Romance in the Age of Cybernetic Conviviality: Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise and the Poetics of Postcolonial Translation

All I ask is that you remember me in the good times we had… Keep me close to your heart… Friends forever.
 
Pass this on to all your friends… If I get it back… I know you care.
 
(To a very special friend I have made on here.)
 

– Facebook spam

Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk. Do not keep this message.
 

— Hsia Yü, Pink Noise

 
In Taiwan, a perfectly faked LV bag hits the night markets before its original copy is officially launched in flagship stores. If a fake LV product cannot be easily equated with postmodern kitsch, as critic Chang Hsiao-hung points out, it also defies analysis as postcolonial mimesis. Chang argues that the fakery of the “digital copy,” instead of being the antithesis of the “official/original” product, marks the multilayered cultural transference that translates the two global/imperial forces–“European superlogos, Japanese nostalgia”–into a decentralizing force that implodes globalization from within (227). Interestingly, in the course of Chang’s analysis, theory itself becomes the “European superlogo” that can be appropriated or counterfeited, as she aptly “translates” Derrida’s “logocentrism” into “glogocentrism” (the “glocalization” of western logos) and his “dissemination” into “fake dissemi-Nation” (the decentralizing force of the fake). Because translation is fundamentally the primal scene of such affective transference–of love–in the age of global connectivity, it can no longer be written off as a para-narrative, the mirror discourse that privileges the original; rather, through the “fake dissemination” of translation, western imports, ideas, and ideals–such as postmodernism–get a new life in the age of post-national and posthuman global deterritorialization.
 
The long-standing criticism of Hsia Yü,¹ Taiwan’s most renowned postmodern poet since her self-published poetry collection Memoranda (備忘錄) in 1984, therefore needs to be rethought in a framework of critical comparativism that does not end with a celebration of her so-called “endless relays of signifiers and signifiers” as the emblem of Taiwan’s postmodernism (Lin 135), but instead takes postmodernism as an object of translation to investigate the process of re-lating and trans-lating as the primal scene of cultural transference.²
 
Such is the promise of the new collection, Pink Noise/粉紅色噪音,a transparent book of English/French poems, drawn largely from the Internet, together with Chinese “translations.” The book is made (manually!) of transparencies, challenging the hegemony of print culture–a design that allegorizes the role of the Internet in contemporary culture. There are thirty-two English poems and one French poem, each with a Chinese “translation.” The book’s language is at first glance that of (post-)modernist defamiliarization, radicalized by its ostensibly parallel poems. Yet both the English/French “originals” (printed in black) and their Chinese “translations” (in pink) are counterfeits: the Western poems are patchworks of lines drawn from a host of sources–from blogs, ads, websites, spam emails, and Baudelaire poems–while the Chinese poems are machinic translations done “mindlessly” by the computer program, Sherlock. In its unique form and with its primary medium of the Machine, Pink Noise seems to shout out postmodernism, as many of Hsia Yü’s fans immediately propose. Their exclusive attention to the formal aspect of the book is understandable; after all, both of Hsia Yü’s previous works, Ventriloquy (腹語術; 1991) and •Rub•Ineffable (●摩擦●無以名狀; 1995), deal with the “materiality of language,” with the former featuring invented Chinese characters, further radicalized by the latter’s “remix” of sentences fragmented and re-assembled from the former. Yet I want to argue that we can read the form and narrative of Pink Noise as the realistic representations of the transformed and transforming public sphere of cybernetic conviviality. Not only is the Machine doubled in this work, but it also doubles the dialectics of two languages into a poetic of translation–a dialogic of love. Hsia Yü makes the Western poems by sending sentences drawn from different sources repeatedly to “Sherlock” until a Chinese translation passes as poetry. The title of poem #25, “They’re back/ they’re sad/ they’re making a porn movie,” for example, is drawn from three different sources. In the collection, therefore, humanity meets/mates–instead of battles–with the Machine. The romantic overtone becomes the harbinger of interspecies and interlingual connections in general. In an interview, Hsia Yü explains that she was “listening to all these great noise and low-frequency acoustic art CDs, and wondering what would result if that concept were applied to words” when she accidentally bumped into the spam translation program.³ The ‘chance encounter,’ or rather, a fling, diverts the planned trajectory toward an unexpected destiny: the white noise that the author strives for turns pink. When Hsia Yü describes machinic translation as the “primal crime scene of a linguistic murder,” her tone is ecstatic: with “a rush of adrenalin,” the poet is dazzled, “stoned”–“it set my head whirling” (“Poetry Interrogation”). Smitten, Hsia proclaims that she has found the one-“Yes, this must be the word noise I’ve been looking for!” The color that translation brings to the white noise therefore also indicates an evolution (local adaptation?) of poetics that outgrows the obsession for a universal, atonal language in pursuit of minimalist purification, to a hybrid tongue of conviviality in the midst of the information revolution.
 
The lyricism in this excessive romantic love with the translation machine returns us to the primary reference of the book: the Net. Pink Noise can be seen as a realistic representation of cyberspace because the web is not only the medium but also the form of the book itself, reflecting such cybernetic relationality: the paradoxical combination of layered shadows and transparency (see Fig. 1 below). Its narrative, too, from the seemingly chaotic chance selection (an oxymoron indeed), is astonishingly readable. More strikingly, generated from the machine are lines of sentimental narratives full of confessional accounts, despite constant glitches, incongruence, and compulsive repetitions. Put allegorically, aren’t the paradoxical and melodramatic colorings of Pink Noise a vivid representation of the romantic possibilities in the age of “digital (un)reason”? In this light, the postmodernism in Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise is not only a formalist play with signifiers but also a complex deep play with the problems of translation, trans-lationality, and cybernetic conviviality.
 

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Hsia Yü, Pink Noise, Image from Drunken Boat (Bradbury).

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission of the author.

 

 
In what language can one speak of love in the age of the deterritorializing Machine? Or, to scale back, can we speak of love when the relationship between two languages juxtaposed seemingly in parallels is complicated by gaps, fractures, and glitches? At first sight, Pink Noise presents two national languages: the imperial language of English on the one hand, and the almost anachronistic translation into Chinese on the other. The semi-colonial relationship of the two languages also changes color as the collection turns to prioritize translation–the labor of love. The transformation from the artificial relation between a Western language and the machinic Chinese translation to a dialogic of love is indeed a masterful, poetic translation. In Pink Noise, schizophrenic bilingualism is turned into felicitous noises of romantic encounters (sometimes, “copulation”) whose language is only too familiar to us. In this essay, I begin with the dialogic of two languages to argue that although the juxtaposition of a global/imperial language and its “other” suggests that the context for this work is an postcolonial melancholia, to which Pink Noise obviously responds, the positive and joyful tone of Pink Noise also invites us to look beyond facile binarism to create a third space full of love and new possibilities. Such a process of becoming is translation par excellence. To read the schizophrenic languages of Pink Noise, therefore, one needs to begin with this third space and the process of becoming. Through the lens of translation, we can hear the Babel of global noises in a different way: the Chinese and the English/French here are, to borrow Bhabha’s formulation, almost “national (languages), but not quite.” Or, there is no Language and no bilateral relationship between two languages. In the web of heteroglossic noises, both the colonial and the other languages become the new possibilities–the being that is other than itself.
 

I. Dialogic of Love: Weblish Meets Translationese

 
Does one read in two languages?–Manuals, for example, often offer multiple languages, but we hardly go beyond the one that is most intimate to us. Therefore, when a poetry collection like Pink Noise professes to present parallel poems in two languages, we begin with caution lest we fall into the deceptive premise of likeness, analogy, and parallelism. On the one hand, randomly solicited lines from the modern monster of endless trivialities, the Internet, become these Western poems of melodramatic pseudo-narrative. On the other, the Chinese poems disrupt and complicate this melodramatic grand narrative of digital globalization. Pink Noise is both a parody of and commentary on the expansive virtual space that increasingly encloses the public sphere and encroaches on the untenable public-private divide–Taiwan boasts more than fifteen million Internet users, more than two thirds of its population (Wang). The promise of the book comes from such a bipolar parole: enacted by the crowdedness of words and the overlapping of letters and characters, the blurred signifiers as fetish objects become a ready metaphor of cybernetic relationality in which the speaking subject and her or his object, the enunciator and the addressee, or, the lover and the beloved, are constantly deterritorialized (Fig. 2).
 

 

 

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Fig. 2.

Pink Noise Table of Contents.

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

 
The book’s doubleness at the level of national languages is doubled again at the narrative level. A unique poetic emerges from its juxtaposition of the machine and the speaking subject. In contrast to the futurist hope for technocratic reason generally found in hypertext internet poetry, Pink Noise is almost old-fashioned in that it appears to be less interested in the technology than in the heterglossia of a common speech that the Net has the potentiality to offer. Much like T.S. Eliot’s intertextual and interpersonal referencing in The Waste Land, Pink Noise aims to “return [poetry] to common speech”: “Every revolution in poetry is apt to be . . . a return to common speech” (qtd in Perloff 29). In Pink Noise, the English poems are noticeably lucid, readable, and grammatical. That (partial) transparency paradoxically results from the practice of citations: each line in the English poems is a quotation, or a combination of quotations, mostly from anonymous online sources. The streaming of citations is no longer the modernist evolution from “Image,” “Word-Image” to Meta-language,” but can perhaps more properly be called a parody of ordinary English.⁴ The mundane moments one spends cruising the web are a “brokenhearted time,” as the first poem in the collection allegorically mourns/moans:
 

How fucking creepy is that?
So different and sweet
A promise awaits us
At the limits of the mystical love
In the bright, shining, god-like glow
If we must die
We will need those rhyming skills
Some people are born with
Others develop

 
Outside, sleet is falling
And there’s a dull pain of festive hangover everywhere
If we must die
We can be comfortable ensconced at the center of an admiring crowd
We’re too apathetic to stop
To hold back the feeling
That real life is happening somewhere else

 

What are the rhyming skills, if not the “double-talk” that is both the online common speech and poetic simulacra of such everyday intercourse? The poetic “montage” in the second stanza–“Outside, sleet is falling/ And there’s a dull pain of festive hangover everywhere”–can be read as the fruit of such unique rhyming skills. The comic-tragic narrative of the poem creates a defamiliarizing effect that is at once banal and poetic.

 
As in other Western poems in the collection, the tone of the poem is almost lyrical, its narrative almost linear and progressive, but not quite–there are gaps and glitches in the story the poem tries to tell. For example, how is the “promise” (line 3) which is “so different and sweet” (2), or the “mystical love” (4) each related to the “sleet” (10), the “festive hangover” (11) and “an admiring crowd” (14)? Does the poem conjure up a scene, a landscape, an imagery, or just a mood stereotypically attached to our impression of such-and-such a scene? If the poem is “about” the non-representable field of the virtual space, where do these amorphous, hazy and fragmented scenic or spatial references lead us? Our reading of the poem requires that we conceive of the text not as a representation of a distant scene or object but the Image itself. “In the sphere of the Virtual–of the digital, the computer, integral calculus–nothing is representable,” Jean Baudrillard writes. “It is not a ‘scene’, and there is neither distance nor a critical or aesthetic gaze: there is total immersion. . .” (77). Pink Noise‘s narrative is the product of such virtual reality. Our googlized brain is plugged to the text-image in such a way that the glitches and gaps in the poetic imagery no longer demand the vigorous decoding process we use when we are reading a symbolic or modernist poem. At the same time, the immanence is porous as “we” (line 16) constantly feel that “real life is happening somewhere else” (19). By making cyberspace the overarching referent, the assemblage of artificial sentences becomes a poem that arrogates a narrative, an Idea, an Image. If there are gaps and glitches in the narrative, they do not really disrupt its message as long as one reads the poem the way one browses the web. The “online streaming” is a simulacrum rather than the actual act of writing;⁵ its language is no longer English but netlish, weblish, or webonics. If such a language seems to be shadowy and parasitic, the poem does not show any anxiety or nostalgia for the missing origin. On the contrary, its ending suggests that the ambiguous in-between space allegorized by its uncanny parody of English is a “non-place”–a utopia— worth dwelling upon. In this way, the pseudo- or quasi-narrative of such poems reads like a commentary on the specific time-space of their unique production. What the citational practice in Pink Noise challenges is no longer the hegemonic powers of the original but the need for mediation between the seemingly incompatible ideas of transparency and depth, superficiality and palimpsestic textuality, and natural speech and its uncanny and often stigmatized other, translation.
 
This allegorical grand narrative of the global culture of the information revolution is subverted by the introduction of a radically heterogeneous language–the Chinese “translation,” or Translationese. Let us look at the poem again, this time in its schizophrenic bilingual form:
 

“Brokenhearted time and ordinary daily moment”

 
How fucking creepy is that?
So different and sweet
A promise awaits us
At the limits of the mystical love
In the bright, shining, god-like glow
If we must die

 

 
We will need those rhyming skills
Some people are born with
Others develop

 

 
Outside, sleet is falling
And there’s a dull pain of festive hangover everywhere
If we must die
We can be comfortably ensconced at the center of an admiring crowd

 

 
We’re too apathetic to stop
To hold back the feeling
That real life is happening somewhere else

 

 
“令人心碎的時代和普通每日片刻＂

 

 
怎樣性交是蠕動那?
是不同和甜
承諾等待我們
在神秘愛的限額
在明亮，發光，似神的煥發
如果我們必須死

 

 
我們將需要那些押韻的技能
某些人是出生與
其它人顯現出

 

 
外面，雨夾雪落
並且有歡樂宿酒愚鈍的痛苦到處
如果我們必須死
我們可能舒適地被安置在
敬佩的人群的中心
我們太無動於衷以致於不能終止
暫掛感覺
真正的生命發生在其它的地方

 

 
Readers ingrained in the sense-making of the English narrative will find the Chinese a complete loss in translation. There is no “loyalty to the original” to speak of, which is all the more striking because the collection makes a persistent claim for love and romance. The lack of fidelity also suggests that the sense of the Chinese poems lies elsewhere than at the semantic level, as the love of translation takes us beyond the scene of monogamous or nationalistic commitments. Translation is first and foremost a practice of becomings. Yet in the history of translingual practices in a postcolonial context, translation is indeed a schizophrenic process: On the one hand, it is wrought with struggles and ideological clashes–what to translate, and how, is obviously a matter of ideological choice rather than of accident.⁶ On the other, as is already made clear in Hsia Yü’s exuberant remarks on the “discovery” of the translating machine, a translation in a colonial context is a love-object that is at once alienating and defamiliarized as well as familiar and intimate. “The books that illuminated my youth were by and large translations,” Hsia Yü says (“Poetry Interrogation”). The sense of tenderness for the machine translation that Hsia Yü betrays in her remarks has its root in a cultural memory that is about to be subverted by the advent of the global digital culture. Translation, for postcolonial intellectuals, signifies a loss, but it is also an object of love, as Hsia Yü confesses: “I’ve always loved those sentences that are rendered with a clumsy fidelity, those adorably literal versions that are virtually indifferent to Chinese grammar (which reminds me of Nabokov, that extreme literalist), and all those second- and third-hand translations from Russian via English and Japanese and who knows what else” (“Poetry Interrogation”). Paradoxically, the “weird Chinese” rendered by translation has become a natural language for many intellectuals in Taiwan who grew up reading second-(or third- or even fourth-) hand, sometimes brutally truncated, translation.⁷ The machine is in this case not the culprit responsible for the disappearance of aura but a good object to which one cathects utopian hopes for breaking away from the throes of Martial Law and of traditional orthodoxy on the one hand, and for recreating new language of public discourse on the other (see Benjamin, “The Work of Art”).
 
Although Pink Noise‘s Chinese is more fragmented, atonal and a- or anti-signifying, its signification should be located not at the linguistic level, whether syntactical or semantic, but in its affectivity–the structures of feelings that make such fragmented linguistic representation a lived reality. Surely a sentence like “並且有歡樂宿酒愚鈍的痛苦到處” (Google translator’s back translation reads: “And there are fun places around alcohol dull the pain of”) is defamiliarized, but it is at the same time intimate to (a certain class of) Chinese readers who have grown up part enlightened, part indoctrinated by reading Western culture via awkward Chinese translations. In this way, the Chinese translation becomes a language in its own right–Translationese.
 
Like Latin, Translationese can be seen as a classed language circulated among the educated elites in the modern Chinese context. The translation of “fucking” into “性交” (sexual intercourse) and “creepy” into “蠕動” (crawling) are “luminous mistakes”: the comic effect is that the banality of everyday English is rendered into a pedantic, academic or jargony translation, and it has the benefit of speaking the truth that is so intimate to Taiwanese intellectuals–translation is never a neutral tool but a twisted bridge across linguistic hierarchies, a distorting mirror that reflects two cultures’ mutual misrecognition. Interestingly, in contrast to the more fluid translation of “dynamic equivalence” which is in vogue these days, the machine-generated translation anachronistically reflects the literal translation of 50s and 60s Taiwan, as readers of New Tide Series (Xinchao Wenku) of Zhiwen Publishing Company would readily recognize.⁸ The sense of defamiliarization in the Chinese poems of Pink Noise therefore has an historical as well as an aesthetic dimension. As much as readers are pained by the bad translations because they are too literal, the newness of (Western) thought is inseparable from the foreignness of the language. The literalness of the Chinese poems sends us back to the familiar love and loss in the translation. In contrast to the English poem’s command of narrative, the Chinese counterpart forces the reader to confront the materiality of the word itself, so much so that the sentence becomes a promiscuous carnival event of pornographic word-objects. Offering pure (bodily) senses by means of linguistic nonsense, the Chinese or Translationese sublates the “logonostalgia”–the nostalgia for authentic meaning–in the English poem. Looking back, it is not English or its “Enlightenment” that is the origin of these Chinese poems, but a schizophrenic syntactical disorder such as “怎樣性交是蠕動那?” (literally, “How sexual intercourse is crawling that?”) that becomes the primal scene of translation.
 
Because Pink Noise turns translation into poetry, the question of whether the Chinese translation here fails, or what counts as a successful translation, becomes superfluous. On the level of trans-lingual practice, there are only uneven contrasts. Not only is the quasi-narrative of the English poems deconstructed by the incoherent, machine-generated Chinese translation, but surprisingly, in its radical dramatization and hyperbole (and we are, indeed, more hyperbolic or dramatic, both in the choice of words and in tone and gestures when speaking a foreign language), the Chinese poems also return us from a poetic obsessed with ideas (or ideologies) to the sound and materiality of poetic language. Attending to the sounds, it is intriguing that it is the Western language that is the “natural speech” while Chinese becomes the foreign and hyperbolic–the embodiment of the idea of the poetic per se.⁹ Does the logical reversal become a political rebel that interpellates Hsia Yü to compose the bilingual poems in this collection?–It is, after all, the hazardous Chinese translation that excites Hsia Yü to “write” Pink Noise in the first place.¹⁰ Perhaps, as I suggest above, it is because translation like this exists in the cultural memory and is therefore loved as a lost object of love; or, perhaps the hyperbolic and radically fragmented Chinese is potentially more poetic because modern (i.e., vernacular, free-versed) Chinese poetry has often been presumed a foreign import.
 
In any case, the attempt to close-read the Chinese poems runs into stumbling blocks because no narrative holds up despite the richness of its poetic fragments. Even the commonplace enough title of the poem, “I am an expert in nothing,” for example, becomes a syntactical disorder–“我是關於沒有什麼的一位專家,” or “I’m not an expert on the,” according to the Google translator. The entire poem reads:
 

English

 
Yes, please send me a biweekly
Newsletter filled with diets
Workouts and weight loss
Secrets, yes, please send me
Special offers, promotions
Coupons and free
Samples from the sponsors
Yes, I’ll answer the questions below
To determine my eligibility for this
Study, if I’m not searching
For myself I’ll answer these questions
On behalf of the person
For whom I’m searching
All information that I enter will remain
Private, I’ll want to give it time
To brew
Yes, technology
Is a beautiful thing
 

Chinese¹¹

 
是，請寄發我雙週
時事通訊被裝載飲食
鍛鍊和減重
祕密，是，請寄發我
特價優待，促銷
樣品從贊助商
樣品從贊助商
是，我將答覆問題如下
確定我的適用性為這項
研究，如果我不尋找
我自己我將答覆這些問題
代表人員
我尋找
所有資訊我進入將保留
專用，我將要想給它時刻
釀造
是，技術
是一件美好的事

 

On the level of cross-cultural or trans-lingual contrasts, the poem turns the materiality of language into the construction of historicity. While the English poem seems to evoke Molly Bloom’s monologue from the end of Ulysses and so implicitly coalesces the modern world of commercialization with pornographic female sexuality, the Chinese translation turns the respiratory exclamation into rhythmic breaks. The question–“How does one read senseless translation as poetry?”–could be extremely suggestive as it relentlessly demands that readers ask: On what criteria does Hsia Yü make her choice of words and sentences (in Chinese)? The distortion of syntax in this case is not so much designed to stimulate multiple significations as to foreground each semantic segment in a way that gives primacy to their sound and rhythmic properties. In written and vernacular forms, Chinese language is more collagiste than layered, as words are made of characters that can be combined in a patchwork manner. In contrast to the linear structure of Western languages like English, in Chinese semantic segments hinge on each other relatively loosely, not as a chain but as a chess board, so that to read Chinese is like “perceiving” a picture–one has to take its totality in at once. The Chinese poem of “I am an expert in nothing” interestingly shifts the reader’s focus from a linear and transparent semantics to a kind of musicology of the Chinese language: because of the distortion, one is compelled to read the patched-together, unlayered Chinese sentences differently, accentuating the rhythmic variation in the length of each segment, which is roughly repeated at the sentence (vertical) level of the poem–wo-shi(我是)●
kuan-yu(關於)●meiyo-sheme(沒有什麼)● di(的)● yiwei-zhuanjia (一位專家). On the vertical level, although the poem consists of only one stanza, its structure can be broken up into five parts, each opening with an exclamation, “yes” (是), except the second part, which only has one line, where the “yes” is planted in the middle.¹² Read as playing with rhythm and musicology, the Chinese poem’s asignifying aspect turns the dominant and hegemonic reading of modern poetry (both in Chinese and in English) around. While critics are drawn increasingly to read the idea, ideology, and narrative of modern poetry, the rendering nonsensical paradoxically returns poetry to primal musicology. The joy of the dance of the tongue rebels against the clichés of lack of meaning or of originality. Perhaps, because this machinic translation gives poetry new life by detaching us from the tyranny of meaning to approximate the dynamism of sounds and rhythm–as one line of the previously quoted poem reads, “We will need those rhyming skills”–here in reading Pink Noise we find our poetic endeavors to be completely saturated with infatuation, romance, and love.

 
Spinning the two national languages around into a dialogic of love, Pink Noise does not fall into facile binary oppositions. Instead, the contrast of the two constantly spins to become something new. This new third space, therefore, points us to the conjoining middle, the knot that weaves together the two seemingly opposite ends. The poetic of translation in Pink Noise suggests that one should not reduce the power of interpellation to brain-washing, for it is through the gradual process of incorporating the uncanny, monstrous, alien object and the affective investment, from frustration to tender feeling of intimacy, that the otherwise provincialized subject can be de-/re-territorialized and become open to the hailing of a foreign voice. Here, the positive, constructive potentialities of translation as differential supplements overwrite the (post-)modernist play of opacity and indeterminacy: it is less interesting to try to decipher these arcane and absurd constructions of the sentence than to contrast the two languages in order to be shocked by translation’s power to produce, the power of becoming. This suggests that the point of departure of the book is none other than the middle ground of conjoining, intersection, and fusion. The two languages are thrown there to evoke the eerie third space which is neither the so-called “source text” nor the “target language” but the shadowy middle where the chance encounter–or the flip side of it, the pornography–takes place (Fig. 3):
 

 

 

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Fig. 3.

Dialogic of Love¹³

 

 
Let us look at the poem, “Brokenhearted time and ordinary daily moment” again, this time turning to its additional third dimension. Its seemingly binary structure calls for an absent third, not written in either language but allegorically forged in the virtual space where the two languages felicitously “copulate”:
 

English Original

 
How fucking creepy is that?
So different and sweet
A promise awaits us
At the limits of the mystical love
 

Original Translation

 
怎樣的性交是蠕動那?
很不同和甜
承諾等候我們
在神祕愛的限額
 

Back Translation

 
How is sexual intercourse crawling?
Very different and sweet
Promises await us
at the credit limit of the mystical love
¹⁴

The reading of these bilingual poems is hardly a “loss in translation.” The first stanza of the poem demonstrates a dynamic difference: while the English part reads like a romantic narrative, the Chinese “equivalent” has a pornographic feel, properly spiced with machinic apathy, as if sense and sensuality, love and lust, or cheesy pathos and industrial indifference were only two sides of the same coin. These contradictory flavors turn out to be a great mix. When “the limit of mythical love” becomes the “credit limit,” it is as if love in a hyper-mechanic society becomes a product for purchase–who is to say that the “bad translation” does not mean what it says? That the signifier is blissfully ignorant of its signified, when “love” (in English) is conveniently translated as “sex” (in Chinese)?

 
It is of course perverse to find a pornography of sense in the dialogic of two languages, but perhaps it is the perversity of imperial/global bilingualism that Pink Noise audaciously brings us that calls for such a perverse process of signification. This is also to suggest that central to the project of Pink Noise is a kind of significant nonsense. In the sense that the English poems parody the nonsensicalness of on-line and everyday small talk, and that the Chinese counterparts embody the obscurantism of an imported language, Pink Noise critiques such nonsense by mimicking, repeating or becoming that nonsense per se.¹⁵ In the following, I want to suggest two different but mutually constructive ways to read such nonsense. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, nonsense lies precisely at the productive voided center of transference/translation. While the romantic undertone of Pink Noise begs the questions of objecthood and relationality, I suggest that nonsense here also points to the common sense of the virtual multitude and to the connectivity that Pink Noise comes to represent. To reexamine the dialogic of two languages, I turn to psychoanalysis to ask: If translation emerges from nonsense, what is the object of translation that delivers us the sense and signification? If the object in psychoanalysis is marked by signs of irretrievable loss, what, then, accounts for the joyous celebration of translation that raises nonsense to the dignity of poetry in Pink Noise?
 

II. The Alienation of Virtual Nonsense: From Lack to Love

 
The relationship between the original poem and its translation is similar to that of the Subject and its Other, or Being and Meaning, as in Lacan’s graph of alienation.¹⁶ In Lacan’s structure, the supposed reciprocity between the Subject and the Other, or the one-to-one correspondence between Being and Meaning, collapses into non-meaning in the confrontation between the two opposites. The signification of the poems in Pink Noise emerges neither from the English/Netlish, nor from the Chinese/Translationese, but from the “non-meaning” or “nonsense” of the third space, which is the field of translation par excellence.
 
I turn to Lacan’s psychoanalysis in the reading of Pink Noise because it is often too easy to espouse poetic nonsense playfully and to bypass an interpretation of the signification of nonsense. Lacan’s insistence on a “singular interpretation,” i.e., the psychoanalytic interpretation, can be helpful if we want to read beyond the anarchism of signifiers and nihilism of meanings. Psychoanalysts constantly need to wrestle with the meaning of nonsensical slips or inconsistencies. As Lacan’s famous example–“Your money or your life?”–shows, although the choice suggested by the “or” here is absurd (so the meaning of the sentence collapses), it is false to conclude that the dissymmetry and lack of reciprocity between the two parts of the sentence entails the nihilism of meanings per se, or conversely, that interpretation is open to all meanings. Lacan insists that there is one interpretation: “[i]nterpretation is a signification that is not just any signification. . . . It has the effect of bringing out an irreducible signifier” (250; emphasis added). Although this is not the place to enter Lacan’s complicated elaborations on the “irreducible signifier” (in Seminar XVII), I bring up Lacan’s unique sense of “interpretation” to caution against a rushed universal theory that celebrates the liberation of meanings, which lands us in what Lacan might call the university discourse (see The Other Side of Psychoanalysis).¹⁷ Indeed, the master signifier, while still situated in the analysand’s speech, generates a web of desire-production so that the interpretation of its meaning is never a passive decoding of symbols which supposedly can run wild but, as Freud puts it, a matter of construction (see “Constructions in Analysis”). Interestingly, Lacan describes such an interpretation or construction as a process of translation: “this ongoing translation of an unconscious that is first of all the unconscious of the other” (Transference XIII: 3).¹⁸ Translation for Lacan has to do with interpreting the irreducible signifier on which is founded the dialectics of the desire of the other.
 
In Lacan’s topography of alienation, a revision of his theory of the mirror stage, the relationship between Subject and Other, or Being and Meaning, breaks away from what he calls the “prescientific truth” or imaginary meaning which is founded on fantasies of wholesomeness. Instead of harmony, we have discordance at the heart of psychoanalytic truth; instead of the whole, the hole; and, as the graphs evolve in later Lacan, instead of signifiers, objet a–the object-cause of desire. The centralization of nonsense is significant in that, out of the conjoining/intersecting middle of the two separate entities whose relationship is marked by dissymmetry and lack of reciprocity, there emerges not the Subject nor the Object but objet a, which becomes the anchoring point of signification.¹⁹ In terms of cross-cultural translation, the virtual/psychic space of objet a arises particularly when the dissymmetries between two linguistic systems are marked: non-signal noises, nonsense, slips, blunders, inconsistencies and the like. The third space which Lacan calls transference-love is therefore the space of (un-)translatability. When Walter Benjamin explains that “The word Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same,” (“The Task” 105), or when George Steiner asks, “labor we may, bread will never wholly translate pain. What, in English, French or Italian is Heimat?” (152), or to return to the Taiwanese context, when one evokes the opposition between yams and taros, we are reminded that a faithful translation is only a fantasy. To the extent that the aromas of Brot, cheese, yam, taro and das Heimat (home) are untranslatable, or that their translation is sustained by non-meaning, the “thickness” of the characters in the Chinese translation is perhaps the most effective representation of trans-lational (instead of relational) desire: this is an age whose virtual reality is a bilingualism or heterglossia from which one cannot escape but to which one can never fully belong.
 
Bruce Fink extrapolates Lacan’s graph of Subject and Other into the dialogic of jouissance. As long as Lacan’s topography of alienation is a reformulation of the Cartesian subject, there are two subjects in Lacan: the subject of signifier and the subject of jouissance. On the other hand, as later Lacan puts a greater emphasis on the subject of jouissance, interpretation also gravitates towards the other jouissance, the excess, or the beyond of phallic jouissance. In other words, signification becomes saturated with sexuation. To translate: meaning in the pre-psychoanalytic discourse has always involved the fantasy of harmony, the most primal form of which is the harmonious copulation of the Mind and the Body. The psychoanalytic interpretation has to go beyond such an imaginary, fantastic, or “pornographic” signification to foreground the discordance, the “hole,” the “falling out” that takes us toward the other jouissance. Fink suggests that the most we can say about such other jouissance is that “it corresponds to ‘making love,’ as opposed to sexual intercourse,” which, according to Fink’s reading of Lacan’s Seminar XX, is “akin to poetry” (Lacan to the Letter 162). Fink’s remark, bringing together love and poetry with the same stroke to antagonize love and sex, offers an interesting perspective from which to read Pink Noise‘s love for two languages. Central to the psychoanalytic interpretation is the jouissance that results from the encounter of two languages–or, in Samuel Huntington’s polemic terms, the “clash of civilizations.” As formulated in Lacan’s graph, the two languages are also structured in a way that the (lack of) relationship (or relationship) between the bipartite entities revolves around the middle, the third space: the non-meaning, nonsense, the place of the objet a (in Lacan), or of pink noise (in Hsia Yü). For psychoanalysis, however, jouissance is the Doppelgänger of lack. As Fink puts it, the other jouissance has its most common manifestation in jealousy, or jalouissance (jealouissance) (Lacan to the Letter 146): Someone must be enjoying themselves more than I am or, as Žižek elaborates in “Enjoying Your Nation as Yourself,” this other jouissance is the fuel of paranoid nationalism and homophobia against our national or racial others, who we believe to be stealing our enjoyment because they have other enjoyments that we do not know of or have (201-211).
 
Indeed, in reading Pink Noise there is a sense that something is left out by the juxtaposition of the two languages: on the one hand, the nonsense in the collage of banal prose of the foreign language; on the other, the non-meaning in the obscure, lofty and stuffy translation. The jouissance in the Chinese and Anglophone readers’ celebratory reception of Pink Noise disguises such lack, a unique sense of failure that a reader of two empowered languages is destined to encounter: both Chinese and Anglophone readers read the form of bilingualism without reading its two languages.²⁰ It is as if the poems become the object or object-cause which is the book itself; as one of the poems says, “words fail me,” which in Chinese becomes “words do not pass/penetrate me” (詞未通過我). With the poetry of the poem lost to the jouissance of the form, Pink Noise is either “degraded” to a coffee table item, or “upheld” as a modern Bauhaus-/Ikea-brand object.²¹
 
In the last graph of the other jouissance, what drops out of the encounter of two jouissances can be construed as the soul of the poem, which takes the place of nonsense/non-meaning/sweet-nothings in the dialogic of love. I think this is where the encounter between Pink Noise and psychoanalysis could take us, to the other reality of the (social) virtual. While the psychoanalytic dialectic problematizes the nostalgia for origins, its emphasis on lack is eerily nostalgic. Does the same lingering nostalgia lurk in the spectacular artifice of Pink Noise? Does it propose that a soul falls away from the book’s virtual noises? My reading of Pink Noise is that although the book departs from lack, its promise is also to work against such negativity: the promise of poetry is exactly to translate lack into love, or, in Toni Morrison’s words, into “thick love.” In the following paragraphs, I return to Pink Noise to engage its other dimension, beyond the negativity of lack: the immanent virtuality of the Net as the transforming and transformative public sphere, and the positive reading of becoming “one” (with a lower case “o”) the Net’s multitude makes possible.
 

IV. Virtually Social: The Uneven Contrast of Critical Comparativism

 
In Interventions into Modernist Cultures (2007), Amie Elizabeth Parry reads Hsia Yü’s “underground poetry” to underscore the “workings of neo-colonial knowledge formations” in Hsia Yü’s “microstructures of the everyday” (81). Implicitly addressing the two prevailing interpretations of Hsia Yü’s poetry as postmodern (in Lin Yaode, Meng Fang, and others) and feminist (in Michelle Yeh, Liao Hsian-Hao, Jian Chengjen and many others), Parry sees Hsia Yü’s play with romantic themes and seemingly apolitical fantasy (of air travel, in “Leaving in a Jet Plane,” for example) as gestures of refusal to participate in the discursification of heteronormative sexual morality in the post-Martial Law era on the one hand, and as challenging the seamless account of (Western) modernity as a borderless (united) state on the other.²²
 
If, as Parry suggests, Hsia Yü’s lyricism pretends to rebel reticently against the uneven developments of modernity as experienced in a neo-colonial locale like Taiwan, then Pink Noise can be read as further literalization of the transformation of the public sphere in the global empire of English, and of the flattening power of global capitalism. In a way, the two different narrative modes of the two languages opens up precisely such an alternative space, a space of the “reticent rebel”: the English poems are amazingly readable and have a coherent narrative, in contrast to the Chinese poems, which radiate with poetic epiphanies here and there but whose poetic effects are co-dependent on the radical syntactic jolts that prevent the poems from forming coherent narratives. Yet, instead of reticence, silence, or lack, in Pink Noise these contrasts also bring up something: the noises. Noises, I argue, are not nothing: they are, in the words of social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, the screen, as in Freud’s “screen memory,” of meaningful “signals” (Twenge and Campbell 118).²³
 
So in the poem, “Then, I will realize that it’s really bad or….,” we find colors at the heart of “(uneven) contrast”:
 

Seduced by flowers
She’s not afraid to be bold when
It comes to decorating
“I have this green hutch, from Romania
Late 1800s,” she says. “It’s a great antique piece
It’s a great color, a very bright green
The doors are held together by bent nails. It’s
Fabulous. I have eclectic tastes.
Nothing really goes but it works.”
 

“I have this cobalt blue vase, probably a foot
And a half tall,” she says
“It’s my favorite color and it’s my
Favorite piece
We registered for it for my wedding
And I got it
Right now it’s in the foyer when you walk in. My favorite
Thing is to put intense, colored flowers
Red or orange, in it for
The Contrast.”

While speaking of the “contrast”–one can understand it in light of Parry’s “critical comparativism”–the poem quickly turns to deconstruct itself, for underlying the contrast there seems to be only nothing. In the poem, a female character is engaged in the mundane activity of decorating something with a flower arrangement. As if to comment on the role of poetry caught in consumerist culture between the lofty “high” art of poetry and the “low” of popular decoration, the poem allegorically asserts that the frivolous and inconsequential–colors, tastes, small objects–are only posited “for contrast.” Although the sentences make grammatical sense, at the same time because of the lack of a meaningful event or action, the poem seems to be about nothing, or nothing but the “intangible things” such as colors or contrasts. “Nothing really goes but it works”–colors are also the intangible something begotten from nothing, as the intangible Internet generates the poems in Pink Noise.

 
The rhetoric of the everyday not only serves as the “uneven contrast” of (colonial) modernity; implicitly, it also brings up the larger social context of virtuality qua sociality. Like the deployment of the everyday (and potentially philosophical) word “nothing” which surfaces in many poems in the collection, the overflowing adjectives, often expressive of emotions, are the “bright” and “fabulous” colors that double-talk or, as Lacan puts it, “half-talk” (mi-dit) between something and nothing:²⁴ they seem to be metaphorical of the inhuman or posthuman connections on the Net which are “Exotic, hypnotic… metaphorical” (Poem #16) but that are too mundane and trivial to be worth poetic breath. Poem #19, “Discover how well her passions mesh” begins with: “This is a stupid document/ It is meaningless drivel.” The meshing of “passions” and a “stupid document” describes the new relationality–or translationality–of the Internet age: the impersonal yet intimate connectivity that is no longer mediated through a third term. By alluding to cyber-reality, the poem runs an “integrated circuit” and becomes self-referential (Baudrillard 79). The poet seems to mock her own creation when the poem continues: “That she does not expect any of the several billion people on her planet to/Actually read,” but to this point the partisanship of the English/Weblish poem no longer satisfies us–we read on to its Chinese/Translationese doublet, only to find that the meaning of “an unending series of unsatisfying compromises” has become its opposite, “不滿意妥協無止境的系列” (not satisfied with the compromises [of] an unending series). The (English) poem ends with a pseudo-philosophical/pop-psychology quest for insight with which to “get past” the “wild and flashy exterior” to “what’s actually on the inside.” But the mirroring of the English and the Chinese can hardly sustain such a binary opposition. There is no telling when the back-and-forth movement between the two languages would produce peculiar “contrasts” that invite “(reticent) rebels,” but it is clear that out of the mundane “nothing(ness),” we get something. Maybe just the flowers. Maybe not even anything as substantial as flowers. Maybe what we get and what the contrast has to offer is only the blue, the orange, the pink–the flood of everyday, inconsequential decoratives–that describe the insubstantial (non-)being in the virtual multitude of our new social reality.
 
With this, let me return to the poem, “I am an expert in nothing.” I have demonstrated that the English and Chinese poems call for different reading practices; the contrast between them produces the historicity that is embedded in both the colonial past and the virtual present of (mechanic) translation/becoming. Paying attention to the poem’s Weblish, this time I show that, the sense of loss notwithstanding, there is a new object in the poem and in Pink Noise as a whole. The object is precisely the “stupid and meaningless document” of the Internet. In this poem, we learn that the expert–“I,” as in “i-Expert”–masters the nothingness of the secrets and private information found in “biweekly newsletters filled with diets/ Workouts and weight loss.” To whom does he/she owe the pleasure? To none other than the new technology of the Internet–“Yes, technology/Is a beautiful thing.” Remember that the English poems are in fact written in a second-hand language, first a semi-colonial language and then one that is relayed, indirect speech of anonymous quotations. The romance with technology is double-edged: as the discourse of (Western) modernity, it is flat, smooth, and has a coherent (although banal) narrative; at the same time, it is also striated, porous, and prone to self-destruction. The end of the poem, on the other hand, points to new species of love and to another dimension of the social that has always been in the background of Pink Noise: ever-expanding virtual space and artificial intelligence. Indeed, technology is a beautiful thing.
 
The collection’s twinning of new-agey romance with online connection challenges us to reconsider whether psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies remain the most helpful models for reading objecthood and relationality now. Is there a Subject behind or produced by the “shadowy colors” or “virtual buzzes”? Are the poems parables of love in the age of cybernetic connectivity, which radicalizes and problematizes the already perilous romantic terrain so that love becomes its opposite–the monist autoerotism of the self-indulgence of the subject and the annihilation of the object? From a Lacanian perspective, psychic reality relies on lack that introduces the Symbolic Order, but in the computer, as Žižek explains it, “virtuality, in the sense of symbolic fiction,” collapses (“Civil Society” 43). For Žižek, the Net disrupts the panoptic function of the Symbolic, and that is what constitutes its psychic threat. There is an intriguing slide in Žižek’s account from the psychic virtual to the social virtual, both of which are upheld in the metaphor of the panopticon. Žižek’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the virtual/social implies that the VR of the computer is the disorder of power, which leads simultaneously to the crumbling of the sexual, the fantastical and the psychic.
 
It is interesting to return from Žižek’s argument about lack and negativity to the yes-saying of the poem, “I am an expert in nothing.” The poem’s tone, which is remarkably lacking in resistance, brings up and ties together two aspects of the psychoanalytic virtual: the fantasy of sexual talk and the submission to the gaze of the panopticon, both of which Žižek thinks support sexual relations. Read in this light, the second person narrative of the poem as well as the explicit references to commercialization are poignant: it is as if Molly Bloom is shouting yes to the corporate industry behind the ads and getting tremendous enjoyment from it. While entertaining Hsia Yü’s ingenious mise en scène of the personal and the social, as well as of the sexual and the commercial, it becomes increasingly unsettling to read the ending of the poem, “Yes, technology/ Is a beautiful thing,” as ironic. Moreover, while a Lacanian interpretation of virtuality presupposes a “double consciousness,” a critical split that allows the subject (or subject, the barred subject) to reflect on its formation, both identity and subjectivity have a different feel through the intimate second person narrative. The “I” as well as the addressed “you” are not identified, therefore non-discrete and un-singular. While most hidden stanzas are prompted by “yes,” it is also interesting to note some exceptions: secrets in lines 5 to 8 (“Secrets, yes, please send me/Special offers, promotions/Coupons and free/samples from the sponsors”) study in lines 10 to 14 (“Study, if I’m not searching/ For myself I’ll answer these questions/On behalf on the person/For whom I’m searching”), and private in lines 15 and 16 (“Private, I’ll want to give it time/To brew”). Then the poem returns to the “yes” narrative and ends with “Yes, technology/Is a beautiful thing.” Whether the evocations of private core and personal identities are ironic is moot; they seem to be too enamored of the act of becoming to even keep track of their own identities. It is also important to remember that in Pink Noise, English/Weblish is also an “identity” joyfully deconstructed by the Chinese/Translationese other. When “technology” meets translation, rather than returning to the black hole of lack as the origin of virtual reality and identity, it inadvertently turns into “skill” (技術), recalling the “rhyming skills” in an earlier discussed poem, and suggesting that, after all, poetry (and love?) is a transformative skill that creates something from nothing.
 
Ultimately, the romance of poetry and bilingual practice has to come from the intimate and radical act of reading. My argument in this essay is that Pink Noise is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, hence resistant to any monopoly of interpretation. It is, nevertheless, joyful and not melancholic or nostalgic for the collapse of symbolic power. The poetry here hardly imposes a moral obligation to interpret. Although I do not propose the interpretation of Pink Noise (as Lacan suggests of a psychoanalytic interpretation), I also want to argue that unlike the Lacanian formulation of love and postcolonial dialectic of power, both of which are embedded with negativity for which lack becomes the ultimate metaphor, Pink Noise‘s dance with the Machine is positive and completely without negativity. Pink Noise is an open invitation for readers to re-late and trans-late. It is up to the readers whether we acknowledge, accept, or turn away from such an open invitation.
 

V. Conclusion: The Virtual Multitude

 
I want to accept the poem’s invitation by returning to Pink Noise to suggest that it is in the act of reading, and furthermore, reading the language of the foreign and the everyday (nonsense), that we can reinvent the emerging virtual social, and transform its fundamental lack into the multitude of love and poetry. The poems in Pink Noise seem to suggest such a reading trajectory; as one of the poems says, “Things seem to get worse before they get better” (Fig. 4):
 

 

 

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Fig. 4.

Poem #32. “Things seem to get worse before they get better.”

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

 
How do things get better as they seem to get worse initially? “The people are dead” and “the things are scattered,” the poem tells us in the beginning–“nothing subsists.” The narrative then zooms in to an undecipherable landscape where “She poised herself on the balance beam gracefully” and “he waited with his fingers posed over the keys.” The scene does not so much announce the “death of the subject” as give us a sense of undistinguished personae, of private selves which are impersonal, un-singular. Moreover, because the lines are drawn from different sources on the internet, we do not know if the “he” or the “she” in the poem refers to the same person. The poem talks about a distant temporality, “a long distant past,” and gives a wasteland-like feel of apocalypses: “nothing subsists/ After the people are dead/after the things are broken and scattered.” But its tone is distinctively different from T.S. Eliot’s messianic or apocalyptic melancholia; it celebrates “works [that] are born as if out of the void.” Among the ambiguous referents to the person/persona and the world/void, two indexes of humanity to the body parts stand out–the fingers and the hand. Although streamlined as a narrative, the poem can be read only by adding a chain of associations from its diverse elements: “balance beam” (signifying harmony?), fingers on “the keys” (roman à clef?), “the ruins” and the notion that “everything vanishes,” “ripe graphic fruit” and the hand as the “obedient instrument” of “a remote will.” The poem interestingly reflects the way one reads the book in general: that is, manually, with a hand, which is autonomous in the sense that it is not controlled by a humanist core but by a “remote will.” The inhuman yet intimate “hand job” is crucial because the book is produced in a way that would be unreadable unless one were to add, say, a piece of paper, to separate each poem from the others. The adding is therefore a subtraction at the same time. Or, to evoke Wittgenstein’s language game, the imperative to “add 1” functions like the cut in Lacanian psychoanalysis that produces the lack constitutive of the emergence of the symbolic order, except that literally adding 1 upends the negativity and turns it into rosy representations of sheer positivity. By adding one more language and one more poem, one creates new poetic space in which the streamlined narrative gives way to defamiliarized (exotic?) fragmentations, which, on the other hand, bear the old poetic fruit of musicology (see Fig. 5 below). Things do get better even when formal fragmentation and linguistic alienation initially seem to make them get worse.
 

 

 

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Fig. 5.

Poem #32. “事似乎得到壞在它們得到更好.”

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

 
The poem’s message–“Things seem to get worse before they get better”–relies on the conceit of the game that by adding the Chinese translation one only adds to the felicity of poetry. To add the Chinese is also to return the poem to its original form of palimpsestic transparency (see Fig. 6 below). The “balance” to which the English poem alludes is figured materially when one translates and adds one more linguistic dimension to the poem. By multiplying, the poetic lines on the one hand lose their decipherability; on the other, by losing their individual identity they gain a new life–they become pink noise (see Fig. 7 below).
 

 

 

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Fig. 6.

“Add 1”–adding the “translation” to the “original.”

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by
permission.

 

 

 

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Fig. 7.

Multiplication.

© Hsia Yü, 2007. Used by permission.

 

Admittedly, both playing the game and adding 1 are metaphors of reading, that is, of how meaning and understanding work. I evoke Wittgenstein’s example of the game “add N” in his Philosophical Investigations here because the tenet of ordinary language philosophy is that meaning and human life are fundamentally connected even in the face of nonsense, whims, mistakes, and noises (143-205). The famous Wittgenstein dictum that there is no private language is apt: the binary opposition between human and machine comes largely from the picture held by the sceptics that (human) understanding is a mysterious, inner mental process that takes painful decoding and is especially vulnerable to gridlocks of communication. With the concept of language games, Wittgenstein shows how mistakes are possible, for example, when one understands the rule to “add N” differently. Does the “alternative interpretation” pass? Or does it fail because it fails to faithfully represent what the rule-makers have in mind? Eventually, the felicity of playing the game involves understanding the rules, not through some mysterious and complicated process of transporting a picture locked in the addresser’s mind but by grasping its meaning in a flash. Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy shows that the meaning of the word is neither in the mind of the addresser, nor in the representation of the addressee, but is in its use.

 
As I turn from the initial fascination for Pink Noise‘s transparent form and undecipherable noises to the physical book and to the material presentation of poetry, I am inspired by Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy. There is no “alien” language, as Wittgenstein famously says. Although Pink Noise seduces us to read the new formidable machinic language as a sign of the end of human agency, Wittgenstein’s language games help me to re-enter Hsia Yü’s poetics for an alternative interpretation. If reading Pink Noise, as many of Hsia Yü’s critics and readers have argued, is to play the linguistic game, then to play a game is also to understand the rules (grammar, laws)–to follow, distort, appealing to, or discard them. The machine itself is neither dogmatic nor anarchistic. In fact, the machine is none other than the sum total of the human. At the end of his discussions of the game “add N,” Wittgenstein uses the machine to symbolize the ordinariness (in contrast to “queerness”) of meaning that is always present (in contrast to “deferred,” “effected,” or “apocalyptic”). “We use a machine, or the drawing of a machine, to symbolize a particular action of the machine,” Wittgenstein says (66). The action of the machine, as meaning in human life, is in fluid movement and can never be fixed; at the same time, its possibilities are always present. This does not say that the machine contains all the possibilities, or that its future movements are predetermined from the start–this would lead to a robotic, “dead” machine. Language, like the metaphor of the machine, is full of possibilities and potentials, yet the richness of such possibilities can only be truly appreciated when we begin with the presentness of their use (Wittgenstein 77-79).
 
Keeping the presentness of the richness of ordinary language in mind, my reading of Pink Noise is eventually a literal and literary one. I take Pink Noise‘s message about the clichés of love to be indicative of the poetic of translation in the new age of global connectivity. In reading Pink Noise, the sporadic yet convivial collage of romantic elements–“luck/運氣,” “contagion/傳染,” “risk/風險,” “superstition/迷信,” etc.–grows, as if to evidence the message in one of the poems: “This has been sent to you for good luck.” By multiplying languages, by adding one(self) to the process of reading, the book professes to be the talisman of such “good luck”–the token of love, which is not different from infection or contagion, as the poem says: “Sometimes there’s nothing that feels quite so good as being bad/ A lot of love results from an infection by other love/有時有沒 什麼感到相當很好作為是壞/很多愛起因於傳染由於其他愛.” The machinic aspect of meaning-production does not prevent us from understanding the common speech of love, nor does it require its infection to become something radically new, and so limit it. Just as the virtual/social is linked to the Machine, so at the same time the Machine is not the antinomy of the human and the ordinary. As long as the process of rendering meaningful implicitly relies on the assumption that there is a human agent who makes choices even amidst machine-generated chaos (i.e., chance), the heartless machine is the poet’s Doppelgänger. One does not have to kill the double in Pink Noise to have a singular interpretation. The poetics of translation is lost when one is tempted to turn, as in the fable of Lot’s wife, to look for the original meaning of the translated words, or to return to the previous life of humanity before the Machine. What Pink Noise presents us is no other than an invitation and a promise. The promise is that the future of poetry and the future of humanity are full of love, as long as one takes the invitation to dive into the great mix of noises and the multitude of nonsense. Such a persistent desire for the new and the unknown is already an old one, but Pink Noise dares the nonsense to repeat it lest the promise of poetry be forgotten in the age of artificial intelligence–
 
“Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk/Do not keep this message.”