Problematics of Translation in Ha Jin’s Poetry: Poet, Critic, Translator
Author : Joan Chiung-huei Chang
Keywords : Ha Jin, language, translation, Wreckage, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin
Ha Jin’s works bespeak an impressive linguistic creativity. Reconfigurating Chinese language through a nativized discourse of English, Ha Jin has
translated, appropriated, and reconstructed Chinese linguistic norms and
specifics into English-language literature in remarkable fashion. Studying
Ha Jin’s Wreckage, a reader with Chinese education will be ready to identity
fragments of renowned Chinese classical verse. Thus the reader is invited
to ponder: To what extent does Ha Jin draw his poetic inspiration from the
corpus of Chinese literature? How shall we measure accredited creativity?
How do we distinguish innovation from renovation, and do those distinctions change our reading of the poems? Although Ha Jin has written exclusively of the reality of Chinese politics and society (with A Free Life the only
exception so far), this material does not obviate the possibility of reading his
works as belonging to a tradition of US immigrant literature. In Ha Jin’s
poetry, the juxtaposition, interaction and fusion of classical Chinese verse
and contemporary American sensibility can be telling. Which has been
translated, the Chinese verse or the American sensibility? What has been
transplanted and translated? Have the Chinese poetry texts, after being
transplanted into the English verse, undergone a transformation of meaning
and resurfaced with new significance corresponding to the complexity of Ha
Jin’s immigrant experiences in America? This paper aims to explore how Ha
Jin’s Chinese poetry texts show significance corresponding to the complexity
of his immigrant experiences in America.