fringe poetry, but not prose 237to parenthood to political rights. A time- and place-bound reading,
then, could bring to mind Kafkaesque traits of life during the Cultural
Revolution, when banal information on the most minute and private
of one’s daily movements could mean the difference between life and
death—and found its way into personal files. But the interpretation of
«File 0» doesn’t hinge on recent Chinese history, for the power of files
is of all times and places. Systematicity is the enemy of individual style:
files can maim the people whose lives they write up and reduce them
to numbers, and a meticulous record of one’s activities, including the
less glamorous, will find every human being vulnerable.
No less important, «File 0» addresses issues such as the incompat-
ibility of public and private discourse, and the capacity of language to
shape “reality” and not to serve it or document it: of the file to write
the life, as it were, not the other way around.^14 The concrete workings
of language—or, people’s illusions of having control over language—
are equally part of its subject matter, as the above enumeration of
linguistic terminology shows. With regard to the many challenges that
«File 0» presents to the translator, I decided on the literal rendering
of 䆡ࡼ ‘verbs’ and ৡ䆡 ‘nouns’ as words-that-move and words-that-name
after realizing how important these categories are, and how literally
they operate, in the original and in Yu Jian’s oeuvre at large.^15
I have tacitly passed over the question whether «File 0» should be in-
terpreted at all, which is of special interest in light of Yu Jian’s avowed
aversion to metaphor and symbolism and the presentation of his own
writing as what-you-see-is-what-you-get, to which we will return in
chapters Seven and Eleven. If more than the above remarks is needed
to justify interpreting «File 0», we should remember that in the last
analysis, it is the reader not the author who decides what is metaphor
and what isn’t. Moreover, throughout the text, defamiliarization on
every level suggests that this text “says not what it says,” in the words
of Martinus Nijhoff,^16 and that it actively engages in dissimulation—
again, to be more exact, that it can be seen to do so by the reader.
If presented as a literary text, the driest institutional language cries
out for deconstruction: to be read, for instance, as an indictment of
(^14) Cf He Yi 1994.
(^15) See Van Crevel 2001.
(^16) Nijhoff 1978: 216. My translation is motivated by the wish to retain the exact
duplication of staat in the original (er staat niet wat er staat), for the crux of the matter is
that Nijhoff’s words apply to themselves as much as to other poetry.