Transpacific Poetics: Ideographic and Prosodic Transpositions in Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” and Marilyn Chin’s “Summer Sleep”.

Through intercultural poetics, the speakers in “Persimmons” and “Summer Sleep” chart their journeys from “foreign” pupils disciplined by English authorities to bilingual wordsmiths. Lee’s speaker, punished by a schoolmarm for his inability to differentiate between English words that look alike, late...

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Published in:University of Toronto Quarterly Vol. 88; no. 2; pp. 246 - 263
Main Authors: KING-KOK CHEUNG, QINGHUA HUANG
Format: Article
Published: University of Toronto Press spring2019
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Transpacific Poetics: Ideographic and Prosodic Transpositions in Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” and Marilyn Chin’s “Summer Sleep”.
      aug:
        au:
          KING-KOK CHEUNG
          QINGHUA HUANG
        affil:
          Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles.
          Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University.
      su:
        Poetry (Literary form)
        Linguistics
        Chinese poetry
        Comparative studies
        English language
      sug:
        subj:
          Poetry (Literary form)
          Linguistics
          Chinese poetry
          Comparative studies
          English language
      keyword:
        “Persimmons,”
        “Summer Sleep,”
        Chinese American poetry
        Li-Young Lee
        Marilyn Chin
      ab: Through intercultural poetics, the speakers in “Persimmons” and “Summer Sleep” chart their journeys from “foreign” pupils disciplined by English authorities to bilingual wordsmiths. Lee’s speaker, punished by a schoolmarm for his inability to differentiate between English words that look alike, later uses Chinese sight rhyme in English to replicate the semantic use of ideographic “radicals” in Chinese poetry. Chin’s speaker, scorned by her mentor for being “mediocre,” grows up to become a sought-after instructor versed in prosodic sleight of hand. Both Lee and Chin address the loss of ethnic heritage and reclaim their inheritance by literary cross-pollination. Where Lee attempts to align the two dominant cultural traditions, Chin subverts both. This article demonstrates how transpacific literary exchanges can be advanced by different strategies that also require attendant linguistic knowledge and comparative analysis on the part of the critics.
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    language: English
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