ in its untranslated form:

Figure 2

‘A War Symphony’

On one level, one might empathize with Chang’s position, for ‘A War Symphony’ is an extremely cunning poem in its iconic and sonic deployment of Chinese characters. The poem starts with the character 兵 (bing), meaning soldier, replicated many times over to represent a troop lined up in neat ranks and files. In a second configuration of characters, we see 兵 interspersed with and transitioning into two onomatopoeic characters: 乒 (ping) and 乓 (pang). Together the latter two characters form the Chinese word for table tennis – or ping-pong, which derives from the sounds of the Chinese characters. But this semantic sense remains inactive. Instead it is the sound of the characters that are tapped into: in a warring context, ping and pang, together with bing, evoke the plosive sound of gunshots.

There is, further, an etymological sleight of hand in how these two characters are related to the earlier character for soldier. Visually speaking, 乒 and 乓 can be imagined as deriving from 兵 by removing one limb on either side at the bottom of the characters. In the context of the poem, this suggests soldiers being injured, more specifically amputated, in the course of fighting. With this reading, the character 兵 is etymologically refigured, with the two bottom strokes construed as a soldier’s legs, when in fact the character is originally an ideograph depicting a hand holding a weapon.

This play with the written script is carried into the final set of characters comprising repetitions of 丘 (qiu) which, following the visual economy of the poem, can be interpreted as the character 兵 minus both limbs. This construal, it should be stressed, is not attested in Chinese etymology but is contingent to the structural development of the poem. Yet 丘, like 乒 and 乓, is duplicitous. If 乒 and 乓 are simultaneously onomatopoeic and iconic, then 丘, apart from being a putative truncated version of 兵, is also a full word on its own. It means ‘mound’ in Chinese and metonymically evokes the image of graves, for traditional Chinese graves are often shaped like mounds and built on elevated ground. In terms of the poem’s narrative, the soldiers at the beginning of the text, having gone through brutal bodily contact, eventually die.

Chen Li’s war ‘symphony’ is not merely an aural performance but a complex orchestration of the shape and sound of Chinese characters in tandem; it is the tension and slippage among the sensorial dimensions that account for the poem’s aesthetic concept – its meme. Because the poem pivots around the corporeal aspects of these Chinese characters, it is rather convenient to dismiss it as untranslatable. This is the position adopted by Chang Fen-ling, as noted above. A direct fallout of this view is the strategy to not translate, which usually means translating the paratexts (mainly the title and original notes, if any) surrounding a poem but not its body text. Hence, Chang’s rendition of the above poem translates the original Chinese title; the entire body text of Chinese characters remains intact in the translation.Footnote ¹² In compensation for the non-translation, Chang supplements a note that summarily explains the relationship among the four characters in the original poem.Footnote ¹³ Translation notes such as this point directly to the perceived untranslatability of the text.

Chang’s paratextual resolution belies a conception of translation as a lateral transfer of semantic meaning from one linguistic system to another, a default and perhaps not totally unreasonable understanding when it comes to translating prose and verse. From this perspective, ‘A War Symphony’ would be considered recalcitrant since either translating or transliterating each of the four characters into English would neutralize the visual-sonic artistry of the original. Yet if we agree that concrete poetry is experimental in its aesthetic, that it is more semiotic than semantic, more about sensuousness than sense (semantic meaning), then surely it is counterproductive to be applying the same criteria as one would in translating normative forms of poetry. Indeed, there is a certain irony in seeking a straight translation of a ‘queer’, as in formally unconventional, piece like ‘A War Symphony’. What is needed instead is a translation that is provocative in its own right, one that performs the original in memesis and not in mimesis.

What concrete poetry does for translation, then, is to call forth a different mode of relation between source and target. In theory, this mode of relation resembles what Philip Lewis calls ‘abusive fidelity’ with respect to translating Jacques Derrida’s writing. Abusive fidelity refers to a translation strategy that ‘values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies and plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own’ (Reference Lewis and GrahamLewis 1985: 41). This would seem to fit very well with our ludification agenda for translating concrete poetry. Yet in practice, abusive fidelity is often realized as hyper-literalism. This means closely tracing the form of the source text, in this case Derrida’s French, ‘trying to reproduce his syntax and lexicon by inventing comparable textual effects – even when they threatened to twist English into strange forms’ (Reference VenutiVenuti 2003: 253).

Such an intense adherence to form would obviously not work for concrete poetry, whose raison d’être is precisely to resist the linearity and monomodality of reading based on a rule-based decipherment of syntax and lexicon. Concrete poetry is non-linear in constitution and open to multiple pathways of reading. It therefore demands a specific mode of reading, which cognitive linguists have glossed as ‘skilled linguistic action’ (Reference CowleyCowley 2021) and which social semioticians understand as ‘a process of design, informed by interest’ (Reference Kress and van LeeuwenKress & van Leeuwen 2021: 11). This means adopting an ‘aesthetic attitude’ toward a source text (Reference MalmkjærMalmkjær 2020: 70), although in the case of concrete poems, the focus would be on their multimodal configuration rather than verbal texting. On this view, reading concrete poetry is an ‘activity in which wordings play a part’, where the wordings are spatially organized into aggregated patternings. The reading interface of concrete poetry is a visual field (see Reference CowleyCowley 2021).

In ‘A War Symphony’, for instance, the vertical transitioning among the four visually proximate characters (兵, 乒, 乓, 丘) makes up an aggregated patterning that comprises the poem’s meme of gradual decomposition, in which soldiers decrescendo their way from life through fighting and into death. To appreciate the poem’s narrative and aesthetic, one needs to trace the verbal composition through a visual-aural perspective, as outlined earlier. Reading then becomes writerly, ‘quite unlike data processing in that it depends on how readers act to regulate the flow of experience’, and how readers act is in turn contingent on ‘living bodies that move, look and otherwise enable them to engage with fields of visible patternings’ (Reference CowleyCowley 2021).

Now how do we transit from such a mode of reading as skilled action into a mode of ludic translating? Translating linearly on the level of verbal signs would disperse the aggregated patterning of the poem and compromise its meme. The key, then, is to translate one visual-spatial setup into another, that is, to deterritorialize the poem’s meme from its aggregated patterning within a particular linguistic constellation and reterritorialize it in a different, but analogical, aggregated patterning within another linguistic constellation. The two patternings, though apparently different, are intertextually related through a substrate, memic recognizability that locates them in a translational relationship. Such a non-linear translation is ergodic; it requires the translator’s non-trivial, cognitive-perceptual effort in articulating a new pathway out of the source text beyond its surface-level manifestation.

Let us look at some ludic renditions of ‘A War Symphony’, which performatively alter the signs in the original Chinese poem in their own different ways while replaying the meme of vertical degradation. The Russian translation, by Papa Huhu, does not translate the full set of Chinese characters in the original but substitutes a set of Russian strings formed around a group of letters in permutation – ВОЙНА (meaning soldier), ВОЙ/ОЙ/НА (mimicking shouts and cries), and НАВОЗ (meaning dung).Footnote ¹⁴ This combination of signs choreographs the same thematic movement from live to dead soldiers in the original Chinese, while playing on orthographic and phonological resources specific to the Russian language to re-stage the poem’s aesthetic motif. A similar strategy is witnessed in an English translation by Bohdan Piasecki. This version starts with repetitions of ‘A man’, representing (male) soldiers, then morphs into ‘Ah-man’ and ‘Ah-men’, with the ‘Ah’ mimicking the sound of wails, and ends with a series of ‘Amen’, or prayers for the dead, implying that the men-soldiers have sacrificed themselves.Footnote ¹⁵

Each of these translations furnishes auxiliary elements not featured in the original. The Russian version ends with a word meaning ‘dung’, thus invoking a grimier image of death and hinting more strongly at the undignified nature of war. Piasecki’s English version, in turn, ends with a solemn, religious undertone with ‘Amen’, while its play with ‘man’/‘men’ brings out the gendered dimension of warfare. In their own different ways, the two translations add value to the original Chinese poem in the course of reworking its meme with resources from Russian and English respectively. Instead of smoothing out differences between the source and target systems, they ride on those differences to generate an extensional response to the prior work.

This potential of translation to value-add is vividly illustrated in yet another English translation, by Cosima Reference Bruno, St André and PengBruno (2012: 268), which adopts a Futurist angle in devising a visual-aural solution to the translation problem presented by ‘A War Symphony’. Instead of starting with the word for soldier as in the original, this translation starts with repetitions of tum, mimicking the sound of marching boots, to metonymically represent the figure of the soldier. In the next turn, tum morphs into bom, and this is followed by chaotic alternations of several strings permutated around the letters from the two preceding strings – boum, boom, toum, toumb, tuum, and so forth. Representing artillery and cannon fire, these haphazard onomatopoeic words gradually ease into a monolithic constellation of tomb, cohering with the phonic scheme above and, as a bonus, corresponding in meaning with the mound-graves in the final stanza of the original poem.Footnote ¹⁶

Bruno’s translation is quintessentially ludic. It is an oblique treatment of Chen Li’s poem in that it refrains from directly translating the characters (兵, 乒, 乓, 丘). It tackles the Chinese poem as ‘a kind of verbal painting’, extracting the ‘structural elements of repetition, serial development, reversal and mirroring, and precise counts of verbal and typographical or phonic components’ (Reference Bruno, St André and PengBruno 2012: 268–9). Using the terms I develop here, the translation goes for the meme, the conceptual schema of the Chinese poem, while manoeuvring around its material signs.

But there is a twist. In the original poem, as we have seen, Chen exploits the architectonics of the Chinese script to enact a gradation across a series of characters by dropping one stroke at a time. The alphabetic script is less amenable to this treatment – one could attempt to reduce the length of alphabetic strings by dropping one letter at a time but that would risk compromising the overall rectangular shape of the poem. Hence, rather than dropping letters, the translation permutates them and in doing so generates even more visual variations than in the original. The translation may not be able to reproduce the same visual deconstruction as the original but through a different aggregated patterning it exceeds the original in lexical variety.

The translation does not only go beyond the words in the original; it transcends the verbal dimension of language by recourse to paralinguistics. Typographical and spatial resources are employed to enhance the overall perceptual effect of the poem, such as modulating between upper and lower cases, mixing different fonts and typefaces, and varying the length of the white space between words. Strikingly the poem concludes by gradually shrinking the repetitions of ‘tomb’ as they run like a vertical scroll until the words (and by extension the soldiers and their sacrifices) become indiscernible – forgotten.

None of the above devices are found in Chen Li’s original, inspired as they are by the translator’s knowledge of Futurist writing:

This metalinguistic commentary points to the notion of translation as a multimodal extension of an original work beyond its semantic meaning and as an intertextual mediation between the work and other creative-critical discourses, in this case Futurist writing. This bringing of another practice or discourse to bear on the act of translation recalls what Clive Scott (based on Reference McGann, Oliphant and BradfordMcGann 1990: 28–31) calls ‘radial reading’.

Radial reading is a centrifugal and constructivist method of reading that involves ‘reading out into, and incorporating, other acts of reading and reference, ancillary texts and contexts, marginal notes, glosses, intertextual materials, such that the constructing of texts is intimately part of an autobiography of reading and associating, a process without end’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 22). The processual nature of such reading invokes a playful ethic not often associated with poetry translation. Here the source text is seen as

On this view, the motivation of literary translation is to open up a text to an unpredictable network of intertextualities with other practices and discourses, with a view to bringing these extrinsic elements into the reconstitution of the text-in-translation. All of this speaks to the performative agency of translation, which does more than reflect a literary work as manifested in a fixated form. Instead, translation refracts, or ‘[supplements] communication through intertextual references and sensorial stimuli’ (Reference Bruno, St André and PengBruno 2012: 269n29), even ruptures a text in order to proliferate its underlying memes centrifugally. The grounds are then set for translation to be seen as a value-adding procedure in literary communication across languages.

These myriad versions of ‘A War Symphony’ demonstrate the open-endedness of translation which, in principle at least, applies to translating in general, although it comes into sharper relief with limit texts like concrete poetry. Each version of the poem, as we have seen, engages with a different set of semiotic resources to put together a unique constellation of signs to translate the meme, not the words, of the original poem. A sure sign of this is that none of these versions features discursive notes to explain how the original poem works. Each of these versions ‘clicks’ on its own, and together they accrue into a macro text-complex around the original.

The mode of translating witnessed here is dialogic and ergodic. It is dialogic in that the translation riffs off and responds to the pre-existing work, taking oblique paths to rhizomatically develop the latter’s memes into apparently new manifestations. Yet it is important to emphasize that the translation maintains intertextual recognizability with the prior text; thus, in ‘A War Symphony’, all the translations pivot on the same structural movement from one set of signs to another while working around the discrete signs. Without this pivoting, the translations would be disqualified as translations. It is the creative tension between the centrifugal push toward new formations and the centripetal pull toward the source text’s meme that defines the dialogic nature of ludic translating.

Ludic translating is also ergodic, for non-trivial effort is always involved. As lexico-grammatical equivalence is downplayed or rendered altogether irrelevant, the solution to the problem presented by the pre-existing work needs to be creatively sought beyond bilingual glossaries, dictionaries, and automated translators. In lieu of words and structures, the ludic translator thinks in terms of mobile resources from linguistic and semiotic repertoires as well as how these resources can be differentially put together, often through trial and error, into economical and aesthetically viable packages. From a ludic perspective, it is thus pertinent to speak of translating as devising (solutions to textual problems) or designing (new forms for existing motifs).

This line of thinking affords us a different lens on translatability: whether a concrete poem such as ‘A War Symphony’ is translatable or not is a matter of perspective. If a translator’s focus is on rendering written signs and their lexico-grammatical meanings, most concrete poems defy translation except on a facile level, that is, by translating the title, adding an explanatory note, and so forth. If, however, a translator’s focus is on performing the concept of an original work with or without rendering the written signs per se, concrete poems are potentially translatable. But that is if we accept a broader rubric of translation that allows it to draw on a full repertoire of resources available in the target context to playfully experiment with a source text – a venture always prone to error and failure.

Such a view of translatability takes chances and exploits the possibility spaces between source and target. It also involves risks and gambits, fully recognizing that any instance of translating could meander several rounds and end up in a cul-de-sac. This could be because the language in which a translator is working does not offer the resources needed to transcreate a particular poem effectively or it could be that those resources are available but the translator has no access to them due to their aptitude, disposition, or temperament.

To my mind, an example of an ineffective translation of ‘A War Symphony’, apart from Chang’s non-translation, is a version by Reference Shen and WuShen and Wu (2012). This version transposes the orthographic metamorphosis of the original poem into serial mutations of the letter ‘i’ (representing the self or individuality of soldiers), twisting it out of shape in different directions to signify the loss of limbs and lives. This technique flattens the multimodal ambiguity of the Chinese original; not only is the element of sound erased from the poem (the visual mutations of ‘i’ are unpronounceable) but the sophisticated sensory landscape in the original is also compromised through the use of a single letter in the alphabet. Chen Li has a similar assessment, maintaining that Shen and Wu’s translation ‘loses the aspect of musicality, which remains important, even to my visual poetry’ (Reference Chen, Corbett and HuangChen 2020: 62).

The crucial point, however, is not to come up with a set of prescriptive, a priori criteria with which to evaluate the effectiveness of a translation before it even comes into being. The point, rather, is that the possibility of failure is always already integral to ludic translation, which values experimentation; failure is immanent to the game, part of its trials and errors. From this perspective, untranslatability is far from a lamentable condition. It affords a gamic dimension to the translating act, presenting impasses as challenges to be creatively resolved. There are potential rewards to be gained, for instance, a sense of achievement in tackling a difficult poem in a different language, especially if the poem’s author is in favour of the translation. Yet like any game player, the translator must also be prepared for a KO, that is, to be knocked out by the source text.

From Pigs to Demons: ‘Nation’

I will now proceed to illustrate my own attempts at redesigning Chen Li’s concrete poems in English, with an eye on the efficacy of a ludic approach.

Figure 3a shows the poem ‘Nation’. Like ‘A War Symphony’, the piece plays on the iconic materiality of the Chinese script, whereby a character is broken down to its atomic level, on the basis of which a playful, non-etymological reading is derived. The character in question is 家 (jia, ‘home’), the second morpheme in the Chinese word for nation, 國家 guojia, which is the poem’s title. The character is deconstructed into two constituent radicals, namely 冖 (mi, ‘to cover’), replicated to form the poem’s first line, and 豕 (shi, ‘boar’), multiplied into a rectangular grid.Footnote ¹⁷ With reference to the title, this spatial deconstruction of a common Chinese character treats the poem’s body text as a particular aggregated patterning, giving rise to the ideographic interpretation that a ‘nation’ is populated by pigs, rather than humans, living under the same metaphorical ‘roof’.

Figure 3a

Original text of ‘Nation’

As with ‘A War Symphony’, it is all too easy to pronounce this poem untranslatable from the outset. But as discussed earlier, such a reaction betrays an understanding of translatability in terms of the extent of semantic transferability from one language into another. In attempting to translate this poem into English, zooming in on the semantics (‘pigs’, ‘roof’, etc.) would be futile, since English and Chinese have different orthographies and etymologies, thus rendering untranslatability a self-fulfilling proposition. Since a straight translation would inevitably fail us, we might as well enter into ludic mode, which means sidestepping the material signs to capture and respond to the poem’s meme.

And what is the meme here? One might phrase it as follows: an ironic subversion of the conventional idea of a nation by way of exposing its unlikely ‘occupants’. The phrasing here is deliberately broad-stroke so as to facilitate the meme’s pivoting toward a different set of signs; using a narrower construction, for instance by including ‘pigs’ in the meme’s formulation, would limit our options. The question now is which word can serve as the central signifier in the translation as a viable response to the mutated ‘home’ character in the original, while still keeping the overarching ‘nation’ theme. This latter theme provides the intertextual, memic recognizability (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015), which is necessary to justify our intervention as one of translation.

I started brainstorming a list of synonymous English words with my doctoral student (playing the role of co-translator) but to no avail. None of the candidate words derived from a literal translation of the Chinese title – ‘nation’, ‘country’, ‘state’ – makes for meaningful deconstruction such as to produce an aggregated patterning in analogical relation to the one in the original poem. I then decided to contemplate obliquely relevant terms whose dictionary meanings do not correspond to ‘nation’ but which nonetheless fall within its broad penumbra of associations. In other words, I began to angle on the original text sideways, and this departure from linear thinking opened up new lexical possibilities that would not otherwise have been available to me.

Soon I landed on – and I want to emphasize the chanciness of the word choice here – the term ‘democracy’. The latter word describes a political arrangement and is thus thematically resonant with ‘nation’. After playing around with the word for a while, I concluded it did not work toward a deconstructive aggregated patterning either. At this juncture, my mind wandered off radially into a different trajectory. At the same time as I was translating ‘Nation’, I was embarking on a different project in sociolinguistics, and one of my key readings for that project was a paper titled ‘New Chinglish and the post-multilingualism challenge’ by my friend and mentor Li Wei. That paper was about how Chinese social media users come up with a creative fusion register that corrupts standard English morphology to make a critical point. Among the many New Chinglish examples cited in Li Wei’s paper is the portmanteau democrazy. Democrazy comes from meshing ‘democracy’ and ‘crazy’ together into one word. It is used to ‘mock the so-called democratic systems of the [W]est and in some parts of Asia where certain legislations such as ownership of firearms can be protected due to political lobbying and, in the case of Taiwan, parliamentarians get into physical fights over disagreement’ (Reference LiLi 2016: 16).

Thinking from New Chinglish back to Chen Li’s ‘Nation’, I pondered using democrazy to form the first line of the translated poem, and then using repetitions of ‘crazy’ to form the rectangular constellation beneath. That might have worked, except that ‘crazy’ is an adjective; a noun is much preferred to match the figure of speech of ‘pig’ in the original. It then struck me that, in the spirit of playfulness, I could tweak ‘democracy’ along New Chinglish lines, using a different inflection than democrazy. I looked intently, almost hypnotically, at the string ‘demo’. The word ‘demon’ jumped out at me. Following this intuition, I inserted an ‘n’ at the midpoint of the word ‘democracy’ to create a new string.

The result clicked immediately: demoncracy. Not only does this invented word visually evoke ‘democracy’, the embedded noun ‘demon’ is extractable, just as the ‘pig’ radical can be singled out from the encompassing ‘home’ character in the Chinese poem. As an unexpected remainder, it aurally resonates, in my mind’s ear at least, with ‘demagoguery’, a term often associated with populist politicians and which etymologically overlaps with ‘democracy’ (from the Greek demos, ‘people’). With these ingredients in place, I was now ready to respond to the meme in Chen Li’s ‘Nation’ by re-entextualizing it in a different constellation of signs and to call forth a new aggregated patterning in English to (out)perform its counterpart in Chinese. Figure 3b shows my rendition.

Figure 3b

English translation of ‘Nation’

As we can see, I have kept the overall shape and developmental structure of the original poem intact. I have not, however, attempted to reproduce the exact number of repetitions in the body text, which would have bloated my text out of shape – aesthetics is always a consideration as far as translating concrete poetry is concerned. I have translated the original title guojia literally as ‘Nation’ to preserve the crucial irony in the poem. In the first line of the main text, I further made a typographical intervention by capitalizing and bolding the ‘n’ in demoncracy (hence, demoNcracy). This serves to guide readers in segmenting the string in a way that would arrive at the intended reading but also to visually cohere with the ‘N’ in the titular ‘Nation’, hence emphasizing the original theme against which the new constellation of signs is to be read.

My approach to translating ‘Nation’ is distinctively ludic. I sought to creatively respond to the stimulus offered by the material signs in Chen Li’s original work, instead of translating those signs on the nose. In the process I allowed myself to read from the outside in by incorporating apparently unrelated developments from New Chinglish to formulate a keyword in the translation (compare Bruno’s incorporation of Futurist aesthetics into her translation of ‘A War Symphony’). It is crucial to acknowledge the serendipities, spontaneities, and subjectivities at work here: it so happened that I was reading about New Chinglish at the point in time, and I decided spontaneously to draw on a potential leitmotif thrown up by the external stimulus, subject to morphological (democrazy to demoncracy) and typographical (capitalization and bolding) adjustments. Conceivably, if I had been reading something else or been reading nothing at all, I would not have been inspired by the same expression and the outcome of my translation would have been vastly different.

This unpremeditated association with linguistic resources external to the poem speaks to the precept of radial reading, as explained above, namely that ‘texts exist in ungovernable strings and clumps, and activate all kinds of achronological relationships’ (Reference ScottScott 2012: 22). Such ungovernable, achronological triggers partake of the ergodicity of ludic translation. Because they originate in extrinsic sources, these triggers are incidental, not immanent, to a work. They yield various possible angles from which a translator can enter a text from outside its box, as it were; each of these angles reveals a potential aspect of the work that may be realized through translation, while downplaying other possible dimensions. Together they give us a holistic grasp of a work in its potential and actual manifestations across languages. And some angles, when attempted in translation, may very well end up in a dead-end, deriving no aesthetically viable solution. Translating ludically entails both rewards and risks.

My English rendition of ‘Nation’ is the outcome of adopting one such angle based on the circumstances surrounding the translating act, including my own reading experience. The translation does not leech on the Chinese text but adds value to it by offering a unique development of the same meme. Chen Li’s poem illustrates, with a touch of cynical humour, that what we call nations are populated by pigs living under several roofs (body politic), perhaps pointing to the laziness or stupidity of the bureaucrats and technocrats running any given country. My English translation, on the other hand, takes a darker turn by revealing more sinister entities dwelling within ostensible democracies or, better still, demoncracies.

Capturing Light in Motion: ‘White’

The ergodicity of ludic translation comes into sharper relief in my next set of examples, where one source text calls forth several instantiations. In the poem ‘White’ (Figure 4a), Chen Li stages a pseudo-etymological performance in Chinese similar to that in ‘A War Symphony’. The first set of characters features six rows of 白 (bai, ‘white’), which then degenerate into another six rows of 日 (ri, ‘sun’ or ‘day’). The logic of this transition is orthographic: the first character has an additional stroke on the top-left that is ‘dropped’ to form the second character. Together the two characters form the compound word bairi, literally ‘white sun’, meaning daytime; therefore, the shift from one set of characters to the other implies the movement of the sun’s rays or the passage of daytime.

Figure 4a

Original text of ‘White’

Next in sequence are five rows of 凵 (kan, ‘dented opening’), formed by deleting two horizontal strokes from the preceding character 日. This is a pictograph that traces the image of a topographical dent, such as a mountain valley. Combined with the first two characters, what we have is an idea of the setting sun bending its rays on earth. This interpretation is sustained in the next sequence, where 凵 is further reduced to a horizontal stroke by dropping the vertical strokes on the two lateral sides – the sun now falls on the horizon. Following four rows of these strokes conjoining into a straight line, the poem ends with several rows of dots, first darker (three rows), then fainter (two rows), and then fainter still (the last row). We might imagine these as dust particles reflecting the vestiges of light, before fading into barely visible particle dots. The sun’s setting is now complete.

As with ‘A War Symphony’, the translation of ‘White’ as it appears in The Edge of the Island leaves the body text alone; only the title is translated (Reference ChenChen 2014: 197). As I have maintained above, this strategy speaks to a frame of straight translation based on semantic equivalence. The ludic perspective I advocate, in contrast, speaks to a frame of transcreation, which aims to shed a different light on the question of translatability by eliding the semantic and highlighting the semiotic. Rather than treat each individual sign in the Chinese poem carefully as if they were sacrosanct, we look at the text as a visual gestalt. This reading is substantiated by Chen Li’s own remark that ‘White’ recalls in his mind’s eye the paintings of Mark Rothko, characterized by the juxtaposition of coloured blocks (Reference Chen, Corbett and HuangChen 2020: 64).Footnote ¹⁸ This gives us a clue as to the meme of the poem, which we might formulate as ‘a movement across different intensities of illumination’.

It is obvious at this point that a straight translation would not do; the question now is how we might translate otherwise. Starting with the word ‘White’ would take us nowhere, though we nonetheless want to keep the ‘moving light’ meme so as to maintain the translation’s substrate recognizability (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015) with the original text. With this meme in mind, I began brainstorming keyword ideas, this time with my research assistant. We ran through a list of English words affiliated to, though not necessarily synonymous with, ‘light’ or ‘sun’, with an eye to their potential to be contracted into shorter sequences or embedded within longer sequences.

Our strategy here is thus one of attrition, whereby alphabetic strings are reduced in gradations by dropping letters, in analogical translation of how the Chinese characters in the original poem morph into other characters by losing their strokes. Contrast this with Bruno’s version of ‘A War Symphony’ (discussed earlier), which permutates letters within alphabetic strings. Permutation does not work for ‘White’ because, unlike ‘A War Symphony’ where sound effects are a central element, ‘White’ is exclusively visual. The downside to my strategy is that the rectangular shape of the original poem needs to be compromised. That is the ‘risk’ I resolved to take for want of a better solution.

We failed on several counts; as mentioned earlier, this kind of trial and error is already factored into a gamic view of translation. Then my assistant recalled seeing those mystical photographs of faint white light around one’s head. That gave us the keyword ‘aura’, around which we decided we could work the translation. At this point ‘aural’ popped up intuitively as a word that could embed ‘aura’. This idea was quickly abandoned as it soon became clear that ‘aural’ diverged from the visual theme of the poem, although it could also provide an interesting counterpoint by resemiotising the visual theme into an aural one.

Keeping my mind’s eye on visuality, I then conjured up the image of the polar lights (recalling a documentary I had watched on the Northern Lights in Iceland), that luminous spectacle of coloured lights that can be observed from the Arctic. Happily, we found that the term for this natural phenomenon is ‘aurora’, which felicitously encapsulates ‘aura’ within its spelling, though not in its exact form. A brief search on Google brings yet more good news: ‘aurora’ is Latin for ‘dawn’ and the name of the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology. These etymologies, hitherto unknown to us, connect with the 日 (‘sun’, ‘day’) character in the Chinese poem, again testifying to how serendipity participates in the translator’s creative thinking process.

So now we have ‘aura’ and ‘aurora’. The latter string, which is the longer one, needs to come up at the top to preserve the integrity of the poem’s meme of visual disintegration. Following the developmental schema of the original poem, that is, the number of rows of the corresponding character blocks in the source text, we set out six rows of ‘aurora’ followed by six rows of ‘aura’. The number of columns, however, is varied, as using the same number of repetitions here as the original would make the translation appear cramped. In ludic translating, the aesthetic may reign over the semantic.

At this point we encountered a bottleneck. ‘Aura’ cannot be further broken down into a shorter meaningful string with a light or sun theme. We decided to catch on the letter ‘u’ in ‘aura’. This is based on the visual attribute of ‘u’, the shape of which is similar to that of 凵 in the Chinese poem. There is furthermore a parallel in terms of how the two texts pivot from one orthographic scale to another: just as the Chinese poem goes from full character to radical (the semantic portion of the character), so the English poem goes from word to letter. We aligned five rows of ‘u’ with the position of ‘u’ in ‘aura’ to create the reductive visual; to follow through the diminutive effect, we further reduced ‘u’ to the shape of an eyelid, which can be construed as a variation on the horizontal stroke in the source text.

Our translation is now shaping up more like a funnel than a rectangle. This is due to the orthographic differences between the two scripts: the architectonic structure of the Chinese character allows it to be deconstructed within a squarish grid; alphabetic strings, however, need to be shortened if we adopt the strategy of letter-attrition (compare: my translation in Figure 4e). We are thus altering the formal contours of Chen Li’s poem following the affordances of alphabetic resources. As mentioned earlier, this is a risk-taking procedure, as we are taking liberties with the shape of the concrete poem. But such risk-taking shifts also exemplify the ethos of transcreation. The point, however, is that once this new shape is set down, its integrity needs to be protected in a principled way. For instance, in an early draft we experimented with moving the last several rows of dots in Figure 4a en bloc to the translation and realized this compromised its funnel shape. To keep to the latter shape, we streamlined the dots to ensure they fell in line with the visual development and formal integrity of the transcreated text, while at the same time attending to how the black dots become fainter down the rows until they fade off.

Figure 4b shows one of my translations, retitled ‘Aurora’. This retitling is necessary because the original title, ‘White’, which derives from the first block of characters, is no longer feasible as it does not figure in the translation. The change in title is symptomatic of the transcreative process, signalling that the translation has taken on a divergent trajectory in developing the original meme. This affords contingency to the translating act, whose pathway is influenced by both textual and extra-textual factors, including, as we related above, sudden triggers by incidental thoughts or random associations with other discourses not directly issuing from the task at hand. In translating concrete poetry one needs to have full regard for the role of chance and arbitrariness, which means thinking from the outside in at the same time as from the inside out.

Figure 4b

‘Aurora’

Since ludic translation is by definition ergodic, the textual problem presented by a concrete poem can yield more than one solution. On this understanding, my assistant and I attempted two further variations for ‘White’, each of which stages the ‘moving light’ meme using the same methodology but on the basis of a different set of resources. One variation, shown in Figure 4c, starts with ‘solar’, which links directly into the ‘sun’ theme in the Chinese original. ‘Solar’ then shrinks into ‘sol’, which is ‘sun’ in Latin and the name of the Roman sun god – this connection with ancient mythology also recalls the classical etymology underlying ‘Aurora’, providing a substrate recognizability between the two translations. And because of how ‘sol’ is spelt, it devolves into a vertical line of ‘o’ instead of ‘u’, as in the ‘Aurora’ translation. The rest of this variation follows ‘Aurora’ and the piece is retitled ‘Solar’ following its leading keyword.

Figure 4c

‘Solar’

The next variation, shown in Figure 4d, begins with a surprising choice of word: ‘sunyata’, which in Sanskrit means ‘emptiness’, thereby taking us on a completely different track than ‘aurora’ and ‘solar’. The term ‘sunyata’ alludes to an instruction on meditation from the Buddhist text ‘Explication on the sixteen visualizations’, roughly translating as: ‘How does one visualize? All sentient beings with eyes that are not born blind have seen the setting sun. One should sit properly, facing the west, and visualize that the sun is setting’.Footnote ¹⁹ On the level of form, ‘sunyata’ is felicitous because it boils down easily to ‘sun’ in line with the original theme, although the ‘sun’ in ‘sunyata’ is etymologically unrelated to the English word ‘sun’, and because ‘sun’ contains a ‘u’ we could further develop the rest of the poem the way we did with ‘Aurora’.

Figure 4d

‘Sunyata’

For our purpose, the important point about this last variation is that it was the brainchild of my assistant, who happened to be a Buddhist. As we were working in ludic mode, my assistant took his religious sensibilities into our reimagining of the Chinese poem. More specifically, in recalling a Buddhist text on meditation while translating Chen Li’s poem, he was effectively performing a radial reading – even though we did not have this technical term at that point – where the theme of visualizing the setting sun as captured in the Buddhist text is brought to bear on the meme of moving light in ‘White’.

Together the three translations above demonstrate how a meme from Chen Li’s poem is ludically translated by way of being re-entextualized in multiple manifestations. The original meme constitutes a nexus through which the three variations share an intertextual, substrate recognizability on the level of the gestalt, even if the discrete signs in the source text (‘white’, ‘day’, and so forth) are not directly traceable in the translations. Such memicity (not mimicry) is the basis of ludic translation, whereby the concept of a poem, not its lexico-grammatical signs, constitutes a mobile element that disseminates across and holds together different articulations of a text. Each of these articulations plays out ‘textual adjustments’ that reset the meme ‘in different frames of meaning and use’ (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 37), such that the relation between a translation and its original can be said to be uncanny – formally different yet still familiar at some level. Together, the three variations coalesce into a text-complex that prosthetically extends the original poem into something larger than itself.

Although the three variations above are presented as English translations, they are in fact heteroglossic in their constitution, featuring Latin (‘Aurora’ and ‘Solar’) and Sanskrit (‘Sunyata’). Insofar as Chen Li’s original work does not contain languages other than Chinese (although it does contain non-verbal shapes, as do the translations), such heteroglossia can be seen as a surplus produced in translation, a value-adding feature that does not originate in the source text. This suggests that from a ludic perspective, translation does more than substitute one language code with another; it mobilizes resources in relation to different frames of meaning and use, exceeding the boundaries of named languages (English, Chinese, Latin) and, as we shall see below, of language as such.

Perhaps the most important quality of ludic translation highlighted by these three variations is the indeterminacy of the process. In conceiving these translations I catered for a degree of randomness, allowing for radial strands of thinking and reading from outside the poem to interact with its meme. Hence, the three translations can be seen as the tentative result of my (and my assistant’s) repeated engagement with the poem’s meme using, among other things, our own experience with and knowledge of light-related discourses (aura photos, polar lights) that lie outside the text.

The ensuing experience stands in contrast with that of straight translation, characterized by the ordered and rational transference of meaning, perhaps clause by clause or line by line, from one language into another. Experimental translation is much more chaotic, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable, continually inflected by epiphanic images and texts conjured up in the here-and-now of translating. Instead of discarding these idiosyncrasies and epiphanies as irrelevant to the work of translation, a ludic perspective embraces them and actively considers how they can be co-opted to add value to the original work in unexpected ways.

What this means is that each time a work is translated, even by the same translator, the outcome will inevitably be different because the extraneous circumstances impinging on each instance of translation can never be exactly the same. My translations therefore do not represent a final resolution of Chen’s poem. Potentially any number of variations in any number of languages can be churned out of the same meme, depending on a host of contingent factors, such as the resources available in a particular target repertoire as well as the translator’s capacity in accessing those resources. The gamic character of the translating process lies precisely in an experimental search for a feasible, though necessarily partial, solution using the resources at one’s disposal.

The resources available for use in translation are not necessarily linguistic. We have seen that the three translations in Figures 4b–d perform an attrition in alphabetic strings to translate the aggregated patterning in the original poem based on the successive decomposition of the Chinese character for ‘white’. One consequence of this approach, as noted above, is that the angular shape of the original poem is compromised mid-way. This is not necessarily a drawback as such, because every performative translation foregrounds certain aspects of a text while backgrounding other aspects depending on the available semiotic resources. The formal shift is part of the performance. The question then arises as to how we can transcreate the poem’s meme using alternative resources so that the integrity of its original shape is maintained.

On this note, I present one last variation on ‘White’, which pivots toward the paralinguistic device of colour (Figure 4e). Since it is determined that the meme of the original poem is about changing intensities of illumination, I chose ‘light’ as the keyword for the translation, which also makes it the title of the translated poem. The word is replicated many times over to form a rectangular shape and then divided into different segments according to the vertical development pattern in the original (six rows – six rows – five rows – four rows – three rows – two rows – one row). Using the gradient function (adjusting for ‘attribute’, ‘angle’, ‘stop’) within the Adobe application InDesign, I applied to each segment a black colouring at a different point on the saturation scale, defined as ‘the scale from the most intense, pure manifestation of a colour to “chromatic grey,” a grey with just a tinge of that colour, and ultimately to complete desaturation, achromatic grey’ (Reference Van Leeuwenvan Leeuwen 2022: 84).

Figure 4e

‘Light’

In multimodal semiotics, saturation scales represent the continuum from ‘maximum emotive intensity to maximally restrained, maximally toned-down emotion’, which can attract ‘more precise meanings and values’ in context (Reference Van Leeuwenvan Leeuwen 2022: 84). In the context of ‘White’, this saturation scale can be used to signify different intensities of brightness, from maximally intensive to maximally toned-down. In applying different saturation scales across layered tiers of the word ‘light’, my translation creates a gradual transformation on the reading interface from intense black (strong light) through chromatic grey (waning light) to achromatic grey (faint light), hence replaying the original poem’s meme using visual rather than verbal resources.

The Paralinguistics of Translation: ‘Pyramid in Flames’

My next example further illustrates how ludic translation can draw on paralinguistic resources to offer a multimodal interpretation of the source text. The poem in question is Chen Li’s ‘Photo of Egyptian Scenery in the Dream of a Fire Department Captain’, shown in Figure 5a. The text is in the shape of a pyramid, which comprises repetitions of the character 火 (huo, ‘fire’). The title gives us the interpretive key: we are in a fire captain’s dreamscape in which an Egyptian pyramid is in flames. The ‘fire’ character seems to lend itself easily to straight translation. Such a translation, in which each occurrence of 火 is substituted by its literal translation, was attempted by Chang Fen-ling and appears on Chen Li’s official website (see Figure 5b). In The Edge of the Island, however, Chang adopted her usual strategy of non-translation (Reference ChenChen 2014: 170), leaving the Chinese characters as they are while closely translating the title. A footnote, which reads ‘The Chinese character 火=fire; 焱=flames’ is added to the base of the translation.

Figure 5a

Original text of ‘Photo of Egyptian Scenery in the Dream of a Fire Department Captain’

Figure 5b

English translation of ‘Photo of Egyptian Scenery in the Dream of a Fire Department Captain’ by Chang Fen-ling

This explanatory footnote, which does not appear in the Chinese original, not only points to the source of the poem’s perceived untranslatability; it effectively cancels the validity of the straight translation in Figure 5b.Footnote ²⁰ As it turns out, the constitution of Chen Li’s original pyramid of ‘fire’ characters is more sophisticated than it appears. It does not simply juxtapose repetitions of the same character but plays with extendable reading frames generated by the architectonics of the Chinese ideograph. More precisely: if we zoom into a discrete occurrence of 火 in the pyramid, we get the character for ‘fire’; if we broaden our lens slightly and observe two of the same character stacked one on top of the other, we get 炎 (yan), which means ‘inflammation’ or ‘burning hot’. Triangulating three ‘fire’ characters gives us 焱 (yan), or ‘bright flame’, while squaring four of these characters produces 燚 (yi), meaning ‘enormous flames’.

Taken together, the four etymologically-related ideographs fan out a range of intensities around the ‘fire’ motif, signifying the modulation of heat during a conflagration. Yet when meshed into the space of the pyramid, their boundaries become indistinct. The aesthetic point of the poem – its meme – is precisely for us to visualize the four characters into being and appreciate how the invisible frames of these characters recursively embed one another. In other words, readers in the know, that is, readers with some knowledge of Chinese writing, are invited to identify the overlapping aggregated patternings beneath the surface manifestation of the word-pyramid.

The prospective English readers of my translation are, of course, not in the know; and they are not serviced by the straight translation in Figure 5b, in which the word (‘fire’) is duly translated but the meme of recursive reading frames is lost. Losing the meme of a concrete poem is as good as not translating at all, and that justifies a retranslation. To recuperate the meme in my retranslation, I (together with my research assistant again) started thinking obliquely, with a view to finding two or more English keywords that fulfil two criteria: first, in keeping with the overall theme of the source text, they should be within the semantic field of ‘fire’, though they need not literally mean ‘fire’; second, they can recursively embed each other into overlapping reading frames. The first of these criteria is linguistic; the second is paralinguistic as it takes the visual patterning of verbal strings into consideration.

First, we churned out four candidate keywords that fulfil the first criterion, namely ‘flame’, ‘torch’, ‘blaze’, and ‘flare’. Then, we looked closely at these words and considered whether adding one or more words could turn them into a recursive string. In retrospect, this process was affectively akin to playing Scrambles. We brainstormed many possibilities, most of which proved futile until we angled on the dimension of colour. Chen Li’s poem is black and white but we asked how his pyramid might have looked in the imaginary dreamscape of the fire captain. Assuming that its colour would have been between dark orange and red, we experimented with the X+flame, X+torch, X+blaze, X+flare collocations, substituting ‘orange’ and ‘red’ for X in each case.

It was when we arrived at the collocation ‘red flare’ that we knew we had hit on a potential keyword. As a noun phrase, ‘red flare’ refers to a handheld device giving off distress signals, which ties in with the fire theme of the poem. The re- in ‘red’ and the -re in ‘flare’ could be capitalized upon to create a recursive string to fulfil the second criterion. We immediately put pen to paper, stringing together several occurrences of ‘red flare’, closing the gap between the two words, hence: ‘redflare redflare redflare redflare’. We then conflated the overlapping -re- between the successive strings to create a continuous reading. The word ‘flare’ now meshes into ‘red’, unexpectedly producing the intermediary word ‘flared’, which is the past participle of the verb ‘flare’ (as in ‘flared up’) and thus also relates to the conflagration theme at hand. The resulting string becomes ‘redflaredflaredflaredflared’, recursively embedding ‘red’, ‘flare’, and ‘flared’.

Figure 5c shows my translation, retitled ‘Pyramid in Flames: A Fire Captain’s Dream’, a tad less of a mouthful and a more idiomatic version of Chang’s English title. The translation re-entextualizes the meme of the Chinese original using a new constellation of signs, playing with the same visual idea of embedding character frames but with recourse to alphabetic strings. In this process, the translation refurnishes the Chinese poem. For example, the materiality of colour is central to my translation but does not figure in the Chinese original. The possibility of jamming ‘red’ with ‘flare’ together into a recursive string is also incidental to the orthographic and grammatical affordances of English. Because of its ludic nature, my translation does not, and cannot, represent a definitive version of Chen Li’s poem, even in English. A different target language may (or may not) offer yet another set of affordances, which would facilitate (or impede) an articulation of the meme along a different trajectory, with its own value-adding features.

Figure 5c

‘Pyramid in Flames: A Fire Captain’s Dream’

To foreground the concept of colour, which represents the semiotic excess brought forth by the translation, I decided to colour the embedded word ‘red’ in red in all its occurrences. This dramatizes the fire captain’s dreamscape as enacted in the translation, bringing the image of conflagration more vividly into readers’ sight. It also serves to segment the string and highlight the meme of overlapping and recursive reading. This latter effect is further accentuated with my italicization of the fla in ‘flared’ to mimic the dynamic movement of flames. Together, these two paralinguistic interventions generate visual modulation, adding theatrical value to an otherwise static, black and white poem. It is granted that these visual embellishments are much less florid and random than those featured in the transcreative work of Clive Scott (see Figure 1). Nevertheless, in heightening the target text’s sensory interface, my translation seeks to improvise on Chen Li’s poem in a way that takes it beyond its verbal signs toward a performative, multimodal trajectory. As such, my translation can be seen as a more subdued version of Scott’s synaesthetic translation, which resists the ‘disembodiment of text’ and returns the latter instead ‘to a full, proliferating materiality’ (Reference Scott, Campbell and VidalScott 2019: 98).

Memesis across Media: ‘Insects for Breakfast’

The preceding example demonstrates a key difference between ludic and straight translation: rather than words and languages, ludic translation is based around resources and repertoires. Whereas straight translation aims at transiting a work from one language code into another, ludic translation goes beyond language as such to orchestrate the full extent of available and accessible resources, including non-verbal ones like colour and typography, in meaning-making. A ludic perspective on translation foregrounds multimodal performativity over and above the discursive signification of an original work.

Pushing further beyond multimodality, the next set of examples illustrates memesis across media, in which a written poem is translated in ludic style and resemiotized beyond print. Figure 6a shows Chen Li’s ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’. The poem comprises a rectangular block of characters that share a common radical, the pictograph 虫 (chong, ‘insect’). What may be slightly surprising is that the poem cannot be, or at any rate is not meant to be, read. Each of the ‘insect’ characters can be found in a Chinese dictionary and are therefore technically pronounceable. Yet many of them, particularly the orthographically complex ones toward the bottom of the rectangular block, are highly obscure such as to be hardly recognizable or readable to the Chinese native speaker. These characters are visually familiar in their material constitution yet elusive in meaning, belonging as they do to the technical-scientific register of entomology.

Figure 6a

Original text of ‘Breakfast Tablecloth of a Solitary Entomologist’

As with much of Chen Li’s concrete poetry, we are faced with a text in which there is more to be seen than to be read. The title suggests we are looking at a piece of tablecloth whose owner is an insect expert. In this visual context, the characters, each of which has a different verbal meaning of its own, signify as individual icons accruing into a larger grotesque image: a tablecloth crawled over by insects. A few interesting observations can be made of the Chinese text. First, the constellation is punctuated by a number of blank spaces; if we are looking at a tablecloth, then these signify holes bitten through by the insect-characters. Second, the Chinese characters appear to be vertically arranged in increasing order of complexity; those at the bottom tiers are much more sophisticated in structure and contain more strokes than those in the upper tiers.

Lastly, a number of the characters denote creatures other than insects, for instance 蛇 (she, ‘snake’) and 蟹 (xie, ‘crab’), or even non-living things, such as 蠢 (chun, ‘foolish’). Because they too carry the ‘insect’ component, they are camouflaged among the other characters even though they do not denote insects. Their inclusion in the visual matrix points to the non-verbality of the text as a whole, in which the characters signify through their form rather than meaning. And the fact that many of the characters, especially those appearing in the bottom tiers, can barely be understood – without recourse to a dictionary, that is – further amplifies their corporeality. Their unutterability partakes of the work’s signification.

Once again, the poem is implicitly pronounced untranslatable in The Edge of the Island, appearing in its original form except for its title, which is closely translated into English (Reference ChenChen 2014: 171). If the individual signs in the original Chinese text are intended to both entice readers (in terms of a familiar orthography) and elude them (in terms of their undecipherability), then a straight translation would surely be counterproductive. Enter ludic translation with its focus on the meme, which I would formulate as ‘a visual monstrosity created through the alienation of language’. The original text, as we have seen, defamiliarizes the Chinese script by putting together obscure characters sharing a common ‘insect’ radical. Thinking obliquely, the ludic translator would ask: what kind of script would have a similar alienating effect for English readers?

Considering we are dealing with an entomological theme, Latin quickly comes to mind. As is well known, insects have scientific appellations in Latin in addition to their common names. And because Latin uses the alphabetic script, it is orthographically consonant with English, many of whose words can be traced to Latin roots. Yet as a language, Latin is unfamiliar to most contemporary users of English, its usage restricted to more specialized domains in academia. More specifically, scientific appellations in Latin are generally long and complicated in spelling as compared with modern English. Prima facie, they offer the visual affordances to develop into monstrous and alienating linguistic formations for English-language readers and are a felicitous resource for our purpose.

With this in mind, my assistant and I set out to translate the ‘insect’ characters in Chen Li’s poem into Latin, by which I do not mean finding the Latin equivalent for each character – that would derive a straight translation that is ultimately meaningless precisely because of its interest in meaning. Rather, we wanted to create the work anew, keeping its meme of monstrosity and alienation while altogether side-tracking its signs. From the word ‘entomologist’, based on Chang’s translation of the original Chinese title, we googled and found the official website of the Entomological Society of America,Footnote ²¹ which hosts a large online database of insect names. We elicited from the database a corpus of scientific names of insects, from which we selected a smaller number to be arranged into the shape of a rectangle tablecloth.

We laid out the Latin words in alphabetical order of their first letter, starting with archatina on the top left to yumensis on the bottom right. This was meant as a response to the original arrangement of Chinese characters, which became increasingly complicated in terms of their number of strokes as one moves from the top to the bottom of the ‘tablecloth’. Following the Chinese original, we also randomly deleted some words to create insect-bitten ‘holes’ in the text; the exact placement of those holes is immaterial in the context of the poem. Finally, I tried out a few font types for the lettering and decided on Consolas, whose slightly archaic, typewriter-style contour evokes – for me, that is – the ‘feel’ of insect tentacles as compared with other sans serif fonts. In ludic translation, font type is a parameter that can be tweaked for desired effects – recall Clive Scott’s translation in Figure 1 with its juxtaposition of several fonts.

Figure 6b shows my transcreation of Chen Li’s poem, which is mostly Latin save for the English title. I find the original title translated by Chang Fen-ling unwieldy. We came up with a couple of candidates like ‘Breakfast with the Insects’, suggesting that the entomologist is eating breakfast while his insects are on the table. This option would have omitted the tablecloth and entomologist themes, which are essential for interpreting the text’s contour as a tablecloth festering with insects. Even the word ‘solitary’ is key in indicating the disposition of the scientist who, in my readerly imagination, might have neglected to do housekeeping (hence insects crawling over the tablecloth) and, more gorily, might even have developed the macabre habit of eating insects for breakfast in his solitary moments. This would give rise to a different interpretation for the holes in the tablecloth.

Figure 6b

‘Insects for Breakfast’

I decided to retitle my English version ‘Insects for Breakfast: A Lonely Entomologist’s Tablecloth’. I changed ‘solitary’ to ‘lonely’ to foreground an emotional dimension in the entomologist’s life that better conveys the affect of the Chinese adjective 孤獨 (gudu) in the original title. The preposition ‘for’ is meant as a placeholder. I initially used ‘at’, suggesting co-location: we might, for instance, imagine the entomologist breakfasting in front of his table covered with a cloth strewn with crawling insects. But this scenario is too ‘mild’ for my taste, and this is where my personality and disposition as a risk-taking translator enter the picture. So I experimented with other prepositions (‘for’, ‘with’, ‘among’), each of which would give rise to a slightly different story. I finally decided on ‘for’ because there is something grotesque in the implication that the obsessed entomologist, being cooped up in his home or laboratory alone all the time, has started developing a habit of breakfasting on his research objects. This reading is of course not attested in Chen Li’s original title; it is purely a translational intervention based on my extrapolative thinking.

But is it not a misnomer to call this an English translation when in fact the body text comprises entirely of Latin terms? Perhaps this is a wrong question to ask in the first place, for it is not the identity of the target language that matters here. We are not so much translating into Latin per se as using Latin as a resource repertoire to develop the meme of the Chinese poem. Instead of restricting our imaginary of translation to a point-to-point correspondence between two closed language systems, ludic translation opens up the discursive space to the full gamut of linguistic and semiotic resources available to the translator. These resources can be orchestrated across their perceived boundaries, for instance, Latin versus English or text versus colour/typography, so as to enrich the heteroglossic and multimodal texture of translation.

My experiment with Chen Li’s Chinese insects could very well have ended here but that would mean discarding a large number of Latin names harvested from the entomological database. With the notion of resemiotization in mind, we further experimented with the idea of transposing our version into an electronic platform in a way that might enable us to recycle those remaining terms in our corpus, perhaps in a random, ergodic manner. At this juncture, the tabular design of Chen Li’s poem, within which characters are lined up in neat files, calls to our minds the celled interface of Microsoft Excel. Thus, we tried transferring our corpus of names collected from the database into an Excel spreadsheet. Using the functions INDEX and RANDBETWEEN, we created a dynamic interface out of the corpus, as shown in Figure 6c. This interface can be intervened in by the reader, who can generate random constellations of words on the screen by placing a cursor on any empty cell in the spreadsheet and clicking the Delete key.

Figure 6c

Excel-mediated version of ‘Insects for Breakfast’

In resemiotizing Chen Li’s poem into an electronic interface, we have essentially turned the original work into a cybertext, both in the ordinary sense of a digitally-mediated text and in Reference AarsethAarseth’s (1997) sense of a manoeuvrable, co-constructive text.Footnote ²² Whereas in their print format, both Chen Li’s original poem and my translation consist of a given, unchangeable set of characters that is primarily visual, our Excel version transforms the written text into a digital artefact whose outcome can be influenced by readerly interception (Reference AarsethAarseth 1997: 4). The resemiotized poem now invites the reader to engage with it visually but also kinetically, hence introducing an ergodic element and turning poetry reading into an embodied, gamic event. As a result, an almost unlimited number of permutations of insect names can be generated to create a virtual, dynamic ‘tablecloth’. The Excel translation generates flux and randomness to the poem’s reading interface, producing a text-machine that can churn out multiple variations on Chen’s poem at the click of a mouse button.

In this set of examples, I have developed the meme in Chen Li’s poem across languages and extended it into a different medial dimension via two operations of translation. The first transits Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet; the second re-mediates a text in print into a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. The former is interlingual, the latter, transmedial, where an already translated text transcends media platforms, taking on ‘an entirely new set of contextualization conditions’ (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 36) provided by Microsoft Excel. As we have seen, Excel offers the affordances, realized through formulaic commands, to unsettle a static configuration of signs in flux. In other words, as the translated poem moves through Microsoft Excel, it undergoes an ‘entirely “new” semiotic process, allowing new semiotic modes and resources to be involved in the repetition process’ (Reference Varis and BlommaertVaris & Blommaert 2015: 36).

Such resemiotization changes the way in which the text is navigated, with the reader having more embodied and ergodic agency in the Excel-mediated version than in the print version. Navigational functionalities, as Reference HaylesHayles (2005: 90–1) reminds us, ‘are not merely ways to access the work but part of a work’s signifying structure’. To change the navigational potentialities of Chen Li’s poem through Excel’s resemiotization is, therefore, to change the work materially. This change in materiality is what Reference HaylesHayles (2005: 116) calls media translation, one performing ‘conjunctions’ between ‘print and electronic textualities’. In this last usage, translation is appropriated as a metaphor to highlight the material constitution of a work, which must transform as the work moves from one medium to another.

My transposition of ‘Insects for Breakfast’ in Excel, conservative as it may be in technical sophistication, aligns with transmedial developments in Chen Li’s oeuvre. The poet has a YouTube channelFootnote ²³ that houses varied performances based around his work, including recitals, musical renditions, and ambient videos. A symbiotic relationship obtains between a poem as it appears in print and as it is performed in other modes and media; each complements the other by capturing an experiential aspect of the work. For example, ‘A War Symphony’ (see Figure 2) has at least two media spin-offs, an animated version and a recital version.Footnote ²⁴ The animated version by Wu Hsiu-ching dramatizes the poem into a virtual battle, splitting the textual configuration of the original into two mobile masses of 兵 characters, whose two ‘limbs’ at the bottom are made to move left and right in emulation of marching soldiers. The two armies are coded blue and red, and as they collide on screen, we see 兵 characters from both sides striking out the ‘limbs’ of their opponents into 乒 and 乓. And when these characters lose their only remaining limb, they turn into a 丘 in black. The animation concludes with a black and white display of 乒, 乓, and 丘 sprawled out and overlapping one another like a pile of debris. Hence, this animated version adds value to the poem by way of the kinetic and colour-coding of the Chinese characters, which are made possible by virtue of the affordances of its medium.

The recital version by Chen Li himself is value-adding in a different way. The oral-aural nuances afforded by Chen’s reading give his poem a semiotic dimension that is at most latent in the printed text. In reading the poem himself, Chen Li imagines the elongated coda in qiu (‘mound’) as onomatopoeic of the ‘eerie autumn winds’: zhenzhen guimei de qiufeng, where qiu (‘autumn’) bears an ambivalent sound-meaning value (Chen Li, personal communication). Chen’s rendition of qiu 丘 in an ‘extended, lingering breath’ can also be taken to suggest ‘the last, languid breathing of dying soldiers’ (Reference ChiuChiu 2018: 33). On this reading, the interaction between ‘the spatiality of visual poetry and the temporality of sound poetry’ (Reference ChiuChiu 2018: 33) extends ‘A War Symphony’ from a written text into a verbal-sonic assemblage.

The last two examples demonstrate how the discursive space of literary writing can be opened up to articulations across media platforms, creating semiotic outcomes that share a memic recognizability with the original text while affording it new expressive and affective capacities. They show that translation can simultaneously be engaged in its substantive and tropic senses to explore the interlingual, multimodal, and transmedial dimensions of semiotic performance. Across all of these dimensions, translation stands in a ludic relation with the original not by directly treating its signs but instead by re-entextualizing and resemiotizing its memes.

Revaluating Untranslatability

Ludic translation has implications for how we think untranslatability, which is but an old chestnut. When we speak of a concrete poem, or other aesthetically-inclined composition, as untranslatable, what assumptions are we making about the nature of translation? Do we think of untranslatability as an inherent textual attribute of concrete poetry or as an emergent construct issuing from a particular, normative conception of translation? In relation to Chen Li’s concrete poetry, we have witnessed how untranslatability tends to become a convenient recourse to justify why one should not translate. Underlying this stance is a fetishization of linguistic or cultural specificity, which has implications for how we approach experimental writing in translation.

The fetish for the untranslatable accrues from a long-standing but not-yet-obsolete tendency in the field to emphasize the discontents of translation, namely what translation cannot do or aspire to achieve. This penchant for difference can be traced to an interest in linguistic and cultural incommensurability, perhaps originating in early prescriptive studies whose contrastive-linguistic focus aims exclusively at managing structural differences between any two languages. Such an enterprise in linguistic matching can never be entirely satisfactory, of course, and the irreconcilabilities that remain become the intrigues of translation studies, a source of fascination feeding into and in turn driven by abundant case studies. Indeed a certain satisfaction seems to derive from the understanding that translation inevitably fails us, hence exposing the gaps that cannot be filled, the differences that cannot be reconciled. Discontinuities in translation seem eminently more interesting than continuities, leading to an emphasis on that irreducible core of identity differentiating each language and culture.

Difference is, of course, a good thing through and through; how we respond to difference, however, is quite another matter. As far as translation is concerned, we could adopt a defeatist attitude and throw our hands in the air in the name of untranslatability. But we could also leverage translation and its lack thereof to think productively about the dialectics of cultural production. The popularization of the notion of cultural translation, describing how migrants ‘introduce an untranslatable foreignness into the realm of the familiar’ (Reference Conway, Baker and SaldanhaConway 2019: 130), thereby ‘dramatiz[ing] the activity of culture’s untranslatability’ (Reference BhabhaBhabha 1994: 321), has enhanced the theoretical purchase of untranslatability within the humanities. Here untranslatability becomes a crucible for the theorization of hybridity as a fundamental cultural condition in an age of global migrations.

Going further down the road is Reference Cassin, Cassin, Apter, Lezra and WoodBarbara Cassin’s (2014) ambitious lexicon project Dictionary of Untranslatables (Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles), which highlights ‘the principal symptoms of difference in languages’ (xvii). What Cassin’s Dictionary demonstrates is that untranslatability does not suggest absolute opaqueness in meaning and hence non-communicability. On the contrary, the fact that a dictionary can be edited around apparently culture-specific terms in philosophy suggests that, even if translation cannot be realized in economical or ‘thin’ formations (cf. Reference AppiahAppiah’s (1993) ‘thick translation’), there are alternative modalities in which the translational can be manifested, such as comparative etymologies across languages. Inasmuch as Dictionary unravels the untranslatable by exposing cross-cultural ambiguities in lexical items, it also abstains from ‘a sacralization of the untranslatable, based on the idea of an absolute incommensurability of languages and linked to the near-sanctity of certain languages’ (xviii).

Building on the translational ethos of Cassin’s work, Reference ApterEmily Apter (2013) argues that untranslatability should be foregrounded in translation history, a history ideally characterized by ‘a decided emphasis on when and where translation happens, and, especially, on how and why it fails’ (29; emphasis added). This spotlighting on the impasse of translation and ‘a non-signifying model of communicability’ (30) is meant to reverse the powerful assumption that translation as a cross-cultural praxis is ‘a good thing en soi’ under which the Untranslatable (first letter capitalization by Apter) is repressed, ‘blind-sided’ (27).

The consequence of this oblivion to and stigmatization of untranslatability is a tendency in world literary studies to gloss over incongruities, to ‘zoom over the speed bumps of untranslatability in the rush to cover ground’ (Reference ApterApter 2013: 17). Apter’s corrective, then, is to resuscitate incommensurability, to build the Untranslatable more formally into the literary heuristic (18) by refocussing on translation failure. For Apter, translation failure is an underrated concept in translation studies that ‘invites elaboration alongside other iterations of the non-translatable: ‘lost in translation,’ the mistranslated, unreliable translation and the contresens, an impassive condition that would seem to nest in language; sometimes discernible as a pull away from language norming’ (Reference ApterApter 2013: 29). It is with these ‘iterations of the non-translatable’ that World Literature could deprovincialize its canon, tapping into translation ‘to deliver surprising cognitive landscapes hailing from inaccessible linguistic folds’ (Reference ApterApter 2013: 16).Footnote ²⁵

The ludic approach to translation advocated in this study is grounded in a similar view of translation failure, although of interest here is the poetics rather than politics of untranslatability. Whereas straight translation terminates in untranslatability, ludic translation begins with the untranslatable, which compels non-linear, rhizomatic solutions to apparently intractable problems such as those presented by concrete poetry. Prima facie untranslatability presents a window of opportunity for ludic translators to experiment with performative renditions. Untranslatability is not a nemesis; it presents a wager that risk-tolerant translators can choose to take up, so long as they are prepared to be frustrated or to fail.

Rethinking Textuality and Authorship

Ludic translation, as I have shown, is a memetic process by which a literary work moves beyond the linguistic-semiotic perimeters of its embodying text. Through this movement, a work mutates itself from one language into another through a procedure that encompasses but also exceeds translation. This has important implications for the ontology of a literary work, that is, what a work of literature is.

From the perspective of memesis, a work can be seen as an abstract potential with any number of possible manifestations. Each of these manifestations draws on a different set of affordances that happen to be available and accessible during a translation event. Hence, a single meme (for instance, a conceptual schema governing the aggregated patterning of a concrete poem) can find reverberations and repercussions in different material formations. This recalls Reference Deleuze and GuattariDeleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of folding, through which ‘a single abstract Animal’, or topological animal, ‘can be folded and stretched into the multitude of different animal species that populate the world’ (Reference DeLandaDeLanda 2016: 151):

On this view, a literary work is a topographical form with the potential to spin off into different manifestations as virtual options. For Reference DeLandaDeLanda (2016: 130), that topographical form is the diagram, which ‘captures the structure of the space of possibilities associated with an assemblage’s variable components’. Reference Žižek, Žižek, Ruda and HamzaŽižek (2018: 20) cites an example directly relevant to translation: the transposition of Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary settings with ‘a different twist without losing their effectiveness’ demonstrates the workings of a literary assemblage whose elements are relatively autonomous and therefore subject to ‘radical recontextualization’.

Non-human agents play a role in this process too. With reference to the transposition of print texts to electronic environments, Reference HaylesHayles (2005) proposes the concept of work-as-assemblage as a heuristic for understanding how a work disperses its textuality across different material platforms to create what I would call distributed texts. Work-as-assemblage designates ‘a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and remediate one another’ (Reference HaylesHayles 2005: 105); it is the textual counterpart of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic construct, Body without Organs.

Reference HaylesHayles’s (2005) argument is that electronic texts differ from print texts in terms of their materiality, defined as the interaction of the embodied characteristics of a text with its signifying strategies (277). Therefore, the intermediation of a print text on an electronic platform (e.g., the digitization of William Blake’s oeuvre into an electronic and interactive archive) would give rise to a different text if substantive differences in materiality can be found, that is, if the electronic version of the work is inflected by the affordances of the technological media. Equally, the same phenomenon can be theorized in terms of how the same resources, or memes, tend to be circulated across different media, leading to what Reference JenkinsHenry Jenkins (2006) calls ‘media convergence’. Hence, as a work distributes itself, the embodying media (construed broadly to encompass the linguistic medium) converge within the assemblage, such that a work becomes overdetermined in being worked through any number of times in different languages, modes, and media.

On this account, a Shakespeare play may be seen as an enfoldable template generating infinite cycles of translations and adaptations. These include YouTube re-mediations around Shakespeare, whose writing serves as ‘an available template repeated across YouTube’, acquiring ‘meme-like properties’ (Reference O’NeillS. O’Neill 2014: 44). The Bard’s oeuvre, through multiple re-mediations on YouTube, is turned into ‘a network of connections between disparate digital objects” (16). These digital objects, including vernacular film productions, fan-made videos, classroom-based performances, online Shakespearean quote generators, and Shakespeare-related mobile apps, embody various memeings of Shakespeare, through which ‘we can see how Shakespeare’s meaning is invariably filtered through and contingent on the present, on the specificities of a time, place and their cultural dominants’ (47). We can thus speak of a global Shakespeare not just in terms of the translation and circulation of his plays in the world’s languages but also in terms of a transmedial poetics derived from their memesis.

Applying this to the case at hand, each of Chen Li’s concrete poems discussed earlier is analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘abstract Animal’. We can speak of each poem as a semiotic assemblage whose components are capable of being deterritorialized from its original constellation and reterritorialized into different linguistic-semiotic formations, each existing as a virtual option in the ‘diagram’ of the Chinese original and giving it their own twist. What my ludic translations have done is to enfold Chen Li’s Chinese poems across languages, modes, and media, and in that process discover ‘in the source text lines, developments of ideas, which hitherto had remained invisible, which might not have been released but for the unforeseen insinuations of new dispositional demands’ (Reference Scott, Kay and MathewsScott 2020: 79). Here, a series of questions provoked by Clive Scott becomes relevant:

A possible response is that my iterations of Chen Li’s poems converge into a work-as-assemblage (à la Hayles), a text-complex that may have originated with a singular text by the poet but does not reside entirely in that text or even with the poet himself. Rather, the ownership of such a text-complex is shared between the poet and his translator(s). In translating ‘Nation’, ‘Pyramid in Flames’, and ‘Insects for Breakfast’, for instance, I worked in close consultation with Chen Li, enquiring about his motivations behind certain details of textual design (he was always happy to supply more information than I needed), while making sure to maintain my autonomy in the course of conceiving the translations.

Hence, although my transcreations radically deviate from Chen Li’s poems in form, the poet is always kept in the loop throughout the translating process. In a sense, my ludic translations extend the experimental ethos that undergirds the aesthetic of Chen Li’s concrete poetry. So where does this locate Chen Li within my ludic translation scheme? Let us recall at this point what Clive Scott says about the imperative to

By the same token, my ludic elaborations of Chen Li’s poems cannot purport to be ‘Chen Li’. Rather, they are a collaborative effort between the poet and myself. Because the resulting translations are dramatically different in outlook, they are paradoxically not-Chen Li even as we recognize that Chen Li ‘is still present in the “notness”’ of my transcreations. It is in this sense that we might speak of the distribution of a literary work across its translational manifestations and, along with that, a distributed authorship. This line of thinking opens up the virtual space for a translation to add value to the source text, even to outstrip the original by reworking its memes in a way that exceeds it far beyond the author’s anticipation. My transcreations of Chen Li’s work can thus be said to extend, enfold, and distribute each of his texts into a work-as-assemblage, which includes the original Chinese, my translation, and other potential renditions yet to come.

On a more philosophical level, the potential of a work to enfold itself centrifugally is always already there. Yet this potentiality need not be imagined as a pure In-itself, as some essence locked into the linguistic sign. Reference Žižek, Žižek, Ruda and HamzaŽižek (2018: 34) uses an interesting analogy to make the point that ‘what an object is in itself … is not immanent to it independently of its relations to others’:

Analogously, the potentiality of a literary work to unravel outward is not so much immanent as it is relational. It arises through the interaction of the work’s memes with the affordances of languages, modes, and media as well as the distribution of those memes into other semiotic frameworks. And it is through such interaction and distribution that this potentiality becomes instantiated in concrete forms that enter into an intertextual-substrate relation with the originating text. This is where the notion of chance and risk enter the game. Following Reference Žižek, Žižek, Ruda and HamzaŽižek (2018), the potentiality of Chen Li’s concrete poetry is not an In-itself. As my textual analysis in the previous section has shown, the unravelling of memes may be facilitated or blocked, contingent as it is on a host of factors beyond the text, such as my subjective knowledge base, imaginative proclivities, and technical know-how. It is these and other unforeseeable factors that bring forth or, as the case may be, suppress a poem’s memes, resulting in differential outcomes in translation. A literary text in-translation, therefore, is always one in-transition.

Redesigning Pedagogies

It is not difficult to conceive of ludification as an underlying model for new pedagogies to promote the idea of play in translation and the creative arts in general. This means repackaging a translation task in a problem-and-solution format and facilitating it as an intersemiotic game where students are asked to resolve a given textual issue in groups and in competition with one another. A typical challenge would involve having students transcreate a discursive text using the interlingual, multimodal, and transmedial resources at their disposal. For example, students could be asked to adapt the imagery of a classical Japanese haiku into an English fable, recast it in a contemporary urban setting, and perform it in the style of virtual storytelling using such digital tools as Adobe Slate and ACMI Generator. Or they could be asked to doodle on a piece of paper their cognitive-perceptual responses to a poem read aloud or a sequence of sounds being played. Students would be encouraged to talk about their transcreations freely without a priori valuations about rightness or wrongness. Students might then be asked to vote on each other’s ludic translations based on both the aesthetic output and the metalinguistic talk.

The AHRC-funded network Experiential Translation offered a series of workshops that exemplified this kind of gamic pedagogy.Footnote ²⁶ For example, ‘Soundscapes – Translating from Music’ was a short course conducted on Zoom (8 April–6 May 2022) designed to provide ‘an introduction to the meaning-making potential of music, with a view to ultimately stimulating the production of intersemiotic translations into other media, such as drawing, poetry, mime or dance’. Its activities were designed ‘to heighten awareness of the semiotic potential inherent in the Western musical tradition through a series of listening exercises and discussions, before mobilizing this knowledge in the production of a new creative work’. Another example is the two-part workshop, ‘Drawing, Asemic Writing and the Temptation of Translation’, which engaged participants ‘in a series of drawing exercises and activities designed to question mark-making in response to things unseen, such as time and space occupied by sounds and place’. Participants would then exchange their asemic writings (writings without alphabets) with each other ‘to read them, to decipher their rhythm, their mood, their material presence, the effect it produces on the reader/viewer’ – in other words, to translate writings without words.

Gamic pedagogies such as these afford teachers and students a parallel experience in translation that focuses on experimental rather than instrumental texts. But all pedagogy must lead to some expected outcome. The question then arises as to what kind of rubric is needed for assessing the translation of aesthetic texts that both contrasts with and complements the usual rubric for assessing translation in general. In other words, what would a rubric for ludic translation look like?

A convenient point of reference would be the standard criteria for translation in an accreditation environment. Let us take for example the assessment rubrics of NAATI (National Accreditation Authority of Translators and Interpreters), the official translation certification agency in Australia. The Band 1 criteria for NAATI’s Certified Translator test comprise the following for the translation of non-specialized texts:Footnote ²⁷