Poetry in Translingual and Intralingual Practices: The “Song of a Yue Person” and Its Implications

This essay revisits the “Yueren ge” (“Song of a Yue Person”)—a Chu-style verbalization of a “Yue” song—that is normally considered the oldest existing poetic “translation” from a non-Chinese language to classical Chinese. The study makes two main observations followed by critical discussion: first, the embedded asymmetry and intralingual orientation underlying the translingual practice between the Yue song and the Chu version, complicating the theoretical model of “translation” in the ancient Chinese context; second, the intertextual correspondence between the Chu version and other early and medieval Chinese poems, especially their variable instantiations of a condensed body of sounds and meanings that constitute the ending couplet of the Chu version. The “Song of a Yue Person” hence integrates translingual and intralingual practices in the manner of “translation-as-composition.” This model of praxis presents a particular way of becoming that, through accumulation, was intralingually oriented toward an emerging literary culture before and during the early imperial period. Moreover, this case invites critical inquiries into broader issues of language, poetics, and textual production, as well as questions of media, materiality, and the sociology of literature, bounded by intralingually circumscribed aesthetics and ideologies.