Zine vol.1: Read here.
I wrote the poem on the first page during a summer in Montreal. I was an Anglophone in the Francophone capital of Canada, simultaneously fascinated and challenged by the language barrier. Where did all those syllables go? I thought as I watched a local French film my friend had just produced. I was caught in a sensory overload: trying to absorb the moving images, grasp the French subtitles, and chase the English-bilingual translations all at the same time. The sounds spilling from the characters’ mouths disagreed with the way I was reciting the French subtitles in my head. French is indeed a beautiful language, but what made it beautiful? Is it merely the acoustic flow of words melting into one another, or is it the lingering cadence of coloniality - an empire’s syntax successfully rebranded as sophistication? We are inexorably shaped by the languages we speak and write. At Yale, much of my cohort consists of international students and diasporic American citizens with complex, layered identities. Like many global communities, we constitute a beautiful linguistic mosaic, yet we remain bound by a hegemonic English. Indeed, the privilege of global citizenship relies on the ability to translate oneself into English.
My mother tongue, Chinese, relies on a logographic writing system where, for instance, the character for “big” (大) mimics a person with their limbs fully expanded. It operates without an alphabet. In order to transcribe Chinese sounds into Latin text, the standard romanization of Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin, was developed by my hometown hero, Zhou Youguang. This is how my name, 胜, is written as “Sheng” on my passport. In the 1940s, before Pinyin was established, Yale linguists had developed their own romanization system, designed to be more intuitive for English speakers to pronounce.
Last semester, I began collecting poems written by my brilliant peers at YSOA in their native languages. My dear friend Yanbo shared a quote by Roland Barthes, translated from French by Paula M. Varsano, that immaculately captures the essence of this project. I must share it here:
“The dream: to know a foreign (strange) language without, however, understanding it: in its difference without that difference’s ever being recuperated by the superficial sociability of language, communication, or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted through a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the schema of the inconceivable; to undo the ‘real’ under the effect of other categorizations, other syntaxes; to discover unsuspected subject positions in speech and to alter its topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable and there experience the shock, never to be absorbed until all the West within us shakes and trembles and the rights of our father tongue…waver.”
Yes! And on top of that, to protest against translation; to respond solely to the graphic architecture of alphabets; to read poems in a beautifully “dumb” way; to dwell in, sit with, and simply exist alongside the nuances and diversity of humanity without the need for immediate comprehension.
This “dream” conceived this zine. I wholeheartedly thank all my friends who shared a piece of themselves through their writing, for accepting my ‘anti-invitation’ and writing a poem that I do not ‘understand’, and to Shiyun for being such a thoughtful graphic designer.
graphic designer: Shiyun Deng
editor: Yanbo Li