Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics by Yunte Huang (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics by Yunte Huang Sara Laws Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics. By Yunte Huang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. True to the goals of the “Thinking Literature” series in which the book is published, Chinese Whispers renders the difficult phrase “transpacific poetics” into a mode of reasoning in and about the world. Yunte Huang deftly moves between poetry, cybernetics, the insurance industry, linguistics, translation, calligraphy, computer science, nationalist cultural projects, and geopolitics, revealing how all these things have to do with the “transpacific” and even with “poetics.” The power of the book is its defamiliarizing effect. In Chapters One and Five, for example, Huang highlights the “transpacific” in contemporary definitions of “information.” In Chapter Four, in the course of relaying his tribulations in translating Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, he defamiliarizes Pound for an English-reading audience. As a result, the perhaps tired subject of Pound becomes interesting again as the story of a mentally ill mortal—not the giant modernist—who, confined in a psychiatric institution, is “obsessed with Chinese,” seeking out Chinese-English “family resemblances” in his unique mode of inquiry. Because of this obsession, Pound “points us in the direction of a world literature that is inherently translational and multilingual” (80). (Similarly, Huang rightfully claims to have defamiliarized Confucius for a Chinese readership in his 1990s translations of The Pisan Cantos.) These moments of brilliance are constellated throughout Chinese Whispers. Spaces between chapters feel like breaks in a series of excellent lectures, even if, like hearing a good lecture, the dazzle of a given chapter may leave some readers desirous of more precise conclusions. The book may not be ideal for an undergraduate audience, though I would recommend its inclusion in graduate seminars. Huang’s earlier work, notably his reevaluation of Moby-Dick in a Pacific context, made a huge impression by showing the innovative potentials of transpacific literary criticism. Since then transpacific studies has grown through the work of scholars drawn from various subfields. Chinese Whispers is a necessary addition to the field not because it corrects scholarly misinterpretations (even though Chapter Five does argue that “we have failed to see what is really at stake in Ernest Fenollosa’s seminal essay [‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’]” [116]) nor because the book reckons with American literary giants. Its contribution to the field of transpacific literary criticism is to show how integral the transpacific is—in the work of American poets like Wallace Stevens; in the life of esteemed scholars like Huang himself; and also, surprisingly, in the logics of the insurance industry. In Cold War America, the children’s game of Telephone was named “Chinese Whispers” because Chineseness at the time stood in for the untrust-worthy, the slippery, the nonfactual or untruthful. The nature of this game thematically unifies the book’s five chapters and a coda, which together champion the “whispers”—for instance, the way that language, information, and communication is transformed through engagement with the Other. The book demonstrates how “poetry imbricates with national language, intangible [End Page 258] economy, translation, risk management, digital technology, and political propaganda” (12). Throughout the chapters, key ideas are bolstered by anecdotes from Huang’s own life and experience and by accessible, precise syntheses of theorists, from Walter Benjamin to Chao Yuen Ruen, the founder of Chinese linguistics. Huang’s chapters have to do with his own interests and translational work; with avantgarde poets and poetics; with interlanguages; and with two major cultures (Chinese and Anglo-American) as they struggled to modernize in the uncertain twentieth century. In Chapter One, the idea of a “translocal dialect,” seen in Lin Yutang’s “Chinglish,” is the answer to the misguided dream of a universal language, which drove New Critics to fashion the program called Basic English. Huang argues that, rather than asserting the control, purification, and universality valued by this program, pidgin English is a critique of English from within. Of especial interest here is the fascinating (if flawed) Bentham-inspired, pan-optical methodology behind Basic English. Chapter Two, “less an essay than a meditation,” takes up the idea of “vernacular imagination,” which for Huang...