Speaking from “In-Between”: Jennifer Wong and the Translation of the Self

Seen as both a means of communication and an identity-defining factor, language has always been a key element when outlining the contours of Sinophone literature. It becomes an even more important feature when shifting the focus from prose to poetry, especially when the reflection on language itself becomes the fulcrum of an author’s production. From a geographic point of view, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora are two crucial manifestations of the Sinophone, which sometimes happen to merge together and generate composite identities connected to a new linguistic dimension. This chapter focuses on Jennifer Wong’s poetry by exploring her collection 回家 Letters Home (2020), which employs the metaphor of the homecoming to represent the in-betweenness characterizing her identity. Language and translation are among the key issues Wong highlights when portraying the complexity of her experience as a young woman born and raised in Hong Kong, who then moved to the UK. Wong’s poetry is literally a journey through languages that, crossing time and space, goes back to a non-dimensional limbo where places and language cannot be reconducted to traditional coordinates. In this chapter, Codeluppi takes the linguistic contamination as a starting point to analyze the role of translation as an interiorized process allowing for the creation of a new hybridity, at the crossroads of tradition, modernity, migration, and translingualism.