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Abstract In conversation with Ursula Deser Friedman, Ha Jin reflects upon the process of “rewriting” his poetry and prose, branching into philosophical reflections on the (un-) translatability of these respective genres, the Sisyphean quest for “home,” and literary multilingualism as an antidote to political censorship. Jin’s observations on carving out a hybrid linguistic niche paint (self-)translation as creative transmediation across mediums, languages, genres, and temporalities. Jin elaborates on his campaign to democratize English by writing against the grain, while reflecting upon multilingual literary creation and his immigrant identity at large. Jin’s foreignized linguistic aesthetics destabilizes the hegemony of English globalese by challenging the assumption that birthright automatically bestows a superior command over one’s “native” language. Jin’s reflections on writing, translation, wandering, exile, and immigration paint the Self as a cosmopolitan subject occupying an interstitial Transwriting Zone at the crossroads between multivalent linguistic and cultural identities.
Jin et al. (Wed,) studied this question.