Even outside its opposition to hegemony, part of the radical generative potential of multilingual expression lies in its capacity to create novel linguistic meetings between text and reader, situating linguistic asymmetries beyond just coloniser-colonised relations. At each juncture, varying from reader to reader, there are generative crossings of partial language understandings that reveal the relationality and situatedness of language. The non-normative aesthetic value in ‘deep’ multilingualism comes partly from its expansion of metaphoric possibility, especially for other plurilingual readers. Wen-Chin Ouyang and Jane Hiddleston highlight how multilingual encounters can be ‘subversively reconfigured to involve a form of co-creation based at once on partial understanding and on [our] own creative imagination’, drawing attention to how in contrast to notions of national or purist understandings of language, often language is not a full, nor a nationally bounded experience. (6) I demonstrate in the following what they describe as the encounters of partial languages, understanding Yu’s own mix of linguistic codes with my own limited knowledge of diasporic Cantonese, which draws my attention to certain elements over others. In ‘Conversations with computer’, Yu’s diction evokes layers of meaning through extended webs of signification:

i feel the night outside
never ever seeking to befriend me in the least
scratching my roof of head with branches of paranoia
and the lamp
of the slenderest body
that forever waits to serve (35)

Yu paints the loneliness and desperation of fruitless writing through the phrase ‘scratching my roof of head with branches of paranoia’, gesturing to multilingual expression through its non-normative syntax. At a surface English-only read, the idiom ‘a roof over my head’ comes to mind, referring to shelter, further supported by the ‘night outside’ with ‘branches’ scratching the roof. This imagery sketches out themes of the financial consequences of working as a poet in an unforgiving industry.

If we interrogate signs further by extending into plurilingual polysemy, we find an additional layer of signification concurrent with the English meanings. In this passage, we find hints pointing to a parallel metaphoric construction. Yu’s use of ‘roof of head’ suggests the character 頂, which refers to the top of something, specifically used for the crown of the head, and forms a part of the word for roof, 屋頂. The radicals in 頂 are 丁 and 頁, the former meaning a ‘male worker or servant’, and the latter etymologically related to ‘head’, but now commonly referring to ‘page’, or ‘sheet of paper’.¹ Yu’s last three lines in the passage reinforces this reading: 丁 is the phonetic radical in lamp in simplified Chinese (灯), and the combination of its logographic shape and meaning as ‘servant’ is reinforced by his reference to the ‘slender body’ that ‘waits to serve’. Hidden in the English but revealed through the Chinese is the additional meaning of ‘page’ in 頁, perhaps assigning the master to the servant. Whilst the English metaphor describes the economic stress of the literary industry, the Chinese metaphor gestures to Yu’s subservience to his writing as he labours, ‘terminally poetic’. These intertwining readings of cross-cultural expression demonstrate the aesthetic possibility in multilingual counter-aesthetics, developing a palimpsest of metaphor that is dynamic in its co-creation through varying linguistic meetings.

Similarly, Yu asserts the potency of a ‘deep’ multilingual soundscape in which Mandarin and English blend to create aural effect. His poetry insists upon a combination of language that resists discrete notions of language and linguistic difference. As a key example, in the poem ‘Reading poets’, Yu writes on the influence of different ‘national’ literary traditions: his first section is about Chinese poets, consisting of lines of romanised classical Chinese poetry and his own accompanying translations. As Yu explains of the Chinese poets, ‘somehow they are all sad / tens of thousands of years sad’, this point enunciated with the sibilant aurality of the following line and translation:

/t͡ɕ/ianbuduan lihuanluan /ʂʐ̩/ili/ ʈ͡ʂʰ/ou bie/ʂʐ̩/i yifan /t͡s/iwei /t͡s/ai/ɕ/intou
the entanglement of /s/adness cannot be cut loo/s/e with /s/i/s/or/s/ and refu/z/e/s/ to be /s/orted out (118, own identification of sibilants with IPA symbols)

Using romanised Mandarin emphasises the aural qualities of the lines, and interspersion with English translations allows their soundscapes to blend; the sibilance across languages creates a soft soundscape of melancholy stillness, even using the word ‘sad’ itself seven times in the section (118). Yu demonstrates that even for a monolingual audience, languages presented in combination emphasise the affects of blurring soundscape, highlighting the cross-fertilisation of poetic effect. Yu emphasises that language, in literary expression, should not exist as discrete hierarchical categories that represent nations, but rather as a relational web of images, soundscapes, and experiences that reflect the plurilingual nature of our own lives.

Terminally Poetic, in its hard to stomach imagery and its challenging expression, criticises Australia’s aesthetic hierarchy, interrogating its Anglocentric and monolingual prestige. Through asserting an alternative aesthetics that centres ugliness and vulgarity, Yu’s poetry confronts the literary market, destabilising hierarchies of language and desirability. He undermines canonical prestige, drawing attention to how aesthetics is entrenched in racially charged asymmetries. His linguistic play further challenges the bounds of Australian literary expression, highlighting the limitations of normative English, and asserting the latent potential of breaking beyond Australia’s monolingual condition. Yu’s unsettling collection offers a glimpse into the rich alternative deployments possible in leaving behind Anglophone norms, destabilising its arbitrary prestige, and leaving us wondering what possibilities a plurilingual Australian literature and literary market might engender.