XiXi’s Architectural Poetics: Making Room for Translation in Hong Kong

In her acceptance speech for the 2019 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, XiXi reserves the final words to all literary translators in a newly composed poem, “A Salute to Translators.” In this poem, the speaker expresses her dream to possess the key to every room in the Tower of Babel only to remind us that this dream is inevitably impossible. Thus, we must allow ourselves to rely on translations despite their imperfections. The poem ends with the figurative depiction of a poem on its own journey, one that anticipates its transformations through translation to reach future readers and wider audiences. The image of a poem confined in its original language is reminiscent of the claustrophobic verticality, signature to Hong Kong’s terrifying architectural spaces as a “city-built-upon-its-past-incarnations.” Such a city is “terrifying” as though each city-dweller, were doomed to imprisonment and isolation from the outside world and from each other, while one’s memories and experiences are layered and overlapped with others’ and eventually buried underground. In this paper, I address how XiXi, with her gift as an architect in literature through her lifetime career as a writer, reimagines space and structure in resistance to Hong Kong’s overwhelming verticality. The essence of her architectural poetics should be elaborated in terms of opening up of enclosed structures, creating passageways and corridors for moving through, and, making room for translation. Three texts from her œuvre, each in a different genre, are selected for discussion: the abovementioned poem, an essay originally published in 1968 as a tribute to her diseased father, “Gǎngdǎo wú ài” 港島吾愛 [Hong Kong Island, Mon Amour], and her 2008 novel <em>Wǒ de Qiáozhìyà</em> 我的喬治亞 [My Georgian].