Bearly Itch
熊译之痒
Poetry-Translation Apparatus (fault in progress during the war)
Chapbook, A5, 36pp., 2025
Bearly Itch moves along the edges of translation, where Asian bodies are repeatedly misread and language slips, stalls, or fails to transmit. Drawing on my grandfather’s work as a telegraph specialist in Hanoi, the project folds telegraphic syntax into bodily experience. In Bath Notes (COPY.CAT), phrases such as “touch.flow=good.hard” simultaneously conceal and disclose, while equations including “China=Holland” and “China=Failed Child+Love” register identity as something never fully delivered, persisting instead as malfunction.
The Vanishing Point opens with the question, “Where is my orgasm?” and approaches absence as a structural condition. My mother’s cancer, diagnosed when I was twenty, became entangled with the gradual loss of my mother tongue—illness and language receding in parallel. Translation appears here as a contrapuntal relation: never arriving, yet continuing.
“It was hardly war, the hardliest of wars. Hardly, hardly.” The oscillation between barely and bearly runs throughout the work, where expression remains both impossible and unavoidable. The “itch” is not a strategy of obscurity, but a worn and sensitive condition of language and body—close to the skin, persisting across time.
Come! Rejoice! Time spills over without end!
《熊译之痒》沿着翻译的边缘展开。在这里，亚洲身体不断被误读，语言滑落、卡顿，或无法完成传输。项目取材于祖父在河内从事电报工作的经历，将电报式语法折入身体经验。《澡堂笔记（山寨版）》中的“touch.flow=good.hard”同时遮蔽与显露；“中国＝荷兰”“中国＝失败的孩子＋爱”等方程式，则将身份呈现为某种始终无法完整送达、只能以故障状态持续存在的事物。
《消失点》以“我的高潮在哪里？”开场，并将缺席作为一种结构性条件展开。二十岁时母亲罹患癌症的经历，与母语逐渐流失的过程彼此纠缠——疾病与语言并行退却。翻译在这里成为一种对位关系：始终无法抵达，却仍不断继续。
“这几乎算不上战争，最几乎的一场战争。几乎地，几乎地。”barely 与 bearly 之间的摆动贯穿全书，表达既不可能完成，又无法停止。这种“痒”并不以晦涩为目的，而是一种磨损而敏感的语言与身体状态——贴近皮肤，并在时间中持续存在。
来吧！快活吧！时间无尽地溢出！
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