ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses several exemplars of spectacular writing in the form of language art. The rise of multimodality has led to an increased focus on the visual-within-the-verbal and the verbal-within-the-visual: images have gained considerable visibility in terms of their capacity to signify, as opposed to functioning as a “mere” backdrop to discursive texts. The transliteration is informed by a recombinant poetics, where the English sounds are collapsed or dismembered in the Chinese at the artist’s discretion. By producing transliterations that sit on the verge of sense and nonsense, creating slippage and transition between the visual representations of languages, or crisscrossing textual threads that belong to contrasting genres and registers, translanguaging “creates a kind of third narrative that limns the border between avant-garde literature and visual art”. A translanguaging perspective on literary art, by conjoining applied linguistics with visuality, locates the study of language use beyond the usual comfort zone of linguists and translation studies scholars.
