Translating Self, Performing Migrancy : Ha Jin’s A Distant Center

This chapter explores Ha Jin's self-translation in his poetry collection A Distant Center (2018). As an established Chinese-American diasporic writer who has built his career writing exclusively in English, Jin's decision to compose poems first in Chinese before self-translating them into English marks a belated linguistic homecoming in his decades-long trajectory of “linguistic migration.” As a “born-translated” semi-autobiographical poetry collection, the Chinese originals were written with English translations in mind, an anticipatory orientation that has embedded the very genesis of his poetic texts with a jarring Anglicism, while the English translations bear the imprint of Chinese linguistic and poetic traditions. The double writing process calls for a bitextual reading that recognizes the incompleteness of each version in isolation. The comparative analysis reveals Jin's English translations consistently aestheticize mobility and displacement through romanticized vocabulary to perform migrancy. We demonstrate how self-translation points to the contingencies and constructedness of cultural self-representation in diasporic writing through his introduction of markers of Chineseness absent in the original. By examining instances of language crossing and transcultural dialogism in Jin's English translations, we highlight how Jin's poetic double writing brings to crisis the dominant paradigms of U.S. monolingualism, native speaker competence, and national literature.