Between Calligraphic Untranslatability and Symbolic Translatability: Xu Bing’s Pictographic Art

Emily Apter's conception of the "untranslatable" taps into the dynamics and difficulties of translation between languages and cultures. The process of translation is described as a "intransigent nub of meaning that triggers endless translating in response to its resistant singularity." When words are taken out of their context, the idiosyncratic meaning is obliterated and revamped. On the one hand, different from the Derridean critique of Western logocentric bias of writing, Chinese characters, particularly written in the form of calligraphy, are faced with great challenges when they need to be translated into other non-pictographic languages. The strokes, pauses, structures, ink tones and sizes in Chinese calligraphy all contribute to the meaning of the text imminent to the artist's spatiotemporal situation and fluctuations of his/her mental state. To a large extent, the calligraphic art resists the temptation of translation, either into other languages, or into Chinese characters in print. On the other hand, Chinese characters with their pictographic quality have the potential to transcend the phonocentric confines of languages and are possible to be translated into a universal language. The Chinese artist Xu Bing 徐冰 plays with the calligraphic form of Chinese characters in his artworks. In his project Book from the Sky 天書 (Tianshu), he extracts the strokes and radicals from the Chinese characters and rearranges them into new artificial and meaningless ones, containing the imagist form and obliterating the meaning. In Book from the Ground 地書 (Dishu), Xu uses symbols from the public sphere and makes them into a book, which is accessible to people of different linguistic backgrounds. I argue that by playing with the Chinese characters as pictographic signs and other public signs, Xu Bing's artistic practices challenge the border between the singular and the universal, and the translatable and the untranslatable, rendering implications for the cross-lingual translation.