fringe poetry, but not prose 231epilogue entitled «Last Book» (ो) containing “no main text” out-
side «Appendix One: File Production and Storage» (ḷḜࠊϢᄬ
ᬒ). The text totals over 5000 words in translation. For «Salute», I will
illustrate large parts of the discussion with examples taken from «The
Monster», cited in full in chapter Five. For «File 0», I will do so with
reference to a representative excerpt from «History of Growing Up»,
cited overleaf. To conclude my argument, I will return to both texts in
their entirety. A full English translation of «Salute» is found in Rendi-
tions 51 (1999); one of «File 0», in Renditions 56 (2001).
Look and Sound«Salute» has no line breaks, but when it appeared in Flower City the
editors or the typesetters must have viewed line length as an essential
feature of the text, which suggests that they went some way toward
classifying «Salute» as poetry “proper.” They strictly adhered to the
number of characters per line in the text’s first, unofficial publication,
and they made sure that most lines did cover the width of the page.
If the absence of lineation adds to the prosaic qualities of «Salute»,
its visually poetic status emerges in the stylized alternation of long
and short paragraphs, or stanzas. In its regular alternation of long
and short, «The Monster» exemplifies patterns that are discernible
throughout the series, although they are not equally obvious in each of
its constituent parts.
«File 0» does have line breaks, but its lines tend not to be “broken”
until considerable time has passed. This makes one feel that the line,
paradoxically, wants to continue but cannot bear the prospect of being
cast in the typesetter’s mold. In this sense, translation into alphabetic
script does more justice to the spirit of the text than the original. Be-
cause alphabetic writing takes more space than Chinese characters,
if the visual integrity of «File 0» is to be respected, the translation has
to be in landscape format, drawing extra attention to the text’s width.
This is precisely how Renditions has consistently printed translations of
Yu Jian’s poetry. Regrettably, in this chapter and the next, I must oc-
casionally resort to indentation to show that the line is longer than will
fit on these pages—even if I use smaller type, following the example
of the 2004 Collected Works of Yu Jian (Ѣമ䲚). Something else that
will likely catch the reader’s eye is that «File 0» is punctuated not by
conventional marks such as commas and full stops, but by blanks the