Rewriting English from the Margins: Marilyn Chin’s Translingual Poetics

Marilyn Chin’s poetic corpus, this article argues, embodies a systematic translingual poetics—a sustained project of rewriting the English language and reconfiguring the American poetic tradition from its sociocultural margins. Moving beyond existing studies of her bilingual techniques and cultural hybridity, this analysis situates Chin within the broader conversation on translingual poetics that has taken shape in literary studies over the past decade, drawing on the foundational work of Steven G. Kellman, Suresh Canagarajah, and Bruce Horner et al., as well as more recent scholarship by Sarah Dowling and Eugene Ostashevsky. Translingualism, understood here as a disposition of openness and inquiry toward language difference, recognizes all language as fluid, emergent, and contested, and provides the essential lens for examining Chin’s practice. Focusing on her three core poetry collections—Dwarf Bamboo (1987), The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (1994), and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2002)—the study traces the evolution of her translingual strategies across three dimensions: the rewriting of literary authority through parody and slanted allusion; the transplantation and subversion of classical Chinese forms; and the material inscription of Chinese characters and pinyin as acts of memorial and resistance. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory and King-Kok Cheung’s bilingual poetics, the analysis shows how Chin’s translingualism unsettles the dominance of Standard English, challenges Orientalist and patriarchal appropriations of Chinese heritage, and forges a new, margin-centric poetic language. Chin’s practice, it is argued, can be read as translingualism as method: not merely depicting hybrid identity but actively rewriting the norms of American poetry, thereby offering a concrete case study for reimagining American Studies in a multilingual landscape.