Samuel Beckett’s bilingual oeuvre provides a fertile ground for examining the role of translingualism in literary creation, particularly through the practice of self-translation. Translingualism refers to the phenomenon of authors who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one, as first defined by Steven G. Kellman in his seminal and controversial work The Translingual Imagination (2000), and later expanded upon by other scholars to encompass broader dimensions of cultural and linguistic hybridity in literary practices. Beckett's deliberate choice to write across languages, particularly in English and French, transcends mere linguistic dexterity; it embodies a conscious artistic pursuit of a ‘third way’ that challenges traditional monolingual frameworks and modernist linguistic innovations.

Beckett’s transition to writing in French in the 1940s was initially perceived as an attempt to escape the stylistic constraints of English. Beckett famously chose French in order to “write without style,” believing that the constraints and unfamiliarity of French allowed him to strip language to its essentials. Paradoxically, this shift to French enabled him to return to English with a renewed sense of simplicity and detachment. Beckett even confessed that English had become foreign to him due to his immersion in French (Charles Juliet, 1986). His linguistic oscillation exemplifies the notions of ‘decentredness’ and ‘decentred recentredness’ (Kim, 2024). Beckett's translingual approach reflects David Bellos’s provocative question, “Is your native language really yours?” Beckett’s answer, embedded in his works, suggests, beyond George Steiner’s concept of ‘unhousedness’ (1971), a deliberate linguistic homelessness that paradoxically facilitates the construction of new literary homes across languages.

This paper explores Beckett's translingualism as both a framework for creating bilingual works, focusing on how it interweaves questions of ethics, space, and style in his creative process. By writing and self-translating, Beckett transcended linguistic limits and explored the aesthetic potential of dialogic interaction and constant shifting between languages. By situating Beckett’s translingual creative process as a precursor to contemporary writing practices, including the works of multilingual writers like Jhumpa Lahiri or Kazuo Ishiguro, this paper highlights how his approach challenges traditional linguistic boundaries and offers foundational insight into the complexities of language and creativity.

The proposed paper will examine the poetry of Cathy Park Hong and the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha to uncover how their works rely on technological motifs to address the difficulty inherent in the communicability of their respective experiences as Korean-American immigrants. The works of both poets employ stutters, fragmentation, silences, and erasures to reflect upon the untranslatable and unbridgeable gaps in experience and the inadequacy of available communicative modes to inscribe and convey their individual and collective experience of exile, diasporic travel and assimilation. While Cha’s works employ technological apparatus in various forms (photographs, videos, and art installations) to contemplate upon the themes of immigrant assimilation, untranslatability, and the history of the Korean-Japanese conflict, Hong’s works employ futuristic and fictive scientific images to ponder upon similar questions of exile, linguistic colonialism, and the violent histories that circumscribe Korean-American immigrant experience. The proposed paper is specifically invested in examining how the works of both poets in their unique ways emphasize on the performative and embodied aspects of their subject matter, and in doing so present a poetic performance that resists easy subsumption into algorithmic pattern-seeking or text mining.

Levy Hideo’s short story “Mihosō no Mama” (Left Unpaved, 2016) opens with a vivid description of the author-narrator’s room in his Tokyo home, in which the pattern of bamboo shadows falling upon a shoji sliding frame is described as being “different and yet the same, the same and yet different” to that he saw half a century prior, in the Japanese-style house in Taiwan which he lived in as a young boy. This comparison, or transposition, of a typically Japanese aesthetic, perceived in two distinct places and times, insofar as it functions as a definition of translation itself, implies that a metaphor of translation might be useful in making sense of the legacy of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, and by extension colonialism in general.

In this paper, I will consider the scope of this translational metaphor as it functions within this specific short story, while also referring to other writings by Levy which support such a reading. Such consideration is complicated by the fact that Levy is an American-born exophonic writer of Japanese, who acquired the language midway through life, and whose writing itself thus, arguably, inherently contains an element of translation. Whether or not this is the case, Levy’s writing is characterized by an awareness of (un)translatability from Japanese into his mother tongue of English, something that can even be observed in the above quote, pivoting on the conjunction “no ni”, which only roughly translates into English as “even though”, or “and yet”. Therefore, this paper will also consider the question of Levy’s writing style in relation to the dynamics of translation between Japanese and English, to provide further context on the viability of conceiving colonialism through a metaphor of translation.