1: A Quest for Polyphony: Coding and Decoding the "Hybrid" Multilingualism in Wu Ming-yi's Fuyan ren

As underlined by Gwennaël Gaffric (2019, 73), the multilingual dimension of Taiwanese literature mirrors the “carnivalesque vertigo” of the island’s sociolinguistic complexity. Among the contemporary writers who intentionally (and fictionally) reproduce a mixture of languages stands out Wu Ming-yi 吳明益 (b. Taoyuan, 1971), who dwells between Hokkien and Chinese Mandarin, thereby embodying a Sinophone paradigm. In his internationally acclaimed novel Fuyan ren 複眼人 (2011, The man with compound eyes), described as “an environmental fable blending fantasy with realism” (Lin 2019, 14), Wu Ming-yi transcends the individual diglossia to perform a more complex linguistic heterogeneity. By means of a creative approach to multilingualism, the author gives shape to a hybrid and multi-layered heteroglossic landscape, where real and fictional indigenous traditions from the Sinophone-Austronesian world access and enrich the Chinese sphere, thus generating a transcultural dialogue through and beyond translation.

The paper intends to explore several theoretical and practical aspects of linguistic hybridization and translation, in the domain of Wu Ming-Yi’s novel. In the interest of tackling the intersemiotic problem of the polyglossic and polyphonic interaction, the various levels of the linguistic variety constructing the author’s “imaginary of languages” (Glissant, 2010) will be observed and described. Therewith, subjects of investigation will be the translating practice, intertwined with code-switching, which is displayed and developed throughout the literary language, as well as by a personal self-translating narrative.