Companion Plant Reading: Translating Vegetal Voices

Combining Donna Haraway’s call to acknowledge non-human significant others in her Companion Species Manifesto with the ‘biocentric form of literary criticism’1 advocated by critical plant studies, this essay uses the agricultural practice of companion planting as a Framework for reading beyond the canon of anglicised world literature. I analyse three short stories – Sofie Isager Ahl’s ‘Naboplanter’ (‘Companion Plants’, 2018), Can Xue’s ‘鸡仔的心愿’ (‘Chick’s Heart’s Desire’, 2020) and Audrey R. Hollis’ ‘Seedlings’ (2018) – that translate between the botanical and the human realms and use vegetal voices to challenge gendered social conventions, linguistic preconceptions and lingering anthropo-centrism. By planting together texts in Chinese, Danish and English intermingled with the idiom of plants, I propose messy, multimodal and multilingual translation as a funda-mental figuration in our pursuit of a planetary approach to comparative literature.