Steven G. Kellman (Ed.), Natasha Lvovich (Ed.) - The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism (2022, Routledge) (10.4324 - Â 9780429298745) - Libgen - Li

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF
LITERARY TRANSLINGUALISM
Though it might seem as modern as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov, translingual
writing –texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one –has an
ancient pedigree. The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism aims to provide a comprehensive overview
of translingual literature in a wide variety of languages throughout the world, from ancient to modern times.
The volume includes sections on:
• translingual genres –with chapters on memoir, poetry, fiction, drama, and cinema
• ancient, medieval, and modern translingualism
• global perspectives –chapters overseeing European, African, and Asian languages.
Combining chapters from lead specialists in the field, this volume will be of interest to scholars, graduate students,
and advanced undergraduates interested in investigating the vibrant area of translingual literature. Attracting
scholars from a variety of disciplines, this interdisciplinary and pioneering Handbook will advance current schol-
arship of the permutations of languages among authors throughout time.
Steven G. Kellman is a widely published critic and essayist, and a professor of comparative literature at the
University of Texas at San Antonio. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he served four terms on the
board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and received its coveted Nona Balakian Citation for
Excellence in Reviewing. His books include The Self-Begetting Novel; The Plague: Fiction and Resistance; The
Translingual Imagination; Redemption:The Life of Henry Roth; The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside; Nimble
Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism; and Rambling Prose: Essays.
Natasha Lvovich is a writer and scholar of multilingualism and of translingual literature. She is Professor of
English at the City University of New York, Kingsborough Community College, and a founder and editor-in-
chief of the international Journal of Literary Multilingualism (forthcoming in 2022). Among her publications is a
book of autobiographical narratives, The Multilingual Self (Routledge), followed by numerous essays, articles, and
creative works. Lvovich has organized panels at international conferences, guest-edited academic journals (with
Steven G. Kellman), and lectured on the topic internationally (École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France).
ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE HANDBOOKS
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For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Literature-

Handbooks/book-series/RLHB
THE ROUTLEDGE
HANDBOOK OF LITERARY
TRANSLINGUALISM
Edited by Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich

First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich to be identified as the authors of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-27918-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-07715-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-29874-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
The cover design was adapted from The Nature of Language, a mural installed at the James B. Hunt Jr. Library at
North Carolina State University. The bilingual artist, José Parlá, was born in Miami to immigrants from Cuba.
Based in New York, he has exhibited in Beijing, Copenhagen, Havana, London, Paris, Tokyo, and other cities.
About The Nature of Language, Parlá explained: “I found inspiration in the essence of words and their
combined power, however abstract, within a landscape of gestural forms and characters that serve as
carriers of meaning.”
CONTENTS
List of Contributors ix
Preface xvii
I
Translingual Genres 1
1 Translingual Memoir 3
Mary Besemeres
2 Translingualism and Poetry 18

Alice Loda and Antonio Viselli
3 Literary Translingualism and Fiction 31

Fiona Doloughan
II
Ancient Literary Translingualism 43
4 Literary Translingualism in the Greek and Roman Worlds 45

Eleni Bozia and Alex Mullen
5 Literary Translingual Practices in the Persianate World: Past and Present 60

Alaaeldin Mahmoud
6 The Curious Case of Sanskrit Literary Translingualism 71

Deven M. Patel
v
Contents
III
Post-Classical Literary Translingualism 83
7 Translingualism in Medieval Jewish Culture 85

Ross Brann
8 Literary Translingualism and Neo-Latin: The Case of Latin America 97

Leni Ribeiro Leite
IV
Universal Literary Translingualism 111
9 Literary Translingualism in Esperanto 113

Sabine Fiedler
V
Literary Translingualism in European Languages 127
10 English-French Translingualism across the Centuries 129

Sara Kippur
11 French in the World: Francophone Literary Translingualism 140

Thérèse Migraine-George
12 Literary Translingualism within the Italian Context: Toward New Debates

on the Italian Language 152
Mariagrazia De Luca
13 Nordic Literary Translingualism 165

Julie Hansen and Helena Bodin
14 German-English Literary Translingualism 177

Sandra Vlasta
15 From German into Russian and Back: Russian-German Translingual Literature 188
Miriam Finkelstein
16 Russian-English Literary Translingualism: Switching from Cyrillic to

Roman across the Atlantic 200
Adrian Wanner
17 Translingualism in Polish Literary Context 211

Elwira M. Grossman and Aneta Stępień
18 Literary Translingualism in the Balkans: The Post-Yugoslav Case 227

Una Tanović and Ulvija Tanović
vi
Contents
VI
Literary Translingualism in Africa 241
19 Literary Translingualism in a Multilingual Society: South Africa’s

Publishing Landscape 243
Jana Klingenberg
VII
Literary Translingualism in Middle-Eastern Languages 257
20 Arabic Literary Translingualism 259

Paul Starkey
21 Hebrew Literature as Translingual Literature from its Origins to its Present 272
Melissa Weininger
VIII
Literary Translingualism in Asian Languages 285
22 Chinese Translingual Writing: In and Out 287

Elaine Wong
23 Literary Translingualism in Hindi and Urdu 301

Walter N. Hakala
24 Bengali Literary Translingualism 316

Kaiser Haq
25 Literary Translingualism and the Politics of a National Language:

Hispanofilipino Literature in a Multilingual Philippines 327
Marlon James Sales
26 Translingual/Transnational Writers of Japan 340

Reiko Tachibana
IX
Literary Translingualism in Latin America 353
27 The Amerindian and European Switch: Translingual Writing and

Latin American Literature 355
Roberto Ignacio Díaz
vii
Contents
X
Issues in Literary Translingualism 367
28 Self-Translation 369
Eva Gentes and Trish Van Bolderen
29 Metaphors of Literary Translingualism 382

Rainer Guldin
Index 393
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
Mary Besemeres is an honorary lecturer in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at
the Australian National University. She is the author of Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood
in Cross-Cultural Autobiography (2002), refereed articles and book chapters on translingual and cross-
cultural memoir, and co-editor with Anna Wierzbicka of Translating Lives: Living with Two Languages
and Cultures (2007). She was founding co-editor of the Routledge journal Life Writing and serves on
its editorial board.
Helena Bodin is Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm
University. Her research concerns the functions of literature at the boundaries between languages,
nations, arts, and media. In particular, she has studied modern literature’s engagement with the
Byzantine Orthodox Christian tradition. Bodin currently works on issues of literary multilingualism
and multiscriptalism within the research program “World Literatures—Cosmopolitan and Vernacular
Dynamics” (2016–2021) at Stockholm University (worldlit.se). Her most recent publications include
“ ‘So Let Me Remain a Stranger’: Multilingualism and Biscriptalism in the Works of Finland-Swedish
Writer Tito Colliander” in The Aesthetics and Politics of Linguistic Borders: Multilingualism in Northern
European Literature, edited by Heidi Grönstrand, Markus Huss, and Ralf Kauranen (Routledge, 2020),
and “ ‘The Clamour of Babel in All the Tongues of the Levant’: Multivernacular and Multiscriptal
Constantinople around 1900 as a Literary World,” Textual Practice 2020, 34, no. 5.
Eleni Bozia is Associate Professor of Classics and Digital Humanities at the University of Florida
and holds two doctoral degrees: a PhD in Classics Studies and a DrPhil in Digital Humanities.
She serves as Associate Director of the Center for Greek Studies and of the Digital Epigraphy and
Archaeology Project. Her research interests include Imperial Greek and Latin literature, identity, and
bilingualism in the Roman Empire, and digital humanities. She is the author of the book Lucian
and his Roman Voices: Cultural Exchanges and Conflicts in the Late Roman Empire (Routledge, 2015).
Her second monograph focuses on language and culture acquisition and their effects on the con-
struction of identity. In the field of digital humanities, Bozia works on digital preservation of artifacts
and natural language processing and promotes the bidirectional relationship between humanities and
sciences.
Ross Brann studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem,
New York University, and the American University in Cairo. He has taught at Cornell since 1986
ix
List of Contributors
and served twenty years as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Brann is the author
and editor of books and essays on the intersection of medieval Jewish and Islamic cultures, including
The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (1991), Power in the
Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Eleventh-and Twelfth Century Islamic Spain (2002), and
Iberian Moorings: Al-Andalus and Sefarad and the Tropes of Exceptionalism (2021). He is currently working
on Maimonides: A Very Short Introduction.
Mariagrazia De Luca is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a
“laurea magistrale” (MA) in Italian and Comparative Literature from La Sapienza in Rome and an
M.A. in English Literature from the City College of New York, CUNY. Her research focuses on
translingual and multilingual writers within various Italian contexts. In 2010, she was a contributing
writer for Breviario per conoscere la letteratura italiana della migrazione [Brevary to Know Italian Literature
of Migration], edited by Armando Gnisci and Nora Moll. In 2019, she was awarded the Charles
Hall Grandgent Award from the Dante Society of America for her essay, “From Forced Readers to
Freedom Writers: Responding to Dante in Postcolonial Somalia.” In spring 2021, she began her
fellowship at the UC Berkeley Language Center, where she is designing a pedagogical program
geared towards teaching Italian through the lens of multiculturalism.
Roberto Ignacio Díaz is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the
University of Southern California, where he teaches and writes on Latin American cultural and lit-
erary history with a focus on transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is
the author of Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature (2002) and several art-
icles on the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, the correspondence of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez
Feo, and the baroque in Guillermo Cabrera Infante. He is presently at work on a monograph about
the historical and textual convergences of Latin America and opera.
Fiona Doloughan is Senior Lecturer in English (Literature and Creative Writing) at the Open
University, UK. She is author of two monographs, Contemporary Narrative: Textual Production,
Multimodality and Multiliteracies (2011) and English as a Literature in Translation (2016), and a number of
articles and book chapters on narrative fiction and the evolution of the novel form. She is currently
working on her third monograph on auto/biography, memoir, and autofiction.
Sabine Fiedler is a professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig (Germany). She studied
English and Russian and holds a PhD in English linguistics and a second degree (Habilitation)
in general linguistics from the University of Leipzig. Her research topics include phraseology,
interlinguistics (the study of planned languages), lingua franca communication, translation,
Anglicisms, humor studies and comics. She has worked as a task leader responsible for linguae
francae within the project “Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe” (2014–2018) which
received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program. This research
included studies of the language choices and practices of migrants, Erasmus+ exchange students,
and the use of Esperanto as a lingua franca.
Miriam Finkelstein is an assistant professor of Russian literature in the Institute of Slavic Studies at
the University of Graz, Austria. Her main research areas are contemporary Russian and Russophone
poetry, Russian- Jewish literature, Russian- American and Russian- German literature, exile and
migration. She is the author of Im Namen der Schwester. Studien zur Rezeption der Regentin Sof’ja
Alekseevna bei Katharina der Großen, Evdokija Rostpočina und Marina Cvetaeva (2011) and co-editor of
the volumes Slavische Literaturen als Weltliteratur. Hybride Konstellationen (2018; with Diana Hitzke) and
Opfernarrative in transnationalen Kontexten (2020; with Eva Binder et al.). Currently she is writing her
x
second book The Migrant Remembers Back. Memory and History Narratives in Contemporary Literature on
Russian Migrants.
Eva Gentes studied self-translation as product and process in contemporary literature in her doctoral
thesis (2017). She is the editor of the bibliography on self-translation and writes a blog on the same
subject. She has published articles on various aspects of literary self-translation and has lately focused
on self-translation in minority language contexts.
Elwira M. Grossman is the Comparative Literature programme director and Stepek Lecturer in
Polish and Comparative Literature in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University
of Glasgow, UK. She is editor of Studies in Language, Literature and Cultural Mythology in Poland.
Investigating “The Other” (2002). Between 2012 and 2016 she was a critical friend in an AHRC-
funded international project Researching Multilingually and co-designed a MOOC course Multilingual
Learning for a Globalised World. Her relevant articles include “Transnational or Bi-cultural? Challenges
in Reading post-1989 Drama ‘Written Outside the Nation’ ” (in Polish Literature in Transformation,
edited by Ursula Phillips et al., 2013) and “Bi (Multi) Lingual Theatre in the Globalized British
Context” (2016/2018) in Teksty Drugie. She is a co-applicant on the Royal Society of Edinburgh
project (2020–2022) devoted to current academic research in Migration Studies and its relevance for
Scottish school curricula.
Rainer Guldin is a lecturer in German Culture and Language at the Faculties of Communication
Sciences and Economics of the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (Switzerland). He is
Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed open access e-journal Flusser Studies (www.flusserstudies.net/).
His main areas of research are metaphor theory, translation and self-translation, multilingual literature.
Recent publications include Metaphors of Multilingualism. Changing Attitudes towards Language Diversity
in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy (2020); Translation as Metaphor (2016); “(Re)Translating Space
into Time: Temporal Metaphors in Translation Studies,” in Translation and Time. Migration, Culture,
and Identity, edited by James St. André (2020: 12–26); “From Threshold to Threshold: Translation as
a Liminal Activity,” in Journal of Translation Studies 3(2) (2020, New Series): 5–25, “Metaphorics,” in
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (Routledge,
2019: 324–329).
Walter N. Hakala is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Asian Studies Program
at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the
Definition of South Asia (2016, 2017) and has published articles on coffee in 18th-century Delhi, lan-
guage in Afghanistan, and South Asian lexicography. His current project is a survey of Urdu epigraphy.
Julie Hansen is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at the Department of Modern Languages at
Uppsala University. She is a specialist in Slavic literatures (Czech and Russian) and comparative lit-
erature. Her research interests include memory studies, multilingual literature, and translation theory
and practice. In addition to numerous articles on literary multilingualism and translation, she is (co-)
editor of the volume Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature (2013) and the special issues
“Contexts of Russian Literary Translation” (Translation and Interpreting Studies, 2016), “Translingualism
and Transculturality in Russian Contexts of Translation” (Translation Studies, 2018) and “The Theory
Deficit in Translingual Studies” (Journal of World Literature, 2018).
Kaiser Haq studied at Dhaka University before taking his PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar
at Warwick University. He was a senior Fulbright Scholar and Vilas Fellow at the University of
Wisconsin–
Milwaukee, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at SOAS. Haq retired from Dhaka
xi
University, and is currently Professor of English, University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. A recipient
of the Bangla Academy Prize, the Sherwin W. Howard Award for Poetry, and the Distinguished
Achievement Award for Creative Writing (South Asian Literary Association), his books include eight
poetry collections, most recently Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems and Pariah and Other
Poems; six translated volumes: Selected Poems of Shamsur Rahman (Pathak Shamabesh); Quartet; The
Wonders of Vilayet; The Perfect Model and Other Stories; The Woman Who Flew (Penguin); The Triumph of
the Snake Goddess; Selected Poems of Shaheed Quaderi; and as editor: Contemporary Indian Poetry, “Padma
Meghna Jamuna: Modern Poetry from Bangladesh”.
Sara Kippur is Associate Professor of French at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, where she also
serves as Chair of the Department of Language and Culture Studies. Her research is at the intersec-
tion of 20th–21st century French and Francophone literature, translation studies, cultural studies, and
book history. She has published a scholarly monograph on modern and contemporary self-translators,
titled Writing It Twice: Self-translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (2015), and she is
co-editor of the volume Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture, and Politics Today (2016), which
examines current, pressing issues in the field of French Studies. Her articles have appeared in journals
including PMLA, Yale French Studies, L’Esprit Créateur, and a/b Auto/biography Studies, and she is cur-
rently writing a new book tentatively titled Transatlantic Pacts: America and the Production of Postwar
French Literature.
Jana Klingenberg is a lecturer at the University of Pretoria, involved in the publishing studies
program at the Department of Information Science. She completed her master’s in Information
Science with specialization in Publishing at the University of Pretoria in 2015 with the title
“Multilingual Publishing: An Investigation into Access to Trade Books through the Eleven Official
Languages in South Africa.” She is currently working on her doctorate at the University of Pretoria,
with her thesis focusing on publisher histories (specifically Human and Rousseau and Tafelberg
Uitgewers) and their changing cultural impact.
Alice Loda is Lecturer in International Studies and Global Societies at the University of Technology
Sydney (Australia). She holds a PhD from the University of Sydney and a MA and a BA from the
University of Pavia (Italy). Her research interests include translingualism, modern and contemporary
poetry, rhythm, translation, migration, and ecocriticism. Her first monograph The Translingual Verse:
Migration, Rhythm, and Resistance in Contemporary Italophone Poetry is currently in press.
Alaaeldin Mahmoud is an assistant professor of English at the American University of the Middle
East in Kuwait. Among his published, translated books (into Arabic) are Louis Couperus’s novel Eline
Vere (2015); Other Renaissances: A New Approach to World Literature (2014); and G. Belzoni’s Narrative
of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and
Nubia (2005). His current research focuses on Arab Nahḍah, modern Arab literature, travel writing,
world literature, and literary translingualisms. A recent research interest is the various ramifications of
popular culture and entertainment in the MENA region.
Thérèse Migraine-George is a professor in the Department of Romance and Arabic Languages

and Literatures at the University of Cincinnati in the US. She is the author of African Women and
Representation: From Performance to Politics (2008), From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics,
Poetics, and Politics (2013), a book of essays and two novels in French. Her research focuses on
Francophone writers, the history of Francophone literatures, African cultures and film, and queer
African studies.
xii
Alex Mullen is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham and a fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford. She has held research fellowships at the Universities of Cambridge and
Oxford. She is co-editor of Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds (2012), author of Southern
Gaul and the Mediterranean (2013), which won the American Historical Association’s James Henry
Breasted Prize, and co-author of The Language of Roman Letters: Bilingual Epistolography from Cicero to
Fronto (2019). She is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project The
Latinization of the North-western Roman Provinces: Sociolinguistics, Epigraphy and Archaeology (2017–2023).
Deven M. Patel is a Sanskrit scholar, translator, and critic. His first monograph Text to Tradition: The
Naiṣadhīyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia (2014) is a landmark study of one of Sanskrit
literature’s canonical literary works viewed through the lens of eight centuries of critical recep-
tion. He has also published on hermeneutics and translation practices, linguistics, and poetics in
ancient and medieval India. Current areas of research and translation include multilingualism in India,
modern Sanskrit literature, intersections of visual and literary culture, and the genre of anthology. He
teaches and lectures on Sanskrit and classical Indian literature, ancient epics, critical theory, philosophy,
and mythology in the Departments of South Asia Studies, Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and
Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Leni Ribeiro Leite holds a PhD in Classics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and is
Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the Federal University of Espírito Santo,
Brazil. Her main areas of research are Latin poetry of the Flavian era, epideictic poetry, and Latin in
Early Modernity, mainly in Latin America. She has published books on Latin literature of the first
and second centuries c.e., including Épica: Ovídio, Lucano, Estácio (2016) and As cartas de elogio de
Plínio o Jovem (2019) as well as articles on the reception of Latin literature in Early Modern Latin and
vernacular literatures. She is currently working on an edition and translation of Book 2 of Maffei’s
Historiarum Indicarum Libri XVI, one of the first Latin publications which tells of the arrival of the
Portuguese conquerors and the lands of Brazil for a wide European audience.
Marlon James Sales is a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the
Department of Comparative Literature of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently
researching the history of translation and multilingualism in the Spanish Philippines.
Paul Starkey is Emeritus Professor at Durham University, UK. Until his retirement, he was Professor
of Arabic, Head of the Arabic Department, and a former Director of the Institute for Middle Eastern
and Islamic Studies at Durham. A specialist in Arabic literature and culture, he is Chairman of the
Banipal Trust for Arab Literature and the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near
East, and until 2018 was Vice-President of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. With Julie
Meisami, he co-edited the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature in 1998. Professor Starkey’s translation of
The Book of the Sultan’s Seal by Youssef Rakha won the 2015 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic
Literary Translation, and his translation of The Shell by Mustafa Khalifa won a Sheikh Hamad Award
for Translation and International Understanding in 2017.
Aneta Stępień holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Surrey and a MA in
Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw. She is a tutor on the Critical Skills programme at the
National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She has taught Polish language and literature, cultures of
Central and Eastern Europe, and gender at the universities of Glasgow, Surrey, and Trinity College
Dublin. Stępień is the author of Shame, Masculinity and Desire of Belonging. Reading Contemporary Male
Authors (2017). Her recent academic publications include “From Auschwitz to Jedwabne: Holocaust
xiii
Memory in post-1989 Polish Fiction” (2019) in Holocaust Studies. A Journal of Culture and History
and “Women’s Organizations and Antisemitism: The First Parliamentary Elections in Independent
Poland” (2020) in Nationality Papers.
Reiko Tachibana is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies at the
Pennsylvania State University. She has published on Narrative as Counter-Memory: A Half-Century of
Postwar Writing in Germany and Japan (1998), and on Kenzaburo Oe, Shohei Imamura, Yoko Tawada,
and Tatsuzo Ishikawa among others.
Ulvija Tanović works as a translator and interpreter between English and Bosnian/Croatian/
Serbian. She has been translating fiction, poetry, and non-fiction for twenty years, including writings
by Aleksandar Hemon, Hamza Humo, and Dr. Seuss. She is a founding member of the Association
of Translators and Interpreters of Bosnia and Herzegovina and has mentored young translators at the
University of Sarajevo.
Una Tanović is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts

Amherst. Her current research concerns the poetics and politics of migrant epistolary networks. Her
translations of Bosnian literature have appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Freeman’s.
Trish Van Bolderen is completing a PhD in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa, where
she is researching contemporary literary self-translation practices within Canada. She has published
on this topic and Hispanic-Canadian literature, and has co-authored self-translation entries in A
Companion to Translation Studies (2014), with Rainier Grutman, and Oxford Bibliographies (“Latino
Studies”) (2018 [2015]), with Eva Gentes.
Antonio Viselli is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global, Cultural, and Language Studies
at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto,
and MAs from the University of Perpignan Via-Domitia (France), the University of Bergamo
(Italy), and St. Andrews University (Scotland). His research interests include intermediality,
nineteenth-and twentieth-century poetry, and Francophone literature. Together with Rachel
F. Stapleton he is the editor of Iconoclasm: The Breaking and Making of Images (2019).
Sandra Vlasta is a researcher at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media/
General and Comparative Literature at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where she was a
Marie-Sklodowska-Curie fellow from 2017 to 2020 (project “European Travel Writing in Context.
The Socio-Political Dimension of Travelogues 1760–1850,” https://travelwriting.uni–mainz.de). She
was a researcher at the University of Vienna (2008–2012) and at the Austrian Academy of Sciences
(2012–2014). Her current research interests include literary multilingualism, literature and migration,
and travel writing. She is co-founder of the web portal “Polyphonie. Multilingualism_Creativity_
Writing” (www.polyphonie.at). Her recent publications include: Contemporary Migration Literature in
German and English (2016); Immigrant and Ethnic-Minority Writers since 1945: Fourteen National Contexts
in Europe and Beyond (2018; edited with Wiebke Sievers); Literarische (Mehr)Sprachreflexionen (2020;
edited with Barbara Siller).
Adrian Wanner was born and raised in Switzerland and received his PhD in Russian literature from
Columbia University in 1992. He has been teaching at Penn State since 1996. He is the author of
Baudelaire in Russia (1996), Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (2003), Out of
Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (2011), and The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation among
Russian Poets (2020). In addition he has published six books with his German verse translations of
Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian poetry.
xiv
Melissa Weininger is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at California State University, Northridge.
Her research focuses on modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature, Jewish nationalism, and gender, and
she is currently at work on a book on diaspora Israeli literature, including contemporary translingual
Israeli literature. She teaches courses on Jewish film and literature, women and gender, and modern
Israel. Most recently, her work on the artist Yael Bartana has appeared in The Palgrave Handbook of
Holocaust Literature and Culture (2020) and an essay on novels by Nava Semel and Ruby Namdar was
published in Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making (2020).
Elaine Wong is a visiting assistant professor at Trinity University in San Antonio,Texas. She translates
Taiwanese literature into English besides teaching. Her scholarly essays, poems, and translations have
appeared in Asymptote, Berkeley Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Chinese Literature Today, Grey Sparrow,
Indiana Review, InTranslation, L2, Modern Poetry in Translation, and TAB, among other publications.
xv
PREFACE
It might seem as modern as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov, but translingual
writing—texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary
one—has an ancient pedigree. It may well have developed shortly after the invention of writing itself.
It is quite possible that Etruscans, Anatolians, Carthaginians, and other peoples of the Mediterranean
basin and Asia Minor appropriated the newly devised alphabet brought by the seafaring Phoenicians
not only by adapting it to their own unlettered tongues but also by writing in Phoenician. It might
even stretch as far back as the twenty-third century b.c.e., when the first poet history knows by
name, Enheduanna, the only daughter of the powerful Akkadian King Sargon, composed her poetry
in Sumerian, though her first language was probably Akkadian. Within the far-flung empires of
antiquity, citizens wrote in the imperial language—Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit—
regardless of what they spoke at home. And immigration has long been a powerful motive for
switching languages.When the Biblical Ruth abandoned her Moab homeland to follow her mother-
in-law, the Judean Naomi, back to Bethlehem, it is likely she took up Hebrew.
War, famine, disease, and oppression have combined with a revolution in transportation technology
to create unprecedented mobility in the twenty-first century. Few migrants are writers, but many
migratory writers are translingual, switching—like Julia Alvarez from Spanish to English, Alberto
Gerchunoff from Yiddish to Spanish, Hideo Levy from English to Japanese, or Aharon Appelfeld from
German to Hebrew—to the ambient language of their new homelands.Yet kanshi, the poetry written
for centuries in Chinese by members of the Japanese aristocracy, demonstrates that it is not necessary
to leave home to become translingual. It is difficult enough to write well in one’s native language, but
writers who take on the added handicap of composing in a second, third, or even fourth language
have made rich contributions to the literatures of the world. They also pose pointed questions about
the relationship between language and personal and social identity.
Translinguals are among the most prominent contemporary writers in the United States—an
abbreviated list might include André Aciman, Rabih Alameddine, Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Louis
Begley, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz, Ariel Dorfman, Cristina Garcia, Olga Grushin, Ursula Hegi,
Aleksandar Hemon, Ha Jin, Andrew Lam, Li-Young Lee, Yiyun Li, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Dinaw
Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Chigozie Obioma, Luc Sante, Gary Shteyngart, Charles Simic, and
Lara Vapnyar. Though the French are so proud of their language they enforce its purity through
diktats from the Académie Française, they have nevertheless bestowed glittering prizes on linguistic
interlopers. Among feted authors whose mothers never sang them “Au clair de la lune” are Vassilis
Alexakis, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Hector Biancotti, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Romain Gary, Nancy
Huston, Milan Kundera, Jonathan Littell, Amin Maalouf, Andreï Makine, Alain Mabanckou, Irène
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Némirovsky, Atiq Rahimi, André Schwarz-Bart, Jorge Semprún, Dai Sijie, Henri Troyat, and Elie
Wiesel. Germany even created a special award, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize (named for the
nineteenth-century German poet who was born in France), for translinguals—such as Zehra Çirak,
Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Yoko Tawada—who write in German.
Several of the most accomplished literary scholars of the twentieth century, including
Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and René Wellek, employed a magisterial command of multiple
languages and literatures. However, multilingualism was for them a tool rather than a subject
for study. It was not until the late twentieth century that authors who write in more than one
language or merely in L2 came under sustained scholarly scrutiny. Though other terms such
as exophone and plurilingue have been employed, the term translingual has gained wide currency
among scholars throughout the world—in dissertations, monographs, journal articles, special
issues of journals, and conferences. The language-switching of individual authors such as Beckett,
Nabokov, and Isaak Dinesen had been analyzed, but an attempt at a comprehensive study of
the phenomenon of literary translingualism had to await The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in
Literature (1970). Other early discussions of literary translingualism—though they did not use
that term—include: Leonard Forster’s The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature (Cambridge
University Press, 1970), Elisabeth Klosty Beaujour’s Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the
“First” Emigration (Cornell University Press, 1989), and John Skinner’s The Stepmother Tongue: An
Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction (St. Martin’s, 1998). However, much of the current scholar-
ship is a response to Steven G. Kellman’s pioneering attempt to define and examine the subject in
The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
Nevertheless, because there are thousands of languages and many hundreds of thousands of
translingual combinations, no one scholar can presume to cover the subject. Other useful single-
author monographs have included Mary Besemeres’s Translating One’s Self (Peter Lang, 2002), Doris
Sommer’s Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Duke, 2004), Brian Lennon’s In Babel’s
Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States (University of Minnesota, 2010), Olga Anokhina’s
Multilinguisme et créativité littéraire (Harmattan/ Academia, 2012), Arianna Dagnino’s Transcultural
Writers and Novel in the Age of Global Mobility (Purdue University Press, 2015), Olga Anokhina’s
Écrire en langues: littératures et plurilinguisme (Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 2015), and Fiona
J. Doloughan’s English As a Literature in Translation (Bloomsbury, 2016), and Katie Jones, Julian Peerce,
and Aled Rees’s edited International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures (Cambridge Scholars, 2020).
More specialized studies of literary translingualism during a particular period or by particular authors
include: J.N. Adams’s Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Adrian
Wanner’s Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern University Press, 2011),
Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (Fordham, 2012), Tamar
Steinitz’s Translingual Identities: Language and the Self in Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind (Camden House,
2013), Axel Englund and Anders Olsson’s edited Languages of Exile: Migration and Multilingualism in
Twentieth Century Literature (Peter Lang, 2013), Marie Lauret’s Wanderwords: Language Migration in
American Literature (Bloomsbury Academics, 2014), Till Dembeck and Georg Mein’s Philologie und
Mehrsprachigkeit (Beiträge zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, 2014), Sara Kippur’s Writing It Twice: Self-
Translation and the Making of a World Literature in French (Northwestern University Press, 2015),
Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (Columbia
University Press, 2015),Alain Ausoni’s Mémoires d’outre langue: l’écriture translingue de soi (Slatkine, 2018),
Rachael Gilmour’s Bad English: Literature, Multilingualism and the Politics of Language in Contemporary
Britain (Manchester University Press, 2020), Rainer Guldin’s Metaphors of Multilingualism (Routledge,
2020), Steven G. Kellman’s Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism (Purdue University Press,
2020), and Adrian Wanner’s The Bilingual Muse: Self-Translation Among Russian Poets (Northwestern
University Press, 2020).
A few edited volumes have collected writings by translinguals about the experience of switching
languages.They include Steven G. Kellman, ed., Switching Languages:Translingual Writers Reflect on Their
xviii
Preface
Craft (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), Isabelle de Courtivron, ed., Lives in Translation: Bilingual
Writers on Identity and Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka,
ed., Translating Lives: Living with Two Languages and Cultures (Queensland, 2007), and Brigitta and
Thomas Busch, ed., Mitten durch meine Zunge: Erfahrungen mit Sprache von Augustinus bis Zaimoğlu
(Drava, 2008). However, to find a collection of critical studies of literary translingualism, one has
to turn to special issues of scholarly journals that focus on the subject. They include Ania Spyra, ed,
American Book Review, 35 (2014), Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich, ed., L2Journal, 7:1 (2015),
Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich, ed., Studies in the Novel, 48:4 (2016), Michael Boyden
and Eugenia Kelbert, ed., Journal of World Literature, 3:2 (2018) and Natasha Lvovich and Steven
G. Kellman, ed., Critical Multilingualism Studies, 7.2 (2019).
The very first bibliography of translingual literature in several categories, included in the spe-
cial issue on literary translingualism of L2Journal (Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich, eds.,
L2Journal, 7:1 (2015)), testifies to the vitality of the field. Because poetry, fiction, and nonfiction
by translinguals, along with scholarship on their work, is proliferating, any such roster is of neces-
sity provisional and incomplete. Since no one scholar, not even René Wellek, is conversant enough
in all of the permutations of languages from which and to which authors have switched, the study
of literary translingualism is of necessity collective. It has been advanced in recent years in sessions
sponsored by the Modern Language Association, South Central Modern Language Association,
American Comparative Literature Association, International Comparative Literature Association, and
International Symposium on Bilingualism, among others. The study of translingual literature has
increasingly attracted scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including comparative literature,
linguistics (theoretical and applied), language pedagogy, cultural anthropology, postcolonial studies,
psychology, translation studies, and history.
The study of literary translingualism is complicated by the fact that it is sometimes difficult or otiose to
try to determine when someone is in fact writing in an adopted language. Is Jhumpa Lahiri’s Anglophone
fiction truly translingual, despite the fact that as an adult she lacked fluency in Bengali, the tongue she
learned first, as a small child, but then ceased to use? Roger Federer, who grew up in Switzerland, is fluent
in Swiss German, Standard German, English, and French. Because his mother is South African, Afrikaans
might be called his mother tongue, but, since Federer does not speak it, it would be odd to call translingual
a memoir that he might write in German. For George Steiner, who grew up perfectly trilingual, in English,
French, and German, it would be arbitrary to designate one L1, another L2, and another L3. In polyglot
parts of Africa and India, identifying a primary language can be a challenge. Moreover, languages are fluid,
and the boundaries separating them from one another and from dialects, creoles, pidgins, and registers are
often indistinct and unstable.When, after publishing the poetry collection El imperio de los sueños (1988) in
her native Spanish, Giannina Braschi published a novel, Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), in Spanglish, it was perhaps a
different kind of translingualism than when, after publishing six novels in his native Czech, Milan Kundera
published La Lenteur (1995) in French.
This handbook of literary translingualism was assembled with global ambitions. However, no single
volume could possibly encompass all the potential permutations of language-switching throughout
the world. If there are approximately 5,000 languages in the world, the number of translingual possi-
bilities would equal 5,000 × 4,499 ÷ 2 = 12,497,500. And that is only calculating the number of bilin-
gual translingual possibilities; authors who, like Kamala Das, Vladimir Nabokov, and George Steiner,
move among three or more languages add even more possibilities to the challenge of mapping out the
universe of translingual literature. Furthermore, because of the unequal distribution of cultural capital,
Goethe’s dream of a genuine Weltliteratur accessible to all seems chimerical, if not merely Eurocentric.
As numerous scholars, including Emily Apter, David Damrosch, and Rebecca Walkowitz, have argued,
translation drives the global literary economy. Translingualism is one of its most prominent features,
though not all parts of the world participate equally.
So, within the confines of a single volume, we offer an overview of some of the most notable
traditions of writing in an adopted language. Contributions come from scholars on every continent
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except Antarctica and cover a wide range of languages—not just the usual Western suspects—English,
French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish—but also Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Esperanto, Hebrew,
Hindi, Japanese, Swedish, Tagalog, and Xhosa, among others. Nor is the focus exclusively modern
or contemporary; chapters include discussions of translingualism in ancient Greece and Rome and
in the Persian Empire, as well as among medieval Jewish writers, and in Renaissance Latin. Other
chapters examine literary translingualism in particular genres, including fiction, memoir, and poetry, as
well as particular topics including autotranslation and metaphors of translingualism. Memoir, in par-
ticular, has attracted many remarkable writers who use the genre to recount their experiences moving
between languages. What Alice Kaplan dubbed “language memoir,” an account of the author’s acqui-
sition of another language, has in fact become a recognized sub-genre. Major works of fiction, drama,
and poetry have been written by authors writing in a language other than their primary one, and it
is instructive to study the particular linguistic demands exerted by each genre.
Because of the hardships created by the COVID-19 pandemic, some invited scholars had to with-
draw from this project. However, even if this handbook had contained twice as many chapters, it
could never claim to be exhaustive. For one thing, each of the chapters in this volume was written
in English (though often by scholars for whom English is an adopted language). The ideal handbook
of literary translingualism would cover tens of thousands of literary combinations and be written
in thousands of languages. Nevertheless, we offer this one in the hope of introducing readers to a
vibrant field of study and inspiring further contributions. We thank our far-flung contributors for
their dedication and erudition. And we remain grateful to the staff of Routledge, particularly Senior
Editor Michelle Salyga, Editorial Assistant Bryony Reece, and the publishing house’s editorial board,
for supporting this project and sharing our conviction that the study of literary translingualism is
worth articulation. We also thank our assiduous copy-editor, Rosemary Morlin. We are especially
indebted to the growing international community of scholars who have made translingual literature
an exciting, vital subject of study.
xx
I
Translingual Genres
1
TRANSLINGUAL MEMOIR
Mary Besemeres
In The Translingual Imagination (2000), Steven Kellman suggests that there is no consensus among
translingual writers on the question of whether language shapes thought. Whereas Nuruddin Farah,
writing in English rather than his native Somali, “dismisses Whorfian anxieties over language,” for
André Brink, who writes both in Afrikaans and in English, “language is integral to perception” (45).
The approach of writers of translingual memoir, however, seems less varied. With few exceptions,
translingual memoirs link experience of language explicitly with experience of culture, that is, with
particular ways of thinking, feeling, being with others. To cite some notable examples, in Borderlands/
La frontera (1987)—part-translingual memoir, part border-culture manifesto—Gloria Anzaldúa
contrasts the obdurate pressure of “respeto” (for elders, for el padrino) with the brash notion of “ambi-
tion,” which she says is “condemned in the Mexican culture and valued in the Anglo” (40); in Lost
in Translation (1989), Eva Hoffman defends the Polish emotion of “tęsknota”—a passionate “longing”
for home (4)—from the charge of sentimentality implicit in the English word “nostalgia” (115);
Maxine Hong Kingston recalls balking as a child at the assertively upper-case and singular “American
‘I’,” used to the more plural-seeming “seven strokes, intricacies” of the “Chinese ‘I’ ” (166); Richard
Rodriguez sets the “hey you” of his Californian childhood (“everything outside our house was
English, was ‘you’ ”) against the Spanish distinction between tú—“the intimate voice,” “spoken to
children and dogs,” “among lovers”—and usted—“the formal, the bloodless, the ornamental you,”
“spoken to the eyes of strangers. By servants to masters” ([1992] 54). In line with the thinking
of fellow-translingual, Ludwig Wittgenstein,1 these writers portray moving between languages as a
matter of learning to live with different concepts—with culturally specific, sometimes conflicting
understandings of how to live.
If “life writing” is taken to refer to any written representation of a life or lives,2 then “translingual
life writing” corresponds to a vast corpus. To encompass even part of it would require reaching back
at least to the Confessions of Augustine, a Berber who wrote in Latin,3 if not to Sumerian-Akkadian
tomb inscriptions, and forward to contemporary media including blogs, like the Turkish-German-
English ein fremdwörterbuch by Kübra Gümüşay.4 My remit here, however, is the more recent, more
modest genre of translingual memoir. As Thomas Couser outlines in Memoir: An Introduction (2011),
memoir is a late-modern form of life narrative with fairly specific thematic parameters. The English
word derives from the eighteenth-century French mémoire, meaning a brief authoritative text, via
the plural form mémoires/“memoirs”: Franklin’s “memoirs” were first published in 1791 in French
as Mémoires privées de Benjamin Franklin. By the early twentieth century the singular form “memoir”
had come to signify a crafted, reflective personal narrative. A famous (non-translingual) example is
English writer Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907), about his childhood in the orbit of a devout
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-1 3
Mary Besemeres
Plymouth Brethren, biologist father.Whereas the term “autobiography” suggests an attempt at a com-
prehensive account of a life, the territory of “memoir” is usually more narrowly defined. Typically,
memoirs address a particular period of life (e.g. childhood), a dimension of life (e.g. illness), or life
with someone else (e.g. a family member, mentor, etc.).
Overwhelmingly, the historical spur for the emergence of translingual memoir has been
experience of linguistic displacement, whether due to migration (see e.g. Pavlenko [2001]) or
colonization (see e.g. Berger). The impetus for writing translingual memoir has been its appeal
for writers and readers alike as a medium for communicating experience. Travel and the need
or desire to learn new languages are further, closely interrelated stimuli, exemplified by Alice
Kaplan’s French Lessons (1993) and Katherine Russell Rich’s Dreaming in Hindi (2009). Two or
more of these factors may overlap, as in the case of Tim Parks, author of Italian Neighbours (1992)
and An Italian Education (1996). British-born Parks moved to Italy with his Italian wife in 1981;5
his memoirs are about life “in Italian” but are written in English, hence are translingual in subject
rather than form.
This chapter distinguishes between two kinds of translingual memoir: those that engage with
translingual experience, and those that are written in a non-native language and hence count tech-
nically as “translingual” but do not deal with translingualism (e.g. Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My
Life I Write to You in Your Life). Here I discuss the first kind, not the second. Some of my examples are
texts written (mainly) in a first language, like those of Parks, others, in second or third languages, but
all explore what it is like to live translingually. Likewise, for purposes of comparison, my discussion
omits autobiographical novels, however much they might overlap in practice with memoirs (see for
example, parallels between Julia Alvarez’s Something to Declare (1998) and her novel How the Garcia
Girls Lost Their Accent, or between Buchi Emecheta’s Head Above Water (1986) and her first published
novel In the Ditch).
“Translingual memoir” is meant here, nevertheless, as an inclusive category that embraces texts
reflective of diverse kinds of translingual experience, some of which I refer to using the terms
listed below:
Language Migrant Memoirs

These are texts like Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Esmeralda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican
(1993) or Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People (2003). This crowded subcategory of translingual
memoir extends from texts by actual “language migrants” like Hoffman or Santiago to second-
generation memoirs like The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston, daughter of Cantonese
immigrants to California, or Unpolished Gem (2006) by Alice Pung, Australian-born daughter of
Chinese Cambodian refugees. Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (2006) by Rudy
Wiebe is an example of an outlying sub-subcategory: memoir by a descendant of language migrants.
Wiebe was raised in Canada in a Mennonite community, speaking the “Plattdietsch” of his ancestors
(Prussian immigrants to Russia), and encountering English only at school.6
Memoirs of Education in a Colonial Language

These include indigenous and other post-colonial narratives. A striking Australian example is Pictures
from my Memory: My Story as a Ngaatjatjarra Woman (2016) by Lizzie Marrkilyi Ellis. The book
describes the author’s childhood in her family’s Ngaatjatjarra-speaking community of Warakurna
in the Western Desert, experiences at Wiluna mission school (where she learned English), and her
later work as a teacher and translator of English and Ngaatjatjarra and related languages. Another
Aboriginal Australian translingual memoir is Betty Lockyer’s Last Truck Out, written partly in what
Lockyer calls “Broome-talk,” a contact language of pearling town Broome with roots in Malay
and local indigenous languages as well as Chinese, Spanish, and German, “with hints of Irish” (48).
4
Translingual Memoir
Lockyer recalls the efforts of her community’s grandmothers (“our mimis”) to keep alive Nyul Nyul,
her mother’s language, amidst the pervasive English of Beagle Bay Mission (to which they had been
evacuated from Broome in 1942). Other memoirs of translingual education in a colonial language
include texts by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Leila Ahmed, and Leïla Sebbar, discussed below.
Immersion Narratives/Memoirs of Language Travel

Often classed by booksellers and critics as travel writing, these narratives can equally, and perhaps
more fruitfully, be read as translingual memoirs (see Besemeres [2012]). They are typically accounts
of living for a time in the sphere of a non-primary language. Some portray immersion in a lan-
guage entirely foreign to the writer, as does Peter Hessler’s Kiriyama-prize-winning River Town: Two
Years on the Yangtze (2001), which depicts his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling, Sichuan,
learning Mandarin while teaching English.7 Another memoir of this kind is Cathy N. Davidson’s 36
Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan (2006), an account of visits over a decade to a town
near Kobe where Davidson taught English at a women’s university and herself learned Japanese,
travel initially inspired by a passionate admiration for Japanese aesthetics. Other memoirs portray
deeper involvement with a parent’s language, like the deftly titled Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei
(1991) by third-generation Japanese-American David Mura, which draws on diaries to recount a
year spent in Japan, and recalls growing up as a “sansei” in a sometimes racist America. Elif Batuman’s
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010) is an exuberantly
unconventional chronicle of encounters with the Russian of Batuman’s book-fueled desire, but also
depicts a stint in Samarkand tussling with Uzbekh, related to Turkish, her transnational family’s first
language. Some “language travel” memoirs describe forays into ancestral languages, for example Black
Earth City: A Year in the Heart of Russia (2001) by English writer Charlotte Hobson, whose maternal
grandfather was born in London to Russian immigrants.8
“Immersion narratives” is also arguably an apt term for cross-linguistic auto-ethnographies like
Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco and Jean Briggs’s Never in Anger (Besemeres [2012]).
However, given the complex questions of disciplinary genre and ethics which these works raise, I do
not consider them here.
An often-cited immersion narrative is American linguist Karen Ogulnick’s Onna Rashiku: Like a
Woman (1998), which combines personal reflections on learning Japanese in Japan with more general
insights into the field of second language acquisition. One of her observations illustrates mordantly
how cultural attitudes that underwrite certain idioms can readily infuse loanwords:
Satoko and I seemed to find ourselves in a more marginalized space. Whereas single men in
Japan are referred to in a more positive light, as becheraa [bachelor], Japanese expressions for
single women portray them as “old” and “unwanted”: old Christmas cake [furui kurisumasu
keiki], unsold merchandise [urenokori], and “spinster” [orudo misu].
(90–91)
The expression “furui kurisumasu keiki” contains a transliteration of the English “Christmas cake”—a
popular American-style Japanese consumer item—which appears symptomatic of the cultural syncre-
tism of post-American-occupation Japan, yet also reflects persistent local male chauvinism. The word
becheraa, with its positive connotations, seems to knit American and Japanese sexisms neatly together.
Many texts span more than one of these categories. Gini Alhadeff ’s The Sun at Midday: Tales of
a Mediterranean Family (1997) conveys interwoven perspectives of a child of language migrants (her
father left his native Rhodes for Egypt, before both parents moved the family to Italy), and a fre-
quent language migrant in her own right, from her birthplace of Alexandria via Tokyo and London
to a life split between New York and Chianti; in view of the above, Alhadeff is also a seasoned “lan-
guage traveller.” Natasha Lvovich’s The Multilingual Self (1997) is a memoir of migrating as a young
5
Mary Besemeres
academic and parent from Moscow to New York and from Russian into (American) English, but
also pays homage to French, an enduring first love for Lvovich, linked with the French literature,
philosophy, and films she encountered at university. (Additionally it explores translingual experience
of synaesthesia.) Parks’s “Italian” memoirs can be read both as memoirs of “language migration”
between Britain and Italy and as “immersion narratives” since they document the early stages of an
involvement with Italian that was initially expected to be temporary. Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words
(2001) is a language migrant memoir, given that Stavans migrated to the U.S. and into English, but
also, partly, an immersion narrative, since it describes a significant engagement with Hebrew, and a
Mexican education in diasporic Yiddish.
The terms “language migrant,” “language travel,” and “immersion narrative” as used here are not
meant, then, as fixed categories but only as ways of highlighting significant shared aspects of many
translingual memoirs.
In “On Language Memoir” (1994), Alice Kaplan first drew critical attention to the phenom-
enon of translingual memoirs, coining “language memoir” to describe texts from Alfred Kazin’s
Walker in the City and Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory to her own French Lessons and Annie
Ernaux’s La Place, with its portrait of estrangement from beloved working-class parents expressed
at the level of language: Ernaux’s store-bought yaourts versus her father’s soupe from his potager. As
Kaplan comments, through a certain lens all memoirs start to look like language memoirs. In her
perceptive study Language Learner Narrative: An Exploration of Mündigkeit in Intercultural Literature
(2014), Helen O’Sullivan proposes the term “language learner narrative” in place of Kaplan’s “lan-
guage memoir” and my own terms “language migrant memoir” and “language travel memoir”
(Besemeres [2002, 2005]). “Language learner narrative” has the advantage of being more specific
than “language memoir” and more comprehensive than either “language migrant” or “language
travel” memoir, but its emphasis on the experience of learning a new language excludes memoirs
of immersion in a parent’s language, like David Mura’s Turning Japanese. “Translingual memoir”
captures a wider field.
As Eva Hoffman reflects in her essay “P.S.” (2003), individual experiences with languages and
cultures differ widely, so that no single memoir can speak for others. Yet her metaphor of “self-
translation” connects in suggestive and dynamic ways with other translingual memoirs. In The Sun
at Midday, published eight years after Lost in Translation, Gini Alhadeff writes (perhaps in rejoinder to
Hoffman) that she “never” feels she is “translating” herself:
I have swallowed several ethnic identities whole and no single one lords it over the others
… I never feel I am translating “myself.”There is an “original me” in every language I speak,
though this “original” is constantly rendered false by the presence of other, just as original,
“originals.”
(4)
These lines express a strong sense of cultural contingency and of recurrent slippage between selves,
shaped by multiple childhood migrations. At the same time, Alhadeff ’s narrative voice is itself openly
unreliable, often deadpan or tongue-in-cheek, as when she declares earlier, “I was sent to Florence
and became Italian … to New York and became a New Yorker, if not an American,” and this entire
passage ends, “it is easy to see that our origins will soon have become invisible,” yet the book makes
them visible.
This chapter’s focus is on book-length memoirs, but here I want at least to indicate the existence
of a rich range of translingual essays, some of which constitute mini-memoirs in themselves. Many
are included in special anthologies on multilingual lives, such as Language Crossings (2000) (Karen
Ogulnick ed.), Becoming American (2000) (Meri Nana-Ama Danquah ed.), Lives in Translation (2003)
(Isabelle de Courtivron ed.), Switching Languages (2003) (Steven Kellman ed.), The Genius of Language
(2005) (Wendy Lesser ed.), and Translating Lives (2007) (Mary Besemeres and Anna Wierzbicka eds.).
6
Translingual Memoir
Others have appeared individually, in journals or magazines. Albeit on a smaller scale than books,
essays have contributed significantly to the field of translingual memoir. One of the earliest is Joseph
Conrad’s 1919 “Author’s note” to A Personal Record, which claims that for Conrad, English was “love
at first sight,” that rather than adopting it he was “adopted” by its “genius,” and that “its very idioms …
fashioned [his] still plastic character” (v–vi). These avowals appear intended to deflect British readers’
attention from the writer’s previous existence as the non-English-speaking Konrad Korzeniowski.
More recent memorable examples include Tzvetan Todorov’s “Bilinguisme, dialogisme et
schizophrénie” (1985), on the ambivalence of resuming his Bulgarian-speaking self on his first return
visit from Paris to Sofia in 18 years;9 Isabelle de Courtivron’s “Memoirs of a Bilingual Daughter”
(2003), on an American adolescence spent trying to evade her French mother’s wishes, and the
still bemusing, sliding-door scenarios thrown up by regular return visits to France; and Elisabeth
Holdworth’s Calibre-prize-winning essay, “An die Nachgeborenen: For those who come after” (2007), with
its disquieting memories of a postwar childhood in the Netherlands and the parents with whom
she emigrated to Australia: her father, a hero of the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance and heir to a titled
Calvinist clan; her mother, a Dachau survivor, born to illiterate Jewish parents in 1920 in Flanders
and kidnapped for a maid, at age ten, by her own future mother-in-law. To confront this history
Holdsworth resorts reluctantly to English as the “fluidity, the emotional creak with which one can
summon ‘the past’ using English, is not possible in Dutch” with its “extremes” of “ ‘verleden tijd’ …
meaning … ‘dead times’ ” or “ ‘vroeger’ … an indefinite gesture to an unspecified era.”10
Some essays address translingual experience far more explicitly than do book-length memoirs
by the same author. An example is Xiaolu Guo’s Guardian article, “ ‘Is this what the west is really
like?’ How it felt to leave China for Britain” (2017), which says more about Guo’s wrestling with
English as a Mandarin speaker and writer than her compelling, but on this issue, reticent, book, Once
Upon a Time in the East (2017). Her essay describes how English words, lacking the pictorial basis
of Hanzi, fail to really evoke the world for Guo; the different verb endings imposed by “tense” in
English strike her as being like “bizarre decorations” on the “simple, strong building” of tense-free
Mandarin; being pushed by English into using the first-person singular all the time feels “uncom-
fortable.” Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s “The Im/Possibility of Life-Writing in Two Languages” (2003)
reveals that in writing Among the White Moonfaces (1996), a narrative of her Malaysian childhood and
migration to America, Lim set out to write a language memoir, but in the end didn’t, dealing only
obliquely with her Malay-Hokkien-English trajectory. Translingual memoirs and essays by the same
author often allude to one another: lines from Leïla Sebbar’s autobiographical essays, like “Si je parle la
langue de ma mère” (1978), are echoed in her memoir Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (2003), with
telling variations (see Besemeres [2015b]); Eva Hoffman’s reflection “P.S.” is a retrospective comment
on Lost in Translation; Ilan Stavans’s “My Love Affair with Spanglish” (2003) delves into the passion
for Spanglish that On Borrowed Words, his memoir of life with Spanish,Yiddish, Hebrew, and English,
“stops short of explaining” (131).
A final point on memoirs and essays: among translingual memoirs, including some paradigmatic
examples, I count books of autobiographical essays that clearly add up to a thematic whole. Kyoko
Mori’s Polite Lies (1997), for instance, explores the life between Japanese and English of a writer
who left Japan for the U.S. at the age of 20. Mori describes herself as remaining “only partially
Japanese in my thinking,” galled to hear her own voice take on a traditional woman’s deferential high
pitch when addressing a male stranger in Japanese, yet also finding certain American speech styles
persistently jarring (16–17). The book’s metaphor for translingualism is one of “changing stations”
between languages and sometimes preferring the transitional space, “where the static is” (19). In texts
like Mori’s, unlike in more miscellaneous essay collections, each essay is effectively a chapter that
contributes to an overall narrative.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory ([1951] 1966) is one of the best known translingual memoirs,
both because its author was famously translingual and because it can justly lay claim to being his best
work.11 Despite learning English at the age of four, as a child Nabokov was thoroughly immersed
7
Mary Besemeres
in Russian, so there is no question as to his memoir’s formal translingualism. However, perhaps in

line with his stated view that “people” do not “think in languages” but “in images,”12 Speak, Memory
does not consider translingual experience in the kind of depth that characterizes the other texts
outlined here. Nabokov’s most telling comments on the subject appear in letters (e.g. “I am too old to
change conradically”)13 and essays14—as though the topic was either too personal, or not imaginatively
interesting enough to him, to make it into his masterwork of memory.15
In A Border Passage: From Cairo to America–A Woman’s Journey (1999), Leila Ahmed connects her
own history insightfully to that of modern Egypt. With her Ottoman-Turkish mother and Arab
father Ahmed spoke Arabic and French as a child, but, once enrolled at Cairo’s English school—
where Arabic was forbidden—she increasingly spoke with her siblings and British-educated father
in English, which excluded her mother: “a language of subversion and a way of circumventing and
baffling the adults” (23). Ahmed had her first formal Arabic lesson aged 12, in 1952—“the year of
the revolution.” Her private teacher was a Palestinian refugee, “Miss Nabih.” Angered by her pupil’s
frequent mistakes, Miss Nabih “finally screamed” at Leila: “You’re an Arab! ... An Arab! And you don’t
know your own language!’ ” (243). Ahmed recalls becoming “suddenly furious” herself, slamming
shut her book and declaring: “ ‘I am not an Arab! I’m Egyptian! And anyway, we don’t speak like
this.’ ” (243). Refusing to read on, she was slapped on the face. Ahmed comments: “What Miss Nabih
was doing to me in class the government was doing to us through the media” (244), and elaborates:
I … hated that incessant rhetoric. Al-qawmiyyah al-Arabiyyah! Al-Uraba! Nahnu al-Arab! Arab
nationalism! Arabness! We the Arabs! Even now, just remembering those words, I feel a surge
of mingled irritation and resentment. Propaganda is unpleasant. And one could not escape it.
(244)
The government’s “bludgeoning” of the mind extended to intimidation by the mukhabarat, the secret
police (244). Under Nasser, the multiethnic Egypt of her parents’ generation, for whom Copts were
“a special people,” anciently “indigenous” unlike Arabs, and Jews no less Egyptian than Arabs, was
violently dismantled in the name of Arab nationalism. And yet Ahmed also writes poignantly that her
father’s reverence for “things European” led him to “undervalu[e]‌” his own heritage and hence to
neglect its transmission to his children. Lacking “mastery” of “cursive Arabic script,” Ahmed cannot
decipher the handwritten memoirs her father left her (23).
Comparing cultural models of child rearing, anthropologist Naomi Quinn argues that along with
“explicit corrections of their behaviour” children typically receive messages “implicit in look, ges-
ture and other body language” and that “these habitual, embodied practices converge to immerse the
child in a cultural world of a certain constant shape” (480–481).16 In A Border Passage, Ahmed makes
this point in a compellingly personal way when she remembers learning how to read the world from
her mother and aunts, women whose Muslim beliefs, unlike those of male sheikhs, were primarily
expressed verbally, as lines from the Quran recited daily and as reflexive, proverbial attitudes voiced—
and sometimes challenged—in conversation:
Their mere responses … –a word, a shrug or even just their postures—passed on to us …
how we should be. And all of these ways of passing on attitudes … through touch and the
body and in words spoken in the living moment–are by their very nature, subtle and evan-
escent … [yet] profoundly shape the next generation. … Beliefs … impressed on us through
those fleeting words and gestures are written into our very lives, our bodies, our selves …
and into how we live out the script of our lives.
(121–122)
An example of this evolving intergenerational life “script,” expressed by turns in Arabic by her aunts
and in Ahmed’s own narrating English, is their remembered conversation after her mother’s death. In
8
Translingual Memoir
the days before she died, they tell Leila, her mother did not recognize visitors, “seemed to be seeing”
only the dead, like their brother Fuad:
It was no doubt delirium, my sister interjected as my aunts talked of mother’s death. Probably,
darling, my aunt Nazli said, and then Aisha, too, chimed in,Yes ah daruri, ya habibti, no doubt,
darling.
“But still, you know,” Nazli resumed after an interval, the wonder back in her voice, “the
way she was talking to them, it was exactly as if she could see them.”
(223)
Ahmed gives voice here to her aunts’ perceptions—those of Nazli and the more “modern” Aisha—as
well as her sister’s skeptical insistence that it could only have been hallucinations. Characteristically,
the narrative voice includes and embraces them all.
Like Lost in Translation and A Border Passage, Lucia Graves’s A Woman Unknown:Voices from a Spanish
Life (1999) is a searching and eloquent memoir that explores emotional connections to languages as
well as to places and people. It evokes the author’s childhood in Deià, a Majorcan mountain village to
which she moved, aged three, with her English parents Beryl Pritchard and the poet Robert Graves.
Although Deiàns tended to view even mainland Spanish as foreigners, like the local midwife, Blanca,
who was from Valencia and therefore “a forastera, an outsider” (32), Lucia and her brothers grew up
embedded in village life. They spoke English at home but Majorcan—the island’s form of Catalan—
with everyone else. Graves writes of these years: “I moved easily between two separate worlds, chan-
ging my gestures, my facial expressions and my intonation as required, almost switching identities
when I switched languages” (26). The memoir goes on to describe her teenage years at an oppressive
Francoist school in Palma, where Majorcan speech was greeted with “ ‘¡Habla en cristiano! Speak in
Christian! [i.e. Castilian Spanish]’ ” (93), and where under pressure from the nuns, Lucia came close
to converting to Catholicism; an international school in Geneva where she first stumbled upon her
father’s fame, and struggled to write essays in “wild” unphonetic English; her study of Spanish lit-
erature at Oxford; and over 20 years in Barcelona, married to a Catalan musician and raising their
children speaking Catalan, English, and Spanish.
In a thought-provoking passage, Graves contrasts the emotional resonance of the English word
“dead” with that of the Catalan “mort,” presenting them as emblematic of differences in cultural
outlook:
I soon understood that languages were closed worlds, that their translation could never
convey the exact emotion of one word into another language. To say the man in the port
was dead, was simply not the same as saying he was mort, even if both words have the same
meaning. The emotional connections between sound and meaning cannot be disentangled,
for in doing so they are lost. In my experience “dead” was like a dull pain, like the end of a
smile.“Dead” was my half-brother David who had died four months before my birth, leaving
no trace, in Burma. Mort was the sudden tolling of bells, deep mourning, the whole village
scuttling up the hill to the church, a gloom beyond words, and the young men carrying the
coffin on their shoulders, their hair plastered down with brilliantine, their spotless Sunday
clothes the pride of their mothers or wives.
(25)
In Graves’s experience, the English word “dead” conveys pain yet also the impression of a muted
smile, as though the speaker were embarrassed, or hiding the depth of their feelings; “mort,” by con-
trast, is as forceful and immediate as the bells which give voice to the village’s “deep mourning.” One
emotion seems individual, private, inhibited; the other, communal, public and unmistakable. It is only
at her father’s funeral, when “the strongest young men in the village” help her brothers carry his
9
Mary Besemeres
coffin and she and her mother and brothers are “kissed on both cheeks by the whole village” that the
two emotional landscapes coincide: “Dead and mort became the same that day, and my two worlds
joined in one” (27).
Graves shows how difficult it is to say definitively which of her languages is primary: “I slipped
in and out of my three languages as one enters and exits different-coloured rooms in a house” (113).
Majorcan remains her shared language with her brothers, who still live in Spain (57), whereas she
moved to England in 1991.17 As a literary translator, she works with and between Spanish, English,
and Catalan texts. Each of her languages, then, has been primary at different times. Is her memoir
“translingual” (Kellman and Lvovich 152) in the sense of having been written in a second or third
language? Not exactly, given that English is her “mother tongue” (116).Yet it is clearly a memoir of
an unusually—and reflectively—translingual life. Graves portrays her transitions between Majorcan,
English, Spanish, and (mainland) Catalan in a way that illuminates cultural differences among them,
as well as the changing personal meanings each has had for her.
In Heading South, Looking North (1998), Argentinian-born Chilean-American writer Ariel
Dorfman recalls a scene with one of his high school teachers in Chile that brought home to him
unnervingly how cultural conditioning might draw on grammar:
I had given a final clumsy bang with a hammer to a monstrous misshapen contraption I had
built and it broke ... so I turned to the carpentry teacher and “Se rompió,” I said, shrugging
my shoulders.
His mouth had twisted in anger. “Se, se, se,” he hissed. “Everything in this country is se,
it broke, it just happened, why in the hell don’t you say I broke it … Yo lo rompí, yo, yo, yo,
take responsibility, boy.” And all of a sudden I was a Spanish speaker, I was being berated for
having used that form of the language to hide behind, I had automatically used that ubiqui-
tous, impersonal se, I had escaped into the language, escapé lenguaje adentro.
(114–115)
Here Dorfman depicts Spanish as a powerful medium that he inhabited unconsciously as a 16-
year-old and which his (countercultural?) teacher tried to get him to resist. Yet elsewhere he
also writes of the dramatically shifting roles of Spanish and English in his life. When he and his
wife were living in Berkeley as refugees from Pinochet’s regime, his languages seemed almost
to switch places: where Spanish had been linked with his love for Angelica and solidarity with
Latin American peers, and English—the idiom of his New York childhood—“relegated to a pri-
vate conversation with myself,” now English was “calling” him in “the bubbling vernacular of
America” (217–219).
In a similar vein to Dorfman but more understatedly, in American Chica,Two Worlds, One Childhood
(2001), Marie Arana embeds Spanish words in English narration in a particularly evocative way. She
recalls her own thinking, at age four:
I knew, with a certainty I could feel in my bones, that I was deeply Peruvian. That I was
rooted to the Andean dust. That I believed in ghosts. That they lived in the trees, in my
hair, under the aparador, lurking behind the silver, slipping in and out of the whites of my
ancestors’ portaits’ eyes.
(7)
The phrase “under the aparador” uncannily channels the voice of the four-year-old Spanish-and-
English speaker. (Arana’s American mother was from Wyoming, her Peruvian father from Lima; they
met in New York, and lived first in Peru, then the U.S.) Of her father’s appearance, viewed up-close
by herself as a child, Arana writes, vividly: “The Papi I knew … [had] skin that was brown, smooth
and hairless. He was not fat but taut as a sausage—bien papeado, as Peruvians like to say. Potato-tight”
10
Translingual Memoir
(8). His effect on the household when he arrived for lunch is captured by the servants’ “fluttered”
announcement: “the señor was home” (9).The fearsome threshing machine that he oversaw as “Doctor
Ingeniero” at Cartavio’s American-owned sugar factory is pictured as a giant insect: “A worker’s
hand might be drawn into the iron jaws of the trapiche as it gathered cane into its mandibles” (9);
the word “trapiche” potently conveys the perspective of Cartavio locals. Of her American-trained
father’s crucial mediating role in the town’s sugar business, Arana says: “He could pacify the
gringos.”
The passage ends bitingly: “Los pishtacos, the workers would say to one another whenever such
tragedies occurred. … Ghosts. Machine ghosts. Pishtacos norteamericanos. And as anyone who knew
Peruvian historias understood:They needed the fat of indios to grease their machines.” (9) The meaning
of “pishtacos” here goes beyond the folk belief imbibed by Marie, to express the workers’ bitter con-
sciousness of Anglo exploitation.
In his memoir The Speckled People (2003), like Arana’s a tale of “mixed mother tongues,”18 Hugo
Hamilton depicts a bewildering trilingual childhood in Dublin: he recalls feeling tenderly embraced
by his mother’s German at home (“mein armer Schatz …”), exposed to an often hostile English on the
streets, and compelled to speak Irish when in earshot of his father—an Irish nationalist who forbade
his children to speak English, on pain of a beating. Eccentrically, if consistently, the father welcomed
his immigrant wife’s German, regarding English as the shared enemy of Irish and Germans alike. In
his second memoir, The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006), Hamilton recalls as a teenager writing stories
and practicing speeches in English in front of the mirror, but still in secret for fear of his father. His
books are triumphantly translingual in that they are written—masterfully—in what had been for so
long a forbidden tongue.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s memoirs Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter
(2012) trace two parallel, opposite movements, across lines of language and culture. One follows
Ngũgĩ’s path from the Gĩkũyũ-speaking realm of his childhood—his mother’s hut, his father’s com-
pound, Kamiriithu village primary school—into the English-speaking sphere of the prestigious
Alliance Academy at Kikuyu, a high school for Kenyans founded by British Protestant missionaries.
The other draws the reader deeper into the Gĩkũyũ-speaking world of rural Kenya by means of a
buoyant English that is soon defamiliarized as a colonial language, a source of ambivalence as well
as enlightenment for the schoolboy Ngũgĩ—whose older brother has joined the Mau Mau. These
alternating lines map the formation of a writer who ultimately reverted from the imposed “James”
of “James Ngũgĩ” to “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,” choosing Gikũyũ as the medium of his plays and fiction,
while continuing to address readers in English in his nonfiction, as with these memoirs.
As a title, In the House of the Interpreter rivals Hoffman’s Lost in Translation for resonance, with
its multifaceted play on the figure of the “interpreter.” In a sermon for Ngũgĩ’s cohort at Alliance
Academy, principal Edward Carey Francis is recalled comparing the school to “the Interpreter’s
House” in Pilgrim’s Progress, where the dust of original sin is swept away by Christianity—presenting
himself as “the Interpreter,” his Kenyan students as the dusty pilgrims (42–43). The house of the
memoir’s title then is Alliance Academy, its chief interpreter Carey Francis, who provided his African
students with an idiosyncratically liberal interpretation of English culture which still meant to mold
them as British subjects. But Ngũgĩ shows how in that “house,” he and his peers honed their skills
of counter-interpretation, interpreting colonial culture vigorously back to its source and using their
education ultimately to further Kenya’s struggle for independence. As narrator, Ngũgĩ also interprets
traditional Gĩkũyũ-speaking culture for non-Kenyan readers (one could argue less critically, although
not when portraying his father’s culturally sanctioned cruelty to his mother).
To a lesser extent than Ngũgĩ’s memoirs, J.M. Coetzee’s powerfully bleak Boyhood: Scenes from
Provincial Life (1997) can be read as a memoir of education in a colonial language: here, one colonial
language, English, imposed on another, Afrikaans. But while Afrikaans is the language of his wider
family, with his parents “the boy” mainly speaks English. The book’s drama centres on the boy’s rela-
tionship with his parents, rather than on his translingual education, but perhaps his ease with English,
11
Mary Besemeres
the main language of home and of literacy, is understood implicitly to distance him further from his
Afrikaans-speaking relatives.
Gelareh Asayesh’s memoir, Saffron Sky: A Life between Iran and America (1999), alternates between
vibrant images of her childhood in Tehran, memories of the upheaval of migrating to America and
attempting to forge an American adult identity, and more recent experiences during return visits to
Iran, from half-welcome prayer with beloved family members to encounters with morality police
in Tehran. Born in Iran, Asayesh first moved with her parents to North Carolina at eight; the family
returned to Iran and migrated permanently to the U.S. when she was 15. Among many other Farsi
words, Asayesh mines “Amrika” in particular for its conflicting, powerful resonances, formative for her
as a child: a visceral rejection of Western cultural imperialism yet also a fascination with the West’s
allure, which explains her unhappiness, aged 12, at being thought by Iranian classmates to have an
“Amrikayi” accent (162).The book conveys an aching longing for the Iran of Asayesh’s childhood and
extended family:
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, the words of my first language bursting
into my mouth from some long-suppressed place. For days afterward, the English words feel
like foreign objects on my tongue, metallic and cold, like the loose filling of a tooth. I walk
around full of hidden despair until I manage once again to forget my childhood self.
(174)
Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America (2003) presents
interesting analogies and contrasts to Saffron Sky. Dumas’s Iranian-American relatives are the stars
of her narrative, at the heart of her early immigrant existence: “The world … for us consisted of
my aunts, uncles and cousins” (71). In a chapter titled “It’s all relatives,” Dumas quips that whereas
“Inuits” may have “twenty words for snow” Iranians have an equivalent number for “different kinds
of relatives”: to the single English word “cousin,” Farsi presents eight distinct alternatives (95). She
tells us that the word “ameh” (father’s sister) “still conjures up feelings of being enveloped in love”
because of her closeness to her ameh Sedigeh, who lived near them in Abadan (97). This emphasis
on the importance of relatives echoes Asayesh’s lavish use of Farsi kin-terms, like aghajoon (maternal
grandfather). Less personal and probing than Saffron Sky but no less engaged with Iranian-American
transcultural experience, Funny in Farsi shrewdly plays cultural differences for laughs, performing
memoir as stand-up comedy in place of Asayesh’s eloquent ballad.
Memoirs in Languages Other than English

The main focus of this chapter is translingual memoirs published in English. This is due partly to the
limits on my reading ability outside English (represented by Polish, Russian, French, some German,
less Italian), which prevent me from identifying, unaided, translingual memoirs written in non-
European languages. But part of the reason for the Anglophone bias of the choice of works cited
here is that memoir is a hugely popular genre in North America (for memoir’s “American roots,” see
Couser, 108). Below, before concluding, I draw attention to some notable translingual memoirs in
European languages other than English.
French
Like Ngũgĩ’s and Ahmed’s memoirs, Leïla Sebbar’s Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père (2003) is very
much a story of formation through a colonial language, no less ambivalent about French than theirs
are about English. Unlike theirs, however, Sebbar’s is the perspective of a writer born to one colonial
culture parent (a French mother) and one indigenous culture parent (an Algerian, French-educated
father), and not raised to speak the indigenous language.19 Canadian-born author Nancy Huston’s
12
Translingual Memoir
doubly translingual memoir—Nord perdu (1999) and its English complement Losing North (2002)—
makes keenly critical observations about French language and literary culture while also anchoring
Huston firmly in their domain, and expresses a complex mix of grief and relief at partly “losing” her
native Canadian English. Huston and Sebbar co-edited the important anthology Une enfance d’ailleurs
(1993), which features recollections of childhood in French by authors of Maghrebi, Cuban, and
other descent.
Two famous French graphic memoirs, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007) and Riad Sattouf ’s
L’Arabe du futur (2014) are also thoroughly translingual narratives: Satrapi’s depicts a move from Tehran
and Farsi to Paris and French, via a Francophone boarding-school in Vienna; Sattouf ’s dramatizes
scenes in Libya and Syria that originally took place largely in his father’s Arabic, and sometimes in
his mother’s French.
German
Translingual German poet José F. Oliver’s books of essays Mein andalusisches Schwarzwalddorf (2007)
and Fremdenzimmer (2015) reflect on his years growing up in the Black Forest, in the eponymous
“Schwarzwalddorf ” of Hausach, as the German-born son of Spanish Andalusian gastarbeiter. Oliver’s
essays ponder a life lived not only between Spanish and German but also between the dialects of his
childhood, more deeply embedded in memory: the “Alemannisch” of his birthplace Hausach, and his
family’s “Andalusisch.”
In Language Learner Narrative Helen O’Sullivan examines works by other eminent German literary
translinguals, including Turkish-born Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Mutter Zunge (1990)20 and Japanese-
born Yoko Tawada’s intriguingly titled essay “Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte” (2007).21 A recent,
celebrated translingual German memoir—like Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, part-memoir, part-
manifesto—is Sprache und Sein (2020), by Kübra Gümüşay (creator of the blog, ein fremdwörterbuch).
Hailed by German critics as “an impressive book—poetically and politically,” Sprache und Sein probes
“how language shapes our thoughts and determines our politics” (“wie Sprache unser Denken
prägt und unsere Politik bestimmt”).22 Like Özdamar, Gümüşay is of Turkish descent, but whereas
Özdamar came as a gastarbeiter to Germany, at 19, Gümüşay was born in Hamburg, the granddaughter
of a gastarbeiter.
In Translingual Identities (2013) Tamar Steinitz compellingly explores autobiographical texts in
German and English by German-and Austrian-born Jewish authors Stefan Heym and Jakov Lind,
arguing that Heym’s suggest a “productive doubling of perspective,” while Lind’s convey haunting
“loss and fragmentation.” Heym and Lind each made a linguistic shift into English rather than into
German, but they are significant German-language exponents of translingualism in that as writers
they moved back and forth between their languages. Aneta Pavlenko (2002) and Steven Kellman
(2000; 2003) have both drawn attention to the painful relationship to her native German of another
gifted Holocaust survivor, American historian Gerda Lerner, who wrote of “living in translation”
(Kellman [2003] 5).
Italian
Vivian Gerrand has written extensively on autobiographical representations of transnational experi-
ence in Italian by Somali-born writers such as Ubax Cristina Ali Farah, and Igiaba Scego (see Gerrand).
Pulitzer prize-winning American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, the London-born daughter of West Bengali
immigrants, has written a memoir in Italian about her recent move from the U.S. to Italy, In altre
parole (2015), which constitutes an extended love letter to the language. A very different translingual
memoir written in Italian, about migration to an Anglophone country, is Rosa Cappiello’s Paese
fortunato, published in English translation as Oh Lucky Country (1984)—a surreal, profane indictment
of the author’s years as a non-English-speaking Italian migrant worker in Australia.
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Mary Besemeres
Spanish
Marjorie Agosín’s The Alphabet in My Hands:A Writing Life (2000) is a dreamlike elegy for her Chilean-
Jewish childhood and a lament for her family’s expulsion from Chile after the fall of Allende’s gov-
ernment. In a series of intense fable-like vignettes, Agosín presents paradoxical memories of family
warmth and material privilege alongside local poverty and pervasive anti-Semitism, embodied even
by a beloved, otherwise nurturing “nana.” The book offers glimpses of Agosín’s growth as a writer of
Spanish who lives and works in Massachusetts. After a traumatic period as a refugee at high school
in Georgia, Agosín studied Latin American literature at university and now teaches it at Wellesley,
returning to Chile for visits with her children when she can. Translated from Spanish by Nancy
Abraham Hall, the original, presumably titled El alfabeto en mis manos: una vida de escritora, has not been
published. Evidently Agosín composed it for publication in English.
Polish
A new translingual Polish life narrative is Dziennik pandemiczny (Diary of the Pandemic) by writer
Walery Butewicz, whose native language is Ukrainian. His manuscript won first prize in the Polish
Literary Institute’s “pandemic diary” competition, as announced on 26 September, 2020. Butewicz
was born in 1983, in Cherkasy, Ukraine. He completed a doctorate on Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry
at the University of Warsaw, where he is now a lecturer. A member of the judging panel is quoted
online comparing Butewicz’s distinctive contribution to contemporary writing in Polish with that of
Conrad and Nabokov to English and American literatures.23
Conclusion
Translingual experience generated the many memoirs discussed in this chapter, but individual
perspectives—and experiences—clearly vary widely. What appears to be present in most if not all of
these narratives, however, is a strong sense that the language you live with helps to shape who you can
be; that idioms and words can carry deep-rooted cultural attitudes, which differ markedly between,
if also within, particular languages; and that these differences, pace Nabokov and Farah, do matter.
Acknowledgments
Steven Kellman’s and Natasha Lvovich’s “Selective Bibliography of Translingual Literature” (2015)
was a major resource for this chapter, introducing me to a long list of fascinating new works in the
field. Grateful thanks to Denise Angelo for drawing my attention to Betty Lockyer’s Last Truck Out
among other texts, to Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams for alerting to me to Kübra Gümüşay’s Sprache
und Sein, and to Zuzanna Bułat Silva for the latest tip-off: Walery Butewicz’s Dziennik pandemiczny.
Notes
1 See Diamond on “life-with-the-concept” (264–266).
2 Besemeres and Perkins (vii).
3 See Kellman (2000) (51).
4 www.bpb.de/dialog/netzdebatte/158183/ein-fremdwoerterbuch-kuebra-guemuesay-ueber-ihr-blog/.
5 Parks (2016).
6 Wiebe is also a second-generation “language migrant”: his parents emigrated from Russia to Canada.
7 Besemeres (2012).
8 Besemeres (2011).
9 Besemeres (2015a).
10 www.australianbookreview.com.au/ a br- o nline/ a rchive/ 2 007/ 1 31- f ebruary- 2 007- n o- 2 88/ 2 369-
an-die-nachgeborenen-for-those-who-come-after
14
Translingual Memoir
11 Joseph Epstein, for instance, calls it one of a handful of “truly great” autobiographies: www.wsj.com/articles/
masterpiece-nabokov-looks-back-at-life-before-lolita-1402709442
12 Cited in Kellman (2000) (70).
13 Cited in Besemeres (2002) (108).
14 Cited in Kellman (2000) (70).
15 His novel Pnin has more to say, see e.g. Besemeres (2000), Kager.
16 Cited in Besemeres (2012) (222).
17 See Frank.
18 See Besemeres (2015b).
19 See Besemeres (2015b).
20 Cited in O’Sullivan (139).
21 Cited in O’Sullivan (213).
22 https://kubragumusay.com/buch/
23 https://instytutliteratury.eu/2020/09/26/dziennik-pandemiczny-werdykt/
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17
2
TRANSLINGUALISM AND POETRY
Introduction: What is (Translingual) Poetry?

In this chapter, we examine the ways in which translingualism manifests in poetry, with special
attention paid to the transformations that the movement across languages generates in verse.
Poetry is a genre that often eludes linearity and builds on an allusive use of language instead.
Most narrative genres are subject to the syntagmatic, linear axis of combination—where words
contiguously brush up against each other, creating meaning through stories—whereas poetry
calls the reader’s attention to combination, selection, and synthesis. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge
explains, “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose
and poetry; that is prose; words in their best order;—poetry; the best words in the best order”
(Coleridge, 72). Not only can poetry transmit a message through discursive strategies but, as a
genre, it also foregrounds a poetic function of language, according to which meaning is both
embedded in and yet resides beyond words.
As maintained by key theorists such as Roland Barthes and Henri Meschonnic, form and ideology
are inseparable in poetry (Barthes 179–233; Meschonnic 99; see also Loda “Dolce era la notte”108).
In this chapter, we rely on the same assumption and, as such, analyze diverse forms of translingual
poetry in order to devise the fundamental creative horizons that they define. Notoriously, poetry is
foregrounded by meter, rhythm, style, and linguistic play.These components support the declamation
of heightened emotions and feelings as well as the expression of positions and subjectivities. In poetry,
subgenres vary considerably from one culture and epoch to another: from haikus to sonnets—in
either iambic pentameter (English) or hendecasyllabic scansion (Italian)—and epics, elegies, epigrams
and epitaphs, lyrics, British limericks, laments, as well as odes, blasons, and rhapsodies, among many
others, some of which are more prevalent in some cultures than others. Each of the subgenres creates
a space of expression at once unique and deeply interconnected.
One of the peculiarities of poetry resides in its specific status with respect to the processes of sig-
nification and meaning-making. In fact, as Nicola Gardini points out, poetry does not simply relate to
or describe the world, but it works instead to construct a substitute, a model, or an idea of the world,
and it does so through a unique use of words and rhythms (Gardini 127). This quality is key in this
context, as the analysis of translingual poems may support the emergence of ideas of the world spe-
cifically generated by the encounter between the practice of versification and the poets’ translingual
imagination.
18 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-2
Translingualism and Poetry
This chapter aims to illuminate the qualities of this distinctive encounter, and it does so through
developing a focus on transformations and mobilizations at the level of words and images related
to translingual poetry practice. After briefly expanding on the relationship between poets and their
languages, the chapter presents three analytical sections. Therein, we conduct a textual examination
of translingual poems at the intersection with three key concepts: tradition, word, and world. These
concepts correspond to distinct and yet interrelated manifestations of translingual poetry across
different spaces and times, and in three main linguistic contexts: the italophone, the francophone, and
the anglophone. The limitation of our investigation into these contexts is primarily due to reasons
of space. Nonetheless, we maintain that some core components of the translingual poetry practice
that we illustrate below extend well beyond these areas, and they may provide a relevant point of
departure for future investigation on the theme.
The Translingual Poet: Versification Across Languages

The bond between poets and their languages is complex, and the commonplace idea that poets may
possess only one true language is particularly ingrained in literary history.1 The idea of writing poetry
translingually—which in this chapter broadly defines the act of writing poetry in a non-native lan-
guage or employing more than one language in verse—is then all the more radical within the bound-
aries of this genre, as it holds the potential to defy rooted paradigms of uniqueness and establish a
more relational and fluid view of the process of poetry-making itself.
For poets, choosing to write translingually has many implications. Among other things, it means
immersion in and dialogue with other—sometimes distant—traditions, opening unprecedented spaces
of rhythmical and lexical encounters, and—in the majority of cases—asserting non-monocultural and
non-monolingual views of the world.
Among the many struggles that poets face in their literary practice, a major one is the pursuit
of exactness and, at the same time, the attempt to move beyond the limits of a language whose pri-
mary unit, according to Steven Kellman, “is the individual, irreducible word” (Kellman 11). Many
translingual poets are in a heightened awareness of these struggles, and they rely on their knowledge
of the spaces in-between languages to overcome them. For instance, the Brazilian-Italian poet Vera
Lucia De Oliveira, who writes her verse in both Portuguese and Italian, explains:
Ogni lingua è una prospettiva sul mondo e ci insegna a vederlo e a pensarlo. Ci sono cose
che riesco a dire solo in portoghese e altre solo in italiano. … Parlare è modulare il silenzio,
a volte è pure sventrarlo, altre volte è inoltrarvisi con attenzione e delicatezza perché ci sono
momenti che possiamo sentire e captare solo se apriamo un grande spazio interiore. Fra le
due lingue, cammino e forse loro mi fanno camminare.
(Rosa)
[Each language is a perspective on the world and it teaches us to look at it and to think of it.
There are things that I can say in Portuguese only and others that I can say only in Italian …
To speak is to modulate the silence, sometimes even to destroy it, other times to enter in it with
attention and delicacy because there are moments we can only feel and intercept if we open a
great internal space. Across the two languages I walk, and perhaps they make me walk.]
This critical awareness, as we shall see, results in the translingual poets’ works often exceeding them-
selves in transformative ways and in their frequent exploration of the porous boundaries that both
foreground and connect diverse languages and traditions.
Translingual practice not only impacts versification at the level of coupling signifier–signified,
that is to say the transformation of the “physical” components of language and of their associated
meanings—through, for example, linguistic hybridizations, the introduction of novel words and
19
sounds, morphological manipulations—but it also holds the potential to mobilize in-depth the per-
ception and interpretation of the poetic language itself. In European poetry, since antiquity and
especially as an effect of Giambattista Vico’s influential theorizations, poetic expression has been
conceptualized as a return to a unique language: the language of childhood.2 Engagement with
childhood is extremely relevant to this discourse, as, for one thing, it reinforces the idea that poets may
actually possess only one language for their verse, the very one they were raised into.Yet, translingual
poets, especially those whose practices are located across the most radical poles of linguistic dis-
tance, employ languages that Ornela Vorpsi—who herself writes in Albanian, French, and Italian—has
explicitly defined, with a powerful metaphor, as “without childhood”:
Per scrivere avevo bisogno di una lingua che non portasse in sé l’infanzia e per me
l’italiano è una lingua senza infanzia. … Un’altra lingua vuol dire un’altra cultura, un
altro paese … e io per ragioni personali avevo bisogno di questa distanza.
[In order to write, I needed a language that did not bring with it a childhood, and for me
Italian is a language without a childhood. … Another language means another culture,
another country … and for personal reasons I needed that distance.]
(Pezzani and Vorpsi)
Many translingual poets use these qualities as creative tools to explore novel ways of expression.
In other instances, poets seek to build or (re)create a second linguistic childhood in a non-native
language. For instance, the Italian-born Franco–Canadian poet Alexandre Amprimoz, who writes
in French, English, Italian, and Spanish—while rarely mixing them—delivers the experience of
a translingual migrant in perpetual linguistic exile. However, in opposition to Vorpsi, Amprimoz
actively seeks to deconstruct and reinvent the child’s linguistic malleability, which he does in his
second and third languages. He questions what he terms the “meta-translatability of language” and
its ability to convey “primitive realities,” where “primitive” embodies at once the pervasive child-
like world omnipresent in his poetry, all the while suggesting an attempted return to a pre-literate
state: a poetic search for an ur-language (Viselli). Vorpsi and Amprimoz’s words, albeit on different
trajectories, reinforce the idea that translingualism can identify a path toward a drastic process of
restructuring and interpreting language, one that extends to rethinking the epistemology of genres
themselves.
A final introductory note is necessary to foreground some specific definitory struggles related
to poetic translingualism. According to Kellman and Lvovich (152), literary translingualism includes
both authors who write in a language other than their first one and authors that employ an explicit
alternation between different languages in their work. The manifestation of these two types of
translingualism can have quite distinct effects within the realm of poetry and has received very diverse
levels of critical attention in scholarship. The alternation of different languages within one poem has
been mostly investigated under the term “poetic multilingualism,” and has fostered the majority of
analyses on the theme.3 On the other hand, the habit of poets writing verse entirely in non-native
languages and without mixing them—extremely common throughout centuries—has been signifi-
cantly under-investigated in its specific character.
With the aim of creating patterns of continuity and dialogue among these two aspects of the
translingual poetic practice, we explore both of them in our thematic sections without applying a
rigid distinction. However, it is important to consider that while the first tends to explicitly fore-
ground proximity (contact, collision, closeness between different languages), the second one may
build instead on the creative potential of linguistic distance (the de-familiarizing effect of writing
beyond the mother tongue). As we will see in our examples, these two poles sometimes converge, but
the diversity of effects that they may create in verse must be kept into account while discussing the
peculiarities of the translingual poetic discourse.
20
Tradition: Translingual Poetry as a Relational and Disruptive Practice

In this section, we analyze examples from translingual poets whose innovations, for aesthetic, political, sub-
jective, or ludic reasons, manifest themselves not only in the crossing of languages, but also through establishing
dialogic relationships with diverse poetic genres and traditions. Several among these cases involve patterns of
explicit linguistic proximity—that is, alternation of different languages in the same text—particularly recur-
rent in pre-modern and early modern poetry, which is the main focus of the section.
Traveling back to the origins of Romance literature, for instance, we encounter the poetic
genre of the descort—a word that means contrast, disagreement—which foregrounded significant
translingual poetic performances. Emerging within the Provençal tradition in the twelfth century,
and later filtering into other linguistic and cultural contexts, the original descort embodied the lament
for an unrequited love expressed through the rigorous alternation of diverse languages in each stanza
(Lavezzi 104–05). Among the most famous interpretations of this form is Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’ Eras
quant vey verdeyar, which employs five different languages: Provençal, Genoese, Langue d’Oil, Gascon,
and Galician-Portuguese (see Wright).This example is considered an influential point of reference for
the dissemination of the genre across other languages and traditions.
The descort extensively traveled through space and time, asserting itself within the italophone trad-
ition as well. One reinterpretation of Raimbaut’s model is based, for instance, on the sole example
of descort attributed to Dante Alighieri: Aï faus ris, pour quoi traï m’avez. This text holds many points
of interest for our discourse on translingual poetry. In fact, Dante himself can be fully considered a
translingual poet, not only due to his ability to write verse in several languages—including vernacular
and Latin—but also for the intrinsically plurilingual nature of many of his writings.4 Second, his
descort manifests the intention to reconnect to a well-established tradition, and in particular to do so
by building on a trilingual performance.
The song, organized in three stanzas, holds a sophisticated metrical structure, based on the alter-
nation of volgare (Italian vernacular, of which Dante is a passionate defendant), langue d’oïl (Ancient
French, which in this case is hybridized with Provençal), and Latin (a language that the author exten-
sively uses in his writings, including poetry). To offer an idea of its characteristics, we transcribe the
first stanza below:
Aï faus ris, pour quoi traï m’avez

ocule meus? et quid tibi feci,
che fatta m’hai sì dispietata fraude?
Iamque audissent verba mea Greci!
Se onques autres, dames, et vous savez
che ’ngannator non è degno di laude.
Tu sai ben come gaude
miserum eius cor qui prestolatur:
en li esperant qui pas de lui ne cure.
Ai Dieus, quantes malure
atque fortuna ruinosa datur
a colui ch’aspettando il tempo perde,
né già mai tocca di fioretto il verde.
[Ah! Faux smile, why did you deceive /my eyes? And what did I do to you, /to provoke
such a cruel fraud? /If the Greeks had heard my words! /If only other ladies, and you as
well, /knew well that a traitor is not worth praise! /You know how much joy /the heart
of those who are able to wait can feel: /expecting those who do not care. /Oh God, what
a pain, /what disgrace happens /to him who waits, loses his time, /and never gets to touch
the green of sprouts].5
21
In this passage, Dante creates a connection between different traditions through his mastery of the
three languages. The variation of languages and the association of a specific rhyme to each one of
them allows the poet to allocate to them a perfectly equal space through the poem, a mechanism that
recalls and yet transforms Provençal precedents. The alternation of languages obviously alludes to the
conventional theme of the confusion and dismay of the rejected lover, whose desire is destined not
to be satisfied. The exercise is thus apparently located in the realm of a conventional performance of
polyglotism and metrical mastery.
And yet, Dante’s song can say much about the search for an anti-hierarchical balance between
different languages and traditions, not to mention his fight to champion the use of the vernacular for
poetry over Latin. The adhesion to a translingual model thus denounces a double intention: that of
connecting and that of performing an equalizing function upon diverse traditions, an exercise that
clearly places relationality at the center of the scene.
Further translingual poetry experiences within the italophone context deal more directly and
explicitly with issues of subversion, as they explore a disruptive relationship with languages and
traditions. These experiences align with trajectories of resistance and liberation, two aspects that have
been individuated as core in translingual poetry.6 For instance, the works in Macaronic by Teofilo
Folengo, a precursor of the pluringual François Rabelais, used to merge the vernacular lexicon with
Latin morphology and syntax in a century that saw the debate on language as particularly perva-
sive. While compiling his work, Folengo was certainly moved by a desire to entertain a dialogue
with a specific tradition, but this dialogue was nonetheless mostly based on instances of disruption.
As scholars have persuasively demonstrated, his verse often abandons the apparently playful terrain,
embodying instead a fierce critique of the values that were animating the political and intellectual life
of the Italian Cinquecento (Segre 62–71; Contini 102–06).
Contextually, the use of the pavan [Paduan] dialect in the comedies in verse by Angelo Beolco,
named il Ruzante, embodied the need to make visible the vitality of dialects in open opposition
to normative and domesticating attempts of the Italian vernacular, which were extremely strong at
the time. The identification of the ideological charge of poetic translingualism in these contexts has
allowed scholars to uncover how this latter was active through the centuries across anti-canonical
directions, a subterranean action that was nonetheless extremely impactful. Hence, we can assert that
a second function of crossing traditions in translingual poetry is a resistant, subversive, and disrup-
tive one.
These embodiments of translingual poetry do not appear solely in pre-modern and early-modern
times. In the context of Anglo-Modernism, for example, authors such as Samuel Beckett, James
Joyce, and T.S. Eliot used translingualism and the explicit intermingling of diverse languages to rela-
tionally tap into other cultures and literary movements, as well as subversively disturb and question
the limitations of meaning in one sole language. Eliot and Ezra Pound were enormously influenced
by Dante and the Provençal tradition cited above, as well as the more historically adjacent French
poets from the nineteenth century. On the whole, these authors saw in the use of translingualism an
opportunity to free English-language poetry from the shackles of its own traditions. Pound particu-
larly sought this aspect, as evidenced in his goal in The Cantos: “to break the pentameter, that was the
first heave” (Pound 518). Such a statement illustrates that the intercultural practice and attempt to
innovate by supplementing one’s tradition may also manifest through destruction and violence. The
translingual poet, as we shall demonstrate, can either destroy to make new or imitate and borrow in
the name of creativity and originality.
The French symbolist movement— populated by figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur
Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Tristan Corbière, and Jules Laforgue, among others—
particularly captivated Eliot, who began writing verse in French as pastiches of what he and his
successors viewed in large part as accursed poets; damned, marginalized, and misunderstood artists,
swept aside as the rag pickers of society. Eliot felt a kinship with these poets in particular and with the
symbolist movement more generally, which he felt was a literary movement with no real equivalent
22
in the Anglosphere.7 Eliot was intrigued by the linguistic and poetic revolution of the symbolists,
which he sought to replicate in French and English, and which had a lasting impact on his later
verse, particularly in his poem “The Waste Land” (Turner 122).The following excerpt from the poem
“Mélange adultère de Tout” [“A Pure Adulterous Mish-Mash”] exemplifies the emulative aspect of
Eliot’s translingualism, in a ludic, self-deprecating style calked on a combination of Corbière’s poems,
including “Épitaphe” and “Le poète contumace”:
En Amérique, professeur;
En Angleterre, journaliste;
C’est à grands pas et en sueur
Que vous suivrez à peine ma piste.
En Yorkshire, conférencier;
A Londres, un peu banquier,
Vous me paierez bien la tête.
C’est à Paris que je me coiffe
Casque noir de jemenfoutiste.
En Allemagne, philosophe
Surexcité par Emporheben
Au grand air de Bergsteigleben;
J’erre toujours de-ci de-là
A divers coups de tra la la
De Damas jusqu’à Omaha.
Je celebrai mon jour de fête
Dans une oasis d’Afrique
Vêtu d’une peau de girafe.
On montrera mon cénotaphe

Aux côtes brûlantes de Mozambique.
(Eliot 24)
[In America, a professor; /In England, a journalist; /You will have to stride along and sweat /
Barely keeping pace with me in my tracks. /In Yorkshire, a lecturer; /In London, somewhat of
a banker,/You will very much make fun of me. /It’s in Paris that I wear a black cap /Of one
who couldn’t care less. /In Germany, a philosopher /Overexcited by a sense of elation /In the
grand air of a mountaineer; /I wander always here and there /And get lost in fleshpots /From
Damascus to Omaha. /I celebrate my birthday /In an oasis of Africa /Wearing a giraffe skin. /
They’ll point out to my cenotaph /On the burning coast of Mozambique.]8
The themes of exile, displacement, and even contumacy present in Corbière’s work echo Eliot’s
poetic subjectivity as well, as he shifts the epitaph in Corbière’s work here to a cenotaph. A short
excerpt from Corbière’s “Poet by Default” suffices to uncover some similarities between the two
poems, particularly the manner in which the professions of poet, philosopher, and artist intertwine
for both Corbière and Eliot in ludic ways. In this passage, the poet further underlines the ambiguous
trajectory of the accursed poet, which Eliot followed:
Faisant, d’un à-peu-près d’artiste,

Un philosophe d’à peu près,
Râleur de soleil ou de frais,
En dehors de l’humaine piste.
(Corbière 89)
23
[He was an artist, more or less, /He was a poet of sorts, a hack /Who loved leaving the
beaten track /To breathe air that’s cool and fresh.]9
What is it about symbolist verse that so fascinated Eliot? As Kellman writes, “It is difficult to imagine
Mallarmé writing in any language other than his inimitable, untranslatable French, though another
poet, one less dependent on the evocative sonics and semiotics of particular syllables, might manage
the transition” (11).“Evocative” is a key adjective in this passage, as it partially defines symbolism: sym-
bolist verse must not name the poetic object of desire; it must evoke or suggest it, one line or contour
at a time. The symbolist symbol is shrouded in mystery, and only a happy few initiates are among the
chosen to decipher the obscure and enigmatic poetry that Mallarmé championed as a reaction to
the clichéd language of the masses and the media, which must be undone through an abundance of
synesthesia, occult references, disruptions in form and content, evocations of music (see Mallarmé’s
“Un coup de dés”), and a re-imagining of the semiotic chains that bound words and letters (see
Rimbaud’s “Voyelles”).
Although symbolist verse is, as Kellman writes, often “inimitable,” Eliot attempts the impossible
by writing French verse that imitates the likes of Laforgue and Corbière specifically, two symbolists
whose acerbic self- deprecating humor and linguistic play particularly intrigued Eliot. Turner
summarizes several scholars’ conclusions as to why Eliot turned to writing poetry in French and
the lasting impact it had on his poetic process, which includes the ability “to tap his deeper feelings”
(Moody 57); an influential shift in his conception of poetry (“a radical linguistic break” between
his earlier and later work [Piers Gray]); and experiments in language and form, with an evolution
from “poems in French to poems modeled on French verse forms,” where French represents at once
“signposts, tools, even weapons” (Gray 253;Turner 111).The element of poetic translingualism that is
evident in Eliot’s pastiches and homage is relational and dialogic, as he seeks inspiration in a tradition
that can only nurture his craft.
In this section, we have demonstrated that translingual poetry allows poets to explore new
intercultural spaces by expanding on traditions that can supplement, complement, or even subvert
their traditional spheres, all the while adding new tools and weapons to their poetic arsenal, in an
attempt to forge new forms, movements, and traditions.
Word: The Transformative Nature of Translingual Poetry

The previous section demonstrated that translingualism may manifest in poetry for various
reasons: from ludic, humorous, and witty objectives, to more socio-politically complex deviations
from tradition, to the desire to open novel hybrid creative spaces. This section turns to the pro-
cess of poetry-making and explores how translingualism impacts the very mechanics of poetry
at the level of configuration of the signifier–signified couplet. As per Kellman’s description, the
poet’s toolkit includes the “sonics and semiotics” (11) of verse, the shape of words, and their
ensuing acoustic images. The experience of moving across languages has the potential to trans-
form in-depth the set and use of the linguistic and rhythmical instruments that are in the poets’
possession.
A first example of the translingual transformation of the process of poetry-making is from
Albanian-Italian author Gëzim Hajdari. Hajdari fled Albania in 1992, after his life was threatened
for his political and intellectual activity. He moved to Italy, where he settled in self-exile and began
to reconstruct his literary career in his second language, albeit never abandoning his first.10 The way
in which Hajdari inhabits his translingual poetry is through what he conceptualizes as a “double
language” (Hajdari and Inverardi 302). Hajdari explains that his verse is born double, as per the
synchronic agglomeration of Albanian and Italian words on the page, a feature that he faithfully
reproduces in the vast majority of his books. We provide an example below:
24
Bie shi vazhdimisht Piove sempre

në këtë in questo
vend paese
ndoshta ngaqë jam forse perché sono
i huaj. straniero.
(Hajdari 47)
[It always rains /in this /country /maybe because I am /a stranger]
Hajdari’s concept of the double language allows us, among other things, to point out the distinctive
role that rhythm holds in translingual poetry, where verse often materializes through parallel vibra-
tion of the two (or more) languages involved, configuring as an encounter located within words and
lines and yet that transcends them (Loda “Corpo e Tempo” 142–3).The parallel flowing of Italian and
Albanian in Hajdari’s texts, within verses spontaneously born double, materializes this encounter.This
process impacts language from its innermost components in transformative ways and often creates
hybrid and liberated expressive spaces. This allows us to single out a third function of translingualism
in poetry, a transformative one at the word and verse level.
Translingual poets also seek innovative ways to interpret signification at the word level by
rethinking the very qualities of poetic language. This process is often based on accelerated contact
with the sound and shape of words. The work of Barbara Pumhösel, an Austrian-Italian author, goes
decidedly in this direction. Pumhösel was born in Vienna and moved to Italy in 1988, where she
began writing poetry in Italian almost immediately.11 Unlike Hajdari, Pumhösel’s works are usu-
ally published in either Italian or German, and the explicit examples of language intermingling on
her page are limited to a few lexical inserts, and to some morphological, syntactical, and rhythmical
intersections that frequently lead to the creation of neologisms, another extremely common trans-
formative feature of translingual poetry.The textual strategies in the poetry written in her second lan-
guage are based on a creative use of linguistic distance, which is possible only when writing beyond
the mother tongue. Pumhösel describes how distinctively verse in a non-native language arises:
Io sento una parola e dal suo suono la collego ad un’immagine e prima di imparare cosa
davvero vuol dire, posso anche toccare quella parola come un oggetto da guardare che mi
suggerisce delle cose che poi non sono.
(“VI seminario italiano degli scrittori e delle scrittrici migranti”)
[I hear a word, and from its sound I connect it to an image, and before learning what it
actually means, I can even touch that word, as an object to look at, that suggests things to
me that in the end are not there.]
The consequences of this physical relationship with words are multiple. As an effect of linguistic dis-
tance, words tend to acquire a sculptural relief on the page. This increase in the weight of material
components of words also determines a specific focus on the graphic profile of texts, which become
poem-objects. A good example is found in Pumhösel’s Eva [Eve]:
Sono stufa
di vedere Eva
che morde
la mela
sotto lo sguardo
del serpente.
Eva che quadro
25
dopo quadro
viene ricacciata
dal paradiso.
Vorrei vederla
seduta sul ramo
più alto del melo
con le gambe
penzoloni.
Vorrei vederla
sorridere
mentre prepara
una torta di mele
o ancora mentre
cantando pianta
i semi.
(Pumhösel,
prugni 126)
[I’m sick of seeing Eve /biting the apple /while the serpent looks on. /Eve who, painting
after painting, /is expelled from Paradise anew. /I’d like to see her seated, /legs dangling
/from the highest branch of the apple tree. /I’d like to see her smiling /as she makes an
apple pie /or again as, singing, /she plants the seeds.] 12
In this poem, words are used to transitively reproduce the trunk of the apple tree, which Eve eventu-
ally climbs, progressively liberating herself from a conventional representation, and designing her path
through figurative–ideological empowerment. Through a translingual strategy, Pumhösel embodies
as such a capsizing of paradigms, which materializes both within a linguistic and imaginative terrain.
In this section, we have demonstrated that attention to the shape, sound, and organization of
words and verses in translingual poetry not only highlights novel ways meaning beyond the signifier–
signified binary is created, but points to the very process of poetic creation (its “meta-translatability”)
in a genre where words become much more than simply referential.
World: Translingual Poetry and the More-Than-Human

A final and fundamental effect that we associate with translingual poetry is the ability to create
more inclusive and fluid ideas of the world, including through an ecologizing action. In a study on
poetry translation, Clive Scott has highlighted the ways in which moving across languages fosters the
arising of a transitive gaze of the poet on the reality observed, one that stimulates the development
of more interconnected and environmental ideas of the world (286). When poets abandon a dom-
inant language and begin to construct their verse beyond their mother tongue, their observation
and attentiveness to the outer world and its more-than-human inhabitants is transformed. Poetry
reinforces as such its ability not only to represent the word, but to become a model of the world, and
translingualism facilitates the development of more open and all-embracing poetic subjectivities.
Such a statement resonates harmoniously with Innu Québécois poet, activist, and actress Natasha
Kanapé-Fontaine, whose translingual distance is doubled when we take into account that she writes
primarily in one of Canada’s colonial languages, French, albeit a minority language in many contexts;
however, her first language, unbeknownst to her until she saw a video of herself as a child speaking
it, was Innu-Aiman. Kanapé-Fontaine’s poetry is a testimony to a fusion of ecopoetics, feminism, and
translingualism, in an attempted return to the language of childhood she no longer possesses.Through
her work, Kanapé-Fontaine seeks to retrieve the lost language of her past, and she does so by fusing
26
the paradigms of memory and imagination. She traces this lineage in the poem “Qui suis-je si je ne
suis pas le saumon?” (“Who am I if I am not the Salmon?”) in a spatio-temporal confrontation of city
and village, as well as past and present:
Je dis: je suis la fille de ...

mais je n’aperçois pas le bouleau
qui m’attend avec ses racines.
Je dis: nin u utanish …
mais je n’aperçois pas la pinède
qui m’attend avec son écorchure.
…
Qui suis-je si je suis l’ours
qui suis-je si je suis le saumon
quel est mon nom si je retourne à la ville
si je m’engouffre entre les gratte-ciel
et les routes d’asphalte?
Les gens de la ville ne savent pas dire
le mot terre
les gens de la ville ne savent pas dire
le mot peuple.
Je suis partie si loin de mon fleuve époux
je suis partie si loin de mon pays natal
je suis en exil en mon propre pays.
(Kanapé-Fontaine, 42)
[I say: I am the daughter of … /but I cannot see the birch /who awaits me with its
roots. /I say: nin u utanish … /but I cannot see the pine wood /who awaits me with its
graze … Who am I if I am the bear /who am I if I am the salmon /what is my name if
I return to the city /if I plunge into the skyscrapers /and the asphalt roads? /People of
the city know not how to say /the word land /people of the city know not how to say
/the word people /I left far away from my river spouse /I left far away from my native
country /I am in exile in my own country.]
In this poem, Kanapé-Fontaine performs a displaced subjectivity through the inability to describe
terms and concepts once the protagonist (“daughter”; “utanish”) is removed from the propitious
natural backdrop synonymous with belonging and creation: her land. In this text and elsewhere
in her works, the poet reactivates a dormant mythology in which characters incarnate, both meta-
phorically and metonymically, their natural surroundings in the name of hospitality. Similar to the
relationship between bear and salmon, the ecology of the page can also enact a relationship of power
between various elements, especially when multiple languages are at play in the materialization of
the poetic landscape. After all, the presence of a foreign word can symbiotically complement and
supplement meaning within a text, but it can also parasitically eat away at its very core signification.
Poetic translingualism performs an ecologizing function in this poem through the poetic landscape
that manifests through the retrievable language of childhood and the (in)hospitable elements, from a
textual, linguistic, and environmental perspective, that surround the poet on her quest.
From Kanapé-Fontaine’s materialized poetic landscape, we move to a final example by Pound,
whose musicalization of a poetic landscape incorporates many of the elements discussed in this
chapter, including tradition, experiments at word-level signification such as the sculptural relief
on the page, as well as a less anthropocentric exploration into the specularity between word
and world.
27
In Pound’s The Cantos, the poet uses explicit multilingual and translingual13 versification to dis-
rupt traditional meter (thus breaking with the pentameter) in order to challenge the limitations of
language. The following passage, which describes the cascading of two birds, contains English, Italian,
and Provençal:
with two larks in contrappunto

at sunset
ch’intenerisce
a sinistra la Torre
seen thru a pair of breeches.
Che sublia es laissa cader
(Pound 431)
Pound’s verse here contains various levels of interest for translingual discourse. In this excerpt,
translingualism meets intermediality—the interconnectedness of various arts and media—through
a reflection on the limits of mediated language, which articulates through an intersection of poetry
and music. In fact, Pound’s translanguaging could be characterized as contrapuntal, a defining aspect
of polyphony that suggests the musical style of the fugue, where several voices interweave (see Viselli).
Similar to his modernist counterparts, Pound was curious about the bounds of language, and he
attempted to unravel the semiotic strands inherent in words by suggesting an amimetic form such
as music in his poems. Language, outside poetry, traditionally operates according to a mimetic struc-
ture, where a referent in the real-world links to a given word, concept, or idea. As alluded to above,
however, words in poetry are not necessarily referential, and the allusion to different art forms in lit-
erature further exacerbates this claim that seems inherent to translingual poetry: by choosing to cross
languages, the poet shifts the focus away from conventional meaning and toward other methods of
signification such as form and sound.
Music, for example, does not have a direct conventional equivalent between sound and object
(or acoustic image). The symbolists and modernists suggested musical form and structures in their
writing as a manner in which to underline the void of significance in contemporary language and
push the boundaries of interartistic creations. The experience of translingual versification, as outlined
in our discussion on the transformative nature of translingual poetry, supported them in this direction
and hence in reconfiguring the very dynamics and mechanisms of poetry creation. Such a crucial
reconfiguration led to a propitious backdrop for the poet’s linguistic experimentations into new
world models in which language would be pushed to its semiotic limits.
Pound arguably reaches the pinnacle of his intermedial experimentations into meaning at word
and verse level in the musicalization and materialization of poetry through the birds and notes motif
in the following passage:
ff
d
g
write the birds in the treble scale
(Pound 545)
…
three solemn half notes
their white downy chests black-r immed
on the middle wire
periplum
(Pound 560)
28
While imprisoned in the Pisan detention center, Pound would watch birds compose and recompose
themselves on the musical staves that were the metal fence in front of his cell. Once translated to the
multilingual page, any possible harmony or cacophony gives way to letters and birds, which in turn
become voiceless notes. The meaning behind phonemes and morphemes makes way for the physical
object of letters—a process that is particularly prominent elsewhere in Pound’s reflections on Chinese
ideograms. Here, the sculptural attributes of the letters transform into musical notes on a stave. Music, in
this context, therefore becomes yet another language in the poet’s translingual tool box, complemented
as well by the translingual neologism that culminates in the passage of two contrapuntal larks cascading to
their death.The term “periplum” (from French via Latin) is synonymous with “journey” in Pound’s opus,
and in this excerpt, it embodies both the end and a new beginning, in a similar fashion to the ambiguity
in trajectories between where one language begins and the other ends in translingual poetry. What is
evident is that Pound’s experimentations into the limitations of language—arguably his attempt to push
language to its void by annulling the way in which it signifies—only creates a new connection with,
and model of, the world, an ecologizing relationship with language thanks to his poetic translingualism.
Conclusion
The examples of translingual poetry we have chosen represent various translingual trajectories. We
have emphasized that through traditions, whether relationally or subversively, poets have created
intercultural and novel hybrid poetic dialogues and spaces in the name of originality and homage.
At the verse and word-level, translingual poets have focused on poetic transformations that attract
the reader’s and listener’s attention to the sound and shape of words by pointing well beyond their
conventional relationship to any real-world reference. Finally, we have demonstrated that translingual
poets are in a privileged position to rethink language’s ability to both represent and become the
world by reshaping it not in terms of binaries and oppositions, but, as the pre-fix trans etymologically
implies, by focusing on the very movement to and from languages, with a focus on the liminality of
the threshold between such languages, the worlds, and the cultures they embody.
Notes
1 On the monololingual paradigm and its rootedness in literary history, see Yildiz 1–29.
2 We would like to thank Professor Sonia Gentili who was the first to point out this juncture. For the idea of
uniqueness of language and its intersection with the notion of mother tongue see Yildiz 10–14.
3 See, for instance, Hanna and Seláf; Sciarrino; Colangelo.
4 On this theme, see at least Fortuna et al.
5 The text is drawn from the critical edition by Lazzerini. All translations across the chapter are our own, unless
otherwise specified.
6 For the definition of resistance and liberation, we refer to Serenella Iovino’s conceptualization in Ecocriticism
and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (1–12). For power subversion and translingual poetics, see Dowling.
7 The work of Edgar Allan Poe is arguably the closest example to symbolism in English literature.
8 Translation by C R Mittal, in Mittal (78).
9 Translation by Christopher Pilling, in Hibbit and Lunn-Rockliffe (17).
10 For the full circumstances of Hajdari’s exile, see Poema dell’esilio.
11 Pumhösel is now a renowned and award-winning author of children’s literature and poetry, as well as a
member of the collective of translingual women writers called “La compagnia delle poete.” On this experi-
ence of performative and collective translingual poetry, see Armato.
12 Translation by Brenda Porster, in Pumhösel, Eve.
13 In The Cantos, poems are either multilingual or translingual, written entirely in Italian, for example.
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Yildiz,Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue:The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press, 2011.
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3
AND FICTION
Fiona Doloughan
Introduction
This chapter considers literary translingualism in relation to the genre of fiction, addressing some
of the distinctive stylistic and thematic features of translingual texts with a primary focus on the
novel and short fiction. While translingualism in literature is an age-old phenomenon, with a long
history and ancient pedigree (Kellman and Lvovich 403), it is one that has multiplied and intensi-
fied in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as a consequence of patterns of migration,
changing demographics and, to an extent, the rise of English as a global language. Developments
in fiction, in terms of form and substance, cannot be attributed solely to the effects of literary
translingualism; however, it is certainly the case that translingual writers have shaped and continue
to shape developments in fiction in significant ways, as discussed below. Given the varying contexts
for, and motivations of, translingual writers and the specifics of their trajectories, generalizations must
inevitably be made with a degree of caution. Nevertheless, there do appear to be some characteristics
shared by translingual writers such as greater tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, and awareness
of relativity (see Beaujour 1989). In addition, certain overarching features, both stylistic and thematic,
typical of the work of translingual writers, include but are not limited to, a focus on language and
issues of translation (see Doloughan 2016), representation and/or enactment of linguistic, cultural,
and often generic border-crossing, ludic and/or (self-)reflexive and critical commentary (see Sommer
2004). Indeed, we might even go so far as to suggest that “the impact of cultures in motion” (Wilson
218) is a determinant of or resource for translingual creativity and this is certainly reflected in much
contemporary translingual fiction.
As a process of moving from one language to another, or working across languages (from the Latin
prefix “trans”), using different tongues, literary translingualism refers to “the phenomenon of writers
who create texts in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one” (Kellman
2019, 337). As Rita Wilson points out, literary translingualism can be seen today as “an overarching
cultural phenomenon” (Wilson 217) which has arisen as a result of “the increased border-crossings
occurring in contemporary superdiverse societies” (Wilson 215). Wilson is using the term “border-
crossing” in both a literal and a metaphoric sense to refer to those who move from one place to
another, whether of necessity or by choice, as well as to other kinds of movement, across linguistic,
cultural, and technological borders, for example. In other words, she points to the prevalence of par-
ticular societal conditions that underpin contemporary translingual production. Of course, not all
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-3 31
Fiona Doloughan
those who cross borders, literal and/or metaphoric, go on to become producers of translingual litera-
ture but it seems that mobility and/or cultural and linguistic exchange or interchange underwrite the
kinds of literary creativity demonstrated by many translingual writers today.
We might think here by way of example of writers as diverse as Elif Shafak (primarily Turkish
and English with some French), Xialou Guo (Mandarin, Zhejiang dialect, and English), and Jhumpa
Lahiri (primarily English and Italian with some Bengali) to name but three, all from different lin-
guistic and cultural backgrounds as well as from different parts of the world. Shafak, Guo, and Lahiri
all produce work, including fiction, that treats cultural encounters in a broad sense, and demonstrates
the power of narrative to transform ways of thinking and being by bringing into contact different
linguistic and cultural traditions. Shafak’s 2019 novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, for
example, produces a rich and layered account of the life of a sex worker in Istanbul, drawing on the
memories that flit through her mind in the time it takes for consciousness to ebb. Guo’s A Lover’s
Discourse, a work in dialogue with Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux, relays in short,
meditative chapters the struggles of a Chinese-born woman living in post-Brexit England, to com-
municate with her Australian-German lover. And Lahiri’s work to date as a writer of short stories
and novels in English as well as of a memoir in Italian, reflects an engagement with protagonists who
must navigate cultural and linguistic difference. Lahiri is a writer who, having enjoyed early success
as an English-language writer of fiction, including short story collections (Interpreter of Maladies and
Unaccustomed Earth and novels, (The Namesake and The Lowland) chose to “begin again” in a third
language, Italian, to which she had no “natural” or inherited connection other than a love of the lan-
guage. In addition to a language memoir, In altre parole (2015), which contains her first short story, ‘Lo
scambio’ (‘The exchange’) in Italian, Lahiri’s first novel, Dove mi trovo, written in her newly acquired
language, was published in 2018. The novel, translated by Lahiri herself under the title Wherabouts,
appeared in English translation in May 2021. Lahiri sees herself as “a writer who doesn’t belong
completely to any language” (Lahiri 21). Opting to write in Italian was, she claims, “a sort of literary
act of survival” (57), an expression that requires some unpacking in relation to its possible meanings.
To voluntarily set aside early literary success in one language (English) so as to begin the process of
text creation in another, chosen language (Italian), might seem counter-intuitive in terms of literary
survival.Yet, the process of moving across languages, while extremely painful for some (cf. Guo) can
be not only productive but also liberating for others, allowing them to realize different aspects or
versions of self, as well as offering the possibility of “translating” the lives of others into fictional form.
Translingualism and Genre/s

Writers who have not only switched languages but also worked in different genres are numerous
but we might consider by way of example Vladimir Nabokov (Russian, English, and French),
Samuel Beckett (English and French), and Kamala Das (Malayalam and English). Both Nabokov and
Beckett published works in an array of genres—poetry, drama, short stories, novels and essays, and
in Nabokov’s case, an autobiography—and for both writers, though to differing extents, translation,
including self-translation, was an important part of their creative and revisional process. Kamala Das
preferred to separate her languages according to genre, writing prose fiction in her native Malayalam
and poetry in English (The Translingual Imagination 13). Her poetry is described as “pioneering” and is
characterized as having “contributed immensely to the growth and development of modern Indian
English poetry” (Patel 3). The Looking Glass is said to be a “revolutionary text, where the poet
leads a crusade against all the ideological and cultural determinants of expression in which a male-
dominated society believes” (Singha and Ghosh 193). This suggests that use of a particular language
in relation to genre can be deployed strategically to unsettle taken-for-g ranted assumptions as well as
contributing to the development of a literary tradition.
A more recent example of a writer using language and genre/s both to unsettle, and to extend
the possibilities of genre/s, is that of Ocean Vuong. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2017 for Night
32
Literary Translingualism and Fiction
Sky with Exit Wounds, Vuong is a Vietnamese-American translingual poet whose first novel, On Earth
We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), has also been received to critical acclaim. Vuong’s poetry, written in
American English with some phrases and a proverb in Vietnamese, confronts and articulates his
“difference” in terms of his dual heritage (born in Saigon, brought up in the U.S. from the age of
two) and his sexuality (as a queer writer) in a language that mixes American vernacular and the
musicality of oral Vietnamese in a collection that speaks to the writer’s experience, while writing
back to and remaking narratives of the past. For Vuong, language is like a person’s DNA, unique, and
idiosyncratic insofar as everyone has their own idiolect. His novel, ostensibly a letter in English to
a mother who can barely speak the language, about the narrator’s life, is underpinned by the influ-
ence of Vietnamese, both language and oral storytelling traditions. The Vietnamese language which
he spoke at home has, he maintains, impacted on and improved his English; he has learned how
to listen to the breath between syllables. In short, even as one language (English) is predominantly,
but not exclusively, employed in Vuong’s work, both poetry and prose, it is an English attentive to
the sounds, rhythms, and accents of other linguistic, cultural and storytelling traditions. While a
focus on language, if not culture, and storytelling might be considered the prerogative of all writers,
and not appear to be specific to translingual writers, it is nonetheless true that access to more than
one language informs writing in sometimes materially significant ways. As a poet who also writes
fiction, Vuong’s attentiveness to language might be attributed not to his translingualism but to his
initial choice of genre, and it is certainly true that his fiction is “poetic in the deepest sense” (Kirkus
Reviews).Yet, as will be discussed in a later section, hybridity of form and border-crossing, including
the creation of a hybrid voice through linguistic experiment (Guo 2020), is a characteristic of much
contemporary translingual writing.
Language/s and Style

For translingual writers, who, by definition, have access to more than one language, there is
likely to be evidence in their work, including fiction, of a high degree of linguistic and metalin-
guistic awareness. This is the case whether they be isolingual translinguals, who construct their
literary work in an acquired language, such as English in Joseph Conrad’s case, rather than his
native Polish or his acquired French, of which he had a high degree of mastery, or ambilingual
translinguals, who like Samuel Beckett (French and English) or Vladimir Nabokov (primarily
Russian, American English, French) create a highly valued body of work in more than one lan-
guage (Kellman 2019, 338). Language can be said to be a resource for meaning-making with access
to additional languages, whether actively employed or drawn on in less visible ways, impacting
upon the construction, in both senses of the word, as process and as product, of their translingual
writing. Conrad’s famous novella, Heart of Darkness, for example, while clearly a text written in
English, is also one that is permeated by a concern with meaning-making and with language, and
the cultures to which they pertain. There is in Heart of Darkness representation of other (mostly
European) languages (e.g. Latin and French) and mention of other systems of writing such as
Cyrillic, originally thought by narrator Marlow to be cipher (Conrad 38; 54), while indigenous
voices are often presented in relation to noise and babble (see, for example, Conrad 19; 35; 65),
or “strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language” (66). In addition, the
looming presence at the heart of the novel, Kurtz, portrayed as a man of great eloquence, has a
name which can be said to trigger a palimpsest of linguistic meanings, given the fact that “kurz”
is a German word meaning “short” and Kurtz is described as a kind of linguistic and cultural
amalgam: “His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the
making of Kurtz” (49).
So even as Conrad is an example of a writer whose literary reputation depends on his oeuvre
in the English language—he is after all considered to be one of the U.K.’s most important literary
modernists—he is at the same time a writer whose translingualism has had an important impact on
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Fiona Doloughan
his use of language. This goes beyond representation of other languages and what might be termed
implicit translation in his work to recognition of the specificities and singularities of his style. Conrad
was often seen by his contemporaries as producing a prose style in English, deemed at the time to
be “exotic” and seen to be influenced in its syntax and rhythms by his knowledge of both Polish
and French (Bär). For Conrad specialist Robert Hampson, “Conrad was accustomed to finding his
identity in and between a range of languages” (Hampson 204–5). In relation to literary deployment
of his linguistic competence in more than one language, Hampson sees evidence in Conrad’s work
of the skilled representation of a plurilingual experience. However, he distinguishes Conrad’s early
work, such as Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, from his later prose fiction such as Heart of
Darkness or Lord Jim, where Marlow is introduced as narrator, arguing that Conrad uses his “awareness
of others’ linguistic competencies” (205) in a reflexive way, allowing him to make clear the diffe-
rence between his own and Marlow’s linguistic competencies, where Marlow’s apparent knowledge
of English, French, and school-boy Latin “have an impact on his narration” (205). In other words,
representations of other languages in his fiction, and the ability of language to include or exclude,
as illustrated above in relation to Heart of Darkness, become “a vital component of his self-conscious,
modernist fiction” (205).
Another writer whose style is the product of literary translingualism is Milan Kundera, who
moved to France in 1975 from his native Czechoslovakia. While he continued at first to write in
Czech, he was aware that his books, many of which were banned in Czechoslovakia, would largely
be available to his readership in translation and he eventually began writing in French. His last
novel written in Czech was Immortality in 1988. For some critics, the move from Czech to French
resulted in slimmer, novella-like works of economy and precision, though with a degree of simpli-
fication, from the Czech writings of his middle period; for others a stylistic unity could be traced
between them, given Kundera’s long-lasting interest in classic French literature, which underpinned
his writing in Czech and remained a feature of his later prose.
For critic and translation studies specialist Michelle Woods, Kundera’s writing in French bears the
stylistic and thematic hallmarks of his own personal style, but this is a Kundera whose material base is
now French, rather than Czech, and who understands, like most other translinguals, that language is
above all a tool employed to create stylistic and other effects. “Translingual writers,” Woods indicates,
“are particularly self-aware of how language works, what it does in their writing” (428; italics in
original). She shows how Kundera’s use of French serves to reflect aspects of his characters, under-
cutting their pretensions and ignorance. In relation to a scene in La Lenteur/Slowness, she speaks of a
“Kunderization of language” (441), whereby Kundera takes “pleasure in playfulness” (440). In short,
for Woods, Kundera becomes aware of the transgressive qualities of his writing and continues them
in his writing in French. What may appear reductive or a simplification is, in fact, a way of focusing
on the effects produced by language, through “repetition, unusual syntax, and euphony” (Woods 428).
The fact that Kundera’s work in both Czech and French has received literary acknowledgment at
the highest levels, in France through publication of a two-volume Pléaide edition of his works (2017),
and as a recipient in September 2020 of the Franz Kafka Prize for his extraordinary contribution to
Czech culture, is evidence of his participation in two linguistic and literary cultures.
The Role of Translation and the Figure of the Translator in

Translingual Fiction
As with writing, so too with translation: it can relate to an aspect of process as well as the resultant
text; translation in both its literal and metaphoric dimensions is a feature of the work of many
translingual writers. This is true of ambilingual translingual writers such as Samuel Beckett who
famously self-translated his works, often using the translational process as a vehicle for stimulating as
well as revising his writing in one language or the other (French and English). As a writer who chose
to spend most of his adult life in France, Beckett famously turned his back on English in favor of
34
writing primarily in French; in truth, however, his linguistic trajectory was more complicated, and is
perhaps more accurately described as a “[s]‌huttling between and translating across languages” (Slote
116). In her article on Beckett’s bilingual writings, Maria Kager draws attention to the ways in which
there was not only a constant back and forth but also a struggle for dominance between French and
English on Beckett’s part. In looking at his work through a neurolinguistic lens, she concludes that
the “tensions, interactions and cross-fertilizations between Beckett’s English and his French govern
the very substance of his writing” (Kager 82).
In much contemporary translingual fiction, translation and the figure of the translator is integral
to the thematic structure and fabric of the work, in addition to its methodological and/or stylistic
deployment. Discussion of the fiction of Xiaolu Guo—see below—is emblematic of this tendency
but it is also reflected in neighboring or attendant concerns in translingual fiction with cultural
translation more generally in terms of the representation of linguistic and cultural others and with
border-crossing. Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Lo scambio’ (‘The Exchange’), referred to above, penned in Italian
and reproduced in her language memoir preceded by a brief authorial commentary in terms of its
apparent meaning, illustrates this tendency in relation to the short story.
The story is narrated in the third person by a female translator who has moved to a different
country in search of another version of herself. “Voleva generare un’alta versione di se stessa, nello
stesso modo in cui poteva trasformare un testo da una lingua a un’altra”/”She wanted to produce
another version of herself, in the same way that she could transform a text from one language into
another” (In Other Words 66–67).Wandering through the city streets, she follows some “illegible signs”
(71) into a building where a group of women are trying on clothes inside an apartment. Welcomed
by the owner who speaks the language perfectly “but with a slight accent” (73), the translator tries on
a range of black, well-designed clothes. It is only when she is ready to leave that she realizes that she
has lost a black sweater. While a black sweater is eventually found, the translator does not recognize
it as her own but wears it nevertheless. Next day back in her room, she spies it sitting on the chair
and “knew that it had always been hers.” “And yet”, she continues, “this sweater was no longer the
same … Now when she put it on, she, too, was another” (81). The comment from Lahiri introducing
the story, which she wrote without realizing at first what it meant, indicates that she understands the
sweater to be language: “il golfino è la lingua” (64). As Rita Wilson puts it: “Transformation of the
self, that shifting of identity, is of course what all this is about. Languages, as well as being tools, are
the vehicle into a new culture: experiencing oneself in a language that is not native means (ideally)
to know others and one’s self in a new way, conveyed here metaphorically by changing clothes”
(Wilson 219).
Lahiri is conscious of having had to pare back her language in Italian but she finds this liberating,
rather than restrictive, since she is free to experiment, having no hereditary or culturally accumulated
ties to the language. Lahiri’s own biography would suggest that the woman translator who has left
her previous life and connections behind to move to another city with few possessions and a for-
eign language is, in fact, a version of herself. It is at the level of language and the metaphors used
that the “meaning” of the story “translates itself ” and is conveyed. As Urmila Seshagiri (2016) puts
it: “Metaphor, Lahiri’s signature literary device, has always connected the several narrative threads of
her fiction.”
A very different writer in terms of cultural provenance and linguistic inheritance who neverthe-
less shares with Lahiri a focus on translation is Chinese-born writer, Xiaolu Guo, referred to in the
Introduction. Without exception, her work treats translation in multiple senses, sometimes simultan-
eously. From her breakthrough 2007 novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, which
mimics the language-learning process, and employs a dictionary form to “translate” Chinese lin-
guistic and cultural concepts for her mainly Anglophone audience, to her recently published A Lover’s
Discourse (2020) via her 2014 novel, I Am China, Guo has incorporated translation into her fiction at
the level of style, theme, and narrative strategy. I Am China is a story that literally, as well as metaphor-
ically, unfolds through translation, as Scottish translator Iona Kirkpatrick, works on the translation of
35
Fiona Doloughan
a disordered bundle of diary entries and correspondence between two young Chinese people, one a
musician in exile, following the distribution of a political manifesto, the other a performance poet,
who eventually makes it to London.
Just as Lahiri’s short story in Italian operates at the level of linguistic, symbolic and metaphorical
connections, with unnamed characters indexed by profession and status, Guo is a writer well aware of the
resonances of language and culture, including naming practices. Her choice of names in I Am China was
motivated by such linguistic and cultural choices and resonances (e.g. a translator named after a Scottish
island), while her general preference for unnamed or minimally named characters (e.g. the unnamed
male lover and the female protagonist mainly referred to as “Z” in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary
for Lovers; no names in A Lover’s Discourse) is something that she sees as having the potential to frustrate
an easy adequation of character and culture or character and place.This is with a view to focusing on the
dialogic interaction between characters whose positions are representative, rather than unique, and may
reflect more generalizable philosophical and existential concerns. In other words, for Guo, the stripping
out of culturally imbued naming practices that would locate characters in specific places can permit
a more focused enquiry on questions of more general import and relevance in her work, such as the
architecture of memory, culture as a discursive practice, and literary style as a function of translation. Guo
sees her literary style as a kind of translational composite, the outcome of reading and writing practices
intersecting at different stages of her life. As a student in China she read French and American literature
in translation, literature whose impact on her thinking she continues to acknowledge (e.g. the fiction
of Marguerite Duras, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg); and as a young, somewhat rootless but ambitious
writer switching to English for a complex mix of reasons connected with mobility and residency/citi-
zenship requirements, censorship issues and freedom from constraint, she found herself in a new envir-
onment with an expanding Anglophone audience interested in the migrant experience and translation
of self across borders. Such issues were discussed online by Guo on January 12, 2021 in the context of
“Exhibition (de)Tour: The Life of Memory: Xiaolu Guo on her writing and filmmaking” with curator,
Ute Meta Bauer, of the Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore.
This interest in translation in multiple senses can also be seen in the work of translingual Lebanese-
American writer Rabih Alameddine whose 2013 novel, An Unnecessary Woman, treats the solitary
existence of a female translator into Arabic. Indeed, to apply a description of the protagonist of
Lahiri’s Wherabouts to Alameddine’s novel, it might be said that An Unnecessary Woman, is “the story
of a woman who turns her solitude into a profession” (Teheran Times), given the focus of protagonist
Aaliya Saleh’s life, set against the backdrop of civil war in Lebanon, on the problematics of moving
across languages and cultures. Holed up in her apartment in Beirut, Aaliya has spent her time over the
years engaging in “a translation of a translation” (Alameddine 284), completing thirty-seven works
from a range of source texts via their French and English translations. This double act of translation
is her chosen system until the end of the novel when she reviews her “somewhat arbitrary decision”
(62) to create an Arabic version of a non-French, non-English source text via their French and English
translations, and decides to allow herself the luxury of choice, a choice that will finally depend not
on a system but on chance (291). Alameddine is a writer whose work is considered to actively draw
on multiple linguistic and cultural frames in his work, engaging with intertexts and allusions from
Western literature and re-presenting them in an Arabic context for his English-language audience. As
Yousef Awad (Awad 88) puts it: “As an Arab author in diaspora, Alameddine draws on both canonical
Western texts and Arab cultural heritage to depict the experiences of his characters, who usually live
between cultures.”
Migration, Exile, Return, Concepts of Home

In flagging up a cluster of themes in relation to translingual fiction, I do not wish to suggest that such
themes cannot be found in other genres by translingual writers nor that other writers never engage
with such themes. What I do wish to indicate is that particular thematic tendencies characterize
36
translingual fiction and that their treatment in novel form clusters around issues of migration, whether
voluntary or involuntary, exile, return, and concepts of home. Milan Kundera’s 2000 novel Ignorance,
written in French, rather than Czech, and translated into English in 2002 by Linda Asher, treats the
myth of the great return via the story of Irena and Josef, who knew each other in Prague, and who
meet at the airport in Paris on their way to the city after twenty years living abroad in Paris (Irena)
and Denmark (Josef). Their experience of return forces them to confront the incongruity between
memories of the past and present realities, including disparities between the actual geography of the
city and their memory of it. In addition, no one seems to be particularly interested in the lives they
have lived in the interim; and Josef finds the sound of spoken Czech “flat and unpleasantly blasé”
(Kundera 195), even though lovemaking with Irena was spurred by her use of obscenities—“dirty
Czech words” (178)—which aroused him.
As a philosophical meditation on what it means to leave one’s homeland and live in exile, adopting
a new language and ways of being in the world, Ignorance raises questions about identity in relation
to both memory and experience, and interrogates the links between language, place and concepts of
home. Interpolation of references to Odysseus and Penelope, and linguistic and essayistic digressions
on language, home and exile, form a kind of interrogative counterpoint to the main narrative
thread: section 2, for example, looks at the etymology and cross-linguistic resonances of words
connected to nostalgia, both return after absence and longing, bringing into historical and associa-
tive dialogue the roots of these terms and their semantic nuances in different languages (Kundera
5–7). It poses the question of whether it might not have been better for Odysseus to have remained
with Calypso rather than return to Penelope and ends with the image of Josef returning to Denmark
to the house he had shared with his wife, thereby providing a somewhat ambiguous answer to the
question of departure, exile, and return. Ana Maria Alves (2017) reads the evocation of Odysseus in
Ignorance as a means of asking whether it is time to rewrite the Homeric myth and replace it with
the modern myth of the twenty-first century émigré: “En évoquant Ulysse, Kundera se demande
si nous ne devrions pas réécrire le mythe homérique et le substituer par le mythe moderne de
l’émigré européen du XXIe siècle” (Alves 6). (By referring to Odysseus, Kundera is asking whether
the Homeric myth should not be rewritten and replaced by the modern myth of the twenty-first-
century European migrant.)
While reflections on home and evocation of a place a given character has left behind is not the
sole prerogative of migrant writers or translingual writers of fiction, it is certainly the case that
constructions and memories of “home” from the perspective of a character who has had to leave
their homeland and journey elsewhere is typical of the thematic concerns of many translingual
writers. A comparative perspective is necessarily embedded in their fiction, sometimes, as seen
in the case of Ignorance above, because the characters effect a return, if only temporarily, to their
homeland and comment on the differences, but this perspective may also be realized through acts
of memory and comparisons between the place left behind and the place of arrival or where a new
home has had to be established. For example, the title story, “In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd”
(Menéndez 2001) from a volume of the same title, evokes memories of Cuba from the perspective
of main protagonist Máximo, as he meets to play dominoes with fellow Cuban Raúl, and Antonio
and Carlos from the Dominican Republic. Ana Menéndez, herself the daughter of Cuban exiles,
who grew up in Miami, creates a sense of “here” (Domino Park, Little Havana, Miami) and “there”
(pre-revolutionary Cuba; and the early years of Cuba under Fidel Castro) through the dialogue and
banter of the four domino players and via Máximo’s backstory and memories.
The English text is threaded through with words and expressions in Cuban Spanish, including
slang, and references to Cuban literature and culture (e.g. writer and national hero José Martí; the
Cuban danzón, a musical genre and dance; guayabera, a kind of loose-fitting shirt with pleats and
large pockets worn untucked, and popular in Latin America; el manicero, the peanut vendor). There
is, in equal measure, nostalgia and pain in the memories of Máximo. The joke he recounts to the
other three players about the Cuban mutt and the American poodle, the punchline of which provides
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Fiona Doloughan
the story’s (and indeed the volume’s) title, is indicative of his own feelings of abandonment and dis-
placement, as he navigates old age and a life of increasing isolation following his wife’s death. His
connections to his roots, to Cuba, are bitter-sweet from the standpoint of a man who has had to
start again in the U.S. where his “Spanish and his University of Havana credentials meant nothing”
(Menéndez 6). The inclusion of a broken English “translation” of part of the dialogue recounted
between the two dogs, “You are one hot doggie, yes?” for “O Madre de Dios, si cocinas como
caminas” (Menéndez 28) is indicative of what is lost in translation, as well as indexing the plight of
newly arrived migrants.
Another example of the ways in which links are created in fiction by translingual writers between
“here” and “there,” comes from Sandra Cisneros’s now classic coming-of-age tale, The House on
Mango Street, in which young protagonist, Esperanza, whose family has come to the U.S. from Mexico,
refers to the Mexican records that her father listens to on a Sunday morning while shaving, as “songs
like sobbing” (Cisneros 10), an indication of his continued investment in, and nostalgia for, the culture
he has left behind. This is in the context of a section in which Esperanza reflects on the sound and
signification of her name, which includes both hope and waiting. From her child’s perspective, there
is already consciousness of the differences between its English and Spanish meanings and resonances.
“In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means
waiting” (Cisneros 10). Named after her great-grandmother, Esperanza hopes not to “inherit her
place by the window” (Cisneros 11). Rather than being on the inside looking out, she wants to exer-
cise some agency and make her own way in the world. In considering the kind of house she would
like to have when she grows up, Esperanza makes clear that her idea of a house is different to the ones
in which she has been living with her family to date: rented accommodation where space has been
at a premium in sometimes noisy neighborhoods. She wants a house of her own, “a house quiet as
snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem” (Cisneros 108). The concept of home
for Esperanza, then, is built not on differences between “here” and “there” in terms of a country and
a culture left behind but rather on the need for self-determination and the literal and metaphoric
space—“a space for myself to go”—in which to realize her future as a writer.
Border-crossing
While attention/attentiveness to language has already been flagged up as a characteristic of many
translingual writers, there is another feature of translingual texts that depends on awareness of the
affordances of more than one language. We can speak of linguistic and stylistic border-crossing in
respect of the work of translingual writers who “surface” in their fictional texts evidence of such
border-crossing by drawing attention to linguistic difference and/or by combining the resources of
more than one language to create something new.The previous examples from Ana Menéndez’s short
story have already highlighted how inclusion of both languages, sometimes with “translation,” some-
times without, where meaning is expected to be derived from context, can create, at different times in
the story, a sense of parallel universes, yet also offer critique of exclusionary linguistic practices, where
there is an assumption of English only, rather than English plus. In the story it is the tourists who see
the domino players as men from another culture and a bygone age, their ritual practice framed by
a guide who positions them as “keeping alive the tradition of their homeland” (Menéndez 26), as if
they were pieces in an open-air museum. Use of a sprinkling of Spanish cannot simply be considered
a textual marker of authenticity but shows how the lived realities of the players are bound up with
their linguistic and cultural origins. At the same time, non-Spanish speakers will need to work harder
to understand or capture all the resonances that a bilingual reader will grasp more readily.
Another meaning of border-crossing relates to thematic and generic concerns whereby translingual
writers of fiction draw on the embeddedness of language in culture to present characters who work
across cultures and/or cross borders both literal and metaphoric. Many writers of Hispanic heritage
bring to their use of American English consciousness of different linguistic and cultural systems.
38
For example, Junot Díaz, winner of the Pulitzer prize in 2008 for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao, inscribes in his work references to the troubled history of the Dominican Republic, from the
perspective of those who have moved to the U.S.; Julia Alvarez is another example of a Dominican-
American writer who, while writing in American English, seeds her texts with stories of cross-
cultural interactions. In novels such as How the García Girls Lost their Accents Alvarez creates a sense of
the complexities of moving between cultures and seeks to embed in the rhythms of her prose an echo
of the oral culture first experienced by her characters.
Reading Translingual Literature

As mentioned above in relation to Menéndez’s short story, reading literature that depends on
knowledge of more than one language, can create challenges for the reader who does not have
access to all the languages on which the writer draws. Whether the writer includes or excludes
the monolingual reader and/or nods to the bilingual or multilingual reader may depend on what
the writer is trying to achieve and on the politics of writing. There is a moment in Xiaolu Guo’s
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, for example, when the character-narrator, frustrated
by her attempts to master English and understand British culture, writes in Chinese. For most
British readers, this would not be comprehensible without what is presented as being the Editor’s
Translation on the following page:
I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enor-
mous. It swallows me, and it rapes me. I am dominated by it. I wish I could just forget about
all this vocabulary, these verbs, these tenses, and I wish I could just go back to my own lan-
guage now.
(Guo 180)
At one level, then, the text in Chinese is a mimetic device to flag up to the reader what it is like to
encounter a different language and script without the benefit of scaffolding, explicit cultural medi-
ation, or translation. At the same time, the content and tenor of the supposed Editor’s Translation of
the narrator’s text, which refers to the power of English to subject the narrator to symbolic violence
by imposing on her a different language and culture, forcing her to translate herself, is such that it
clearly functions as a critique of linguistic and cultural colonization. Moreover, reading this section of
text will resonate differently for Chinese-speaking and non-Chinese-speaking readers. Inclusion of a
source text (in Chinese) and its translation (in English), apparently by different hands, but most likely
by the author herself, both enacts a moment of crisis and conflict for the protagonist within the novel’s
narrative arc, and signals the difference that it makes to read bilingually, rather than monolingually.
There are a number of points at issue here both in relation to the strategic deployment of lan-
guage/s in text, and more generally to the politics of language. As increasing numbers of writers
draw on the resources of more than one language, either in an effort to challenge the dominance of
a single language and test the monolingual paradigm and/or to create a bi-or multilingual reading
experience, the onus is being placed on readers to engage with text at different levels according to
their own linguistic and cultural histories and to acknowledge “the validity and value of cultural and
linguistic exchange, even in the absence of perfect comprehension” (Williams 7). In the example
discussed above, Guo was drawing attention to Anglophone linguistic bias, while at the same time
foregrounding the advantages of bilingual privilege. Indeed, across the novel as a whole, despite
moments of frustration such as that illustrated above, there is recognition of the benefits as well as
burdens of bilingualism.
As Ilan Stavans’s work on Spanglish has shown, the dynamics of language acquisition are such
that new forms of language can emerge from the interplay of other languages, such as Spanish and
American English. Far from being simply intermediate forms on the way to full “mastery” of a
39
Fiona Doloughan
language, these new forms take on a life of their own, becoming embedded in culture and are seen
to be reflective of new social and political concerns. Giannina Braschi’s novel in Spanglish, Yo-Yo
Boing! is characterized as a “perfect example of translingual practice” (Moreno-Fernándes n.d.) on the
reviews page of Braschi’s website and demonstrates the extent to which code-switching as a linguistic
and cultural practice has the potential to rewrite the rules of literary engagement. At the same time,
however, it can be a demanding read for readers unused to such a linguistic rollercoaster.
Translingual Creativity and Generic Renewal

Clearly creativity, whether understood as process, product, or both, is not the prerogative of writers,
let alone, translingual writers.Yet it might be said that translingual writers evidence a particular kind
of creativity that derives, at least in part, from their very translingualism. This translingual creativity
which stems from knowledge of or expertise in more than one language and/or culture, can result,
as has been said, in greater cognitive flexibility, an enhanced sense of the relativity of phenomena,
and greater tolerance of ambiguity (cf. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour and Doris Sommer). Many con-
temporary translingual writers not only switch languages or employ more than one language in their
work but also cross genres. Such genre-crossing is not limited to working in more than one genre, but
is, in effect, an unsettling of the assumed affordances and constraints of genre and a mode of generic
renewal.Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, referred to above, is not just a reversioning of a poem
from his earlier collection in a more elaborated novelistic form. Nor is it simply a reworking of an
older form, as his reference in the Waterstone’s interview (2019) to the impact of Melville’s Moby Dick
on his work might suggest. Rather, for Vuong, as for Guo, and many other translingual writers, genre
is a cross-cultural resource for meaning-making that allows him to take some of the conventions of
imagistic poetic modernism in the manner of a William Carlos Williams, and storytelling conventions
from Japan, and the U.S. to create generic renewal in the production of a complex, multi-layered text.
This “power of storytelling … [to] refuse the monolingual paradigm” (Sim 243), is enacted in Vuong’s
novel. Equally it might be said that it is the power of translingualism that generates new storytelling
practices that emerge from translational writing and generic border-crossing to produce transform-
ation and renewal.
Concluding Remarks
This chapter has been concerned with the ways in which literary fiction has been impacted by a
writer’s translingualism and has discussed the stylistic and thematic concerns evidenced in the fiction
of a number of translingual writers. It acknowledges that as a phenomenon, whereby writers adopt
a language that they acquire rather than inherit, or compose works of literature in more than one
language, translingualism has always existed. It has focused, however, on the period of its intensifica-
tion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has examined the effects of translingualism on
the shape and substance of the work of selected writers from different parts of the globe for whom
English is an essential, but not exclusive, part of their repertoire. It has also gestured to the fact that
literary translingualism necessarily intersects with research on and discussions of other phenomena
such as bilingualism and multilingualism, translation, “translational” writing, and self-translation. It
has pointed in addition to the impact of translingualism on readers of literary fiction, as well as
considering the potentially different ways in which monolingual and multilingual readers may engage
with translingual prose texts. From a post-monolingual perspective, switching languages, employing
them for different purposes, mixing and blending them is at the heart of using language dynamic-
ally, flexibly, and creatively.Yet, at the same time, “the immense distances between languages” (Lahiri
91) and the very real time it takes to learn a language to the point where one can “penetrate its
heart” (Lahiri 91), is a slow and sometimes painful process that it is difficult to short-circuit. In this
sense, then, there needs to be a strong connection between writer and the language or languages she
40
employs. Connections are made, rather than given; writers shape whatever language/s they have at
their disposal. As Lahiri puts it in interview at Princeton: “It’s only by stepping outside the language
you take for granted—the language you can express yourself in without thinking—that you can really
learn to work in any language” (Alio 2020).
The body of literature treating translingual writers and examining translingualism as a force in
literature has increased rapidly since publication in 2000 of Kellman’s The Translingual Imagination.
Indeed, the notion of a translingual turn (Dutton 2016) reflects increasing interest in the phenom-
enon and the fact that translingual writing has the capacity to unlock, if not dismantle, linguistic
silos and unsettle binaries, such as “native” and “non-native” languages, by creating a third space
(Bhabha) around writing that is more than the sum of its parts. While not all translingual writers
consciously activate and display in their work material evidence of the competing influence of other
linguistic and cultural systems, their writing is nevertheless the product of a degree of linguistic and/
or cultural mediation. As illustrated in the body of this chapter, translingualism in literature affords
writers access to a greater range of stylistic and narrative resources enabling them to produce works
that evidence enhanced creativity, and a high degree of self-reflexivity, thereby driving evolution in
forms of fiction. It also demands of readers who may be unfamiliar with the differing languages and
cultures at the writer’s disposal a greater degree of care and attention in engaging with translingual
fictional texts.
Works Cited
Alameddine, Rabih. An Unnecessary Woman. Corsair, 2013.
Alio, Danielle. “Jhumpa Lahiri Champions the Writerly Art of Translation.” Princeton University website: www.
princeton.edu/news/2020/09/04/jhumpa-lahiri-champions-writerly-art-translation, September 4, 2020.
[Accessed November 16, 2020].
Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost their Accents. Bloomsbury, 1991.
Alves, Ana Maria. “Pour une déﬁnition de l’exil d’après Milan Kundera.” Carnets: Revue électronique d'études
françaises, Deuxième série 10, 2017. Website; https://journals.openedition.org/carnets/2249#quotation
[Accessed June 2, 2021].
Awad, Yousef. “Bringing Lebanon’s Civil War Home to Anglophone Literature: Alameddine’s Appropriation of
Shakespeare’s Tragedies.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 3, 2016, pp. 88–101. Available online at: https://browzine.
com/libraries/810/journals/39878/issues/13960018[Accessed February 19, 2021].
Bär, Gerald. “Fantasies of Fragmentation in Conrad, Kafka and Pessoa: Literary Strategies to Express Strangeness
in a Hetero-Social Context.” Altea: Revista de Mitocrítica, vol. 3, 2011, pp. 1–21.
Barthes, Roland. Fragments d’un discours amoureux. Editions du Seuil, 1977.
Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration. Cornell University
Press, 1989.
Bhabha, Homi. “How Newness Enters the World.” The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994, pp. 303–337.
Braschi, Giannina. Yo-Yo Boing! AmazonCrossing, 2011.
———. Reviews of Yo-Yo Boing! available at: https://gianninabraschi.com/yo-yo-boing/ [Accessed December
23, 2020].
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. Bloomsbury, 2004.
Conrad, Joseph. “Preface to A Personal Record.” In Heart of Darkness, Fifth Norton Critical Edition edited by
Paul B. Armstrong. W.W. Norton, 2017, pp. 266–268.
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead, 2007.
Doloughan, Fiona. English as a Literature in Translation. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Dutton, Jacqueline. “Etat Présent: World Literature in French, Littérature-Monde, and the Translingual Turn.”
French Studies, vol. LXX, no. 3, 2016, pp. 404–418.
Guo, Xiaolu . A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Chatto & Windus, 2007.
———. I Am China. Chatto & Windus, 2014.
———. Once Upon A Time in the East. Chatto & Windus, 2017.
———. A Lover’s Discourse. Chatto & Windus, 2020.
———. “Exhibition (De)tour:The Life of Memory: Xiaolu Guo on her Writing and Filmmaking.” Presentation,
conversation and discussion held online on January 12, 2021, as part of exhibition of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s latest
work, What about China? Available at: https://vimeo.com/503382449.
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Fiona Doloughan
“Interview: Xiaolu Guo on the universal human narrative and creating a hybrid voice,” February 17, 2020.
Available at: https://weai.columbia.edu/news/interview-xiaolu-guo-universal-human-narrative-and-
creating-hybrid-voice [Accessed February 18, 2021].
Hampson, Robert. “Joseph Conrad, Bilingualism, Trilingualism, Plurilingualism.” In Bicultural Literature and Film
in French and English edited by Peter Barta and Phil Powrie. Routledge, 2015, pp. 192–206.
Kager, Maria. “Comment Dire: A Neurolinguistic Approach to Beckett’s Bilingual Writings.” L2 Journal, vol. 7,
2015, pp. 68–83.
Kellman, Steven. The Translingual Imagination. University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
———. “Literary Translingualism: What and Why?” Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices, vol. 16, no. 3, 2019,
pp. 337–346. http://journals.rudn.ru/polylinguality/article/view/21823/17270 [Accessed September
16, 2020].
Kellman, Steven and Natasha Lvovich. “Introduction” [Special Issue on Translingual Fiction], Studies in the Novel,
vol. 48, no. 4 (Winter), 2016, pp. 403–406.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2019 www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ocean-vuong/on-earth-were-briefly-
gorgeous [Accessed June 2, 2021].
Kundera, Milan. Ignorance. Translated by Linda Asher. Faber and Faber, 2002. [English version]
———. L’Ignorance. Editions Gallimard, 2003 [2000] [French version].
Lahiri, Jhumpa. In altre parole. Ugo Guanda Editore, 2015. In Other Words. Translated by Ann Goldstein.
Bloomsbury, 2017.
Menéndez, Ana.“In Cuba I was a German Shepherd.” In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, edited by, Ana Menéndez.
Headline Book Publishing, 2001, pp. 3–29.
Moreno-Fernández, Francisco. “Yo- Yo Boing! is a perfect example of translingual practice.” —Francisco
Moreno-Fernández (Instituto Cervantes, Harvard University). Cited on website of Giannina Braschi, https://
gianninabraschi.com/yo-yo-boing-vanguard-novel/
Patel, M.F. “Indian Feminine Sensibility in Current Indian-English Women Poets.” In Recritiquing Women’s Writing
in English,Volume 1, edited by M.F. Patel. Sunrise Publishers and Distributors, 2009, pp. 1–15.
Shafak, Elif. 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World. Penguin, 2019.
Seshagiri, Urmila. “Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn.” Public Books, 2016. www.publicbooks.org/jhumpa-lahiris-
modernist-turn/ [Accessed February 2, 2021].
Sim, Wei-chew. “Becoming Other: Literary Multilingualism in the Chinese Badlands.” Textual Practice, 2020-02-
01,Vol. 34 (2), pp. 235–253.
Singha, Sankar Prasad and Joyjit Ghosh. “Kamala Das’s The Looking Glass: A Woman’s Writing.” In Recritiquing
Women’s Writing in English, Volume 1, edited by M. F. Patel. Sunrise Publishers and Distributors, 2009, pp.
189–194
Slote, Sam. “Bilingual Beckett: Beyond the Linguistic Turn.” The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett
edited by Dirk Van Hulle. Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 114–125.
Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education. Duke University Press, 2004.
Teheran Times.“Jhumpa Lahiri’s Italian novel ‘Dove mi trovo’ published in Persian.2 Available at: www.tehrantimes.
com/news/447984/Jhumpa-Lahiri-s-Italian-novel-Dove-mi-trovo-published-in-Persian [Accessed February
18, 2021.]
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.Vintage, 2019.
———. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Jonathan Cape, 2017.
Waterstone’s interview with Ocean Vuong.YouTube, July 2, 2019. Available at: www.bing.com/videos/search?q
=ocean+vuong+youtube&docid=: [Accessed February 2, 2021].
Williams, Hannah. “Translingualism as Creative Revolt: Rewriting Dominant Narratives of Translingual
Literature.” FORUM, Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, Issue 30, Spring 2020, University of Edinburgh.
Available at: www.forumjournal.org/article/view/4474 [Accessed September 29, 2020].
Wilson, Rita. “‘Pens that Confound the Label of Citizenship’: Self-translations and Literary Identities.” Modern
Italy,Vol. 25, no. 2, 2020, 213–224.
Woods, Michelle. “Elsewhere: Translingual Kundera.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 48, no. 4 (Winter), 2016, 427–443.
42
II
Ancient Literary Translingualism

4
IN THE GREEK AND
ROMAN WORLDS
The Context for Greco-Roman Literary Translingualism

Literary translingualism refers to the practice of multilinguals writing in languages other than their
mother tongue, and instead, for a variety of reasons, composing literature in their second or third
languages.1 Though earlier works treated the subject, the field was given coherence and impetus
following the publication of Kellman’s The Translingual Imagination (2000). The complexities of bilin-
gualism and biculturalism in Greco-Roman literature have long been explored, but the translingual
dimension, a specific and important aspect of the complexity, has not been discussed using this ter-
minology and therefore not linked to the field of literary translingualism. The Greco-Roman world
offers numerous examples of translingual authors, some of whom discuss the phenomenon of writing
in a non-native tongue and shed light on the evolving relationships between languages and cultural
identities.
When we tackle the literature of the Greco-Roman world, we must remain alert to the nature of
our evidence: Although we have some direct indications of how authors and readers contemplated
literature and language, much has been lost. We have only what has been passed down to us, either
by often complicated processes of manuscript transmission over centuries or through rarer finds of
ancient texts in archaeological excavations.2 The materials that can be assembled and studied are
therefore only a small part of the original literary environment and one that has been prone to
the choices of medieval scribes and archaeologists’ trowels. All interpretation is highly subjective, of
course, but we should remember that our attempts to consider ancient literature in its context are
hampered by multiple layers of subjective reconstruction of the past itself.
The writing of literary works in a language that was not the author’s first was no doubt a common
phenomenon across the Greco-Roman world, but our ability to identify the examples with confi-
dence is restricted. Commonly, we know few biographical details of the early lives of ancient authors,
making certainty about their native language elusive. Moreover, aspects of the linguistic context of
the ancient world make matters complicated.
One issue concerns what might count as literary translingualism in the Greek world, which is
usually described as being composed of different dialects. Modern concepts of what constitutes a
language, the shorthand of “Greek” used in classical studies and beyond, along with the popular,
yet unattributed, quotation πᾶς μὴ Ἕλλην βάρβαρος “whoever is not Greek is a barbarian” have
created the illusion of uniformity in Greek languages and cultures. The real picture, however, is
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-4 45
far more complex. One cannot talk about a single standardized ancient Greek, unified through a
common system of education, codified grammar, and formal written forms. It is rather a vast reper-
toire consisting of a number of, sometimes very different, varieties, which showcase startling variation
in orthography, lexemes, grammar, and pronunciation.
Questions that reasonably arise concern the perception that the Greeks themselves in Archaic
and Classical times held about these variations. Did they acknowledge them? Did they consider
them simple differentiations of the same mother tongue? Could they understand each other
when they came into contact through trade, travel, migration, etc.? Initially, the words dialektos
and glossa were not distinguished as in modern linguistics as “dialect” and “language” respectively.
The word glossa could refer to a dialect or to a language, while the word dialektos only began
to bear the meaning of dialect after the Hellenistic period. More specifically, Homer’s Odysseus
uses the word glossa to talk about the many dialects spoken on the island of Crete (Od. 19.175).
Herodotus references a foreign language with the same linguistic term (1.57), and Thucydides
mentions the Dorian dialect while using the term glossa (3.112). Similarly, the word dialektos was
used with the meaning of language as articulate speech (Aristotle, Problemata 895a6) and written
language (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition 11). However, we also come across
usages that prefigure the later meaning “dialect.” Aristophanes uses the word with the meaning
“speech” and “spoken language” (with the meaning “idiom”) (Fragments 685), and Demosthenes
the orator (4th century b.c.e.) uses the word to mean the “way of speaking,” possibly referring to
accent (37.55). Later on, Diogenes, the 2nd-century b.c.e. Stoic, uses the word dialektos with the
meaning of dialect (Diog.Bab.Stoic. 3.213). Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st century b.c.e.) (On lit-
erary composition 3) and Plutarch (1st–2nd century c.e.) (Alexander 31) also employ the word with
the meaning of dialect and local expression respectively.
So, although the word dialect comes from Greek, it is clear that the modern meaning should not
be incautiously mapped onto the ancient and that when we talk about the Greek “dialects,” these
are in some cases significantly different linguistic varieties with socio-political associations that we
might today recognize as separate “languages.” Of course, the old chestnut in linguistics about what
constitutes a language or a dialect could lead us into an endless debate: For our present purposes, in
our view, the use by ancient Greeks of quite different linguistic varieties than their mother tongues
to write in specific literary genres can be viewed as an example of literary translingual behavior
(section 2).
During Roman times, another issue concerns assigning “mother tongue” status in a context where
bi-and multilingualism were the norm. Elite Romans were expected to have knowledge of both
Latin and Greek languages and cultures, and there is evidence that most of them would have been
exposed to and taught both languages in early life (Tacitus, A Dialogue on Oratory 29). In a famous
passage, the 1st-century c.e. Latin rhetorician Quintilian (1.12) argues that Roman boys should begin
with instruction in Greek, since they will be immersed in Latin anyway, though the study of Latin
should not be started much later. In the Roman elite context, then, “mother tongue” status could be
assigned to both Latin and Greek.
Similarly, one might assume that writers of Latin texts from the Western Roman provinces, par-
ticularly ones newly incorporated, had local languages (Gaulish, Celtiberian, Iberian, Lusitanian inter
alia) as their L1, but their position as elite provincials often living in well-connected urban centers
may mean that in many cases Latin was already one of their primary languages, if not necessarily the
only one, even only a couple of generations after conquest.3 This is particularly likely in provinces
that seem to have undergone relatively early, and apparently rapid, Latinization (for example southern
Gaul, incorporated from the 2nd century b.c.e. and parts of the Iberian peninsula incorporated from
the 3rd century b.c.e.). Lucan, Martial, and Seneca, for example, all originally from Hispania, prob-
ably knew Latin from birth. Ausonius, the 4th-century c.e. writer from Bordeaux famous for his
pride in his provincial origins, almost certainly did not speak the Celtic language Gaulish (a language
barely spoken in cities in the later Roman Empire), and his pride was rooted in a provincial Latinity.4
46
The Greek and Roman Worlds
However, Ausonius perhaps did produce a translingual output, though not a Gaulish–Latin one, since
he composed poems entirely in Greek and created texts which alternated from Latin to Greek
between lines, even mid-word.5 Since he says that he struggled to learn Greek as a boy (Professores
8.13–16), we might assume that Greek was for him a second language.
In the eastern Roman provinces, literary translingualism was arguably likely to have been more
familiar. Alexander the Great’s Empire made the use of Greek as a lingua franca widespread in the
eastern Mediterranean and the Near East (section 2), a situation which was continued by the ever-
pragmatic and bilingual Roman elite, creating (crudely speaking) a situation where Latin was very
occasionally used as a “Super-High” language, Greek as High, and the assorted local languages as
Low, with some exceptions (Adams 2003a). Interestingly, under the Roman Empire, a few local
languages were revived or appeared for the first time in writing, such as Syriac, a high-register form
of Aramaic, from the 1st century c.e. onwards, which was used from the 3rd century to create literary
texts, including translations of the Bible (King 2018). In Egypt, from where the bulk of our Greek
papyri hail, Egyptian was not entirely overshadowed, and Demotic literature was still written during
the Greco-Roman epoch—a language that developed after 300 c.e. into what we know as Coptic
and which was used to create an extensive Christian literature (Boud’hors 2012). Many eastern
Roman provincials who wrote in Latin and some who wrote in Greek were producing a translingual
output. Consider, for example, the Greek works of the Syrian Lucian (section 4) and of Josephus,
from Roman Judea, who notes at the end of his Greek-language Antiquities of the Jews his difficulty in
mastering Greek as L2 and admits that he speaks it with an accent (AJ 20.11.2).
The Greco-Roman world covered a vast time and space and produced a varied and influential
literature by multilingual authors. We have been selective in choosing authors to illustrate the phe-
nomenon of literary translingualism, and naturally these choices have been reached through our
own research biases and experience. We begin with the early Greek literary world where different
linguistic varieties were employed dependent on the generic form, so, for example, a writer whose
native tongue was Doric Greek would use Ionic Greek to write elegy (section 2). The next section
(3), on The rise of Rome, moves the geographical center of gravity to Italy and explores the way in
which, as Rome expands, the roles of Latin and Greek are constantly negotiated. The relationships
between the Romans and the Greek language(s) and the Greeks themselves are the most obses-
sively discussed in our ancient sources, although other languages and peoples come into the Roman
ambit as Rome expands within and beyond Italy. Finally, we turn to the first two centuries of
Empire (section 4), when the Roman world continues to incorporate numerous provinces with a
range of different mother tongues that form part of a linguistic environment with two languages of
power: Latin and Greek.
The Greek Literary World: Dialectal Heterogeneity and “Barbarian” Tongues

We begin our journey into literary translingualism in Archaic and Classical Greece, for which ancient
commentators describe a Greek “language” with a large number of so-called “dialects” spoken
throughout Greece as well as in Greek colonies in Sicily, Italy, and across the Mediterranean. In the
early 5th century b.c.e., a number of supra-regional dialects can be identified that span different
regions, as well as epichoric dialects with their own distinct characteristics that belong in one of the
mother dialects. The main dialectal families according to modern dialectologists were Attic-Ionic,
split into Western, Eastern, and Central Ionic, and Attic; Arcado-Cypriot; Doric, which comprised
North-West Greek and Peloponnesian Doric; and Aeolic, with speakers from Thessalia, Boeotia, and
the northern Aegean coast of Asia Minor.6 The connections between these dialects were multiple
and spanned the morphological, syntactical, and phonological.They can be explained through a geo-
graphical and historical perspective—each dialect appearing and evolving at a certain period in time
and in specific geographic regions—but also as products of convergences, borrowings, population
movement, parallel developments, and inheritance from parent dialects.7 These linguistic modulations
47
must be understood against the backdrop of the non-unified political divisions of Greek territory and
the colonies. In the Archaic and Classical Greek world, each city-state had its own political, adminis-
trative, and religious system, and there was no single linking linguistic variety.
In literature, the linguistic atlas is complex. There are cases when speakers from different areas
are represented as speaking their own respective dialects. In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (people from
Acharnai, a region in Attica), market traders speak their own dialect. In the same author’s Lysistrata,
Spartan envoys also preserve their idiom.8 However, this linguistic medley is not represented in
other literary genres, where we find a striking uniformity of dialect in direct speech even if
speakers are from other dialectal regions. This linguistic uniformity cannot reflect the spoken
realities, and the contexts are too varied to assume the mediation of interpreters, for example.
Perhaps the choice to present a flattened dialectal picture might be interpreted as the simplest
way to communicate to the widest audience, but whether this might reflect an ability to under-
stand dialectal variation amongst the audience (they can fill that linguistic quality in themselves)
or not (they would not have been able to understand it) is hard to tell. In support of the latter,
we could cite Thucydides’ comment about the Eurytanians, “who form the largest tribe of the
Aetolians, and are (they say) the most unintelligible in language and eaters of raw-flesh” (3.94) or
the conversation reported by Plato: “ ‘Well, Socrates,’ he said, ‘what else do you think Simonides
meant? Was he not reproaching Pittacus for not knowing how to distinguish words correctly,
Lesbian as he was, and nurtured in a foreign dialect?’ ” (Protagoras 341c). Evidence to support the
former assumption could be Socrates’ plea in the Apology (Plato, Apol. 17d–18a) to be treated as
a foreigner speaking his own dialect, an indication of local vernaculars being used and under-
stood outside their territories. Despite the acknowledged differences of the Greek “dialects,” there
seems to be a general understanding of their cultural relatedness as “Greek,” as becomes evident in
Herodotus (8.144.2) where the Athenians and the Spartans admit to their shared blood, language,
and culture—a bond that sets them against the barbarian “other.”9 In contrast, generally speaking,
Greeks seem impressively uninterested in the languages of non-Greeks (Bers 1997).
Recurring ancient literary translingualism occurs in Greek literature when the Greek dialect
chosen follows a standard conditioned by each literary genre, rather than the native dialect of the
author. Each genre has a “native” dialect in which it is written, and which is preserved by authors
irrespective of their own provenance. Starting with Homeric epic, the language is a mixture of Ionic
and Aeolic elements as well as archaisms, creating a literary form with features which can be linked
to varieties from different geographical areas and dating to centuries apart (Horrocks 1980, 1987,
2010; Palmer 1962). Ionian elegy, another type of archaic poetry, originates in Ionic-speaking ter-
ritories. Major representatives of the genre include figures from Ionic-speaking areas, such as 7th-
and 6th-century Archilochus, Mimnermus, and Hipponax, but also poets from areas with different
dialects, such as Theognis, Tyrtaeus, and Solon (Kaczko 2008; West 1974), and the surviving poems
feature occasional vernacular elements from each poet’s area. By contrast, choral lyric is born and
developed in Doric-speaking areas. Initially, practitioners of the genre also work in Doric-speaking
areas, such as 7th-century Alcman (Cassio 2007) who wrote in Sparta albeit from Sardis in Lydia.
Later on, the genre becomes more internationalized as poets from south Italy, Ceos, and Boetia—
Ibycus, Simonides, and Pindar respectively—embrace choral poetry and a literary Doric dialect takes
shape. Finally, from the late 7th to the 5th century, the Ionic dialect finds itself as the “official” lan-
guage of pre-Socratic philosophers and historians (Vessella 2008).
By the 5th century b.c.e., the political landscape had shifted in favor of Athens. After the end of
the Persian wars, Athens assumed the leading role of organizing the Greeks and protecting Greek
culture as a collective identity against the perceived barbarian otherness of the Persians. Subsequently,
Athens became the cradle of political and cultural activity in the Greek world, with authors, orators,
poets, and other prestigious figures, of a range of different mother tongues, flocking to its soil to
write, perform, and contribute to Athenian intellectual preeminence, bringing the Attic dialect to the
forefront. However, the situation is never simple. Athenian drama is a unique case of amalgamation
48
within the genre itself, with the main dialogue in Attic but with the choral sections infused with
Doric features, influences of choral lyric. The Attic of the dialogues, a composite of Ionic and a
higher register of Attic, does not necessarily reflect any spoken vernacular. Thucydides writes the
History of the Peloponnesian War in a type of Attic that favors Ionic elements rather than local Attic
idioms, showcasing a more internationalized take on dialectic confluences, while Lysias the orator,
who wrote speeches on behalf of middle-class Athenians, prefers to remain closer to spoken Attic.
By the time Plato writes his dialogues, his didactic passages resemble the language of Attic drama, his
dialogic parts are close to the educated spoken Attic of his times, and overall it is evident that literary
Attic is severing its initial Ionic ties (even though by then Ionic elements were permanently adopted
into Attic). Attic acquires a new unrivaled status amongst the other Greek dialects that mirrors and
is mirrored in the equally unique position of Athenian prestige in the Greek political, cultural, and
literary world (Dover 1997;Vessella 2008).
Eventually, Great Attic, an Ionic-influenced, simplified version of classical Attic, became the back-
bone of the Koine, which was adopted by Macedonian rulers and spread across the new Greek ter-
ritories.10 Koine became the official form of language for administration, commerce, and literature
at the expense of local dialects of Greek city-states (Bubeník 1989). Koine was used for technical
writings, such as Euclid’s mathematical texts and texts that were not meant as high literary prose, such
as the New Testament. Local Greek dialects and local languages (for example Egyptian, Phrygian, and
Pisidian, and their associated contact-induced Greek varieties)11 continued to be used, especially in
oral communication, and as a result many authors of the Koine wrote translingually. As often happens
with vernacular languages, Koine lost its prestige starting as early as the end of the 3rd century b.c.e.,
and authors sought to write in higher register Attic that resembled the Attic of Classical orators, Plato,
and Thucydides. This tendency culminated during the so-called Second Sophistic (1st–3rd century
c.e.), a literary and cultural movement that took hold under the Roman Empire (section 4). Authors
strove to imitate “pure” Attic that seemed to guarantee Greekness. Of course, even in this case, pure
Attic could not be easily standardized, as the language was now used by non-native Greek speakers
who had to decide about the level of conservativism they would adhere to, which of the Classical
Attic authors to imitate, and whether new forms of Attic were adulterated or simply indications of
linguistic evolution (Swain 1996; Whitmarsh 2001).
The Rise of Rome: Negotiating Roles for Latin and Greek

Against this backdrop of extensive genre-based translingual literary output from the Archaic and
Classical Greek world, a settlement was growing in power in the Italian peninsula (Lomas 2018;
Terrenato 2019). It is easy to forget, given the later creation of a vast Empire, that it was by no
means assured that Rome would take the lead even within the Italian peninsula itself. It was just
one grouping amongst several with different languages and cultural backgrounds, some relatively
similar linguistically, such as Faliscan, Oscan, and Umbrian, others divergent, for example, Etruscan
(Clackson and Horrocks 2007 37–76). The Etruscans, indeed, who were involved in trade across the
Mediterranean from an early period and who adopted literacy earlier than Latin speakers, might even
be seen as a more likely candidate for empire-building than the Romans.
Within the Italian peninsula itself Greek language and culture had a strong foothold in the area
known as Magna Graecia, essentially the coastal parts of the boot of Italy and Sicily (Leiwo 1994;
Lomas 1993; Tagliapietra 2018; Tribulato 2012; Willi 2008). It is likely that the earliest known named
author writing in Latin, the 3rd-century b.c.e. Livius Andronicus, may have come from this part
of Italy (Tarentum). He may well have had Greek as his first language and is famous for having
translated the Odyssey into Latin and its “native” Saturnian metre.12 Sadly, we only have snippets
of this early translingual output cited by later authors. The 2nd-century c.e. Roman biographer,
Suetonius, described Livius Andronicus, and the early Latin author Ennius (c. 239–169 b.c.e.) from
Rudiae in the heel of Italy, as semigraeci “half-Greek,” referring to the nature of their teaching and
49
outputs. Ennius, who wrote, amongst other things, an epic version of Roman history (again only
transmitted in fragments), was another pioneer of Latin literature (Damon and Farrell 2020; Skutsch
1985). Aulus Gellius reports several centuries later that Ennius said he had tria cordia “three hearts,”
explaining that this was because he spoke Greek, Oscan, and Latin. As Wallace-Hadrill (2008 3–4)
points out: Greek was because Rudiae was in Magna Graecia, which the Romans regarded as a
Greek-speaking territory; Oscan because Rudiae was in origin a settlement of the Messapi (and their
language was different from Oscan but perhaps centuries later Oscan is standing in for Messapic as a
generic non-Latin/Greek language of Italy, or he was actually from an Oscan-speaking family who
had moved south); and Latin because by Ennius’ birth in 239 b.c.e. Rudiae had been under Roman
control for two generations. In Ennius’ case, Latin may well have been a learned language and the
earliest epic history in Latin may be a translingual output. Terence was probably also a translingual
author, writing Roman comedies in the 2nd century b.c.e. inspired directly from Greek examples
and trying to create a “more restrained and formally consistent style” (Clackson and Horrocks 2007
177) than his predecessor Plautus, deliberately imitating Menander’s Attic Greek (Karakasis 2005).
Terence was probably originally from north Africa and Latin may have been his L2 or even L3, but
his Latinity was deemed a model long after the Roman Empire fell.
By the end of the Republic and the early years of the imperial period, the people of Latium
formed a powerful and growing force on the Mediterranean stage, their empire-building extending
to the Iberian peninsula in the west, Egypt to the south, Syria to the east and the Low Countries
to the north. Despite the contact with a large number of local languages, and a famous Plinian
statement on Rome’s “civilizing mission” that includes drawing together “jarring and uncouth
tongues into unity of language” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 3.39), the commentary in our lit-
erary sources is almost entirely focused on what was seen as the key linguistic issue: the relationship
between Latin and Greek.The “non-classical” languages were ignored. Elite Romans wrestled with
the relative positions of what they saw as both their languages and literary cultures. They deeply
respected Greek language and culture as the model and, in some senses, superior to their own
(Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio “Conquered Greece captured its savage
victor and introduced the arts to rustic Latium,” Horace, Epistles II.155), but they also considered
Greek culture “effeminate” and “decadent” and themselves as superior through conquest. The lin-
guistic politics in this period must be seen in the context of this ever-evolving relationship,13 as
Romans attempt to claw their way to cultural dominance, through imitating, flattering, outdoing,
and criticizing.
Greek is permitted to continue (following Alexander’s conquests) as the lingua franca of the
eastern Empire and as a language of culture everywhere, and all elite Romans should know it intim-
ately, but they must simultaneously be cautious of seeming “too Greek.” An illustrative passage occurs
in Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars,14 where the emperor Tiberius (14–37 c.e.), a fluent Greek speaker, is
characterized as so cautious in his use of Greek in that most Roman of places, the Senate, that he even
apologizes for having to use a Greek word which was already an integrated borrowing (monopolium)
(Tiberius 71). Another anecdote, related by Suetonius, describes a more serious incident, in which
a Greek-speaking Roman citizen is stripped of his citizenship by the emperor Claudius for not
knowing Latin (Claudius 16.2),15 but this is given in the context of Claudius’ inconsistent and unrea-
sonable behavior and cannot have been a common occurrence (numerous Roman citizens in the
Greek East will not have known Latin well, or even at all). Claudius is described later by Suetonius
as skilled in Greek and of the view that Greek and Latin counted as “both our languages,” and he is
even supposed to have written histories of the Etruscans and Carthaginians in Greek (Claudius 42).16
Indeed, the examples of linguistic purism must be understood against a backdrop of the common
use of both languages, which is constantly negotiated depending on the topic, addressee, political
context, and so on. The use of Greek in the large Roman epistolary output is particularly illustrative
of this: Cicero laces his Latin with code-switches into Greek, at least in socially appropriate contexts.
Some switches make it clear that parallel bilingual processing is occurring for the letter writers and
50
readers and several of the numerous switches involving literary quotations also require knowledge
of the context of the original Greek text to understand the implicature (the quotation may even be
partial and requires the reader to complete it to understand fully the point).17
Assessment of the Greek language in Cicero’s correspondence has demonstrated that it is varied
(O’Sullivan 2017).18 It seems to be more Classical (i.e. more Attic) than we might perhaps have
expected from an author who knew contemporary spoken Greek. It also includes words not other-
wise attested in Greek or Latin sources (for example ἀλογευόμενος at Ad Atticum VI.4.3) and ranges
over different dialects and periods of the language to achieve specific goals, such as obfuscation, par-
ading of knowledge, and characterizations of individuals. Cicero predominately wrote in Latin and
though he will have learned Greek from a very young age, we might consider his Greek writing
“translingual.” In the three passages of extended Greek transmitted to us (VI.4, VI.5, IX.4), Cicero
deliberately chooses words and uses old-fashioned features such as tmesis (separation of prefix and
verb) and verbal adjectives to make the letters “opaque for the average reader of the Koine,” in order
to achieve his stated aim of obfuscation (VI.4.3 and VI.7.1).19
While on the whole Cicero seems to be basing his own written Greek more on Classical than
contemporary norms, O’Sullivan argues that “this choice was by no means universal amongst his
Roman peers,”20 giving examples of contemporary Greek which can be associated with Atticus and
Antony. He goes on to remark that
“Cicero’s own use of Greek is in fact suggestive of that return to Classical Greek which we
know as Atticism, and which first emerges into the historical record in the Roman orator’s
own lifetime, and, moreover, in Rome itself ... Atticism was not the invention of Greeks,
but of Romans who, as outsiders, could see the difference between the evidently decayed
Greek language around them and that of the Classical form which they studied so avidly.”21
The literary translingualism of elite Roman epistolographers is skilled and multifunctional: Cicero,
and others, do not simply write in Greek; they manipulate the dialectal forms available to them for a
wide variety of functions, including to obfuscate, to evoke specific contexts, to be creative, to charac-
terize individuals, to reflect the realities of written and oral bilingual interaction amongst peers, and
to stake a claim to, and help to create, cultural movements (for Atticism see also sections 2 and 4).
The Roman Empire: E Pluribus Duo

As the Empire ages, linguistic relations and ideologies continue to develop. In most areas, this entails
the ongoing marginalization of local languages, and the embedding of a two-language set-up, with
Latin running the West and Greek the East. Arguably there is now more confidence amongst the
Roman elite to allow a domain-based carving-up of their two languages in literary and other contexts
(Greek, for example, tends to corner rhetoric, grammar, medicine, and philosophy). They appear less
obsessed by the perceived “poverty” of their language and the awkwardness of the cultural superiority
of the Classical (not contemporary) Greeks which preoccupied earlier authors.22 Rome has become a
superpower, and Romans express confidence that Latin can, and should, reflect this. As part of being
culturally Roman, they still need to know Greek language and literature intimately, of course, but this
is a culture that they now own and control.
If we take the evidence of the 2nd-century c.e. correspondence between Marcus Aurelius and his
older teacher, and possible lover, Fronto, from Cirta (modern-day Constantine, Algeria), we might
consider that Romanness, for at least some Antonine elites, entails knowledge of the separate entities
Attic Greek and a perfect Latin, i.e. lingua Romana.23 This may signal a significant development if
we consider that in the Late Republic and Early Empire Romanness of language, for some at least,
involves what might be conceived as the duality of a single mixed entity combining both Latin and
Greek. This is a crude generalization, of course, as different perspectives on language and culture
51
remained live, making the use of Greek and Latin in literary texts a versatile agent, but one which
helps our contextualization as we probe the complexities.
Fronto is a “linguistic nationalist”24 so renowned for his purity of language amongst con-
temporaries that Aulus Gellius deploys him as his champion guardian of the Latin language.25
On the surface, it seems therefore that Fronto’s practice in his epistolography, which includes
writing Greek letters and code-switching into Greek in his Latin, might show misalignment
from his mission.26 Indeed, Marcus expresses surprise that Fronto has deemed something he has
written in Greek to be one of his favorite compositions and remembers that he has recently
been admonished by his teacher for such a dangerous practice. This attitude—that using Greek
can represent a periculum “danger”—might support Adams’ view that “it would have been an
extreme act for two educated Romans to communicate purely in Greek to express their joint
possession of the trappings of that culture.”27 But just as Marcus teases Fronto by saying he has not
learned Greek, since he had lessons from stellar Greek teachers and writes extensively in Greek,
for example his Meditations written in Koine Greek, we need to be cautious about what Fronto
and others say about their linguistic practice and assess both the theory and the practice in their
context.
A key opportunity for exploring Fronto’s views on language, identity, and culture occurs when he
writes a letter in Greek destined for Marcus’ mother, Domitia Lucilla. Instead of sending it directly
to the apparently intended recipient, Fronto sends it via Marcus noting that he would appreciate it if
Marcus would check his Greek first so that he might avoid embarrassing mistakes.
I’ve daringly written a letter to your mother in Greek which I have included in the letter
which I have written to you. Read it first and, since you’ve studied Greek more recently
than I have, if you find any howlers in it, correct them and then pass it on to your mother.
I do not want your mother despising me as an Opicus.
(van den Hout 1988 (VdH) 21.12–16, translation Mullen)
We must not take this comment at face value: Fronto’s Greek is excellent. Rather this is a strategy.
First, writing in Greek and asking for it to be checked by his student flatters both Domitia Lucilla,
who had been working on her philhellenism, and the middleman, who has been raised to a pos-
ition of superior linguistic authority. Second, presumably Domitia Lucilla will not be alerted to the
mistakes, so Fronto creates further intimacies between his student and himself for which even the
mother–son relationship is no match. Third, it allows Fronto to set out his ethnolinguistic position.
He is a leading Latinist of his day and by making such a fuss about his Greek, getting it checked
by Marcus, and disingenuously worrying that it might be full of mistakes, barbarisms, and not Attic
enough, he flags up that he is not Greek (VdH 24.1–3). In highlighting the risks of barbarous language
and evoking the image of the Opicus,28 he opens the way for comments on his own background as
“a Libyan of the Libyan nomads” (VdH 24.9).29 By focusing the attention on his being a native of
a land far from Rome, his linguistic skills in writing faultless non-native Attic Greek, while being a
preeminent Latinist, might seem even more outstanding. Fronto is making a display of his vision of
Romanness, namely having native elegant Latin, lingua Romana, and learned Attic Greek no matter
where in the Empire you were born.
Also, from modern-day Algeria, Apuleius (c. 120–170 c.e.) surfaces as a figure of bilingual elo-
quence who uses his knowledge of Greek to transform literature. We can presume that he was
trilingual—Punic being his native language and Greek and Latin acquired.30 As a matter of fact, in
the introduction of his novel Metamorphoses, speaking through the main character Lucius, Apuleius
describes stays in Greece and then Rome to learn the languages—a task that, as he says, was
completed with considerable difficulty (1.1).31 In north Africa, the educated elite consisted mainly of
Latinists. It was especially with Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161–180 c.e.) that Greek was promoted
(MacMullen 1966 12–13). Apuleius’ facility with Greek earlier in the Roman period of the city is
52
therefore perhaps relatively exceptional (Horsfall 1979 79–95; Kotula 1969 386–392). At some point
in his life, he married a wealthy widow and was consequently accused of performing magic to gain
her attention. In a very Platonic manner, which demonstrates his mastery of languages and cultures—
both literary and social—he authored his Apology to defend himself. Other works include Florida, an
anthology of information pieces much like modern-day encyclopedic articles (Todd Lee 2005), On
the God of Socrates, and On the Universe.32
His works are written in Latin, and he references repeatedly his knowledge of Greek. Apuleius
re-envisions Roman literature by taking Greek literary works and adapting them to the Latin
language and Roman culture (Sandy 1997 9–16). In the Apology, he says that he is known for
being knowledgeable in both languages (1.4) (Bradley 2012 3–22) and pokes fun at his accuser
for being unable to read Greek (30.11). He makes a similar remark in Florida, where he also
says that his audience is accustomed to his bilingual speeches (18.15). Obviously, these language
switches could indicate that Apuleius expected his audience to be familiar with Greek, too, or he
is simply boasting about his facility with languages. Throughout the Apology, he quotes Homer
(22.5) and Plato (25.10–11) and references Aristotle (36.3–8). He also delves into the process of
linguistic and cultural translation and discusses the difficulty of finding Latin words for certain
Greek terms (38.5). Similarly, in his treatise On Plato, he asks for his readers’ favorable reception and
understanding, as he had to find neologisms for the obscure Platonic topics he is discussing (1.9).
In Florida, he says that he will sing a hymn in both Latin and Greek and will also preface it with a
dialogue in both languages (18.38–43).
Apuleius’ ingenuity, though, transcends the traditional boundaries: he is a translingual Punic author
who does far more than translate Greek texts into Latin. He creates a new literature which effectuates
transculturalism.33 It is widely accepted that his Metamorphoses did have a Greek original that sadly
does not survive (Mason et al. 1978 1). At the beginning of his work, Apuleius admits to adapting
the Greek original, not simply translating or switching between languages, but actually writing a
Latin version of the Greek archetype.34 Additionally, there are some Punic nuances such as the Punic
pronunciation of Latin words, even though not enough to suggest that Apuleius is brandishing his
Carthaginian roots.35 Furthermore, his On the Universe is 862-lines long of which only 600 corres-
pond to the Greek pseudo-Aristotelian namesake. The rest consists of Apuleius’ own adaptations
and accretions, along with other more minute adaptations of Greek customs and concepts with the
Roman equivalents (35.366–368) (Müller 1939 133). More specifically, he substitutes Homer with
Vergil, once again modulating a particular work to fit another culture always against the backdrop of
the original (36.369).
Another unique case of linguistic permutation finds itself in Lucian, born around 125 c.e. in
Samosata, the capital of the Kingdom of Commagene that became part of the Roman province of
Syria. He self-identifies as (As)Syrian, and his native language was probably Syriac. Lucian, though,
climbs the ranks of Roman administration as a naturalized Roman citizen and writes in Greek while
migrating between languages and cultures and showcasing a magnificent command of Greek. Lucian
belongs in the wave of the Second Sophistic, a literary and socio-cultural phenomenon of the time,
that boasts a return to the Classical models of Greek literature and a revival of Hellenism and Atticism
in all its forms (Bozia 2015; Jones 1986; Swain 1996 17–64;Whitmarsh 2001 248–294) (section 2). In
the context of a sprawling Empire of significant diversity, Lucian represents a slew of individuals who
write in Greek as non-native speakers.
Grammarians and theoreticians in this period comment on, chastise, and correct non-native users
of Greek and particularly Attic. So, apparently “monolingual” Greek writings, such as those by non-
native speaker Lucian, become scrutinized by “guardians of the language” as objects of study of, what
we now might call, literary translingualism. Moeris, the 2nd-century lexicographer, distinguishes
between primary and secondary Attics (194.29, 197.28, 208.15), thus creating a barrier between
the original Attic natives and the new speakers of the so-called revived Attic. Similarly, Phrynichus,
another contemporary lexicographer, among his lemmas and accompanying comments creates yet
53
another category of speakers, the fake Atticizers (Eclogae 54).There is no indication as to whether this
refers exclusively to non-native speakers, even though Favorinus, a trilingual Roman sophist from
Gaul, is mentioned on several occasions for his linguistic infelicities (Bozia 2018).
Against this backdrop, Lucian puts his non-native eloquence to the foreground and subverts the
notion of native infallibility, all the while pronouncing his natural ability to switch seamlessly between
languages and cultures. In A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting, he seemingly self-flagellates for using the
wrong greeting on account of the time (1). He admits to his foreign provenance while showcasing
a masterful familiarity with both Greek and Roman customs and languages (13, 16–19). In The
Mistaken Critic, Lucian attacks his addressee for accusing him of a linguistic barbarism (1) and presents
the history of the word and its socio-cultural nuances, thus bridging the supposed chasm between
native and non-native speakers of Greek (11–12). In Zeuxis, he suggests a resurgence of Attic Greek,
not as a replica of the original 5th-and 4th-century b.c.e. Attic, but as a newly fashioned form that
mirrors the diversity of its speakers. Finally, in The Solecist, he produces a minute diatribe of the Attic
dialect where he lists a number of mistakes to which new speakers of Attic are prone, while simul-
taneously providing the correct models. This particular work could be read as Lucian’s manifesto for
a less rigid consideration of language, as he—a non-native speaker of Greek—clearly puts his flu-
ency on full display. As part of this ongoing debate on forms of language, Sextus Empiricus, a 2nd-/
3rd-century c.e. philosopher, in Against the Grammarians discusses the two types of Hellenism—the
grammatically approved forms and the common usage ones. He proceeds to favor the latter, appreci-
ating language as a living organism that transforms and modulates, creating new spaces for non-native
speakers (1.240).
During the imperial period, the educated elite made the case for linguistic translatability that also
extended to cultural permeability. The surviving texts suggest that translingualism in the Roman
Empire created a space that could accommodate fluent non-native speakers, who could be open
about their foreignness. Ultimately, this era showcases the dominance of two languages at the expense
of the many (e pluribus duo), but also the ways in which multiple cultures found expression through
the practices of Greco-Roman translingualism.
Conclusion
In our exploration of Greco-Roman literary translingualism, we have covered a large geograph-
ical area and a lengthy timeframe. The output of the Greco-Roman literary world from Homer
to Apuleius is diverse, but, despite the differences in cultural context, translingualism seems to be
a feature in various permutations throughout much of its history. Greek literature is marked in
its first few centuries by translingualism caused by what might be called “generic dialectalization,”
whereby Greek speakers write in a Greek “dialect” in some cases quite different from their native
Greek tongue. In the Roman context, literary translingualism is of two main types: the Latin–Greek
translingualism of elite Romans such as Cicero and Fronto for whom one of the languages can be
classed “dominant,” and translingualism involving the writing of Latin/Greek by authors whose L1
was a local language such as Syriac, Punic, and Oscan, a feature of some early Latin authors and, later,
provincials particularly from north Africa and the eastern Empire.
We have seen that Greco-Roman translingual writing is used to serve a range of functions: to fit
the generic norms, to evoke specific contexts, to characterize individuals, to reflect the realities of
written and oral bilingual interaction amongst peers, to carve out ethnolinguistic identities and to
stake a claim to, and to help to create, cultural movements, such as the Second Sophistic. Modern
commentators on Greco-Roman literature have long been cognizant of the linguistic and cultural
interactions in play when authors write in languages other than their mother tongues, but have not,
until now, addressed them specifically in terms of literary translingualism. It is hoped that this is not
simply a case of adding new terminology, but that by focusing on this specific practice, we can learn
from, and make comparisons with, work on literary translingualism in other cultural contexts.
54
Notes
1 Translingualism is also used as a term in modern sociolinguistics, where it is linked to translanguaging. Mullen
(e.g. 2020) has used it with this sociolinguistic meaning, what we might call linguistic translingualism, in the
context of epigraphic materials from the ancient world which show flexibility of linguistic resources. Work
on linguistic translingualism reminds us that we should not always assume that groups think in terms of the
bounded entities we know as Standard Languages.
2 For the shape of the cannon and what has been lost, see Netz 2020.
3 For local languages in the Roman provinces, see Adams 2003a, Adams, Janse, Swain 2002, Bagnall 2011,
Biville et al. 2008, Cotton et al. 2009, Millar 1968, Mullen 2013, Mullen and James 2012, Neumann and
Untermann 1980, Papaconstantinou 2010, Ruiz Darasse and Luján 2011.
4 For Gaulish, see Lambert 2018, Mullen and Ruiz Darasse 2018, 2020. For Ausonius, see Sivan 1993.
5 For Ausonius’ knowledge of Greek, see John 2020.
6 There is no little debate about the dialectal classifications. The scheme set out in Buck 1955 is still a reliable
guide. For subsequent work, see Christidis 2007 part III, Coleman 1963, Colvin 2010, Crespo et al. 1993,
Finkelberg 1994, Gaverini 2012, Horrocks 2010 9–66.
7 See Finkelberg 1994 and Morpurgo Davies 1987.
8 For a detailed discussion of Old Comedy and linguistic practices, see Bers 1997, Colvin 1999, Willi 2003.
9 For the dichotomy of Greeks and barbarians, see, for example, Strabo 1.4.9, Thuc. 1.3.3, Xen. Hell. V.1.17.
10 The term Great Attic is coined by Thumb 1901, 1906.
11 For Egyptian Greek, see Gignac 1976, 1981, Mayser 1970; for Anatolian Greek, see Brixhe 1987.
12 For Saturnian metre, see Kruschwitz 2002, Parsons 1999.
13 For Roman linguistic politics, see Dubuisson 1982, Kaimio 1979, Rochette 1997, 2010.
14 For Suetonius, see Power and Gibson 2014 and Wallace-Hadrill 1983.
15 It is unclear whether the episode described by Cassius Dio (60.17.4) where a Lycian envoy has his Roman
citizenship removed by Claudius due to linguistic incompetence is the same as that related by Suetonius.
16 For further discussion of the linguistic practices of the Julio-Claudian Emperors, see Elder and Mullen 2019,
chapter 5.
17 For a recent account of Greek code-switching in Cicero and other Roman epistolographers, see Elder and
Mullen 2019 and https://csrl.classics.cam.ac.uk/. For earlier work on Ciceronian code-switching, see Adams
2003a 308–347 and Swain 2002.
18 Cicero produced a voluminous correspondence which circulated in Antiquity and of which we now have
preserved large collections to Atticus and Ad familiares (friends, colleagues, and family members) and smaller
collections to Brutus and his brother Quintus. Cicero’s letters are erudite and polished, and are usually
counted as “literary.” See Elder and Mullen 2019 chapter 3 for references to the collections and scholarly
literature.
19 O’Sullivan 2017 98.
22 See Swain 2004 for discussion of the evolving relationship between Romans and Greek culture; see Goldhill
2001, Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2001, Whitmarsh and Thomson 2013 for further discussions of the dynamic
literary and cultural context.
23 For this usage, see also Pliny, Ep. 2.10.2, and for further references, Adams 2003b 194–197. Flobert 1988
argues for a strong link between the use of the term lingua Romana and imperial domination.
24 Swain 2004 17.
25 Gellius refers to Fronto’s sermo purus at 19.8.1. For Gellius, see Holford-Strevens 2003.
26 For code-switching in Fronto’s correspondence, see Elder and Mullen 2019 175–219, Swain 2004, Valette
2014, Wenskus 2003. At Elder and Mullen 2019 211, it is implied that Wenskus suggests Fronto’s praise of
Marcus’ code-switching is not genuine: in fact, Wenskus states that though code-switching into Greek is
presented as a potential risk, Fronto thinks Marcus performs like a virtuoso.
27 Adams 2003a 301.
28 “[a]‌term which is used in second-century authors to signal ignorance of Greek” (Swain 2004 22, with fur-
ther discussion at 38–39).
29 Apuleius does the same (Apology 24.6), see Swain 2004 13. Fronto again mentions his origins at VdH
132.19–20.
30 For the use of Punic and Latin in Madauros, Apuleius’ homeland, see Bradley 2012 143–146. For the con-
tinuous use and coexistence of Punic and Latin in the province of Africa, see Adams 2003a 200–245. The
majority of scholars agree that Apuleius’ L1 was Punic. See, for instance, Harrison 2000 2, Graverini 2012
165. Adams 2007 570, on the other hand, is more restrained in his determination.
55
31 Elsewhere Apuleius stresses his facility in Greek and Latin (Apol. 4.1, 36.6; Flor. 9.27–29, 18.16), but the
significance of the introduction of the Metamorphoses is that he presents language learning as a process for a
non-native speaker. Of course, we need to be mindful of the topos of rhetorical modesty and inadequacies
of speech, which is particularly common in prefaces (on this motif, see Harrison 1990 510). Nonetheless,
as Nicolini 2011 33 observes, Apuleius portrays himself as conditioned by his foreignness and linguistic and
cultural adaptability.
32 For edited texts and translations of all three works, see Harrison et al. 2002.
33 See Mattiacci 2014 and accompanying bibliography for a comprehensive discussion of Apuleius’ complex
linguistic identity. This is conditioned by his African roots and the resulting translingual engagement with a
network of languages and cultures that respect yet may also metamorphose through the different usage paths
via which Latin and Greek reached the province of Africa. Similarly, yet with a stronger focus on identity,
Stone 2014 argues that the evolving and malleable process of identification better describes Apuleius’ literary
output and his constant redefinition of himself.
34 On the multicultural perspectives of the Metamorphoses, see Bowie 2008, Morales 2008, Schlam 1992, Tilg
2014. On Plato’s influence, see O’Brien 2002, Winkle 2013.
35 On the elusive yet meaningful presence of Madauros in the Metamorphoses, see Graverini 2012 185–188,
200–207.
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59
5
LITERARY TRANSLINGUAL
PRACTICES IN THE
PERSIANATE WORLD
Past and Present
Alaaeldin Mahmoud
There is a virtual consensus that translingualism, as a linguistic and literary event, is associated with
the contemporary rise of global communication, cultural globalism, and imperialism, as well as the
comparative ease of international travel, beside migration and labor flows worldwide. However,
translingual phenomena are as old as human language, although assertion may get overlooked or
disregarded. Looking over to the Old World’s imperialisms since antiquity reveals a customary rela-
tionship between imperial expansions, with their various military and cultural ramifications, and
the rise of multilingual/translingual communities within and across those empires. Evidently, the
emergence of “imperial languages” was a key prerequisite for the viability and sustainability of
ancient empires. In various historical moments, languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin,
Persian, and Sanskrit were imperial languages (Kellman 2014: 6), which were, among other things,
instrumental in administrative governance in their respective empires. In the times and places where
the boundaries between the administrative, the religious, and the literary were blurred, an imperial
language was oftentimes the official and mandatory literary language (6). On a related note, the tri-
lingualism of the Rosetta Stone of (circa 196 ce) not only verifies ancient multilingualism and/or
translingualism, inasmuch as the existence of a translingual priestly class who could compose a tri-
lingual panegyric text for King Ptolemy V of Egypt in three languages: Hieroglyphic, demotic, and
Greek (Maher 106–8). Other non-imperial factors like the various forms of human mobility, coerced
or voluntary alike, like displacement, exile, nomadic trade or migration, all varyingly contributed
to translingualism among various individuals and communities. Conversely, translingualism has
also been ubiquitous among adjacent language communities such as Arabic and Persian or Persian
and Urdu.
Literary Translingualism in Classical Persia

To speak of the evolution of literary translingualism in the Persianate world, the births of civilization
and writing systems in ancient Persia need to be discussed. Markedly, Persia was the birthplace of a
multitude of ancient empires from the fêted Achaemenid Empire (550–330 bce) until the eventual
Pahlavi empire (1925–1979).Traces of civilization, and thereafter of empire-building, could be traced
back to 3400 bce, which marks the onset of the Proto-Elamite period, the oldest form of civiliza-
tion in current-day Iran. During more than twenty-five centuries that preceded what was once a
gloriously imperial Achaemenid Persia, Elamite civilization was born in today’s southwestern Iran,
60 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-5
The Persianate World: Past and Present
especially in Susa, the Elamites’ metropole. Nonetheless, little is known about the Elamites’ cultural
and literary activities. Evidently, economic texts written in protocuneiform script appeared at Susa
and other sites on the Iranian Plateau (Potts 51). Correspondingly, Akkadian was also used at Susa for
economic, royal, legal, and religious purposes, even though it did not contribute to the establishment
of “a native Elamite literature” (52). At Susa, a compendium of dream omens was discovered that is
written in Elamite script and the Akkadian language. Two other texts, one letter to Ur III monarch
and the other a magico-religious piece, were Sumerian-Akkadian bilinguals (52). These bilingual or
trilingual parallel texts, comparable to Egypt’s Rosetta Stone, were ubiquitous among the scholar-
scribe classes in the Near East during antiquity.
Investigating the privileged status of the Elamite scholar- scribes “class” is significant for a
deeper understanding of the prevalent bi-or trilingual (and translingual) practices during the pre-
Achaemenid Empire period. Given the socio-cultural circumstances, the Elamite language was by and
large an oral one in view of the high illiteracy rate among the Elamite locals; therefore, the business
of writing and literature was almost exclusively monopolized by the educated elite. The Elamites
were a homogeneous community, at least linguistically; there were no distinct linguistic commu-
nities, regardless of the strong Mesopotamian influence (basically Sumerian and Akkadian) of the
adjacent Mesopotamia on the Elamites, especially from the late third millennium bce. Consequently,
Elamite-Akkadian and/or Elamite-Sumerian pidgins or creoles were unlikely to develop. Instead,
“bilingual mixed languages” more likely developed as the in-g roup languages of a … distinct bilin-
gual community or group (von Dassow 649). More interestingly, these languages arose sometimes for
use as secret languages (Mullen 58). According to Elamotological excavations, Elamite was used to
write Old Persian as in the Persepolis tablets, in indication of alloglottography, where the inscribed
cuneiform signs that ostensibly spell Elamite words, were actually written in Old Persian, spelled
Elamographically (von Dassow 657).
The Achaemenid Empire, or the first and greatest “Persian” empire of all times, was one where
(literary) translingual practices thrived. Since the initiation of empire-building, the Achaemenid
administration was mindful of the crucial need for writing and literacy; therefore, the Achaemenid
administrators employed a large number of bi-and trilingual translators, interpreters, and “cultural
experts” in order to “negotiate the linguistic diversity of the empire” (Wilson-Wright 153). Those
well-trained scribes were principally well-versed in two or three languages: Old Persian (the language
of the Achaemenid Court and the native tongue of the Achaemenid kings), Aramaic (the official
language of the Achaemenid Empire, especially in the territories beyond the Achaemenid Persian
heartland), and Neo-Babylonian Akkadian (limited within the borders of Mesopotamia). Not only
was bi-or tri-lingualism materialized in physical artefacts such as kings’ royal garments (the instance
of a bilingual inscription on the fold of Cyrus’ robe, in Elamite and Akkadian, that reads “Cyrus, great
king, Achaemenian”) (Olmstead 64), or royal seals (evident in the trilingual seals of king Darius and
Xerxes) (273, 237), but also in the mundane and practical administrative work of book-keeping and
taxation. On a related note, the celebrated King Darius I monumental Behistun inscription, inscribed
in Old Persian, Elamite, and Neo-Babylonian, was meant to be King Darius’ Res Gestae that should
be circulated for diplomatic purposes (Wilson-Wright 160). On the part of the scribe who inscribed
this work, it is evident that it was a self-translating practice exercised by one who was knowledgeable
in the three languages.
As with Elamite literature, little is known about Achaemenid literature. In opposition to denying
the existence of Achaemenid literature altogether (Wilber 85), the literary texts pertaining to the
Achaemenids should be viewed in a broader sense to include narrative texts, as well as poems, omens,
and letters, which were ostensibly of apolitical or non-imperial nature. Literary works during the
Achaemenid period chiefly served the empire’s inhabitants’ local needs; consequently, thinking of
bilingual, trilingual, multilingual or translingual literati who wrote or created literary works in a
language (or more) other than their native tongue would be a far-fetched conjecture. Instead, the
savant-scribes of the Achaemenid kings, taken as the “men of letters” of the time, were practically
61
Alaaeldin Mahmoud
translingual authors, so to speak. In effect, the colonizing Achaemenids wanted to communicate

to their colonized subjects why they should be ruled by the Achaemenid Persians (Janzen 845). To
achieve this goal, multilingual “circulars” were inscribed by the royal scribes and it was ensured that
the communicated messages were properly delivered to the targeted subjects. To this end, mainly
for bureaucratic purposes, Official Aramaic or Imperial Aramaic was used as the lingua franca of the
Achaemenid territories (Frye 1955 456). This means that the Achaemenid scribes whose native
tongue should be Old Persian, Elamite, or even Akkadian, to serve their monarch, used to self-
translate circulars into Aramaic to be circulated among the inhabitants of the conquered Achaemenid
territories.
Similarly, ancient Persia’s imperial multilingualism lingered on under both the Parthian and the
Sasanian empires, which ruled ancient Persia and large parts of the Near East during the periods
247 bce–224 ce and 224 ce–651 ce respectively. Major historical events brought about a few
changes like the replacement of Aramaic with Greek as the imperial language of the Parthian and
Sasanian empires following in the aftermath of the Conquest of Alexander the Great. With the
fall of the Achaemenids in 330 bce, the Parthians and then the Sasanians adopted their own native
languages as the official languages of their respective empires; resulting in Parthian and Middle
Persian replacing the languages that were associated with the Achaemenids such as Old Persian,
Elamite and Akkadian. Like the Achaemenid trilingual and bilingual scribes, the Parthian and the
Sasanian scribes, who were not necessarily Parthian or Sasanian natives, but most probably drawn
from other regions like Rome or Arabia (Daryaee 53), had to be bilingual for translating and
writing in other languages. Such a translingual practice on the part of the Parthians and then the
Sasanians served an administrative purpose: to establish a certain structure to connect the various
provinces linguistically, which made it imperative for Persian and non-Persian administrators
and natives to be bilingual in order to be able to deal with the imperial orders and the local
administrations (102). On a different but related note, the existence of at least bilingual translators
and interpreters was not only a prerequisite for imperial bureaucracy or administration, but at
some point in the Parthian and Sasanian history, it was likewise necessitated by imperial rival-
ries and/or diplomacy, indicated in the then evolving diplomatic relations between the Roman/
Byzantine and the Parthian/Sasanian empires, culminated in the peace treaty of 561 ce, which
made it necessary that “[b]‌ilinugal corps of interpreters verified the accuracy of the texts of
treaties consigned to both powers” (Garsoïan 574).
On their part, Parthian and Sasanian kings maintained the tradition of the overthrown Achaemenid
kings and dignitaries to have tri-or bilingual inscriptions of their royal “book of deeds” or Res Gestae.
Reminiscent of the Old Persian Behistun inscription, the famous trilingual (Middle Persian, Parthian,
and Greek) inscription of King Shapur I (r. 241–271) on the wall of the Kaʻbe of Zoroaster or the
bilingual (Pahlavi and Greek) inscription of Ardashir I (r. 224–242) are often cited in commentary on
the attested multilingualism of the Sasanian empire. Tri-or bilingual inscriptions were not limited to
establishing Res Gestae and commemorating military victories, but also documented relatively mun-
dane “events” in the life of the Sasanian kings. For instance, the events following the death of Bahrām
II (r. 274–293) were related in Narseh’s bilingual (Parthian and Middle Persian) inscription carved
on the base of a memorial tower (ruined now) at Paikuli in Iraq (Shahbazi, “Sasanian Dynasty”).
Interestingly, the emergence of bilingual or even trilingual coins (in Greek and any of the Iranian
languages, and later in Arabic) attest to yet another aspect of the consecutive ancient Persian empires’
multilingualism.
As in the debate related to the genesis of Achaemenid literature, whether there is any extant
Parthian literature is still a site of contention. Due to its presumed predominant orality, Parthian
literature, both religious or secular, is evidently and substantially lost; therefore, there is no extant
Parthian literature that survived “in its original form” (Boyce 1983 1151), so we are only left with
the various “versions” of it under the Sasanians; an observation attributed to the common convic-
tion that Parthian literature, like its antecedent literature of the Achaemenids, was largely oral. The
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very orality of Parthian literature, however, should not obscure the fact that there is in fact Parthian
literature, whether we know about it or not. Mary Boyce succinctly elaborated on the existence of
the gōsān minstrel-poet tradition in Parthian Persia, which could be viewed as an evidence of secular
literary activities that appealed to both the king and the commoners, functional at both sad and happy
times (Boyce 1957 17–18). It is quite hard to decide whether such gōsān entertainment shows were by
any means tri-or bilingual performances or presented to tri-or bilingual audiences. However, there
is at least one reason to argue that tri-or bilingual practice appeared to linger on in Parthian and
Sasanian scribal culture, specifically in Parthian/Sasanian religious literature. Interestingly, a Parthian
of noble birth, the prophet Mānī (216–274/7 ce), who was keen to write his own books himself,
was a translingual author in his own right. Although the Manichean Scriptures canon was all written
in Aramaic, Mānī’s mother tongue, and that he encouraged the translation of his own writings into
other languages (“Parthian Writing and Literature”(Boyce 1983 1162)), Mānī himself was most prob-
ably involved in self-translating his book Šābuhragān, dedicated to King Šābuhr I, into Middle Persian.
This self-translation aimed at summarizing Mānī’s teachings in Persian for the enlightenment of the
king (MacKenzie 500).
Literary Translingual Practices in the Muslim Persianate World

The fall of the Sasanian empire to the Arab conquerors in 651 was such an earth-shattering and trans-
muting turning point with long-lasting consequences that not only transcended Persia of the day but
also inflicted profound and enduring effects upon what turned out to be the Muslim Persianate world
in its entirety. Subsequent to the military/colonial encounter between the conquering Arabs and
conquered Persians since 651, significant cross-cultural encounter and fertilization took place. It was
since then that myriad forms of intercultural interactions between the Persian and the Arabic cultures
began to take shape. Rather unexpectedly, indicators of cultural and linguistic cross-fertilization
between the Arabic and Persian cultures are observed as early as the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate
(661–750 ce) itself. No different than any other empire, multilingual (and translingual) practices
would be the rule rather than the exception during the Umayyad Caliphate’s reign as well as during
its successor Islamic caliphates.
Due to geographic proximity, it is easily predictable that Mesopotamia (or Iraq) was one of the
earliest and most conspicuous loci of the Arabic-Persian contact under the Umayyad and Abbasid
empires. This language contact led to the steady growth of bilingual communities in cities like Basra,
and the ensuing emergence of bilingual poets (known as dhawū al-lisānayn), who have been cited by
some landmark books and anthologies of the time such as al-Thaʻālibī’s Yatīmat al-dahr fī maḥāsin ahl
al-ʻaṣr (first published in the tenth century) and ‘Awfī’s Lubāb al-Albāb (13th century). Using Arabic
loanwords in Persian literary works or Persian loanwords in Arabic verse, notably by Persian authors
or those of Persian descent or ethnicity, came to be of special importance for those bilingual literati.
Inasmuch as the tri-or bilingual Persian scribes were cardinal to the administrative logistics and
operations in the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian empires, translingual scribal culture survived
since the inception of the nascent yet robust Umayyad Caliphate, and later continued to thrive under
the Abbasids. Cherished as guardians of the Sasanian bureaucracy, the class of scribes (kuttāb) survived
to serve new Arab Muslim masters, for only the scribes could keep the accounts and help the Arabs
rule their new conquests in the east (Frye 2007 146). In their continued role to serve their new Arab
benefactors, the Persian scribes and/or literati had to learn and use the (classical) Arabic language
beside their Persian native tongue. Following the rise of an Arab Umayyad dynasty to power in the
early medieval Near East, Arabic replaced Aramaic as the new empire’s lingua franca, a language that
would soon be established as the language of religion, science, administration, and literature in the
Umayyad and Abbasid territories, including Persia. Under this new state of affairs, new Arab cities
such as Basra and Kufa grew to be multicultural and multilingual urban centers in which it was
natural that bilingual or even trilingual poets would live and prosper. In some cases, those poets’
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Alaaeldin Mahmoud
bilingual/translingual praxis would not be restricted only to the use of Arabic and Persian loanwords
reciprocally, but we would also hear of doggerels recited in the New Persian language by Arab
Umayyad poets, such as those comic, obscene Persian verse lines by Yazīd ibn Mufarrigh al-Ḥimyarī
(d. 688), whose “doggerel” is held as “[t]‌he earliest, or almost earliest (New) Persian poetry on record”
(Gelder 365) by an Arab poet.
Given the sprouting multicultural and multilingual linguascape in Umayyad and Abbasid Persia (and
elsewhere in the Umayyad and Abbasid Near East) since the 7th and 8th centuries ce, it is useful to
revisit the translingual writers’ various categories, as explicated by Steven Kellman’s seminal book The
Translingual Imagination (2000), further developed in his later work. Due to language contact between
Persian and Arabic in the Near East’s “contact zones” as in Mesopotamia and Persia, the advent of
“isolingual translingual” writers who switch languages and write exclusively in the adopted language
(Kellman 2019 338, emphasis in original) in early Islamic Persia is naturally expected. Switching
between Persian and Arabic, Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ (724–759), an Iran-born Persian scribe who originated
in a scribal family and settled later in his life in Basra, was an isolingual translingual writer who
wrote exclusively in his adopted “literary” Arabic. His magnum opus, Kalīla wa Dimna, is an elegantly
translated Arabic book of animal fables in prose of the original Sanskrit, rendered into Pahlavi “Tales
of Bidpai.” It is uncertain as to the existence of any extant Persian literary writings by Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ.
However, the impact of his few Arabic translations has been incredibly and undeniably wide-reaching,
with his Kalīla wa Dimna providing “the material for the first known Persian mathnavī” (Lazard 622).
On another note, Ibn al-Muqaffa’s less known yet elaborate Arabic translation of the Khwadāynāmag,
the Sasanian-era Middle Persian history text known as “The Book of Lords,” is not only one of the best
Arabic translations of the Khwadāynāmag text, but also it is evident that this translation, accomplished in
750 ce, is one of the earliest works that introduced and incorporated pre-Islamic Persian imperial Res
Gestae into the corpus of Arabic literature more than two centuries before Firdawsī’s Shāhnāme (“The
Book of Kings”) was ever composed (Hämeen-Anttila 213).
Another isolingual translingual whose soaring literary reputation rests on his written work in
the adopted Arabic is the Abbasid poet Abū Nuwās (d. 813/15). Born in Ahvaz in modern-day Iran
circa 756 to an Arab father and a Persian mother, Abū Nuwās had more than one reason to inte-
grate Persian vocabulary and phrases, known in the literature as fārisiyyāt, within his Arabic-language
poetic oeuvre. During a multicultural and multilingual Abbasid era, it is expected, mostly in the con-
tact zones, that literary code-switching (especially between Persian and Arabic) was often observed
for entertainment purposes; such a translingual practice was apparently prevalent to the extent that
it drew the attention of literary scholars of the day like al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868), who observes that “an aʻrābī
(a Bedouin/an Arab) may insert some words or phrases of Persian speech (kalām al-fārisiyya) into his
verse, for the fun of it” (141). In his commentary, al-Jāḥiẓ cites Abū Nuwās along with other less
known Arab Abbasid poets who occasionally inserted Persian words into their verse including Aswad
ibn Abī Karīma, al-ʻUdhāfir al-Kindī, and al-ʻUmānī who wrote panegyric verse lines to the Abbasid
Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, saying:
lammā hawā bayn ghiyāḍ al-usd-i /

wa ṣara fī kaff-l-ḥizbar-i al-ward-i /
ālā yadhūqa ad-dahra āb-i sard-i
“When he [the enemy] falls amidst the jungles of lions
And lands in the paw of the auburn lion [Hārūn]
He swears never to drink cold water”
(Harb 17)
As a literary practice, inserting Persian words and phrases into Arabic verse, since the late Umayyad
and Abbasid eras, or in turn, inserting Arabic vocabulary and phrases into Persian poetry in the late
64
Abbasid era and its aftermath brings to notice the rise of macaronic verse (or al-mulammaʿāt), which
was a literary translingual practice that would mark medieval Persian poetry for centuries to come.
In contrast to Arabic macaronic verse brought about by Arabic-Persian contact during the Umayyad
and Abbasid eras, Persian mulammaʿāt gained popularity and prestige from the early tenth century ce
onwards. It is true that an embryonic Persian literature began to surface under the Tahirid (821–873)
and Saffarid (861–1003) dynasties, it was not until the rise of the Samanid empire (819–999) that
Persian literature attested its renaissance. With the Arabic script replacing the Pahlavi script under the
Tahirids in the 9th century ce, the Arabic language appeared to gain momentum and status in the
early medieval Persianate world, especially under the Sāmānids who promoted the advancement of
the arts, science, and literature. In this ambience, celebrated Persian court poets took pride in their
Arabo-Persian bilingualism. The earliest Persian mulammaʿ could perhaps be the following bilingual
quatrain by Shahīd Balkhī (d. 936):
Yarā meḥnatī thumma yakhfiḍu al-baṣarā /

fadathu nafsī tarāhu qad safarā /
dānad kaz vey be man hamī če resad /
dīgarbārē ze ʿeshq bīkhabarā
(Ghahramani Moqbel 84–85)
He watches my plight, and then lowers his sight

I will give my soul for him if he would unveil his face
He knows what will happen to me
Unaware, once again, of love.
Another compatriot and contemporary of Shahīd Balkhī is the poetess Rābiʿa bint Kaʿb al-
Quzdārī (also known as Rābiʿa Balkhī) (914–943). Coming from an Arab descent, Rābiʿa Balkhī
lived in Balkh in present-day Afghanistan. She was another bilingual who gained legendary popu-
larity as the first woman to write poetry in Persian as well as being the royal court poet in the
Samanid empire. Like Shahīd Balkhī, Rābiʿa Balkhī is also cited to have written macaronic verse
(Loni and Tamimi 6620), but apparently with different motivations. She could be compared to
Abū Nuwās who wrote macaronic verse, not only for aesthetic purposes, most likely in response
to “the spirit of experimentation and anti-conventionality that was characteristic of the modern
(muḥdath) style of poetry” (Harb 2), but also, more importantly, in assertion of their identity as the
“foreign Other” (3).
From the tenth century ce onwards, bilingual (and translingual) Persian-Arabic poetry was the
trend of the time, with numerous notable Persian poets who wrote in both Persian and Arabic,
whether mixing their Persian verse with Arabic vocabulary and loanwords or having a special section
in their poetry divans for qaṣāyid ʿarabī (Arabic qasidas). Besides, tenth century bilingual Persian
poets were both isolingual who wrote exclusively in their adopted Arabic language, and ambilingual
translingual writers who wrote in more than one language (Kellman 2019 338, emphasis in original).
The sweeping majority of the tenth-century Persian bilingual poets were ambilingual translingual
writers who wrote in both Persian and Arabic, with their literary reputation resting upon their
Persian language repertoire. This should not imply that the bilingual Persian littérateurs under the
Saffarids and the Sāmānids fell short of “composing Arab and Persian verse with equal facility” (von
Grunebaum 206).
For the numerous bilingual tenth and eleventh century Persian poets, to mention only a few
examples, like Musʿabī (822–850), Abū Shakūr Balkhī (d. 915/16), Murādī, Aghājī, Bundar of Ray
(active between 997 and 1029), Khusravī Sarakhsī (d. 1002), Kisā’ī (953–1002), Abū Saʿīd Abū’l-
Khayr (967–1049), Asadī Ṭūsī (999–1072), Khwājā ʿAbdullāh Anṣārī (1006–1088), Masʿūd Saʿd
Salmān (1046–1121), Ḥusayn ibn Ibrāhīm Naṭanzī (d. 1103), and Sanā’ī (1080–1131/41), using the
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Alaaeldin Mahmoud
Arabic language for literary or poetic purposes was not only prompted by bilingual courts of the
Saffarids, the Sāmānids, and later the Ghaznavids, but also by the growing prestige and position of
Arabic as the language of literature, religion, and science. Added to this was the already elevated status
of Arabic literature itself as a model to be emulated. Bilingual Persian writers of this time, especially
those associated with the court and chancery, were motivated by their need to refine their Arabic
style through their poetic endeavors in Arabic. In this regard, some celebrated Persian poets like
Manuchehri (982–1040), who seems never to have written a single poem in Arabic, used to brag
“repeatedly of the number of Arabic poets whose collected works he has memorized, and who con-
sciously imitates the form of the Arabic qasida” (Clinton 80). Conversely, a Persian poet like Abū’1-
Fatḥ al-Bustī (d. 1010), born in the city of Bost (modern-day Lashkargah, Afghanistan), stands out as
an isolingual translingual author who is more known for his Arabic than his Persian verse.
Translation of Arabic verse into Persian was another translingual activity by the bilingual Persian
poets of the day. In the tenth and eleventh century bilingual Khurasan, translating Arabic verse into
Persian was prompted by factors like the need to emulate an older and more established litera-
ture from which rhyming schemes, literary forms like lyrical verse and the qasida form, and even
themes were borrowed. With the birth of the New Persian poetry with the work of poets like
Rudakī (d. 940–41) and Daqīqī (d. circa 980), it was customary that bilingual poets would trans-
late Arabic poems into Persian initially, then would later compose their own poems in both Arabic
and Persian (Lapidus 202). In his Lubāb al-Albāb, Muḥammad ‘Awfī cites an anecdote of al-Bustī’s
contextual rendering of two Persian verse lines by Abū Shakūr Balkhī into their corresponding
two Arabic verse lines (Hosseini, Nezahad, and Khosravi 153). Ḥusayn Mujīb al-Miṣrī, a veteran
scholar of Oriental Studies and comparative Islamic literature, cites an incident in which the court
poets under Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghaznī (r. 999–1030) liked two Persian verse lines and thought
that they might translate them into Arabic verse but failed to do so. Those two lines were eventu-
ally efficiently translated by Abū’1-Qāsim al-Isfarāyīnī, the Sultan’s vizier’s son. Besides, translating
Persian verse into Arabic verse, al-Miṣrī argues, was sometimes regarded as a linguistic and literary
exercise by some bilingual poets of the time (118). In their desire to cater for the tastes of their
royal patrons, bilingual Persian poets adopted al-taṣanu‘ (“artfulness”) as a rhetorical and literary
device in order to “prove” their linguistic and literary competence and competitiveness, and almost
simultaneous translation of verse from Persian into Arabic and/or vice versa could be seen in
this light.
The advent of Sufi literature was another factor to be considered for Persian bilingual poets
since the tenth and eleventh centuries. Early influences of Sufi Persian literature could be traced as
early as Khwājā Anṣārī, who is well-versed in both Arabic and Persian mystic prose writings. Persian
Mystic verse received a robust unprecedented boost in the oeuvre of ‘Omar Khayyām (1048–1131)
and Farīd ud-Dīn ‘Attār (1145–1220), then would culminate in the works of all-time great poets
Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī (1207–1273), Sa‘dī (1210–1291/92), and Ḥāfeẓ (1315–1390). The occurrence
of Arabic, whether in the form of loanwords, codeswitches, or mulammaʿ (macaronic) verse lines, is
noticeably infrequent in the works of early mystic poets like Khayyām and ‘Attār, with an extant
Arabic verse that does not exceed fourteen lines in Khayyām’s work (Al-Miṣrī 119), and even fewer
Arabic occurrences in ‘Attār, with only Arabic words or loanwords appearing as rhyming words in
his predominantly Persian verse lines or inserting a couple of Arabic verse lines here and there as
in his prose work Tadhkirat al-auliyā’. With the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the use of Arabic
loanwords and remarkably macaronic verse was popularized to an unparalleled degree in the verse
of Rūmī, who wrote virtually sixty-six macaronic ghazals (almost 500 verse lines) (Ghahramani
Moqbel 85). The prevalence of macaronic, bilingual Arabo-Persian verse in the work of Rūmī,
Sa‘dī, and Ḥāfeẓ could be attributed to the development of Persian poetry from Sabk-i Khorāsānī
(Khorāsānī style), which featured the beginnings of the New Persian poetry, to Sabk-i ‘Irāqī (‘Irāqī
style) characterized by the prominence of ghazals and using Arabic words artistically (Pouya and
Divsalar 311).
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Besides Arabic, which maintained its status as a preferred second or even third language for some
literati and intellectuals in the Persian-speaking world, other languages appear to compete with Arabic
such as Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Tajik, Azeri, and Armenian. Following the Mongol invasion of India,
Persian gained more prominence in the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia to a degree that it rose
to be the language of literature and sort of a lingua franca from the fifteenth century onwards. The
prestige and popularity gained by the Persian language in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent,
particularly as the language of the educated, stimulated bilingual or even trilingual literary practices
among Indian and Central Asian littérateurs from the fifteenth until the nineteenth centuries. There
is a large cohort of notable translingual writers who wrote in Urdu and Persian or sometimes in
Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. The list includes Amīr Khursau Dehlevī (1253–1325) who was a master
of both Urdu and Persian literatures, Mīrzā Asadullah Khān Ghālib (1797–1869), Aḥmad Rāzā Khān
(1856–1921), Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938), who wrote literary works in Urdu, Persian, English,
and Punjabi.
Persian Literary Translinguals in Modern Times

With the transformations that took place as regards the hierarchy of languages across the globe,
especially with the onset of the nineteenth century, French and English—bolstered up by the mili-
tary, political, and economic superiority of France and Britain as the imperial superpowers of the
time—were not only imperial languages in their colonies, but also functioned as lingua francas in and
across many parts of the world, including the modern Persianate world. Markedly, French preceded
English as a language of cultural influence among Persian-speaking littérateurs and intellectuals under
Muḥammad-Shāh Qājār (r. 1834–1848), known for his modernization and reformist endeavors.
One of the earliest Persian poets to represent this new approach towards Iran’s literary modernity is
Ḥabibu’llāh Qāʾāni (1808–1854). Like his old-time predecessors, Qāʾāni was a polyglot court poet
who was knowledgeable in French, English, Arabic and Turkish, along with Persian. He represents
the first stage of literary translations and adaptations in modern Iran when he was commissioned to
translate from French into Persian a textbook on botany (Rypka 330).
Apparently, the airs of modernization (and westernization) continued to blow across Iran
during the Constitutional period (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), an era that
beheld introducing Francophone liberalism to the Iranian intelligentsia. Francophone cultural
influence could easily be discerned in the moral and imaginative attitudes of poets like Iraj Mīrzā,
Mirzadeh Eshqi, Aref Qazvini, and Ali Akbar Dehkhoda (Dabashi 2015 56). Some Iranian poets
of the time are known to have inserted foreign loanwords, mostly French, into their Persian verse
like Iraj Mīrzā (1874–1926), who is best remembered for simplifying Persian poetry and bringing
French into his satirical verse (The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Dabashi 2012 273). No
less significant is the contribution of Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār (1886–1951), who did not only
exercise mixing his poetry with foreign lexicon, but also engaged in contextual literary trans-
lation of notable French texts like his “Ranj o Ganj” (Toil and Treasure), a poetic translation of
La Fontaine’s “Le Laboureur et ses Enfants.” Like their bi-or multilingual predecessor poets of
Khorasan who modeled their verse after Arabic poetic models, modern and contemporary Iranian
men and women of letters looked up to European masters for inspiration; therefore, translations
and adaptations based on “foreign” works were commonplace in the Iranian literary arena since
mid-nineteenth century.
Seen as a generic term that involves adaptations and appropriations and the like, (literary) trans-
lation could be perceived as a (literary) translingual practice (Liu 26) in its own right. Against the
backdrop of this special understanding of translation, Persian authors who translate literary works
into a language other than their primary could be classed as isolingual translingual writers. Like his
medieval bilingual ancestral scribes who translated books into the foreign Arabic, Aḥmad Kamyābī
Mask (b. 1944), a French-Persian bilingual, established his literary reputation on literary translations,
especially of Eugène Ionesco’s plays. Mask published translations of celebrated Persian writers like
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Alaaeldin Mahmoud
Bahrām Bayz̤āʼī’s play Le Huitième voyage de Sindbad (1990) and Aḥmad Shāmlū’s Choix de poèmes
(2000) into the French language.
With “immigration” initiating “a powerful motive for switching languages” (Kellman and Lvovich
3), literary works by immigrant Iranian/Persian-speaking writers provide expedient case studies
for Persian literary translingualisms of today. It is thus worthwhile to draw a line between writers
of the Iranian/Persian diaspora who come from an Iranian/Persian-speaking descent but have no
knowledge of the Persian language and are fully assimilated in their host culture like Yasmina Reza
(b. 1959), the French playwright, actress, and novelist, and other writers who move between and across
their adopted languages of diaspora and their native Persian. One noted author of the latter category is
Marjane Satrapi (b. 1969), the French-Iranian graphic novelist, cartoonist, and illustrator who is master
of at least three foreign languages (French, German, and English) other than her native Persian.
A series of four comic books published in French between 2000 and 2003, Persepolis is a semi-
autobiographical graphic narrative of post-revolutionary Iran, as well as the issues Iranian émigrés
usually encounter whether in Europe or when they return to Iran. Rather unexpected from a French-
educated Iranian émigré who had to leave her country to Austria in her adolescent years, Satrapi
mixes her French-language personal/political graphic narrative with a few Persian words, apparently
for practical reasons. From the very first pages of Persepolis, a few Persian words could be observed
like dokhtarāne (girls) and Pesarāne (boys) for a more authentic account of school segregation in the
aftermath of the 1979 revolution. Other words like the journal Tihrān-e musawwar (Tehran in Pictures)
and “Cinema Rex” (in both English and Persian) appear for almost pragmatic and audience-related
reasons. Such subtle translingual codeswitches into Persian are instrumental in addressing her targeted
“Western audiences [who] are most likely to be the cosmopolitan elite of the Middle East, Middle
Easterners living outside the Middle East, and overwhelmingly Westerners” (Reyns-Chikuma and ben
Lazreg 423).
The life and works of the Iranian poet, novelist, and literary critic Reza Baraheni (b. 1935) provide
an interesting material for literary translingual practices in the works of the contemporary Iranian
diaspora writers. An Iranian of Azerbaijani descent, Baraheni deals a virulent blow against some
Persian-speaking intellectuals related to their take towards his Azeri language and heritage:
I learned Persian at great cost to my identity as an Azerbaijani Turk, and only after I had
mastered this language and was on the point of becoming thoroughly Persianized was
I reminded of my roots by those who were directing polemics against me in the Persian press.
(Baraheni 111)
Baraheni’s testimonial sheds light on language and cultural politics in Iran and other parts of the
modern Persianate world, with repercussions affecting underprivileged language groups, such as lin-
guistic decay, assimilation, or other subtler forms of translingualism. Almost assimilated to the Persian
language and culture, Reza Baraheni was an accomplished author in Persian before he was exiled
by the Islamic Republic “for anti-regime activism” (Hanaway 106). Since the early 1960s, a prolific
Baraheni published numerous poetry books such as Ahovān-e bāgh (“The Garden Deer”) (1962),
Jangal-o-shahr (“The Jungle and the City”) (1963), and Gol bar gostāre-ye māh (“A Flower upon Moon”)
(1970). He also published novels like Rūzegār-e dūzakhī-ye aghā-ye Ayyāz (“The Hellish Times of Mr.
Ayyaz”) (1971), and Chāh be chāh (“From One Well to Another”) (1976). In his U.S. exile, he started
writing and publishing in English, with his premier English-language one-act play “Play No Play,”
which was first produced in Salt Lake City, UT, at Salt Lake City Public Auditorium, 1973 (Watson
41). Later, he published his debut non-fiction work in English, The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on
Repression in Iran (1977).
Like Mask and other Persian-speaking literary translators, Baraheni translated literary works from
English into Persian, remarkably William Shakespeare’s Richard III (1963), in addition to other literary
works by Kundera, Mandelstam, Andric, and Fanon (Aslan 617). Furthermore, Baraheni translated his
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own Persian Zillulāh (1975) into English as God’s Shadow: Prison Poems (1976). He even co-translated
his own poems “The Shah and Hosseinzadeh” and “Hosseinzadeh, the Head Executioner” with
Michael Henderson, and “Ass Poem” with David St. John.These poems are published by the Iranian-
American writer Sholeh Wolpé, another literary translingual, in her anthology The Forbidden: Poems
from Iran and Its Exiles (44, 46–47).
Contemporary literary translingual writing by Persian-speaking authors is not only limited to
writers of the Iranian diaspora; there are also remarkable translingual writers who belong to the
Persian-speaking, Afghan diaspora whose literary translingual practice is worthy of scholarly attention.
Markedly, both of Afghan descent, Atiq Rahimi (b. 1962) and Khaled Hosseini (b. 1965) are two
translingual writers whose literary publications in French and English are best-selling in both the
Francophone and Anglophone worlds. Not dissimilar to Satrapi in targeting western/westernized
audiences, both Hosseini and Rahimi insert into their English-and French-language fictional works
“a series of mostly single-word switches into Dari followed by immediate translations” (Mahootian
206). As the stories unfold in Hosseini’s novels The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns
(2009), English-speaking readers are served with some vocabulary mainly in Dari, Arabic, Urdu,
Pashto, and Hindi like namāz (Islamic prayers), dil (heart), harāmī (thief), ahmaq (stupid), nang (honor),
nāmūs (pride), and Zendagī mīgzara (life goes on), to mention a few examples. As a translingual device,
code-switching is used in Hosseini’s English-language novels to “add an Afghani flavor” to the story
that takes place in Afghanistan, or to “authenticate his characters’ speech communities in the US”
(206). Like Hosseini, Rahimi uses single-word switches into Persian or Arabic in italicization to
play up his characters’ diverse Afghani linguistic identity. When a non-Persian-speaking/non-Afghan
reader of Rahimi’s French novel Maudit soit Dostoïevski (2011) (translated into English in 2013 as “A
Curse on Dostoevsky”) finds words like shahīd (martyr) and ghāzī (conqueror/invader), this reader
will be more informed of a more linguistically diverse Afghanistan. In addition, code-switching is also
instrumental in empowering the linguistic minority communities in Europe and North America, as
those readers identify with Rahimi’s or Hosseini’s characters, as well as see themselves as “insiders” in
contrast to non-Persian/non-Afghani French/English-speaking “outsiders” (206).
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Al-Jāḥiẓ. al-Bayān wa-l-tabyīn,Vol. (2)1, 7th ed., edited by ʿAbd al-Salam Harun, Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 1998.
Al-Miṣrī, Ḥusayn Mujīb. Ṣilāt bayn al-ʿarab wa-l-furs wa-l-turk: Dirāsāt tārīkhiyya wa-adabiyya Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafa
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Aslan, Reza (ed.). Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from The Modern Middle East (Words Without Borders). W.W.
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Boyce, Mary. “The Parthian Gōsān and Iranian Minstrel Tradition.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great
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Cambridge UP, 1983, pp. 1151–1165.
Baraheni, Reza. The Crowned Cannibals:Writings on Repression in Iran.Vintage Books, 1977.
Clinton, Jerome W. “Court Poetry at the Beginning of the Classical Period,” Persian Literature, edited by Ehsan
Ya-Shater, Bibliotheca Persica, 1988, pp. 75–95.
Dabashi, Hamid. The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Harvard University Press, 2012.
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Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Persia:The Rise and Fall of an Empire. I.B. Tauris, 2009.
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Garsoïan, Nina. “Byzantium and the Sasanians,” The Cambridge History of Iran,Vol. 3 (1):The Seleucid, Parthian and
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Gelder, Geert Jan van.“Mawālī and Arabic Poetry: Some Observation,” Patronate and Patronage in Early and Classical
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Ghahramani, Moqbel and Ali Asghar. “Fan al-mulammaʿ: ḥalaqat al-waṣl bayna al-shiʿrayn al-ʿarabī wal-fārisī.”
Majallat dirāsāt fī al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya wa Ādābihā, vol. 6, Summer 2011, pp. 77–100.
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Apr 2018, pp. 213–232. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004277649_007
Hanaway, William L. Review of Les saisons en enfer du jeune Ayyaz by Reza Baraheni. World Literature Today, vol. 75,
no. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 106–107.
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During the First Four Centuries AH in Khorasan.” Modern Journal of Language Teaching Methods, vol. 7, no. 1,
January 2017, pp. 149–155.
Janzen, David. “Yahwistic Appropriation of Achaemenid Ideology and the Function of Nehemiah 9 in
Ezra-Nehemiah.” Journal of Biblical Literature 136, no. 4, 2017, pp. 839–856. http://dx.doi.org/10.15699/
jbl.1364.2017.200013
Kellman, Steven G. “¿Qué es literatura translingual?” American Book Review, vol. 35, no. 5, July/August 2014, pp. 6.
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70
6
THE CURIOUS CASE OF SANSKRIT
Deven M. Patel
Can There be a Sanskrit Literature that Is Not Translingual?

In understanding translingual literature as that which is written in a language other than the author’s
primary language, it may not be outlandish to say that all of Sanskrit literature is, in some sense,
translingual. Indeed, by the turn of first millennium ce (if not much earlier), Sanskrit was probably
no one’s primary spoken language, though it remained a healthy secondary language for many cen-
turies thereafter. Since multilingualism or, at least, bilingualism was the norm in India for much of
its history, one would presume that Sanskrit literary culture would include scores of translingual
authors who compose not only in their first language (some form of early Middle Indic and, later,
one of the many Indo-Aryan or Dravidian ones) but also in Sanskrit. While there are notable writers
in the contemporary period and a handful from immediately preceding centuries who have actu-
ally produced literary works in Sanskrit and another language, the literary record shows far fewer
productive translingual literary authors who compose in Sanskrit than one might expect, given the
plurilingual situation of the subcontinent. Before the 17th century, for example, we can identify a few
names like Rājaśekhara (10th century), Vedāntadeśikā (14th century), Vidyāpati (15th century), and
Kṛṣṇadevarāya (16th century) who are truly translingual, in a literary sense, in that we have works by
them in multiple languages, including Sanskrit.
However, if we widen the scope, identifying ways in which Sanskrit authors with the knowledge
and capacity to produce in a literary form of their “mother tongues” willfully integrated or uncon-
sciously manifested specific features of other languages in their Sanskrit compositions, then the study
of a translingual literary phenomenon in Sanskrit also expands in new directions. We may observe,
for instance, how even canonical Sanskrit authors, writing after the explosion of vernacular literature
around the 10th century ce, implicitly demonstrate in their writing an awareness of diverse linguistic
environments from the subcontinent, which they actively sought to occlude in an earlier era.
Whereas the designations of other classical languages of learning and imperium (Greek, Latin,
Arabic, Persian, Chinese) denote a quotidian and literary aspect, classical Sanskrit (literally:“processed”
or “polished” in terms of phonetics, morphology, and its exacting grammatical correctness) pri-
marily signified a literary or learned register of a language that was nevertheless intimately related
to and perennially co-existent with multiple vernacular variations collectively called prākrit (“nat-
ural” languages). Some of these Prakrit variations metamorphosed into literary languages themselves,
witnessed in early Indian dramas, where certain characters speak literary Sanskrit while others com-
municate in some kind of literary Prakrit; each language used in the play is mutually intelligible to
all of the characters and, presumably, to the audiences in the theater. The fact that various Prakrits
took on independent identities from Sanskrit and from each other, evinced by multiple grammars
of Prakrit languages, prevents us from claiming that Sanskrit and Prakrit are, essentially, one and the
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-6 71
Deven M. Patel
same language with different registers. What further distinguishes Sanskrit is that even though it may
have evolved spontaneously and continues to be spoken among other languages in various contexts,
the standardized register of literary Sanskrit—thoroughly disciplined through grammar and a core
lexicon by the 5th century bce—was uniformly shared and reproduced for centuries across the vast
spaces of Asia through oral and written forms.
Classical Sanskrit and Prakrit were related, in turn, to an archaic form of the Sanskrit language,
sometimes distinguished by scholars with the designation “Vedic Sanskrit” derived from the ancient
liturgical corpus known as the Veda (1500 bce to about 800 bce). Classical Sanskrit ultimately
became the favored linguistic medium from at least the 5th century bce onwards to record and
disseminate the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and material aspects of life on the subcontinent.
Shortly thereafter, two standardized ancient Prakrits—Pāli and Ardhamāgadhi—became respective
vehicles of early Buddhist and Jain texts but did not produce what later Indian theorists would
call kāvya, or imaginative literature. The earliest traces of kāvya expression in poetry, prose, and
drama emerge during the early centuries of the common era. The first works of Sanskrit poetics
(c. 6th century ce) explain that kāvya was only available in literary Prakrits (such as Mahārāshtrī),
Apabhraṃśa (literary forms of earlier Prakrit dialects), and, of course, Sanskrit. Though outside the
purview of Sanskrit poetics, the case of Old Tamil, another significant ancient classical language
of literature in early India, offers a complex story and deserves its own chapter in the history of
translingual writing in South Asia.
While there were certainly multiple languages being spoken on the subcontinent, among so few
choices available to the poet during the first millennium of the common era, the choice of language
was apparently a binary one: one was either a Sanskrit poet or a Prakrit poet. Essentially, in the litera-
ture of this period, one would be hard-pressed to detect a significant presence of a second, localized
spoken/written language in the cosmopolitan idiom of Sanskrit writers composing poetry, prose, and
drama. For example, even though sound evidence identifies the canonical 7th-century prose master
Daṇḍin as active in southern India, or the 8th-century playwright Bhavabhūti as hailing from the
“middle country” (madhyadeśa), no study I am aware of has yet claimed a regional linguistic or the-
matic inflection in their Sanskrit compositions.
During the 10th to 14th centuries, with the emergence of literature in each regional language of
South Asia, the range of available languages for writers expanded to include not only Sanskrit but
also a literary register of one of two dozen languages available to them. While, in principle, many
languages were comprehensible, even spoken, authors were hesitant to stray from their singularly
adopted mode of literary expression. Nevertheless, with these once spoken-only languages breaking
their silence to join South Asia’s wider literary conversations—in the form of grammars, plays, poems,
and poetics (akin to but different from what happened in Europe around the same time with the
rise of the vernaculars orbiting around Latin)—it becomes plausible to identify a translingual literary
element in Sanskrit compositions. This being the case, however, we are still left without much evi-
dence that Sanskrit authors widely composed literature in another language. The choice for literary
expression in early medieval South Asia was still essentially a binary one.
Although it is unclear why more translingual authors did not immediately emerge during
this period, composing in both Sanskrit and in one of their “mother tongues” (Marathi, Bengali,
Gujarāti, Oria, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, etc.), we do find that the cosmopolitan lit-
erary Sanskrit that was for centuries uniformly legible to people across South Asia, Southeast Asia,
Central Asia, and East Asia now occasionally wore a local look in terms of assimilating vernacular
syntax, adopting regionalized lexicons, and exploring new types of themes. For example, even in
high Sanskrit canonical poems of the 12th century, such as Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhīyacarita (The Story
of King Nala) and Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita (The Story of Lord Śiva), there are multiple examples of
neologisms, vernacular expressions, and identifiable syntax and styles that assimilate regional lit-
erary elements with a long-established cosmopolitan Sanskrit that effectively erased regional traces.
These were new developments in the history of Sanskrit kāvya. However, although centuries of
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The Curious Case of Sanskrit
scholarship have attempted to place Śrīharṣa in Eastern, Western, Northern, or Northwestern India
by identifying in his language a regional element, the poet’s literary Sanskrit does not yield a clear
path to make claims of his regional linguistic affiliation. Likewise, even though Maṅkha’s origins
in Kashmir are clear and perhaps a vernacular styling evident in his work, the poem’s visible idiom
is the same classical Sanskrit of earlier authors. Nevertheless, both of these works exhibit a new
kind of Sanskrit that retains its distinctive translocal form while embodying an awareness of a new
vernacular energy.1
Another Sanskrit poet from the 12th century named Jayadeva has been widely studied for his
translingual literary effects although he is not known to have composed any work other than the
canonical and still-popular Gītagovinda (Songs to Krishna). Jayadeva fuses the melodic and thematic
resonances of the song sequences (padāvali) of an eastern Indian language within the grammatical
and phonetic constraints and tropic conventions of Sanskrit. While Jayadeva pulls his Gītagovinda
closer to the sonic rhythms, metrical structures, and syntactic economy of a vernacular that might be
termed Old Bengali, neither he nor anyone else in the 12th century wrote extant works in that or
any other language while also composing in Sanskrit. This perhaps indicates that the language order
in South Asia had not yet fully reoriented to accommodate a literary culture for translingual authors;
without the requisite audience, patronage, and ideology to situate new literary languages in a shared
world with Sanskrit and Prakrit, the classical languages remained the preeminent languages of lit-
erature, even if only for another century or so. Jayadeva’s poem stands out from most other Sanskrit
works for its heightened awareness of non-Sanskrit linguistic possibilities that clearly shape a more
expansive aesthetic repertoire. What is suggested in the Gītagovinda, with its assimilation of multi-
lingual features of literary structure and sound, goes on full display in the case of Tamil and Telugu-
inflected translingual Sanskrit literature, where exclusively Tamil authors like the great 13th-century
poet Kamban may be regarded as channeling Sanskrit in his version of the Rāmāyaṇa inasmuch as
isolingual Tamil-Sanskrit authors like Muttusvāmi Dikshitar (or Telugu-Sanskrit poets like Śākalya
Malla) and true translinguals like Vedāntadeśikā (discussed below) fed their Sanskrit compositions
with rich doses of Tamil literary and musical conventions.2
Literary Bilinguals and the Localization of Sanskrit Literature

in Medieval India
Around the 14th century, regional inflections profoundly transform Sanskrit literature. Most authors
remain isolingual in their literary compositions, although the spate of literary translations from
Sanskrit to a new regionalized literary language changed the subcontinent’s literary culture forever.
Authors like the aforementioned Kamban in Tamil, Bhālan in Gujarāti, Cherusseri Namboothiri in
Malayalam, and Śrīnātha in Telugu leverage their multilingual powers to produce hugely influential
literary works that both reproduce and reinvent Sanskrit literature’s themes and sounds into a truly
novel creation that directly signals to an appreciative audience of literary bilinguals and those with an
ear only for their own language of place.3 However, while these translations resonate with a bilingual
consciousness that catches the ear of knowers of both languages—a feature of Sanskrit works picked
up again during the last two centuries with a flood of translations of medieval classics into Sanskrit
(e.g. the Persian Gulistan, the Tamil Tirukurral, the Hindi Kabirsākhī)—genuine translingual authors
also emerge during this era, those who compose not only in their regional literary language but also
in Sanskrit.
One notable example of such an author, well known for literary works in Sanskrit and Tamil, is
the 14th-century Vedāntadeśikā (or Veṅkaṭanātha). In a study of his Sanskrit poem Goose Messenger
(Haṃsasandeśa), modeled on Kalidāsa’s classic Sanskrit poem from a millennium earlier entitled Cloud
Messenger (Meghasandeśa), Shulman and Bronner argue that this poem exemplifies translingual literary
currents made palpable in numerous Sanskrit poems after the 13th century, questioning if “linguistic
entities that we think of as so neatly bounded and distinct as Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, etc. were truly
73
Deven M. Patel
separate in the minds of those who used them” (7). Given that Sanskrit may never have been a pri-
mary spoken language, and yet expanded for millennia in a literate form, superficially isolingual, that
gave the impression of not only being a primary language but also one that could be used exclu-
sively by a writer, what does it mean when “compound” bilingual writers—simultaneously trained
in a cosmopolitan Sanskrit idiom and in multiple registers of a local language—choose to produce
a Sanskrit work suffused with literary elements from their primary local language, which they can
speak and write in a high register?4 In surveying the momentous changes in “regional Sanskrit lit-
erature” during this era, Shulman and Bronner hypothesize, through a study of such authors as
Vedāntadeśikā as well as Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita and Veṅkaṭadhvarin (both from the 17th century), that as
a Sanskrit work exhibits greater metalingual awareness of the local language, it becomes less available
in “geographical range” but gains in an experiential “depth” that emerges from the expressive density
of the local language’s literary themes, conventions, aesthetic theories, and metapoetic awareness.
They also point out, however, that some “ostensibly localized” Sanskrit works, like 14th-century poet
Gaṅgādevi’s Madhurāvijaya, “sacrifice nearly all its specificity on the altar of a neo-classical, heavily
patterned idiom” (10), thus suggesting that the capacity to fuse translingual literary consciousness may
be productively resisted by some authors.
Another striking multilingual author during the 14th and 15th centuries is Vidyāpati, who
innovatively composed works on letter-writing (Likhanāvalī) and a collection of vignettes about
extraordinary men and political ethics (Puruṣaparīkṣā) in Sanskrit; a biography of a local king in
Apabhraṃśa Avahatta (Kīrttilatā); and love lyrics still sung today in his native Maithilī.The translingual
awareness and artistry he brings to his works remains to be studied although the discrete linguistic
vehicles Vidyāpati chooses for each genre perhaps reveal the effective logic for each choice—with
Sanskrit offering universalizing appeal, the Apabhraṃśa a localized grandeur, and the Maithilī the
most emotional and sonic resonance. Also notable are the early 16th-century translingual poet-
king Krishnadevarāya, to whom is attributed the Telugu masterpiece Āmuktamālyadā (The Giver of
the Worn Garland) and the Sanskrit Jāmbavatīpariṇaya (The Marriage of Jāmbhavatī), and the prolific
16th-century polymath Rūpa Goswami, who seemed to have composed only in Sanskrit but
apparently shaped many of his important devotional and dramatic works to be comprehensible
to a Bengali-knowing audience by using vocabulary, long compounds (that elide Sanskrit declen-
sional endings), and a simplified phonetic structure that would be familiar to a wider non-Sanskrit
audience.5
Perhaps one may point to textualized medieval exercises in multilingual communication as
important vehicles that bridged, facilitated, reflected, and enhanced the production of translingual
literature during this period. Early spoken Sanskrit manuals, for instance, such as Dāmodara’s 12th-
century Uktivyaktiprakaraṇa (A Work on the Elucidation of Speech), a bilingual composition in Old
Kosali (or Old Avadhi/Eastern Hindi), were intended to teach Sanskrit grammar to speakers of
Old Kosali.6 Similar trends to draw together the multilingual inheritance of learned littérateurs were
certainly boosted in the premodern centuries by the substantial growth of the so-called extended
grammar, whereby one language (L1) is entirely composed in another language (L2) with precisely
overlapping descriptive methods and metalanguage used for L2. In this regard, contrastive grammars
of the southern Indian languages Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam (L1) were comprehensively mod-
eled on ancient grammars of Sanskrit (L2) using the very same descriptive technologies developed
by ancient Sanskrit grammarians to describe Sanskrit and, more significantly, composed in Sanskrit
itself. Although not exactly a literary phenomenon, these kinds of complex experiments in bilin-
gual mediation must have had significant effects historically in expanding the impetus to draw in
not only the linguistic features but also the expressive literary worlds of two different languages.7
The proliferation of this type of grammatical exercise continues into the modern era, with such
works as Madhusudan Tarkalankara’s 1835 grammar of the English language composed in Sanskrit
(Iṅgalainḍīyavyākaraṇasāraḥ) and, more recently, Dinabandhu Jha’s grammar of Maithilī (1946), entitled
Mithilābhāṣāvidyotana.
74
A Sketch of Modern Sanskrit’s Translingual Literary Culture

Literary multilingualism during the early modern period (16th to 18th centuries) took many forms
in imperial courts in northern and southern India, sponsored by various groups such as the Mughals,
the Marathas, and various Tamil and Telugu-speaking political elites, among others.Various arguments
have been put forth as to the motivations of these institutions to encourage new forms of multi-
lingual literary practice, from the urge to accommodate or even legitimate the powerful linguistic
affiliations of diverse speakers to the practical need to translate and facilitate communication between
and among them. In all of these courtly settings, however, also prevalent was the influx of literary cre-
ativity engendered by cross-linguistic experimentation. In this context, Sanskrit played a major role.
The Tanjavur Nayaka and Maratha courts of the 17th and early 18th centuries, for example, seem to
have been a particularly fecund site for Sanskrit translingual compositions, where kings encouraged
not only the composition of works in discrete classical and vernacular languages but also polyglot
texts that combined languages into single works.
Particularly notable are the efforts of the Maratha monarch-poet Shahji II, who was praised as
a “master of poetic compositions in five languages” (paṅcabhāṣākavitānirvāhaka) and a “master of
poetry in all the languages” (sakalabhāṣākavitānirvāhaka). For his court, Sanskrit was one among sev-
eral languages utilized in novel dance-drama performances that fused music, dramatic text, and dance.
In addition to reshaping what was understood as “literary” during this period, these multimedia
performances in several languages also conditioned access to Sanskrit for plurilingual audiences by
situating Sanskrit dialogue and songs amidst regional language counterparts. This was a scenario,
Viswanathan-Peterson argues, where “no one language was accorded ‘cosmopolitan’ status, and in
which older discourses of hierarchy and contestation were replaced by those of dialogue, pluralism,
and hybridity” (Viswanthan Peterson 298). A remarkable example from Shahji II’s court is the “Play
in Five Languages” (Paṅcabhāṣāvilāsa), which Viswanathan-Peterson (2011: 306) describes as not only
a multilingual play “but a play about multilingualism.”
The encouraging of multilingual performances such as these, and the pedagogical environments
created by these early modern courts that made such multilingual creativity possible, was continued
under the British educational system from the last decades of the 18th up to the mid-19th century.
With the building of British-Indian universities after 1857, which fostered bilingual literary training
of classical and vernacular Indian languages alongside English, the literary-cultural milieu that formed
hereafter invited a new generation of translingual Sanskrit writers to come to the fore in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like their medieval predecessors, the Sanskrit works that
appear during the past two centuries retain, to varying degrees, the legibility of a widely transmittable
cosmopolitan Sanskrit work while also transforming the language into an instrument for experi-
mentation with new genres, hybrid lexicons, unfamiliar themes, varied musical tones and metrical
structures, and novel configurations of literary affect that, at least somewhat, are traceable to a multi-
lingual attitude to literary expression.
A few scholarly volumes in recent years8 provide a substantive preliminary survey of published
authors born between the last several decades of the 19th century up to the middle of the 20th cen-
tury. Examples of translingual Sanskrit authors born between 1870 and 1905 include the prolific
Malayali-Sanskrit author and educator Attur (Krishna Chandra) Pishorody, who composed multiple
dramas in Sanskrit, one of them (Yogavilasitam) a seven-act play based on a Malayalam story inspired
by a Kannada proverb. Pishorody also penned numerous Malayalam stories, Malayalam translations of
Sanskrit works, and creative retellings of episodes from the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa into a contemporary
Malayalam idiom. Moreover, as did many other bilingual Sanskrit authors, he composed a number
of critical works and commentaries (on music, medicine, and grammar, in particular) in Sanskrit.
Another productive translingual Sanskrit author from this era is (Vasistha) Kavyakanta Ganapathi
Muni, who wrote dozens of creative and critical works (on medicine, astrology, and poetics) in
Sanskrit, the most famous of which is a collection entitled Umāsahasram (A Thousand Poems to the
75
Deven M. Patel
Goddess). His singular Telugu work, composed in the distinctive Telugu dvipada meter, is a book of
hymns on the Vedic god Indra (Indragītamu), a companion piece to his Sanskrit book of hymns on the
same god (Indrasahasranāma).
Three Kannada-Sanskrit authors bear special mention. Jaggu Singarya (b. 1891) wrote plays and
poems in Sanskrit and Kannada that have become staples of Kannada school culture while Rāllapalli
Anantakrishna Śarma (b. 1893), whose mother tongue was Telugu, wrote creative and critical works
in Sanskrit (primarily), Kannada, and Telugu; a later contemporary of theirs, Jaggu Vakulabhushana (b.
1902 as Alwar Iyengar) composed some eighty Sanskrit creative works and fifteen Kannada works.
Gotur Venkatācala Śarma (b. 1894) is an interesting case of a primary Tamil-language speaker who
composed creative works in Sanskrit and Telugu, critical works and biographies respectively in
Kannada and English, but not a single work in his native Tamil. Other notable Sanskrit authors from
this period who composed bilingual works include Haridas Siddhantavagisha (Sanskrit and Bengali)
and Brahmananda Shukla (Sanskrit and Hindi).
Among the few Sanskrit authors of this era that have been critically studied in the English lan-
guage thus far is the Telugu-Sanskrit polyglot Viswanatha Satyanarayana (b. 1895), who composed
two lengthy Sanskrit dramas based on the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata and numerous Telegu works
in diverse genres. Noted Telugu and Sanskrit scholar V. Narayan Rao offers a nuanced assessment of
how this Sanskrit and Telugu poet grapples with the question of “being modern” in theme, form,
and language:
Satyanarayana’s style blends dazzling mythic images such as with the sensibilities of modern
humor. He makes his Sanskrit read like a seamless continuum of classical thought and con-
temporary idiom. For instance, relatively minor characters … all of whom speak Sanskrit
… sound as if they are speaking a modern-day colloquial south Indian language. Lexically
and syntactically it is good Sanskrit, but the idiom and tone are completely modern. . . .The
conversations are simple and . . . fairly intelligible to an educated Telugu audience –dem-
onstrating that Sanskrit is not just for pundits.The verses are heavy, but the Telugu audience
during the first half of the twentieth century was very comfortable with long compounds
[a typical feature of Sanskrit poetry] in verses and plays.
(Narayan Rao 733)
Narayan Rao’s observation about Satyanarayana’s translingual oeuvre—maintaining a classical lexicon

with Sanskrit’s stylistic features (long compounds) while striking a modern, perhaps contemporary
Telugu tone—provides a sketch of the kinds of audiences that were created by such literature. In this
and other Sanskrit translingual authors’ works, the pull of the classical language (L2 and sometimes
L3) for the Sanskrit-knowing audience comes through the filter of the familiar (L1 and L2), before it
is reconstituted in its final form and delivered.
Works by dozens of translingual Sanskrit authors born between 1905 and 1930 often triangulate
three different languages. Thus, for example, the famous Sanskrit scholar and educator V. Raghavan
(b. 1908) composed creative works only in Sanskrit but published numerous critical works in English
and multiple translations from English to Sanskrit and Sanskrit to Tamil. Roma Caudhari (also spelled
Rama Chaudhary, b. 1912), the first Indian female D.Phil. graduate from Oxford University, wrote
nearly twenty plays in Sanskrit but composed all of her scholarly essays and monographs only in
English or Bengali. Another noteworthy female Sanskrit author of the 20th century is Dr. Vanamala
Bhawalkar, who penned plays and essays in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Marathi while composing a scholarly
monograph (on women characters in the Mahābhārata) in English. Bommalapura Venkatarama Bhatta
(b. 1915) creatively worked in three languages—Sanskrit (his primary creative outlet), Kannada, and
Hindi—composing nearly twenty Sanskrit plays, prose poems, devotional lyrics, and epics; he also
was a two-way translator of literary works from Sanskrit to Kannada and Kannada to Sanskrit. E.P
Bharatha Pishorody (b. 1917) wrote plays and stories primarily in Sanskrit but also composed literature
76
in his native Malayalam and in English, while he translated works from Hindi into Malayalam. K.T.
Pandurangi (b. 1918) wrote plays, poems, and essays in Sanskrit, Kannada, and English while also
publishing scholastic editions of works in all three languages. A similar kind of labor occupied both
Sridhar Bhaskar Varnekar (b. 1918), whose corpus of creative, editorial, and translation work spans
Sanskrit, Marathi, and Hindi, and M.G. Nanjundharadhya (b. 1919), who published dozens of cre-
ative, editorial, and biographical works in Sanskrit and Kannada. Also noteworthy Sanskrit translingual
authors creatively publishing in three or more languages during the 1920s are Gaurikumar Brahma
(Oriya, English, Hindi), Ramanath Pathak (Hindi, Bhojpuri), Dinesh Prasad Pandeya (Hindi, Bhojpuri),
and the strikingly versatile translingual author Rasik Vihari Joshi who mostly wrote his creative work
in Sanskrit but composed scholarly studies in Hindi, French, and Spanish.
The new pedagogical contexts, whether the university model or a refurbished traditional edu-
cation, productively altered the Sanskrit author’s creative range and perspective. While university
education in English medium was established after 1835, traditional Sanskrit schools (pāṭhaśāla)
and religious schools (gurukulam) that taught Sanskrit also adapted to formally train their students
in the literary registers of local languages. As such, many authors (as “coordinate” bilinguals)
brought a dual linguistic training to their creative endeavors: learning Sanskrit in traditional school
settings and educating themselves to compose in a literary form of their mother tongue or English
in a university setting.9 Others (as “subordinate” bilinguals) acquired the ability to compose in
Sanskrit by means of their primary language. It is important to reiterate what was stated earlier,
however, that even though the majority of Sanskrit writers in the modern period were isolingual
in their compositions, their Sanskrit works reveal a silent awareness, if not consistent dialogue,
with other literary cultures around them. It is also important to surmise that some authors con-
sciously restricted themselves—like the aforementioned 14th-century poet Gaṅgādevī—to emu-
lating an older pattern of expression in a thematically and linguistically circumscribed Sanskrit
idiom that can be understood as the standard, cosmopolitan classical literary Sanskrit of the first
millennium ce.
The Growth of Global Genres in Sanskrit

The question about Sanskrit’s official role in the new Republic of India was fraught with debate in
the decades preceding and following 1947. Although this is not the place to expatiate on the subject,
it bears mention that there was realistic consideration from many diverse and unexpected quarters
of the Constituent Assembly for a simplified version of Sanskrit to be declared the national language
(along the lines of Hebrew in Israel), before Hindi and English were ultimately adopted. Among the
various viewpoints presented, some argued that as Sanskrit did not belong to any region but had
nourished all of them and was universally regarded as a language of prestige that would be acceptable
to most; others reasoned that the language would be equally difficult for all to learn and, therefore,
mitigate the concerns of linguistic partisanship.10 Its official status notwithstanding, however, Sanskrit
in the 19th and 20th centuries continued to adapt in a plurilingual world, and continues today,
by channeling the expressive capacities of a classical language toward more contemporary genres
such as, for instance, the short story or critical essay or poetry in blank verse. Simultaneously, many
modern Sanskrit works have continued the line of pedigreed Sanskrit genres, like the multi-canto
“long poem” genre (māhākāvya); in the 1960s alone, for instance, at least fifty Sanskrit mahakāvya were
published in print.
Though a vital literary tradition, when compared with the reach that literature written in Hindi,
Tamil, English, or any other modern Indian language has, Sanskrit is a marginal literary language in
modern India. However, unlike classical forms of Latin or Greek, by no calculation can Sanskrit be
labeled a “dead” language. Just in the past several decades, hundreds of new literary works have been
composed in the language, in addition to published work in Sanskrit newspapers and journals with
presumably a large enough audience to read and appreciate them. The comparison with Latin is an
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Deven M. Patel
interesting and complex one. In an earlier period, Sanskrit’s relationship with languages of “place”
resembled Latin’s relationship with the European vernaculars, but the destiny of the two classical
languages has veered in opposite directions since then.While Latin’s literary modernity is virtually nil
outside of ecclesiastical and scholastic contexts, Sanskrit’s continues to grow alongside other modern
literatures, however unevenly. Indeed, while Sanskrit writing is still read in India and abroad, it is dif-
ficult to calculate how large the audience for contemporary Sanskrit literature is, as very few claim
it as their primary language in the Indian census, and most readers of Sanskrit also read one or more
other Indian or non-Indian languages.11
During the early decades of the 20th century, with a wider forum within which to write and
share literature in multiple languages, many translingual Sanskrit authors pioneered new genres
in the language. For example, in addition to expressing himself in standard Sanskrit genres,
Rudra Dev Tripathi (b. 1925) also composed travelogues in Sanskrit, while Ram Karan Sharma
(1927) published two utopian novellas in Sanskrit in addition to poetry collections in Sanskrit
and scholarly monographs and translations in English. The variety of results that emerge in
modern Sanskrit literature are astounding in their range, especially the explorations with global
forms (e.g. sonnets, haiku, tanka, concrete poetry, and so on) that challenge the expressive limits
of the Sanskrit language to do more than provide lexicon to borrowed metrical patterns. Many
works constitute rote exercises in isomorphic translation—the Indian Constitution in Sanskrit,
for instance. As Radhavallabh Tripathi, the preeminent scholar of modern Sanskrit literature
today, describes in his survey, of the massive proliferation of works adapting religious litera-
ture into Sanskrit, many can be described as boilerplate translations, like those of the Bible or
the Koran, while others are sustained experiments to breathe new life into old forms, like the
Sanskrit long poem (māhākāvya) on the life of Christ (Kristubhāgavatam) or the repurposing of
the dialectic genre (saṃvāda) for the purpose of proselytization, as is presaged in Don Antonio
de Rosario’s 17th-century Sanskrit work Conversation between a Roman Catholic and a Brahman
(brāhmaṇa-romanakaitholika-saṃvāda).12
Of all the genres in Sanskrit that emerge during the past century, however, the novel and the cre-
ative translation (or transcreation) show the most abundant growth. The pivotal development of the
novel as a popular genre, with its emphasis on conflict and trauma, and the regeneration of the dra-
matic play to similar effect, comprises the oeuvre of many modern Sanskrit authors. The translation
from Sanskrit (L1) to a regional language (L2) or from L2 into L1 or from L1 to L3 through L2 runs
deep into literary India’s medieval past.Thus, the sparkling modern specimens that Tripathi marks for
us in his survey have a pedigree. For instance: the translation/trans-adaptation/recreation of a Hindi
novel into Sanskrit, with both the Hindi and Sanskrit works written by the same author, as in the case
of Shyam Vimal’s Vyāmohaḥ, “a touching tale of lost love” (Tripathi 177). Contemporary translingual
authors like Vimal, working as novelists or translators or both, extend classical Sanskrit’s exploration
of interior landscapes of political and carnal turmoil at royal courts to the contemporary malaise
experienced in cities or rural settings around similar issues, displacing classical Sanskrit’s preference for
verse with the modern tendency toward prose. Tripathi (178–181) lists a series of themes in contem-
porary Sanskrit novels, including coping with lost love, channeling sentiments of protest and revo-
lution against injustice, negotiating social conflict, and bearing the slings and arrows of modernity’s
misfortunes. (There should be no surprise that there are multiple transcreations of Hamlet in Sanskrit
in the past two centuries.)
Notice what Tripathi says about two particular Sanskrit transcreations of Shakespeare, one of
Hamlet (Dinārka-rājakumāra-hema-lekha) by Sukhmay Mukhopadhyaya and the other of Macbeth
(Meghavedham) by Mohan Gupta: “Both have successfully combined the flow and rapidity of
Shakespeare’s diction and [the] grandeur of classical Sanskrit, but have also Sanskritised all the proper
names of the dramatis personae” (Tripathi 181).13 Indeed, with this comment, Tripathi has captured
the vital divergences between the two linguistic worlds being fused here. First is the lesser obser-
vation, in my opinion, about the marriage of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan diction and Sanskrit kāvya’s
78
“grandeur”; perhaps in this fact, if it is indeed a fact, something is revealed about each language-
world’s elusive weltanschauung, if one wants to think of it that way. More provocative is Tripathi’s
second observation about the Sanskritization of the names. For a Sanskrit audience, the pointed
playfulness and profundity in that seemingly trivial act of re-naming captures a literary umwelt that
one under-initiated in Sanskrit conventions may not appreciate. We can assume from the titles them-
selves that for both of these authors Sanskrit is L1 with the Bard’s English being L2 (if not a distant L3).
The names of both plays sound incoherent, by design, with respect to the subject at hand. Dinārka-
rājakumāra-hema-lekha can perhaps literally be translated as The Golden Ray that is the Prince of the Day’s
Sun. Obviously, nothing in this stream of words has to do with the play Hamlet (except the part of
the Prince), thematically or characterologically. However, the Sanskrit ear picks up “Denmark” in
dinārka and “Hamlet” in hemalekha. The middle word rājakumāra just means “prince.” Thus, we have
our Hamlet, Prince of Denmark as the Golden Ray that is the Prince of the Day’s Sun. Though this
simple choice of giving a homonymic texture to the title may appear flippant, the poet’s point is to
perhaps make it “sound” like Sanskrit even if it cannot “mean” like Sanskrit.
The trend to resonate classical Sanskrit’s tone with a modernist topical idiom, filtered through
awareness of both European and regional Indian language models, strikes alien notes to those
expecting more familiar Sanskrit verse. Recognizing this, Tripathi writes: “The tone of sarcasm with
regard to degeneration of social and political institutions prevails in many Sanskrit poems that have
been recently published” (Tripathi 172). Some of the radical experimentation with language and
form in modern Sanskrit literature, Tripathi (183) continues, creates problems of “comprehension
and communication for those readers who are used to reading the ancient and medieval Sanskrit
literatures.”14 Situating Sanskrit literary modernity in contexts of colonial assimilation, post-colonial
recovery and post-modern nostalgia may help to map some of the psychic and stylistic features of the
translingual Sanskrit author’s imaginative world of thought and writing.15 However, these frameworks
may not tell the whole story of the modern multilingual Sanskrit writer’s literary imagination, as
similar types of creative energy—manifested vividly in neologisms, defamiliarized lexicon, vernacular
syntax, localized idiom, and experiments in blending two languages (bhāṣāsamaka)—can be viewed as
inheritances from an earlier precolonial era when Sanskrit writers experimented with their multilin-
gual gifts in producing an entire literary culture of bitextual play, an extreme poetry, as one author puts
it, to not only draw out the hidden powers and capacities of the Sanskrit language but also to project
that capacity to the other languages they knew.16
It is more than a little ironic that classical Sanskrit authors eluded signposting the regional in their
work while most modern Sanskrit authors either embrace it or are helpless to compose Sanskrit in
any other form—as their capacity to emulate classical Sanskrit works is insufficient, perhaps due to
a lack of training, even were they to desire it. The authors of the medieval period lived in a world
where Sanskrit and the mother tongue were on a more equal footing for literary expression. As
such, their works in both languages demonstrate the importance language held, before modernity, in
shaping an identity (social and self-identity) that was over and above regional affiliation and ethnicity.
Earlier Sanskrit authors, masking their translingual capacities, altogether circumvent the category of
language-identity attached to region, while later authors attempt to restore the regional linguistic
identity to their Sanskrit compositions, and then again, in the modern period, to again revert the
regional back into an amorphous and perhaps asynchronous premodern Sanskrit. Like the rela-
tionship of European vernaculars to Latin, the regional Indian languages have constantly shown to
both displace and supplant Sanskrit while also turning to it for inspiration and models. In this latter
regard, the international nature of Sanskrit has led to some marvelous experiments in translingual
cultural bridge-building. German Sanskrit scholar and poet Carl Capeller (1840–1925), for instance,
translated ancient Greek poems into Sanskrit (Yavanaśatakam) and an anthology of German poetry
(Subhāṣitamālikā), using the classical Sanskrit formula of framing the work in 100 or so verses.Tripathi
also cites Korean-Sanskrit poet Bak Kanbe as another example of the translingual internationalization
of Sanskrit (Tripathi 2016:1 83).
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Deven M. Patel
Sanskrit’s current literary cosmopolitanism seems to be a source of tension among those con-
temporary Sanskrit writers who are more purist in their desire to see a classical form of Sanskrit
restored to its unique ability to express in the presence of a seemingly deterministic heteroglossia.
Others see contemporary Sanskrit—in dialogue with other Indian and international languages—
as liberating Sanskrit’s expressive potential. This latter view echoes an earlier model of Sanskrit
literary cosmopolitanism, which was in conversation with “local ways of being” as representative
of an alternative “non-coercive” spirit. Pollock (Indian Classicity 67–68) writes about this period
as follows:
[It is a] form of broad cultural participation which knew nothing of the tyranny to ‘be like
us’ that marks western cosmopolitanism from Romanization to modern western global-
ization. Wherever Sanskrit travelled –and it travelled everywhere, from today’s Afghanistan
to the edge of maritime Southeast Asia –it travelled not with armies but with professional
religiosi and scholars. Unlike Greek literary culture, in which non-Greeks could, typically,
not participate, Sanskrit literary culture was open to adoption by everyone everywhere, and
was eventually taken up by Buddhists on the Iranian plateau, Khmer princes in Angkor
Wat, and all across the space between. This cosmopolitanism consisted of a certain vision of
culture and power … Moreover, classical Sanskrit cosmopolitanism existed in a uniquely
advantageous relationship with local ways of being.
This last point about “local ways of being” resonates with the importance of the audience in multi-
lingual communication, a subject Kellman highlights in the decision to switch languages:
There are almost as many reasons to switch languages as there are writers who adopt another
tongue. But whether they view the switch positively or not, almost all acknowledge that
switching languages makes a profound difference in what—and how—they write. More
significant than the way that translingualism makes a difference for the writer is the way that
it makes a difference for the text, which means the difference that it makes for the reader.
(Kellman 112)
For the Sanskrit translingual author, writing in Sanskrit for a local multilingual audience opened up a
spacious treasury of wider conventions, meanings, and emotional associations, developed in both local
and distant places. While switching from their primary mother tongue to a cosmopolitan Sanskrit
could bring their readers to distant and shareable worlds, switching to a consciously localized Sanskrit
could bring those same readers to a closer and more richly closed world, a move which brings with
it “a certain fundamental tension,” as Shulman and Bronner explain:
The poet has a choice—he or she can always opt to maximise the universal aura of his poem
at the expense of particular localised traces. Or he or she may go for a vision and language
that are entirely immersed in a micro-context. Each such choice has its promise and its price.
(Shulman and Bronner 9)
It bears repeating that the Sanskrit literary translingual imagination follows other translingual
literatures in being replete with experimental forays to meet the challenges that the exercise to
express L1 into L2 presents, whether it is to craft a perfect replica of the imaginative original or to
uniquely express what is unavailable in one language in another. Often, the Sanskrit writer, especially
in the modern period, seeks to alienate classical Sanskrit through their subject matter, to write exist-
entialist poetry in Sanskrit, for instance (as K.C. Dash does), in a jarring Sanskrit that never before was
used quite that way. In other cases, the traditional playfulness of the Sanskrit poet (made a convention
by the bitextual poets of the medieval period) spills over in the modern translingual imagination to
80
promiscuously juxtapose lexical, metrical, and even phonemic units to create an illusion that you are
reading one language and not the other. Modern experiments such as these for a language as ancient
as Sanskrit suggest, therefore, that there is still something new and exciting to do with the language
of the gods.
Notes
1 Patel (2014: 6). See also Patel 2014: pg. 253 (fn. 17) and pg. 254 (fn. 3 and 4) for a brief note on the vernacular
elements in both the Naiṣadhīyacarita and Śrīkaṇṭhacarita.
2 Shulman (2014: 616) notes that Śākalya Malla, a Telengana author of the fourteenth-century was called “catur-
bhāṣā-kavitā-pitāmaha—the creator of poetry in four languages,” adding: [I]‌t seems that the Telugu tradition
claimed Śākalya Malla as a great local or regional poet, and we can definitely situate him in the polyglossic
cultural milieu of medieval Andhra, probably during the first half of the fourteenth century.” In describing
this work, he continues:“Śakalya Malla writes a Sanskrit that has the suppleness, the range, and the rich modal
forms of the mother-tongues (say, in this case, Telugu) … there is something uniquely productive about the
encounter between past and present in a text that self-consciously mobilizes classical imagery and literary
allusion to explore and experience the present in a new way.” W. Cox (181) also unpacks the ways in which
Kashmiri Sanskrit works “were unmoored from their textual surroundings by southern authors and then
resituated within their own worlds.”
3 See Patel (2011) for a detailed analysis of the ways in which Sanskrit literature was translated into the
vernacular through the mediation of Sanskrit commentaries and into other Sanskrit works (intralingual
translations). In numerous cases, the translingual flow impacts the aesthetic design, sound effects, and tone
of the works. Translators absorbed and adapted commentarial practices for their own creative purpose, often
adopting the Sanskrit commentary’s compositional strategies, prose syntax, simplified synonyms for explana-
tory or creative effect, and the implied meanings.
4 Kellman (115) offers a useful summary of A. Pavlenko’s typology of bilinguals which “distinguishes among
coordinate bilinguals (“who learned their languages in distinct environments and have two conceptual
systems associated with their two lexicons”), compound bilinguals (who “learned their languages in a single
environment and, consequently, have a single underlying and undifferentiated conceptual system linked to
the two lexicons”), and subordinate bilinguals (“typically classroom learned who learned the second language
via the means of the first, have a single system where the second-language lexicon is linked to conceptual
representations through first-language words”).
5 See David Buchta (2014: 198–205) for a detailed discussion of this author’s interlingual awareness.
6 See Salomon (1982) for details about this work.
7 Influential “extended grammars” composed in Sanskrit include grammatical descriptions of Kannada,
Malayalam, Telugu, and Maithilī. See Patel (2017: 45–63) for a study of the adaptation of metalanguage and
of the Sanskrit metalinguistic technologies to describe Telugu in Sanskrit in a Telugu grammar composed
entirely in Sanskrit entitled the Āndhraśabdacintāmaṇi (A treatise [lit. “a wish-fulfilling gem”] on Andhra speech
forms). For an English translation of the text, see Sundaram and Patel (2016).
8 Much of the information culled here is from Ranganath, Satapathy, and Suryanarayana 1994 and Tripathi
(2016).
9 See Note 4 for a concise statement concerning bilingual typology.
10 For a comprehensive account of the work of the Sanskrit Commission, formed in 1955, to discuss Sanskrit’s
role in an independent India, see Ramaswamy (1999).
11 See J. Hanneder (2002) for a thorough analysis of Sanskrit as a “dead” and “living” language.
12 See Zene (2015).
13 The learned professor mistakenly identifies both as “translations of Hamlet” but the first is a translation of
Hamlet, the other of Macbeth.
14 The first scholar to critically write about modern Sanskrit literature in English is V. Raghavan, who like many
men of letters of his generation was an educated speaker of a regional tongue (Tamil), a traditionally trained
Sanskrit scholar and poet, and a skillful communicator in a high register of English. A more recent scholar
and poet who has surveyed widely the terrain of modern Sanskrit literature is Radhavallabh Tripathi, whose
A Bibliography of Modern Sanskrit Writings (ādhunika-saṃskṛasāhitya-sandarbhasūcī) has been invaluable in pre-
paring the following summary of fascinating developments in Sanskrit literature.
15 Some of this translingual activity in the modern period can be attributed to a specific type of nostalgia and
distinguished from the creative urges to translate in an earlier period. Nelson (26) writes about the nostalgic
translation into English as follows: “The new nostalgic translation into English thus parallels (albeit distantly)
an earlier era when Sanskrit works were translated into the vernaculars, where readers and translators alike
81
Deven M. Patel
shared familiarity with both versions and had little compunction about altering the original to fit new aes-
thetic and social contexts (although it bears repeating that the terms of “original” and even “translation” are
only used anachronistically and imprecisely to refer to these movements).”
16 See especially Bronner (2010, Chapter 5:3) (“Sanskrit Bitextuality in a Vernacular World”).
Works Cited
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Bronner, Yigal. Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration. Columbia University
Press, 2010.
Cox, Whitney. “Saffron in the Rasam.” South Asian Texts in History: Critical engagements with Sheldon Pollock.
Association for Asian Studies (Michigan), 2011, pp. 177–201.
Filiozat, Pierre-Sylvain. The Sanskrit Language: An Overview. (Tr. T.K. Gopalan). Indica Books, 2000.
Hanneder, Jürgen. “On ‘The Death of Sanskrit’.” Indo-Iranian Journal,Vol. 45, No. 4 (2002), pp. 293–310.
Kellman, Steven G. “Does Literary Translingualism Matter? Reflections on the Translingual and Isolingual Text.”
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Narayan Rao, Velcheru. “Modernity in Sanskrit? Viswanatha Satyanarayana’s Amṛta-śarmiṣṭham.” Innovations and
Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature. Ed. by Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gray Tubb.
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Nelson, Matthew. Translingual Nostalgias in Modern Sanskrit and Indian Poetry in English, 2018. University of Illinois
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Grammar Composed in Sanskrit.” Histoire Épistémologie Langage, tome 39, fascicule 2, 2017, pp. 45–63.
Pollock, Sheldon. “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out.” Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from
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No. 1, 1982, pp. 13–25.
Shulman, David. “Śākalya Malla’s Telangana Rāmāyaṇa: The Udārarāghava.” Innovations and Turning Points: Toward
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Zene, Cosimo. The Rishi of Bangladesh: A History of Christian Dialogue. Routledge, 2015.
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III
Post-Classical Literary Translingualism

7
TRANSLINGUALISM IN MEDIEVAL
JEWISH CULTURE
Ross Brann
The Language Situation of Jewish Communities in Near Eastern Lands

before the Middle Ages
The peculiar social and political history of the Jews rendered their linguistic practices something
of an anomaly among the religious and ethnic communities to survive the transitions experienced
from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Consequently, it is useful to sketch a picture of the Jews’ complex
language situations in the Mediterranean and Near East prior to the rise of Islam—their linguistic
inheritance so to speak—before considering the indications and significance of translingualism in
medieval Jewish culture.
Early in the first millennium BCE, residents of biblical Israel’s northern region fell under the
sway of Aramaic, the Northwest Semitic language of the Arameans, and subsequently, the Assyrian
empire. Aramaic left an imprint on the literary as well as spoken language of Israelite Hebrew and
even ninth-century Judean elites apparently understood it. The impact of Aramaic on the life of
this people in antiquity was compounded in Aramaic-speaking Babylonia where Judean exiles of
the early sixth century BCE endeavored to uphold and adjust their traditions to life outside their
homeland. By the time some of the exiles’ descendants “returned” to Judea later in the century,
Aramaic was in the process of becoming, in effect, a second “Jewish language,”1 alongside Hebrew.
Aramaic, in all of its many dialectical variations (according to periodization, geography, official and
literary registers, and identification with diverse ethno-religious communities), was closely related
to Hebrew such that Jewish communities of the Near East accommodated easily to its currency. For
more than a millennium, it functioned as the lingua franca of the Near East and served in tandem
with registers of late biblical or rabbinic Hebrew as one of the Jews’ two literary and liturgical
languages.
A second imperial language came from the Aegean to dominate western swaths of the region. It
was more intrinsically “foreign,” and its adoption by Jews created something of a cultural as well as
linguistic divide between the Jewish communities of the late antique Near East. Greek supplanted
Aramaic among the Jews of Egypt following Alexander the Great’s foray into the Near East during
the later fourth century BCE. Greek synagogue inscriptions, remnants, and artifacts indicate the
prevalence of what has been called “Greek Judaism” in the western and north Mediterranean regions
for centuries. For the Jewish communities of the Levant, however, Greek and Aramaic coexisted as
spoken languages until the emergence of Islam. Aramaic remained predominant among the Jews in
Achaemenid, Parthian, and subsequently Sassanian Mesopotamia and Persia.
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Scattered diaspora communities in Mediterranean lands, representing a majority of the Jewish

population by the middle of the second century CE, had long since ceased speaking Hebrew or
in some cases knowing very much of it at all. Because epigraphic and literary evidence is limited,
translations of the Hebrew Bible into other languages serve as important signs of changing lin-
guistic practices of the Jewish communities of the late antique Near East. Aramaic translations of the
Pentateuch and the Prophets (Targumim) are thought to have originated in turn of the second cen-
tury BCE Palestine. Subsequently, they were revised in Babylonia where they acquired authoritative
status in rabbinic tradition. Indeed, it appears that by early in the common era it was customary
practice in the synagogue service to read/recite the weekly Torah portion “twice in Hebrew, once
in Aramaic” (Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 8a), a sign of the latter’s status as the Jews’ primary ver-
nacular. During this period, the rabbis in Roman Palestine continued to speak and transmit their
traditions in rabbinic Hebrew. It became a strictly literary language when the first collection of
statements of Jewish law, the Mishnah, was compiled around 200 CE. Although homiletical litera-
ture (midrash) still was written in Hebrew or a mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew, thereafter Aramaic
supplanted Hebrew as the principal language of rabbinic literary activity. The Palestinian Talmud
(compiled end of fourth century Byzantine Palestine) and the Babylonian Talmud (compiled end
of fifth century Babylonia) were composed in the western and eastern dialects of Jewish Aramaic,
respectively.
While the Targumim served the audience of Aramaic-speaking Jews, Greek-speaking Jews
required a translation of their own in order to understand the Torah and preserve their distinctive
religious community. The Greek Septuagint dates to third century BCE Ptolemaic Egypt and later
was revised. Subsequently, translators completed Greek versions of the Prophets and the Writings
of the Hebrew Bible. With little knowledge of Hebrew, Jewish intellectuals commenced produ-
cing Jewish works in Greek based on Hellenistic literary genres such as historiography, philosophy,
wisdom literature, and imaginative tales and epics on biblical figures and themes. Many such texts
of the narrative kind achieved canonical status as apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books in Jewish
or Christian tradition.
In Greco-Roman Palestine, Jewish elites and religious scholars also knew Greek—whose idioms
are plentiful in both the Mishnah and Talmud—but did not employ it for religious or literary
purposes. The guardians of Jewish tradition were certainly conscious of the environment’s linguistic
diversity. For example, the Palestinian Rabbi Jonathan of Beit Guvrin (third century) supposedly
assigned different languages to specific spheres of social operation: “There are four languages which
are worthy of common use—Greek for poetry, Latin for battle, Aramaic for lamentation, and Hebrew
for speech” (Palestinian Talmud Megillah, 1. 71b). Notwithstanding R. Jonathan’s scheme, his cohort
and their successors ceased speaking (rabbinic) Hebrew as the language of daily life. They conducted
their legal and homiletic discussions in Aramaic and these were captured in literary form in the
Palestinian Talmud.
For reasons which remain unclear, Hebrew literary activity experienced a resurgence in
fifth-century Byzantine Palestine on the cusp of the Middle Ages. It took the form of liturgical
poems (piyyuṭim by payṭanim, poets), most of which are intricate and composed in a learned,
allusive Hebrew register replete with neologisms. Epithalamia and eulogies were also composed
in Aramaic. As for the easternmost part of the region (Eastern Jewish) Aramaic reigned as the
unrivaled religious and literary language of the Jewish community as evidenced in the Babylonian
Talmud. That classical document of post-biblical Jewish culture also incorporates many idioms of
Parthian Middle Persian.
In sum, the Jews of Near Eastern lands before the seventh century were long accustomed to
adapting to the changing linguistic circumstances required to function successfully in the wider
Greek-, Aramaic-, or Persian-speaking society. Their spoken language (Greek, Aramaic, or Middle
Persian) reflected their place of origin and they reserved their two sacred languages (Hebrew and
Aramaic), the vessels of their cultural baggage so to speak, for liturgical and literary purposes.
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Medieval Jewish Culture
The Language Situation of Medieval Jewish Communities in

Mediterranean and Levantine Lands during the Classical Age of Islam
(Christendom’s Middle Ages)
During the seventh century, the new polity of Islamdom unified the Jewish communities of the
Near East, including North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. In due course, Arabic came to displace
Aramaic as the region’s lingua franca. As was the case with the Greek Septuagint in the Hellenistic Near
East and the Aramaic Targumim in the Levant and East, translation of the Hebrew Bible into Judeo-
Arabic by the rabbinic trailblazer Sa‘adia Gaon (b. 882) signaled the prevalence of Middle Arabic as
the principal spoken and, in elevated forms, written language of the Jewish minority community. At
the same time, however, Sa‘adia endeavored to renew the place of Hebrew in Jewish life. He zealously
promoted knowledge of Hebrew and appreciation of its elegance among the Jews of Islamic lands,
especially for use in liturgical poetry. To that end he composed a dictionary introduced in Arabic as
follows:
Just as the children of Ishmael relate that one of their elites observed people who did not
speak Arabic eloquently and this distressed him, and he composed for them a brief discus-
sion in a book from which they could be informed about eloquence, I too observed that
many of the children of Israel do not grasp the basic eloquence of our language, let alone its
complexities … such that Scripture itself is like obscure and incomprehensible speech. So,
I felt obliged to compose a book in which I would assemble most of the words.2
Sa‘adia’s campaign to inspire the Jews to recognize and treasure biblical Hebrew’s aesthetic eloquence
(ṣaḥot [Isa. 32:4] used as the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic faṣāḥa) represents an adaptation of two
closely related Arabo-Islamic tropes going back at least as far as al-Jāḥiẓ and Ibn Qutayba in the
ninth century: idealization of the form and style of classical Arabic as an aesthetic standard (‘arabiyya)
and “the inimitability of the Qur’ān” (i ‘jāz al-qur’ān), that is, God’s own words. Andalusi Jewish
poets and scholars embraced Sa‘adia’s doctrine in theory and practice. Their fidelity to the idea of
biblical Hebrew’s linguistic purity and aesthetic served as a touchstone of Andalusi Jewish cultural
self-definition. A case in point: in his Commentary on Ecclesiastes [Chapter 5 Verse 1], Abraham ibn
Ezra (d. 1167) lambasted El‘azar Qallir, one of the prominent payṭanim of the Byzantine period, for
his morphological innovations and indiscriminate intermingling of biblical and rabbinic Hebrew and
Aramaic.3
Looking back on history of when and how Jewish culture became Arabized, Judah ibn Tibbon (c.
1120–1190), known as the “father of [Hebrew] translators,” introduces one of his Hebrew translations
of classical Judeo-Arabic works with the following historical comment:
most of the Geonim in the dispersion under Islamic rule in Babylonia, Palestine, and Persia
spoke Arabic; and likewise, all the Jewish Communities in those lands used the same lan-
guage. Most of the commentaries they wrote on the Hebrew Bible, the Mishnah, and the
Talmud, they wrote in Arabic, as they similarly did with their other works, as well as with
their responsa; for all the people understood that language.4
The Jews of Islamic lands nevertheless continued to use Hebrew and Aramaic as literary-religious
languages “individually or in combination” with Arabic. Robert Brody observes: “Fluency in Arabic
was the rule, while Hebrew and Aramaic were “learned” languages and were probably understood
to a very limited extent by many Jews, although most (males at any rate) could read these languages
and were accustomed to their use in liturgical contexts.”5 Aramaic so thoroughly dominated rabbinic
discourse during the previous centuries that legal documents such as divorce decrees and marriage
and business contracts were uniformly composed in that language long after Arabic replaced it as the
language in which Jewish life was lived and in which most Jewish cultural products were composed.
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These documents were rendered in literary form in accordance with traditional rabbinic formulae
and they reflect the popularity of Aramaic in select rabbinic literary activities and rabbinic cultural
consciousness until it largely gave way to Hebrew and Arabic by the turn of the eleventh century. And
yet, Hayya Gaon (d. 1038), the eminent head of one of the Iraqi rabbinic academies who wrote most
of his works in Judeo-Arabic, famously remarked that Aramaic was “our language.”6
On the heels of Sa‘adia Gaon’s undertakings, North African and Andalusi Jewish comparative
philologians “discovered,” and then applied their knowledge of the deep linguistic affinities between
Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic to biblical exegesis. Jonah ibn Janāḥ (c. 990–1050), for instance, the pre-
eminent lexicographer and grammarian of biblical Hebrew asserted, “for Arabic after Aramaic is the
language which most resembles ours.”7 In the next century, the great rabbinic scholar and thinker,
Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), put it somewhat differently: “and as for the Arabic and Hebrew
languages, all who know them both agree they are one language without a doubt,”8 although he also
expressed regrets that he had written certain works in Arabic and had to leave their translation to
other scholars.9 In any case, the transition from Aramaic to Arabic in both its vernacular and adminis-
trative forms had profound consequences for Jewish linguistic practices and Jewish culture, no doubt
eased by the close resemblance between the three languages.
Much like Aramaic, Arabic was so much more than a quotidian tongue for all of the region’s con-
fessional communities: it became the language in which Jewish religious tradition was transmitted
and most of Jewish culture in Near Eastern and Mediterranean lands was produced from the late
ninth century onward. Needless to say, Judeo-Arabic in both oral and written forms involved a mode
of code-switching characteristic of Jewish languages (besides Hebrew): it incorporated a significant
measure of Hebrew and Aramaic idioms, terms, and phrases specific to Jewish life and lore. Unlike
Aramaic, Arabic never acquired a sacred aura because it was intimately associated with the revelation
of another, rival religious tradition, even though it dealt extensively with parochially Jewish reli-
gious matters, including Jewish law. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that the Jews’ experi-
ence with Arabic language and learning deeply penetrated and transformed Jewish life and culture
from the Iberian Peninsula to the Iranian plateau.10 Dūnash ben Labrāṭ, the first Hebrew poet of the
Andalusi school, neatly captured the complementary nature of the Andalusi Jews’ two sources of cul-
tural inspiration—religious tradition and Arabic literature—in a witty epigrammatic fragment: “Let
Scripture be your Eden, the Arabs’ books your Paradise.”11 By contrast, Jewish scholars in England,
Ẓarfat (northern France), Provence, Ashkenaz (Germanic lands), and Italy, the lands of Christendom,
steadfastly conducted their studies entirely in Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of tradition, while
speaking the vernaculars of their respective countries.12
The Arabo-Islamic linguistic and cultural environment left an indelible mark on Hebrew literary
creativity, especially on the Hebrew poetry and elevated prose of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), North
Africa, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq. In the mid-tenth century poets began to apply the principles
of Arabic quantitative prosody to the making of Hebrew verse in both its social and liturgical-
devotional varieties. They also adapted to Hebrew the entire system of Arabic poetic genres and
themes (panegyric, boast, invective, lament, wine, love, nature, ascetic, meditative and gnomic verse,
lyrical complaint), rhetoric, and poetics. This process of “translating” Arabic form, style, and content
into biblical (with more than a smattering of rabbinic) Hebrew poetry complemented the Andalusis’
lexicographical, grammatical, and exegetical research which in fact catalyzed their literary creativity.
These cultural products along with scholarship in law, philosophy, and science catapulted the Jews of
al-Andalus to a position of prominence among Jewish communities of Mediterranean and Levantine
lands, especially from the tenth through the twelfth centuries.
Translingualism—A Condition of Medieval Jewish Culture

We can think of translingualism as a perennial condition rather than merely a feature of medieval
Jewish culture within Islamdom. The unique and indispensable status of Hebrew in pre-modern
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Jewish culture makes it difficult to separate the Jews’ multilingualism from their translingualism.
During the Middle Ages Jewish communities in lands as disparate as France and Yemen inherited the
capacity to live in other languages while continuing to employ Hebrew and to a lesser extent Aramaic
as sacred, liturgical, and literary languages. As members of a small, minority religious community, the
Jews’ spoken language might be a dialect of Romance or Middle Arabic, among other vernaculars,
a “necessary language” of the socio-economic kind. However, the biblical and post-biblical layers of
Jewish tradition dictated that their sacred and liturgical languages, Hebrew—the linguistic sign of
their religious peoplehood—and Aramaic—the language of the rabbinic sages—remained “neces-
sary languages” for the production and transmission of Jewish culture wherever Jewish religious and
literary intellectuals might reside. To put it another way: intellectual elites continued to compose lit-
erary works in an acquired and bookish Hebrew irrespective of their places of domicile and linguistic
environment.
Linguistic practices in multilingual societies are inherently complicated, and none were more so
than in al-Andalus.13 A famous anecdote recounted by Moses ibn Ezra (d.c. 1138) about his exchange
with a friendly Muslim jurist textualized the interreligious dynamic of that complexity for Jewish
scholars:
When I was a young man in my native land, I was once asked by a great Islamic scholar,
who was well versed in the religious disciplines of Islam and most kind towards me, to
recite the Ten Commandments for him in Arabic. I realized his intention: he, in fact, wanted
to belittle the quality of their language. So I asked him to recite for me the first sūra—the
Fātiḥa—of his Qur’ān in romance, a language he could speak and understood very well.
When he tried to render Fātiḥa in the above-mentioned language it sounded ugly and was
completely distorted. He noticed what was in my mind and did not press me further to
fulfill his request.14
Andalusi Jewish religious and literary intellectuals such as Samuel [the Nagid] ibn Naghrīla (d. 1056),
Solomon ibn Gabirol (d.c. 1058), Moses ibn Ezra, Judah Halevi (d. 1141), and Abraham ibn Ezra
(d. 1167), to name the most artistically accomplished poets, composed social poetry in Arabic-style
Hebrew along with Hebrew devotional and liturgical poetry and formal letters in elevated prose.15
Each of these luminaries (except for the transitional figure Abraham ibn Ezra who wrote only in
Hebrew although he was fully immersed in Arabic culture) produced their prose works in Arabic.
Indeed, Jewish literary intellectuals recurrently paid homage in Arabic and Hebrew, in prose and
poetry, to their esteemed confrères’ prized command of Hebrew and Arabic and the learning and
cultural capital it signified. An expedient Hebrew pun captured it perfectly: Judah Halevi referred
in a letter to his skilled mentor Moses ibn Ezra as “the learned scholar of Hebrew [‘ever] and Arabic
[‘arav].”16
Aside from his three collections of social, wisdom, and gnomic Hebrew verse, Samuel the Nagid
composed a rabbinic treatise on civil jurisprudence in Aramaic and several grammatical tracts in
Arabic. Ibn Gabirol produced two Arabic works on moral philosophy and another Neoplatonic
philosophical text which survived only in translation in addition to his collections of Hebrew social
and religious poetry. Moses ibn Ezra, too, composed hundreds of social and liturgical poems and
contemplative verse and a book of paronomasia mannerisms all in Hebrew along with two surviving
Arabic prose works, one on Hebrew poetics (The Book of Conversation and Discussion), the other a
philosophically and aesthetically-minded study of problems in the language of Scripture (The Treatise
of the Garden on Figurative and Literal Language).17 Judah Halevi was a prolific poet of Hebrew social
and liturgical poetry who also authored in Arabic The Kuzari Book, a dialogic defense of rabbinic
Judaism in the face of challenges from philosophy, Karaite Judaism, and what he considered the
marginalized historical situation of the Jews and their hallowed religious tradition during the first
half of the twelfth century.18
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Other thinkers such as the aforementioned grammarian-philologist Jonah ibn Janāḥ, the pietist
Baḥya ibn Paqūda (fl. eleventh century), the biblical exegete and lexicographer Judah ibn Bil‘am
(fl. eleventh century), and the rabbinic master Maimonides wrote philological, theological, philo-
sophical, exegetical, rabbinic legal works, scientific writings, and occasional letters in Judeo-Arabic,
and reserved Aramaic for some rabbinica,19 while speaking the Andalusi Arabic dialect and some
Romance. These two vernaculars figure prominently in the Hebrew incarnation of the quintessen-
tially Andalusi Arabic literary form that has been described as “poetry in two languages.”20 The Arabic
muwashshaḥ (strophic “girdle poem”) was composed in the classical language but concludes with a
kharja (“envoi”) in colloquial Andalusi Arabic or Romance. With no vernacular Hebrew equivalent
to draw upon, poets clinched the Hebrew muwashshaḥ in colloquial Arabic or Romance (or simply
eschewed convention and closed the lyric in literary Hebrew).21
From the mid-twelfth century onward, literary creativity in the new centers of Jewish life in the
Christian kingdoms of Iberia expressed fidelity to the Arabized norms of the Andalusi age even as
its producers and consumers encountered and engaged romance literary tastes and traditions.22 The
result was a creative mix of the Judeo-Arabic heritage and romance elements in the varied forms of
Hebrew imaginative rhymed prose works such as Jacob ben El‘azar’s (early thirteenth century) Sefer
ha-meshalim (Book of Tales), collections of tales like Meshal ha-qadmoni (The Ancient’s Proverb or Tales of
the Ancient One) by Isaac ibn Sahula (late thirteenth century),23 and adaptations of folk, sapiential,
and gnomic literature from Arabic, Persian, and international lore such as Ben ha-melekh we-ha-nazir
(The Prince and the Ascetic based on Barlaam and Josaphat/the story of the Buddha) by Abraham ibn
Ḥasdai (early thirteenth century),24 Judah al-Ḥarizi’s (d. 1225) Musrei ha-filosofim (Moral Teachings of
the Philosophers based on Ādāb al-falāsifa by Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq), and the anonymous collections Mishlei
he-‘arav (The Sayings of the Arabs)25 and Mishlei sendebar (Exemplary Tales of Sendebar),26 as well as social
Hebrew poetry by important figures such as Ṭodros Abulafia (1247–1306), and liturgical verse by the
more conservative poets of the Girona school.These literary texts reflect the Jews’ new cultural envir-
onment and its attachment to, ambivalence towards, or repudiation of the Andalusi legacy. Regardless
of their genre or subject, the aforementioned prose works were imbued with Jewish religious signifi-
cance on account of society’s reverence for the Hebrew language.
Al-Ḥarizi, who hailed from still-Arabized Toledo in Christian Castile, represents something of an
outlier during this post-Andalusi age. Judah was resolute in his devotion to Hebrew and cultivation
of an Andalusi literary identity rooted in the mix of Judeo-Arabic, Arabic and Hebrew culture. He
rendered various literary and philosophical texts from Arabic into Hebrew (one noted above) and
authored Taḥkemoni, the classical collection of Arabic-style Hebrew maqāmāt (rhymed prose rhetorical
anecdotes and narratives interspersed with poetry).27 Al-Ḥarizi also wrote Arabic-language accounts
of his travels from Iberia through Provence to Egypt and on to the Islamic East where he composed
Hebrew and Arabic panegyrics for Jewish dignitaries and ended his days in Aleppo as a courtly
Arabic poet.28
The flexible diglossic-triglossic situation of the Jews in thirteenth-century Christian Iberia is evi-
dent in the appearance of the classical text of Jewish mysticism (Qabbalah), the Zohar (the Book of
Splendor), and a thirteenth-century commentary on the biblical Book of Psalms. The former was
written in Aramaic, principally by Moses ben Shem Ṭov de León who ascribed it to a famous second
century rabbi.29 The latter, in Hebrew, includes Castilian words (la‘az) in Hebrew script alongside
Arabic idioms. It marks, among other things, the period’s movement to vernacularizaton in the lands
of Christendom.30 Regardless of their cultural orientation or occasional use of Aramaic, Arabic, or
Romance, the Iberian Jews’ major vehicle for literary creativity remained Hebrew until Shem Ṭov
Ardutiel (c. 1290–1369). Shem Ṭov authored an imaginative work in rhymed Hebrew prose (The
Battle of the Pen and the Scissors) about the challenge of writing during a time of crisis and two litur-
gical Hebrew poems. Better known as Santob de Carrión, he also composed a famous collection
of epigrams in Castilian, entitled Proverbios Morales, for a multiply constructed audience.31 In any
case the ongoing production of Hebrew texts in all the aforementioned prose genres is thought to
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have rendered Hebrew literary creativity available to a wider audience than the rhetorically ornate,
stylized, and courtly poetry composed by the sophisticated Arabized Jewish elites of al-Andalus.
The new turn in and expansion of the Iberian Hebrew literary tradition was transmitted to Provence
during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Andalusi literary and religious intellectual emigrées and
their devotees in the Christian kingdoms were determined to enlighten their adopted communities
by making available the exceptional learning and cultural products of their former homeland. They
undertook translations into Hebrew of Judeo-Arabic and Arabic belles-lettristic, grammatical, lex-
icographical, legal, pietistic, philosophical, theological, and scientific works. Beginning with Judah
ibn Tibbon (c. 1120–1190) and his son Samuel ibn Tibbon (c. 1165–1232), the translators were at a
loss to identify scientific and philosophical terminology in the corpus of biblical or rabbinic Hebrew.
Accordingly, they took it upon themselves to invent thousands of new technical terms in Hebrew.
The translators generated the new words from Hebrew roots in accordance with Hebrew morph-
ology, new idioms out of Arabic loan words, from Arabic calques, and other forms of borrowing or
grafting Arabic onto Hebrew.32 They also encountered syntactical challenges which they addressed by
adopting the practice of literal translation from the Arabic, giving their products a decidedly Arabic
flavor. Despite its artificiality, this learned new form of “translation Hebrew” developed a life of its
own as a significant part of the matrix of medieval Hebrew literary registers.33
If the Jews of al-Andalus, the Christian Iberian kingdoms, Provence, Italy, and Near Eastern lands
never belonged to a Hebrew speech community but acquired the language, how are we to understand
the accomplishment that is their Hebrew cultural creativity? Jewish religious and literary intellectuals
of the period knew the Hebrew Bible by rote, including its most obscure passages that do not turn
up in readily recognized liturgical practice. Their erudite command of its language represented an ideo-
logical commitment of sorts and they internalized the Hebrew Bible’s expressions, citations, figures, and
landscapes. These references informed and supercharged their literary and religious imaginations, turning
the stuff of Scripture into a sourcebook for the cascade of allusions in their own Hebrew poetry and prose.
The numerous Hebrew epistolary poems of friendship Jewish literary intellectuals exchanged
from the eleventh century through the fifteenth century denotes the poets’ sense of belonging to a
tightly knit if relatively small and frequently competitive party of likeminded literati—a Hebrew lit-
erary (but not speech) community. Later figures would have us know them by the historical company
they sought to keep: in a legitimacy-granting gesture they appeal to their literary connection to their
distinguished precursors. A few examples will suffice. Judah al-Ḥarizi devoted two of Taḥkemoni’s
fifty maqāmāt to the history of medieval Hebrew poetry and its poets, especially Andalusis.34 Ṭodros
Abulafia gives voice in a poem to an exquisitely copied Hebrew Bible he acquired in 1300: the
codex’s scribe was none other than the renowned Samuel the Nagid more than two centuries earlier.
The precious manuscript boasts of its distinguished lineage and expresses satisfaction that it found
its way to so worthy a redeemer from obscurity as Ṭodros.35 Solomon Bonafed, the youngest of the
so-called Saragossa Circle of early-fifteenth century Hebrew poets and among the last on Iberian soil,
launched a poetic diatribe against the Jewish nobles of Saragossa by conjuring the eleventh-century
iconoclast Solomon ibn Gabirol to encourage and support him.36 So too, from al-Ḥarizi at the turn
of the thirteenth century and later Ṭodros Abulafia, to the Egyptian aficionado of Andalusi Jewish
poetry, Joseph ben Tanḥum ha-Yerushalmi (d. after 1331) in the next century,37 and Vidal Benvenist in
the early fifteenth century, Hebrew poets of the epochs following the Andalusi “Golden Age” period-
ically draw upon and refer to their illustrious predecessors’ poetic models through explicit prosodic,
thematic, and allusive imitations.38
Medieval Jewish Translingualism in Critical Perspective

If Arabic was the Andalusi Jews’ mother tongue and they also employed it for nearly all of their
written discourses what exactly can be said about their determination to use Hebrew for ceremonial
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and aesthetic purposes? How did their social and liturgical Hebrew poetry and elevated prose serve
as markers of a peculiarly Jewish translingualism in which authors moved nimbly between literary
languages? What principles or customs dictated Jewish religious scholars and literary intellectuals
exchanging their necessary languages? In its biblical and rabbinic forms, Hebrew certainly was an
“acquired language” but not exactly in the normal sense of the term. Because of its liturgical functions
in rabbinic prayer and scriptural recitation, Hebrew resonated daily and deeply in the consciousness
of medieval religious and literary intellectuals. The pre-existence of the Hebrew piyyuṭ tradition and
the prestige of poetry over other discourses in the Arabo-Islamic environment also inspired the Jews’
corresponding routine of reserving Hebrew for poetry. Highly educated Andalusi Jewish elites knew
the Hebrew Bible inside and out and their deployment of this language in their social and liturgical
Hebrew poetry and elevated prose seems to have anchored them imaginatively, artistically, and his-
torically in their classical literary-religious tradition. Yet, as noted above, the choice of Hebrew for
poetic composition is complex because while the language is decidedly Hebrew, its genres, poetics,
and thematic and rhetorical matrix are infused with Arabic form, style and content.
How exactly have modern philologians, socio-linguists, and literary historians accounted for the
Jews’ complex linguistic routines? As we might expect, the matter remains contested. Joshua Blau,
the dean of Judeo-Arabic studies during last half of the twentieth century, asserted that Jewish elites
in Arabic-speaking Islamic lands wrote verse in Hebrew because of the daunting challenge classical
literary Arabic imposed on the prospective poet. For Blau it was of no consequence that Hebrew too
was an acquired language: “both Classical Arabic and Hebrew were acquired languages. Accordingly,
the choice of composing poetry in Classical Arabic or in Hebrew was not between the mother
tongue and an acquired language, but between two artificial linguistic media.”39 The Middle Arabic
Jews employed in their various Judeo-Arabic prose writings, according to Blau, while elevated in
register above the neo-Arabic vernacular and replete with pseudo-corrections and hypercorrections,
nevertheless fell short of the classical language’s exacting standards required to compose poetry. He
further argued that Jews were insufficiently attracted to classical Arabic, not beholden to the linguistic
ideal of ‘arabiyya, uninterested in the “alien atmosphere” of its Bedouin setting, too preoccupied with
religious studies to devote themselves to mastering the language, and conditioned by the centuries-
long literary tradition of Hebrew liturgical verse.40 Blau’s interlocutors countered with evidence
that Jews were indeed so capable: they read classical Arabic poetry and prose extensively and in fact
composed poetry on occasion in classical Arabic.41 Moreover, their Judeo-Arabic (i.e. Middle Arabic)
works often reflected a classicizing literary style.42 Accordingly, there were other, historical, religious,
and ideological reasons Jewish littérateurs eschewed Arabic and turned to classical Hebrew for poetry
and elevated rhymed prose, a possibility Blau himself entertained but did not stress.
Until recently for the most part, literary and social historians ascribed Jewish literary and reli-
gious intellectuals in Islamic lands writing principally in Arabic but reserving Hebrew for poetry as
a matter of their “nationalist” or “religious nationalist” commitment. This prevailing view, exempli-
fied by Nehemiah Allony’s many papers on the subject, argues that for socio-political reasons Jewish
authors, except for Moses ibn Ezra, rejected ‘arabiyya, the aforementioned notion that (classical)
Arabic was the most eloquent language and its literary discourses, especially poetry, the most aesthet-
ically refined. Without question, Jews could not abide on religious grounds by its related trope of the
Qur’ān’s divine linguistic and stylistic inimitability. In response to the prestige of Arabic, they sup-
posedly championed biblical Hebrew, their “national” language, and what they deemed its singularly
transcendent artistic properties.43
Two Arabists intervened to offer refreshing insights on the making of medieval Hebrew culture
in the orbit of Arabic, from Iraq in the East to al-Andalus in the West. Rina Drory developed the
most important and influential model for understanding medieval Jewish translingualism under Islam.
She identified “cultural contact” leading to “literary interference” as the mode within which Jews
encountered Arabo-Islamic culture. Applying polysystems theory to account for the Jews’ linguistic
practices, Drory determined that they employed Arabic for strictly communicative functions and
92
reserved Hebrew for formal, ceremonial, and poetic compositions.44 Following Drory, Raymond
Scheindlin refers to this division of linguistic functions to “ ‘arabiyya, as Hebraized by Saadiah and
his contemporaries,” according to which biblical Hebrew performs the same ceremonial functions
as classical Arabic for Muslims.45 For his part, Joseph Sadan found fault with the intrusion of modern
nationalist sensibilities into the study of medieval literature and framed the ideological contest differ-
ently. He identified religious polemics among confessional communities—the sacred status of Islamic,
Jewish, and Christian scriptures—as the latent or overt core of literary discourses regarding sacred
language and poetics in the Hebrew rhymed prose of twelfth-century Christian Iberia where the
contested Islamic doctrine pertaining to the Qur’ān deepened.46
Elsewhere I also took issue with the prevailing view as totalizing and overdetermined by con-
temporary considerations projected onto the past. Instead, I offered an alternative understanding of
supposed dichotomy between Hebrew and Arabic. Arabized Hebrew itself, the literature composed
in it, and the Judeo-Arabic texts about it represent a Jewish subcultural adaptation of Arabo-Islamic
practices, thought, and values—the nexus of which is called adab in Arabic.47 To put it another
way: the Jewish intellectuals’ renewed commitment to the Hebrew language and literary production
in it represents more than a reaction to ‘arabiyya. Because they lived and thought in Arabic and read
capaciously in Arabic humanistic, philosophical and scientific letters, their cultural program signifies
a deep structural internalization, variation, and transposition of it into Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. As
Raymond Scheindlin explains, their fervent embrace of such a hybrid cultural orientation was pos-
sible because of “the development of a cosmopolitan intellectual life sometimes referred to as Arabic
humanism.”48
In this chapter we have seen that considering the indications and significance of translingualism
in medieval Jewish culture under the orbit of Islam involves breaking down the dialectical relation-
ship between Arabic and Hebrew. In particular, examining “Arabized Hebrew” as one of the Jews’
literary languages is to acknowledge that speaking and writing Middle Arabic (Judeo-Arabic) as
their first language (the language of daily life), employing it in an elevated register for scholarship,
and reading extensively in literary Arabic, had profound consequences for highly educated Jews’
“second, acquired” language, Hebrew, and the cultural products created in it. Complicating matters
further, medieval literary Hebrew was neither a second nor an acquired language in the conventional
sense of these terms but a “necessary language” for Jewish continuity. Since the elites’ Hebrew was
informed by the intersection of Jewish tradition and Arabic culture and the socio-linguistic proximity
of Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic, the translingualism in medieval Jewish culture under Islam is
without many comparanda.49
Notes
1 In this chapter I employ the term “Jewish languages” more narrowly than convention dictates (i.e. languages
spoken by the Jews, written in the Hebrew script, and interspersed with numerous Hebrew and Aramaic
words specific to Jewish practices and tradition). Here, it refers to languages in which medieval Jewish life was
experienced and tradition and culture were conducted and transmitted. Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic
were the languages with the most significant literatures engaging Jewish religious, social, and imaginative
discourses during Middle Ages/classical period of Islam. For purposes of this chapter and its readership, I refer
to primary sources in translation and secondary materials in English wherever possible.
2 Sa‘adia Gaon 150–152 [Arabic]. Sa‘adia promulgated the idea in greater detail in his mature works such as
Kitāb Faṣīḥ lugha al-‘ibrāniyyin (The Book of Elegance of the Language of the Hebrews). See also Sa‘adia’s rousing call
in The Egron for his religious community to embrace the study and use of Hebrew, translated by Scheindlin
(2002) 332.
3 Abraham ibn Ezra 156–157.
4 Baḥya ben Joseph ibn Paqūda 56–57, cited by Blau 19n2.
5 Brody 138–140. This assessment explains recurrent complaints about the Jews’ ignorance of Hebrew, their
persistent use of other languages, or the effect of the Jews’ long exile on the diminished status of Hebrew
itself, such as we find in the writings of Sa‘adia Gaon (above), and other figures mentioned prominently in this
chapter.
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Ross Brann
6 This designation appears in one of Hayya’s responsa published by Harkavy 2:82.

7 Jonah ibn Janāḥ 8.
8 Moses Maimonides 150.
9 See the sources cited by Halkin 238.
10 See Brann, “The Arabized Jews.”
11 Dūnash ben Labrāṭ 93. I have slightly emended the translation by Cole 97 to preserve the parallelism of the
original.
12 After Provence, the Iberian Hebrew literary tradition was transmitted to medieval Italy where many of its
elements merged with trends in that cultural landscape. See Pagis (1991) and Kfir 123–139.
13 On the linguistic practices of the three Andalusi religious communities, see Wasserstein (1991) and López-
Morillas (2000).
14 Moses ibn Ezra 42 [24a]; translated Rosenthal 19.
15 For literary translations of poems by each of the authors mentioned in this essay, see Cole, and for details on
the authors, see the entries devoted to them in Stillman [ed.].
16 Abramson 404. For additional references to this trope, see Brann, “The Arabized Jews.”
17 Scheindlin, “Moses ibn Ezra.”
18 Brann, “Judah Halevi.”
19 Occasionally, Andalusi Jewish religious and literary intellectuals composed poems of consolation or friendship
in Aramaic as a sign of advanced rabbinic learning the poet shared with the recipient. Judah al-Ḥarizi
composed a multi-linguistic tour de force in the form of a 23 tripartite-verse poem in Hebrew, Arabic, and
Aramaic, Taḥkemoni, (2010) 294–295 [#20]).
20 Benabu, 123.
21 On this verse form in Arabic and Hebrew, see Rosen and the bibliography cited there.
22 See Decter.
23 Isaac ibn Sahula, Meshal Haqadmoni: Fables from the Distant Past.
24 See Pagis (1978).
25 Torollo.
26 Epstein [trans.], Tales of Sendebar [Mishle Sendebar].
27 Judah al-Harizi, The Book of Taḥkemoni (2001), translated by David Simha Segal tries to capture in English the
rhymed prose style; The Tahkemoni (1965–1973), translated by Victor Emanuel Reichert, is generally prosaic .
On the Arabic and Hebrew genre, see Drory, “The Maqama.”
28 See the English summary and translations in Judah al-Ḥarizi (2009) 9*–120*.
29 The Zohar, translation and commentary by Daniel C. Matt.
30 See Alfonso (2020).
31 For translated excerpts from the Hebrew and an introduction to this author see Cole 289–292, and accom-
panying notes, 505–507. For a study and translation of the Castilian work, see Perry (1987).
32 Robinson (2019) and (2005).
33 On the varieties of medieval Hebrew, see Sáenz-Badillos 202–266.
34 Judah al-Ḥarizi, Taḥkemoni (Yahalom and Katsumata), 103–116, 209–233; The Tahkemoni (Reichert) 1:69–82,
2:48–71; The Book of Taḥkemoni (Segal), 39–48, 175–189.
35 Ṭodros ben Judah Abulafia 2 [part 2]: 119 [#691]; trans. Cole 265.
36 Prats 1:321–324 (text); 2:556–563 (Spanish translation); partial English translation in Cole 317–318.
37 On whom see Kfir 105–122.
38 On this point and the poetry of this period see Scheindlin, “Secular Hebrew Poetry in Fifteenth-Century
Spain.”
39 Blau 22–23 (n3).
40 Blau 23.
41 See Stern. In the third edition of Emergence and Background (Addenda and Corrigenda, 231), Blau modified his
views about Jewish elites’ control of classical Arabic.
42 Blau 24–27 regarded this style as proof Jewish writers struggled to write classical Arabic. Much of his argu-
ment is predicated on the absolute distinction he draws between the spoken and written word, including
classical Arabic and Middle Arabic.
43 The sharpest example of this approach is Allony and his numerous Hebrew language studies on the subject.
44 Drory (Models and Contacts) 126–146; 158–190; 208–232. See Blau 229–239, for his detailed retort to Drory,
which, among other things, asserts that the “limits [between Arabic and Hebrew in the Judeo-Arabic cul-
ture of the Middle Ages] are quite blurred, since both languages have communicative and literary aesthetic
functions [238].”
45 Scheindlin (2002) 333.
46 Sadan.
94
47 Brann, “Arabized Jews.”

48 Scheindlin (2002) 335.
49 Compare the regimen of Muslim authors of Persia and Central Asia who wrote extensively in Arabic as well
as in their native Persian.
Works Cited
Abraham ibn Ezra. Commentary on Ecclesiastes [Hebrew]. Mikra’ot Gedolot ‘HaKeter’, The Five Scrolls [Hebrew],
edited by Menahem Cohen, Bar-Ilan University Press, 2012.
Abramson, Shraga. “A Letter of Rabbi Judah Halevi to Rabbi Moses ibn Ezra” [Hebrew]. Ḥayyim Schirmann
Jubilee Volume, edited by Shraga Abramson and Aharon Mirksy, Schocken Institute for Jewish Research, 1970,
pp. 397–411.
Alfonso, Esperanza. “The Headings of the Psalms: A Case Study in Medieval Exegesis and Translation.” ‘His Pen
and Ink are a Powerful Mirror’: Andalusi, Judaeo-Arabic and Other Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Ross Brann,
edited by Adam Bursi, S.J. Pearce, and Hamza Zafer, Brill, 2020, pp. 35–62.
Allony, Nehemiah. “The Reaction of Moses Ibn Ezra to ‘arabiyya.” Bulletin of the Institute of Jewish Studies, 3,
1975, pp. 19–40.
Baḥya ben Joseph ibn Paqūda, Ḥovot ha-levavot [al-Hidāya ilā farā’iḍ al-qulūb]. Translated by Judah ibn Tibbon,
edited by Abraham Tsifroni, Maḥbarot le-sifrut, 1959.
Benabu, Isaac. “Poetry in Two Languages:The Kharja and its Muwaššhaḥ,” In Iberia & Beyond: Hispanic Jews between
Cultures, edited by Bernard Dov Cooperman, University of Delaware Press, 1998, pp. 123–142.
Blau, Joshua. The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Neo-Arabic and
Middle Arabic. Third revised edition, Ben-Zvi Institute, 1999.
Brann, Ross. “The Arabized Jews.” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, edited
by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, Cambridge University Press, 2000,
pp. 435–454.
_____. “Judah Halevi.” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa
Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 265–281.
Brody, Robert. The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture.Yale University Press, 1998.
Cole, Peter. Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492. University Press, 2007.
Decter, Jonathan. Jewish Iberian Literature: From al-Andalus to Christian Spain. Indiana University Press, 2007.
Drory, Rina. Models and Contacts: Arabic Literature and Its Impact on Medieval Jewish Culture. Brill, 2000.
_____. “The Maqama.” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa
Dūnash ben Labrāṭ. Poems [Hebrew], edited by Neḥemiah Allony, Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1947.
Epstein, Morris [translator]. Tales of Sendebar [Mishle Sendebar]. Jewish Publication Society, 1967.
Halkin, Abraham S. “The Medieval Jewish Attitude toward Hebrew.” Biblical and Other Studies, edited by
A. Altmann, Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 233–248.
Harkavy,Albert. Ḥadashim gam yeshanim: meqorot u-meḥqarim be-toldot yisra’el u-v-sifruto.Two volumes Karmi’el, 1970.
Isaac ibn Sahula. Meshal Haqadmoni: Fables from the Distant Past. Two volumes, edited and translated by Raphael
Loewe, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004.
Jonah ibn Janāḥ. Kitāb al-luma‘ [Le livre des parterres fleuris: Grammaire hebraique en arabe d’Abou’l-Walid Merwan ibn
Djanah de Cordue], edited by J. Derenbourg and F.Vieweg, 1886.
Judah al-Ḥarizi. Two volumes, translated by Victor Emanuel Reichert, Raphael Haim Cohen’s Press, 1965–1973.
_____. The Book of Taḥkemoni.Translated by David Simha Segal.The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001.
_____. Kitāb al-Durar: A Book in Praise of God and the Israelite Communities [Arabic and Hebrew], edited by Joshua
Blau, Paul Fenton, and Joseph Yahalom, Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University, 2009.
_____. Taḥkemoni, edited by Joseph Yahalom and Naoya Katsumata, Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of the Jewish
Communities in the East and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010.
Kfir, Uriah. A Matter of Geography: New Perspectives on Medieval Hebrew Poetry. Brill, 2018.
López-Morillas, Consuelo. “Language.” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, edited
by María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, Cambridge University Press, 2000,
pp. 33–59.
Matt, Daniel [translator]. The Zohar. 12 volumes, Stanford University Press, 2004–2017.
Moses Maimonides. Letters [Arabic and Hebrew], edited by Joseph Qāfiḥ, Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1972.
Pagis, Dan. “Variety in Medieval Rhymed Narratives.” Scripta Hierosolymitana 27, 1978, pp. 79–98.
_____.Hebrew Poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. University of California Press, 1991.
Perry, T.A. The Moral Proverbs of Santob de Carrion: Jewish Wisdom in Christian Spain. Princeton University
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Prats, Arturo. El cancionero de Šelomoh ben Reuben Bonafed (S. XV). Two volumes, Editorial Universidad de
Granada, 2020.
Robinson, James T. “The Ibn Tibbon Family: A Dynasty of Translators in Medieval Provence.” Be’erot
Yitzhak: Studies in Memory of Isadore Twersky, edited by J. Harris, Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 193–224.
_____.“Translations.” Cambridge History of Judaism, The Middle Ages: The Christian World, Volume 6, Cambridge
University Press, 2019, pp. 506–534.
Rosen,Tova.“The Muwashshah.” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature:The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by María
Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 165–189.
Rosenthal, Franz. The Classical Heritage in Islam. University of California Press, 1975.
Sa‘adia Gaon, The Egron: The Book of the Principles of Hebrew Poetry [Hebrew and Arabic], edited by Neḥemiah
Allony. The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1969.
Sadan, Joseph. “Identity and Inimitability—Contexts of Inter-Religious Polemics.” Israel Oriental Studies XIV,
1994, pp. 324–347.
Sáenz-Badillos, Ángel. A History of the Hebrew Language. Translated by John Elwolde, Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
Scheindlin, Raymond P “Secular Hebrew Poetry in Fifteenth-Century Spain.” Crisis and Creativity in the
Sephardic World, 1391–1648, edited by Benjamin R. Gampel, Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 25–37.
_____. “Moses ibn Ezra.” Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: The Literature of al-Andalus, edited by María Rosa
_____. “Merchants and Intellectuals, Rabbis and Poets: Judeo-Arabic Culture in the Golden Age of Islam.”
Cultures of the Jews: A New History, edited by David Biale. Schocken Books, 2002, pp. 313–386.
Stern, Samuel M. “Arabic Poems by Spanish-Hebrew Poets,” Romanica et occidentalia: Études dédiées a la mémoire de
Hiram Peri, edited by Moshe Lazar, Magnes Press-the Hebrew University, 1963, pp. 254–263.
Stillman, Norman [editor]. The Encyclopedia of Jews in Islamic Lands. Five volumes, Brill, 2010.
Ṭodros ben Judah Abulafia, Gan ha-meshalim we-ha-ḥidot. Two volumes, edited by David Yellin, Weiss Press,
1932–1936.
Torollo, David. Mishle he-‘arav: La tradición sapiencial hebrea en la península ibérica y Provenza, s. XII y XIII. Peter
Lang, 2021.
Wasserstein, David J. “The Language Situation in al-Andalus.” Studies in the Muwaššhaḥ and the Kharja, edited by
Alan Jones and Richard Hitchcock, Ithaca Press, 1991, pp. 1–15.
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8
AND NEO-LATIN
The Case of Latin America
Leni Ribeiro Leite
In this chapter, I will offer a brief overview of Latin as a language that, for the vast majority of its
existence, has been a literary medium for native speakers of various other languages. I have chosen to
focus on Neo-Latin, here understood as all writing in Latin since 1300, agreeing with Ijsewijn (vii).
We should not forget, however, that Latin was in use much before the 14th century as an instrument
for translingual authors, as I shall briefly cover, and that the term Neo-Latin does not come without a
few questions raised, that should be addressed, as pointed out by Knight and Tilg (1–3). First, the term
itself is quite recent, and for most of the time, the writers themselves would not have said they wrote
Neo-Latin; some would probably just say “Latin,” and others would consider their works as part of
some other division, considering how multiple and varied the compartmentalization of humanity
and knowledge was in other times and places. Second, Neo-Latin does not comprise only what we
would now call literature, nor is it confined to Europe. Recent Latinity is profoundly connected to
all contemporary vernacular languages with which it came into contact, and everywhere around the
globe, where Europeans set foot, including the colonies to the East, South, and West of the colonizing
empires.
Of course, for the vast majority of its long existence, Latin has been used in Europe, not only
because it was originated in Latium (now Lazio), a central region of the Italian Peninsula, but because
it spread first with the Roman civilization and later with Christianity, both of which had Rome as
their seat. Therefore, as we shall see, Latin has been a translingual medium in Europe for a long time,
and much research has been done regarding the life and survival of Latin side by side with vernacular
languages in Europe. In the last twenty years, just to cite a few, the studies by Bloemendal, Deneire,
Verbeke, and both volumes of Latinitas Perennis, by Papy, Maes, and Verbaal, have explored this aspect
of the question. In this chapter, however, I would like to shift the main focus to Latin as the product
of translingual operations in the Latin American colonies, since these areas were important multi-
lingual spaces, where languages were used daily as instruments of negotiation, communication, and
oppression.
While translingualism, as a concept, might be a modern addition to our toolbox, the phenomenon
itself is probably as ancient as languages are. In the case of Latin, that is a certainty: translingual Latin—
that is, writers creating texts in Latin which was not their primary language—is well documented in
Ancient Latin literature itself. Authors from as different periods as Plautus (2nd century bce), Ennius
(1st century bce), Martial (1st century CE), Apuleius (2nd century ce) and Augustine (4th century ce),
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-8 97
Leni Ribeiro Leite
to give just a few, were not native Latin speakers, and are still considered some of the greatest authors
of Latin literature.
Of course, one could argue that all Classical Latin is artificial in itself and, therefore, nobody’s
mother tongue. As Solodow (107–108) explains, what we now call Classical Latin was a language
that, although issued from a natural language, in its literary form—that is, the one we have in the
texts relegated to us and used as witnesses of the language—was purposefully constructed, deliber-
ately purified, proposed as an ideal, and consciously propagated, as education was one of the most
successful instruments used by the Romans for pacification of conquered lands.Tacitus (Agricola 21.2)
records the results of the teaching of the Liberal Arts in Britain, with the natives abandoning their
rejection of Latin in favor of training in eloquence. As the places of origin of so many of the most
famous Latin authors prove—Plautus and Terence from Africa; Lucan, Martial, and the Senecas from
Hispania; Ammianus probably from Syria; and so forth—perfect learning of the standardized form
of Latin was achieved by locals of many provinces, and was indeed a goal to all who wished to attain
positions in society and public office. As Quintilian (1st century ce), born in the province of Hispania,
puts it:
Asinius Pollio held that Livy, for all his astounding eloquence, showed traces of the idiom
of Padua. Therefore, if possible, our voice and all our words should be such as to reveal the
native of this city, so that our speech may seem to be of genuine Roman origin, and not
merely to have been presented with Roman citizenship.
[Et in Tito Livio, mirae facundiae viro, putat inesse Pollio Asinius quandam Patavinitatem.
Quare, si fieri potest, et verba omnia et vox huius alumnum urbis oleant, ut oratio Romana
plane videatur, non civitate donata.]
(Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 8.1.3, transl. H.E. Butler)
As we can see from Quintilian’s words, not sounding like a Roman-born could be a hindrance, or
even a source of derision, which shows social pressure towards achieving perfection in the standardized
language of the Romans.
Many centuries later, another foreigner, Augustine of Hippo, in northern Africa, also acknow-
ledges that “the imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke,
but her language, as a bond of peace, so that interpreters, far from being scarce, are numberless.”
[At enim opera data est, ut imperiosa ciuitas non solum iugum, uerum etiam linguam suam
domitis gentibus per pacem societatis inponeret, per quam non deesset, immo et abundaret etiam
interpretum copia.] (Augustine, De Civitate Dei 19.7 transl. Marcus Dods). But while this remark
by Augustine may sound like a complaint, his own choice of Latin as the medium of communi-
cation is translingual, as observed in another one of his works, the 167th Sermon on the Scriptures,
where, expounding on the words of the apostle Paul to the Ephesians, he states “There is a
famous proverb in Punic, but I will tell it in Latin to you, because not everyone knows Punic.”
[Proverbium notum est Punicum, quod quidem Latine vobis dicam, quia Punice non omnes
nostis.] (Augustine, Sermones de Scripturis, 167, 4). Evidently, not only Augustine, an African-born
Latin author, knew Punic, perhaps as his own mother tongue, but his Carthaginian audience, on
the African shore, had mixed knowledge of languages, Latin being the one common means of
spreading the word of the Gospel.
The understanding that Classical Latin was in some ways an artificial language, in that it was not
the everyday spoken language of anyone, does not mean that Latin was not a natural language. It
certainly was, for millions of people through the span of at least seven centuries, considering the first
testimonies of Latin, written in stone, ceramic pots, and metal buckles in the 3rd century bce, to the
fragmentation of the Western part of the Empire in the 5th century ce. However, throughout its life as
a mother tongue and while it gained the prestige mentioned above, it was always employed by those
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Neo-Latin: The Case of Latin America
whose first words had been uttered in other languages. And so it is that Aulus Gellius, writing in the
2nd century ce, speaks of Ennius, who had lived 400 years before him, as “having three hearts,” due
to the fact he knew Greek, Oscan, and Latin [Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat quod
loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret.] (Gellius, Noctes Atticae, 17, 17, 1). Apuleius, yet another African
writing in Latin, at the very opening of his Golden Ass, confesses that
Later, in Rome, freshly come to Latin studies I assumed and cultivated the native language,
without a teacher, and with a heap of pains. So there! I beg your indulgence in advance if
as a crude performer in the exotic speech of the Forum I offend.
[Mox in urbe Latia advena studiorum Quiritium indigenam sermonem aerumnabili labore nullo
magistro praeeunte aggressus excolui. En ecce praefamur veniam, siquid exotici ac forensis sermonis
rudis locutor offendero.]
(Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 1.1. transl.Tony Kline)
Therefore, I would argue that translingualism is at the heart of Latin as it spread and took over
much of what is now Western Europe, Northern Africa, and parts of Eastern Europe and the Middle
East. Nonetheless, differently from other languages that change and pass as the centuries, peoples,
economies and politics come and go, Latin has a history of its own. Due to its artificial, crystalized
form, and due to its adoption as the language of Christianity, its use as a lingua franca among people of
different origins, and perhaps for other reasons, Latin survived the fragmentation and dissolution of
the Roman Empire, and continued serving as a language of religion, government, and communica-
tion much beyond its existence as a native language.That is to say, after some time, Latin was nobody’s
first language, but a second language for almost everybody. At this point, in this sui generis state, Latin
is always, then, the product of a translingual process.
It is very difficult to pinpoint exactly when we could say this starts being true, due to the fact
that, for a long time, all texts were produced in Latin, following more or less the Classical form of
the language, depending on the writer’s ability and access to formal education, as well as on the topic
of writing and the fashion of the times. Based on scarce evidence, one can barely guess how early
or how late during the Middle Ages the spoken varieties of Latin had already changed so much in
the Iberian Peninsula, Southern France, or Romania that one should call them not Latin anymore,
but Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitane, or Romanian. Philologists and scholars of the vernacular
languages have collected evidence and hazarded dates which are never very precise, as languages
hardly ever have precise boundaries, shifting and changing in a fluid manner. It is however observ-
able that, around the 9th century (Burke 47), in most parts of the world where Latin had once been
the language of the population at large, it had already changed into something else, both because of
invasions of different peoples and the mutations natural to languages.
That phenomenon, in which a person writes, speaks, and reads in Latin as a second language, while
at the same time another language or languages are used in daily life, gave birth to a number of cases
in which polyglossia can be identified, starting in the Middle Ages but going well beyond it, into the
Early Modern times and flowing beyond the limits of Europe, into the Americas and other parts of
the world, as I would like to explore in the next pages.
It is useful though to make sure we understand the different forms of the phenomena that are
found in Latin texts of the Medieval and Modern Eras, and I use Adams’s distinction between
“mixed-language” and “multilingual” texts as a starting point (Adams 2003). Adams considers “mixed-
language” those writings that combine two or more languages, such as Latin texts with occasional
words or quotes in a vernacular language. That is very common, for example, in the works of the
explorer of the New World who, finding a plant, an animal or an object never before seen, chooses
to simply use the name given by the natives to that thing, instead of trying to find a Latin equiva-
lent (a strategy preferred by other authors). As an example, Iohannes Petrus Maffeius, an Italian Jesuit
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Leni Ribeiro Leite
who wrote a sixteen-book masterpiece on the Portuguese conquests, when facing the challenge of
naming a tropical tree now known in English as diesel tree, simply said “There are also some of the
plants which the people call copaibas” [Certis etiam e plantis quas vulgo copaibas vocant] (Maffeius,
Historiarum Indicarum, 2.7). Multilingual texts, on the other hand, are those which repeat the same
message in two or more languages, like the Rosetta Stone, or the famous diptychs of Milton, in which
the same text appears in two or more languages, side by side, interlinearly or one after the other, as
Hinds explores in his 2017 paper.
Some of the most famous examples of texts which mix many languages certainly come from
the Carmina Burana, the manuscripts from the monastery of Benediktbeuren, as explored by
Beatie in his article of 1967. This notorious codex has a variety of poems, some in German,
Latin, or Romance languages, but many use mixed language or are multilingual. There are some
examples of isolated German or Romance words in Latin texts, Latin poems with a refrain in
another language, poems with regular alternation of Latin and German or Romance languages,
as well as German stanzas attached to the end of Latin poems with the same or a similar met-
rical form. A small section from a poem, a mixed-language work which alternates Latin and Old
French, should suffice as an example:
Tua pulchra facies

me fey planser milies;
pectus habet glacies.
a remender
statim virum facies
per un baser!
These two basic categories, the mixed-language and the multilingual texts, can, in turn, be
subdivided into more specific ones, such as the so-called macaronic texts, a subcategory of mixed-
language works that has had many different, more or less wide definitions, but that, according to
Sacré, can be understood as texts in which two languages are mixed in such a way that words and
expressions of one language are artificially forced into the grammatical framework of the other.
Macaronic texts were a favorite in medieval times, in texts written in Latin, with vernacular words or
groups of words inserted and, sometimes, superficially Latinized.
In many situations, macaronics have been used to achieve humorous goals or to give a poem a
satirical punch. As a pointed example, the poet laureate John Skelton (1460–1529) has a few examples
of macaronics in which he rhymes English and Latin and uses Latin-sounding suffixes in English
words, as the following short example demonstrates (Boehme 85–87):
Loke now in Exodi,

And de archa Domini,
With Regum by and by;
(The Bybyll will not ly)
How the Temple was kept,
How the Temple was swept,
Where sanguis taurorum,
Aut sanguis vitulorum,
Was offryd within the wallys,
After ceremoniallys
(ll. 164–173)
As John Skelton’s example shows, Latin as a language of daily use, side by side with vernaculars,
both in speaking and writing, was feasible as a communicative tool to his audience. As Dante Alighieri
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(1265–1321), father of Humanism and one of the leading poets of the late Middle Ages and early
Renaissance, discusses in his De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular, c. 1305), the use
of the vernacular has a place and time, or rather, the aptum, to use the rhetorical term. That is, cer-
tain forms and topics would be appropriate for vernacular languages, while others would be better
expressed in Latin. His manifesto on the use of the vernacular was, therefore, written in Latin, guar-
anteeing its wider audience. In the same way, Alberti (1404–1472) chose to discuss the topic of Latin
in vernacular, in his Della famiglia (On the Family, c. 1432), but was perfectly able to write in Latin
for his Momus sive De Principe (Momus or The Prince, c. 1450). Almost in reverse, Puteanus (1574–
1646), praised the use of vernacular languages in his Iuventutis Belgicae laudatio (In Praise of Belgian
Youth, 1607), but the speech itself was in Latin. Antonio Ferreira (1528–1569), considered the father
of Humanism in Portugal, could read and write perfectly in Latin and Greek, but chose to defend
the use of the vernacular language always in Portuguese, as in a letter to Pero de Andrade Caminha,
in Book 1 of his Letters, commented on by Spina. Basílio da Gama (1741–1795) wrote in vernacular
about the war between the natives and the Portuguese soldiers for the implementation of the Treaty
of Madrid (O Uraguay, 1769), but in Latin when dealing with a scientific topic (Brasilienses Aurifodinae,
c.1762), since even as late as the 18th century Latin was the more adequate language to discuss and
propagate science (Mariano 395; Waquet 81–82).1
With these few examples, I would like to show how, during the long duration of the Medieval and
Early Modern Eras, Latin and the many vernacular languages taking shape in Europe were not two
separate entities, living isolated lives. Unfortunately, the study of the History and Philology of those
periods has emphasized more the differences and the arguments for or against the use of one or the
other.Therefore, the Latin and the vernacular texts, produced in the same spaces and at the same time,
have traditionally been studied as two separate worlds, or as two different armies on a battlefield. The
fact is, however, that the discussion about which language to choose when writing a text was prom-
inent for more than half a millennium exactly because there were options (Verbeke 27).2 The intellec-
tual world of those times was very much polyglottic, in which people mastered Latin as well as their
own and possibly other vernacular languages, besides Ancient Greek and Hebrew, depending on their
areas of interest. And even though the depictions seem to show hostilities between two entrenched
sides on the matter, one for Latin at all times (and preferably of the “pure” Ciceronian type) and the
other defending the use of vernacular languages against the old tyranny of Latin, the literature of the
period shows a picture of mutual enrichment, as it gave writers the opportunity to choose languages
and even switch them as they saw fit.
Therefore, using the definitions of Kellman (Literary Translingualism:What and Why), during the ten
or more centuries of Latin as a language of non-natives, basically any work written in Latin was the
product of the mind of a translingual author. A great number of them were ambilingual translinguals,
famous names, such as Thomas More (1478–1535), François Rabelais (c. 1494–1553), John Calvin
(1509–1564), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), René Descartes (1596–
1650), and so many others, who published in Latin as well as in their native tongues, depending on
their themes, forms, and goals to reach different audiences. There were also several famous isolingual
translinguals, even discounting the early medieval period, in which it is difficult to say which language
would be an author’s native tongue: Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540),
Diogo de Teive (c. 1514–1569) and Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536), for instance, were certainly
speakers of vernacular languages when they produced their works exclusively in Latin.
Another important indicative not only of the strength of Latin as a language of common use, a
tool of communication between people from different language groups, but of the dynamics between
Latin and the vernaculars is the surprising number of translations of vernacular texts into Latin. Peter
Burke (65) counts 1,140 of them only between 1500 and 1800—and they are still alive, as the 21st
century translations of the Harry Potter books and Pride and Prejudice show. However, for the period
covered by Burke, they are more than a mere curiosity: the sheer number of them point not only to
the widespread knowledge of Latin, but also to the possibility that foreign vernaculars were difficult
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or perhaps impossible to read, while Latin was the common ground, because it formed part of the
standard education.
Latin was the bread and butter of basic education and an absolute must-have for higher edu-
cation in Europe from Antiquity to the 18th, 19th, or even the 20th century, depending on loca-
tion.3 Therefore, another obvious example of multilingual texts involving Latin and one or more
vernaculars is found in textbooks and other publications related to linguistic instruction, such as
dictionaries, grammar books, and the ubiquitous collections of dialogues, that is, texts that allow the
reader to compare languages known with language being learned. The main surprise might come
in the form of the dialogues or colloquia, not only popular as a piece in which to treat philosophical
issues, but as a school genre, at which some of the brightest minds of the Early Modern period tried
their hand, such as Juan Luis Vives and Desiderius Erasmus. These short, or not so short, dialogues
seem to approach Latin not as an artificial language, but on the same level as the vernacular, used as a
means of communication in daily life (Verbeke 31). Also somehow connected to the classrooms are
translations that print the Latin text together with its vernacular translation. This seems to have, in
general, a didactic purpose, and can be found in many presentations: the printing of the source text
with its translation in parallel columns or on facing pages, the interlinear translation, or the whole
text presented completely in each language in its turn. These multilingual publications seem to have
been popular for a long time such as, for instance, the case of a short volume published in 1810 in
Lisbon, containing Pietro Metastasio’s (1698–1782) canzonetta La Libertà, followed on the same page
by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s French version in a second column, and two Portuguese translations in a
third and fourth columns on the facing page.
Besides, as part of the school curriculum, exercises in translation from Latin into a vernacular
language and back again into Latin would be standard educational fare for the time, as part of every
author’s schooldays, as explained by Haan. As Steiner (16) aptly puts it, bilingualism, understood as
equally expressive fluency in both Latin and the vernacular, was not an exception, and in the work of
an artist of languages such as John Milton (1608–1674), one can perceive currents of Latin, Greek, or
Italian even when he expressed himself in English. As Kellman (The Translingual Imagination) reminds
us, John Milton wrote capably in English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and could certainly read a few
vernaculars.
As a multilingual translingual, Milton is one noteworthy example of what Deneire
(“Introduction: Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular” 2) has called the dynamics of Neo-
Latin, or the complex history of “interplay and exchange, rather than isolation and divergence”
established between texts in Latin as the permanent non-native tongue, and texts in other
languages. Stephen Hinds, in a discussion on Andrew Marvell (1621–1678), cannot avoid bringing
Milton into the conversation about parallel English and Latin compositions. Milton’s collection of
1645, the culmination of many years of his work, comprises a vernacular volume of English Poems
(with a few Italian ones), followed by a volume of Latin Poemata (with the odd ones in Greek).
While discussing the issue of the “single-author poetic diptych,” using Milton and Marvell as his
corpus, Hinds presents a solid case of how, in the poet’s mind’s eye, languages can relate, mix, and
transform into striking artistry. It is worth looking at one single example, from the comparison
between the poems The Garden and Hortus, published adjacent to each other in Marvell’s posthu-
mous 1681 book, in the words of Hinds (17):
‘… the milder sun /Does through a fragrant zodiac run’. ‘Fragrant zodiac’ maps literally
on to fragrantia signa (‘fragrant signs’) in Hortus 52; but the Latin has something extra to
offer. Where does the bold English phrase ‘fragrant zodiac’ come from? Well, it is clearly a
piece of ‘translationese’, formed by Marvell on the basis of his parallel Latin fragrantia signa.
And fragrantia signa? A new locution too, but this time we can see Marvell’s transforma-
tive phrase-formation in action: behind fragrantia lies a word commonly used to refer to
actual constellations in classical Latin poetry, namely flagrantia (‘flaming’); a word which
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would aptly describe ‘fierce’ and menacing star-signs like the Bull and the Crab specified
in Hortus 53. That is to say, it is from Marvell’s own Latinate literalism (perhaps complicated
by a lurking Virgilian metathesis) that one of his most distinctive English locutions derives.
The conclusion is startling: a distinctive, commemorated poetic image in English comes from the
modification of a commonplace term in the Latin poetic memory. At the same time, it is well repre-
sentative of the idea of dynamics, that is, of an undercurrent of dialogue between all those languages
that co-existed within the multilingual community, in such a way that, as again Hinds (21) imagines,
even if a different language version of a poem has never been written, it could have impacted the text
that exists, lurking somehow in the back of the mind of the writer, as a virtual diptych.4
Nevertheless, considering the essential translingualism of Latin literature, especially in the Modern
Era, I would like to highlight that this continued and creative use of Latin was certainly not limited to
the Old World:5 it was also carried in the pockets of the first explorers, settlers, merchants, and envoys
to the shores of the new lands that the Europeans reached and colonized. As Spain and Portugal
spearheaded this endeavor, and ended up building their empires on the other side of the Atlantic, their
role in the development of Neo-Latin in the Americas was primordial, even if sometimes only as a
bridge for transferring men from other parts of Europe: for example, the first Humanist in the New
World was the Italian Alessandro Geraldini (1455–1525), who became bishop of Santo Domingo
on the island of Hispaniola in 1518. Geraldini was a prolific Latin writer in prose and verse, both in
Europe and in the Americas, having produced an account of his own voyage, unfortunately published
over a century later, his Itinerarium ad regiones sub aequinoctiali plaga constitutas (Laird “Latin in Latin
America”).
Ijsewijn, and Coroleu and Fouto have pointed out that Neo-Latin produced in the Iberian
Peninsula has received less attention than works from other parts of Europe, even if the landscape in
scholarship on the field has improved in the twenty-five years that separate those overviews, thanks
to the labor of many scholars who have been exploring the significant corpus of Neo-Latin works
written in both Spain and Portugal, as well as their colonies. Just like other parts of Europe, the
Iberian Peninsula developed a rich literary corpus in Latin at the same time it saw the establishment
of production in vernacular languages, many times in competition with one another. Latin was, how-
ever, still very much the language of religion, but also of law, philosophy, university life in general—a
picture shared with the rest of Europe.
Ijsewijn (81) had already noticed how mobile Spanish and Portuguese writers of Early Modernity
were, and how much of their Neo-Latin works seem to be influenced by the expatriate condition of
their authors, giving as a marked example Luisa Sigea de Velasco (Aloysia Sigea Toletana, 1522–1550),
a Spaniard living in Portugal as a Latin teacher in the court, one of the most famous female authors
using Neo-Latin. Her Duarum virginum colloquium de vita aulica et privata (Colloquy of Two Virgins
Concerning Courtly and Private Life, 1552) and the posthumously published poem Sintra (1566)
were widely praised (Ramalho; Coroleu and Fouto). According to Ijsewijn (82), many of the best
Neo-Latin works of Iberian authors were produced as results of a need to be understood in their host
countries. Simultaneously, that also meant that they were in contact with the contemporary produc-
tion of other regions, which then became objects of imitation and discussion, and entered school and
university curricula all over the Peninsula. As an example, Angelo Poliziano was not only printed in
Spain in successive editions, some of them with commentaries, but also was suggested as a model (as
was Vives in De tradendis disciplinis 3.6) and was then imitated, both in Latin (Juan Ángel González’s
Silva de Laudibus Poeseos or Juan Vásquez’s Sylva Parrhisia) and in the vernacular (Luis Carrilo y
Sotomayor’s Libro de erudición poetica) (Coroleu).
For Portugal, this mobile condition was increased by Lisbon’s own policies of internationaliza-
tion, as one might call them. Many young Portuguese men were granted royal scholarships to study
abroad, at the same time as the creation of universities such as the Colégio das Artes in Coimbra,
Braga, and Évora, which attracted scholars from all over Europe and sealed this as a period of cultural
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renewal (Coroleu and Fouto 469). That meant many Portuguese men participated in the circuit
of schools, letters, courts and publications that characterized the Republic of Letters. André de
Resende’s Erasmi encomium (Praise of Erasmus, 1531) is a strong defense of the humanist ideals of
that more famous name. This work was published in Basel, however, not in Lisbon—and that is true
of many of Resende’s works, which came to light also in Antwerp, Louvain, and Bologna. The same
applies to many other Portuguese scholars, who were almost pilgrims, spending most of their lives
abroad, sometimes not even remembered as Iberians. Such is the case, according to Soares, of Diogo
de Teive, already mentioned before as an isolingual translingual, one of the first Portuguese youths to
study in Paris with a royal grant, at the age of 11 or 12. Returning at the age of 19, he spent only a
few months in his homeland until furthering his studies first in Salamanca and then in Toulouse. Later
in life, he became teacher at the Universities of Paris and Montauban.
Another famous humanist of Portuguese birth was Achilles Statius (1524–1581), the son of a
nobleman involved in the conquests in the East. Pereira informs us that the boy traveled with his
father to Africa and to Brazil, but showed more appreciation for the pen than for the sword, and after
studying Latin and Greek in Évora and Coimbra, moved to Louvain, where his first work, a com-
mentary on Cicero’s Topics was published. After stays in Paris, Rome, and Padova, he became secre-
tary and librarian to Guido Sforza and then worked as papal secretary to Pius IV, Pius V, and Gregory
XIII, while publishing translations into Latin of a series of Greek Fathers of the Church, as well as
his famous philological commentaries on Catullus, Suetonius, and Horace. He never again returned
to Portugal.
The commonly accepted idea that Portugal has almost no production in Latin stems from two
beliefs: first, that little publishing activity within the country reflects the lack of production by
capable scholars as well as a lack of interest or ability by groups of readers; second, that the hold
of papal authority and the Inquisition stifled the flourishing of any intellectual life. However, as
Coroleu and Fouto (469) argue, Portugal had easy and constant access to the European book
market, as the many incunabula and editions found in Portuguese libraries clearly indicate, added
to the already mentioned publications abroad, critical to the successful careers of many Iberian
writers. But even when they did not reach the publishing houses, the quantity of works in
manuscript form that existed and circulated in the Peninsula, some of which have only been
published as first printed editions recently, still attest to an intense intellectual life. André de
Resende, Damião de Gois, Jerônimo Osório, and so many other names, most of them compiled
in António dos Reis and Manuel Monteiro’s Corpus illustrium poetarum Lusitanorum qui Latine
scripserunt (Corpus of Famous Portuguese Poets Who Wrote in Latin, 1745–1748) and in the
Bibliotheca Lusitana (Portuguese Library) by Diogo Barbosa Machado (1741–1758), confirm the
existence of a diverse and intense written production. Again Ijsweijn and Coroleu and Fouto give
excellent overviews of the various genres of production of Latin in the Iberian Peninsula, and the
dynamic interactions between Latin and the Iberian vernaculars, which produced the enrichment
of the Romance literary languages at large.
Due to the position of Spain and Portugal in the international stage at that point, Iberian scholars
were also responsible for the expansion of Latin on a global scale. The questions connected to the
exploration of the New World itself were a topic of intense interest and the theme of many works
written in Latin between the 16th and 17th centuries.The serious and protracted debate on the native
inhabitants of those distant lands is an excellent example of the translingualism of those involved in it,
since it happened simultaneously in the vernacular and in Latin, with arguments being used in many
languages as replies to works written in different languages.The heated debate between Bartolomé de
las Casas and Sepúlveda (Coroleu and Fouto 466; Laird “Latin in Latin America”) which culminated
in the Junta de Valladolid was essentially a question of how Christian civilization should approach
and behave towards the natives of the Americas, and, even though these two most important names
wrote their most famous pieces in Latin, the controversy was complemented and added to by many
other texts, both in Latin and in Spanish. As a religious, political, and social issue, the discussion to
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determine not only if the natives were brutal, soulless cannibals that deserved slavery or a purer group
of humans in need of salvation, but how the Spanish crown should take over that land and if war was
just or not in that situation, the polémica de los naturales debate demonstrates how Latin was the lan-
guage for the discussion of important question of the times, but also how the question belonged, at
the same time, to Latin and Spanish. De las Casas’ answer to Sepúlveda’s Democrates Alter Sive De Justis
Belli Causis Apud Indios (1545) was a Latin text—Argumentum Apologiae adversus Genesium Sepulvedam
theologum cordubensem (1550)—but we also have plenty of his writings in Spanish, among which is
the notorious Brevisima Relación de la Destrucción de Las Indias (1552).6 Though most of Sepúlveda’s
voluminous works were in Latin, when he found difficulties in publishing his Democrates Alter, he
produced a summary of the work in Spanish, so that its contents could be accessed by those who
knew no Latin, including some of the conquistadores who became fierce defenders of his position
towards the colonization of the new lands (Schulz; Gutiérrez).
The main difference in the development and the spreading of languages and cultures between
Spanish America and Portuguese America, with Spanish America sprinting ahead in terms of the
foundation of schools, establishment of universities, and the growth of an intellectual environment,
is due to the distinctive policies and goals of Spain and Portugal. The latter, with eyes towards the
richer and more promising outposts in Africa, India, and the Far East, for quite a while had little
interest in the American lands, while the former very soon founded religious communities, schools,
and colleges. In the early 1500s, there were already centers of learning in the Caribbean, Central,
and South America, sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church in the Spanish lands, while the first
city in the Portuguese area dates from 1532, and the first school only came into existence in 1549,
merely five years before Mexico had its first university. Printing arrived in New Spain in 1538, and
many Spanish decrees and initiatives led to a large production of texts, both in Latin and in Spanish.
Portugal’s policies, on the other hand, were to confine the exclusivity of printing to the metropolis,
and only in the 19th century an official publishing house was established in Brazil. Of course, that
does not mean there were no books and no writers in Portuguese America, but the colony was kept
dependent on Portugal for its printed production. So, all Luso-Brazilian writers had their works
published in Europe—in Lisbon or in other centers such as Paris or Rome.
As pointed out before, however, a lot of the production of writing in the colonies still happened
in manuscript form. As Laird (“Latin in Latin America”) affirms, even for the Spanish colonies,
there is much still in manuscripts, kept both in European and Latin American archives, that remains
to be examined, and if the late-20th and early-21st century has seen the publication of unpub-
lished material, such as the Monumenta collections of the Society of Jesus, many of the sources from
between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries pertaining to Latin America still await critical
editions. Even celebrated authors fall into the category of those with unpublished works. António
Vieira (1608–1697), one of the most illustrious preachers of the 17th century, named by Fernando
Pessoa “the emperor of the Portuguese language,” deeply involved with all religious and political
issues of his times, had to wait 400 years to have his complete works published to critical acclaim: the
thirty-volume collection has finally been completed in 2016.
Vieira was born in Portugal and certainly had Portuguese as his native language, in which he wrote
most of his sermons (but at least one in Italian); however as an intellectual of his time, he also wrote
some poetry in Spanish, and many of his letters were in Latin, as well as his theological treatise Clavis
Prophetarum and some poetry, usually forgotten by the scholars who scrutinize his more famous ora-
tory pieces. More importantly to us, though, as much of the scholarly works on his sermons attest, his
vernacular writing is deeply marked by his knowledge of Latin, in a process of enrichment of his ver-
nacular expression. Nonetheless, at the same time, his Latin texts show, as the editor of the volume of
Latin poetry in the Complete Works affirms, “the brilliancy of the universities that had spread around
the world” (Bortolanza 8). That is because Vieira completed all his studies at the Jesuit institutions
in Brazil, under the curriculum that had seen success everywhere else where the Society had set
foot. The Jesuits were responsible for establishing a network of educational institutions in which all
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students became proficient in Latin prose and poetry, through the contact with and the imitation of
an array of Classical authors. Their approach could be called more Erasmian than Ciceronian, in the
sense that they exercised the imitation of many authors, including the Fathers of the Church; many of
their textbooks praised Erasmus, or at least had an Erasmian flair to them, such as Maturino Gilberti’s
grammar, printed and used in Mexico. This eclectic approach is seen in Vieira’s vernacular sermons,
peppered with citations of the most important figures of Antiquity, both pagans and Fathers of the
Church.
Paired with that, an awareness of contemporary issues and a desire to work in the heat of polit-
ical battle made the Jesuit modus operandi an essentially plurilingual one, as observed by Severo. They
were responsible for many of the first grammars of the native languages, both in Latin (as Domingo
de Ara’s Incipit ars Tzeldaica or the controversial Historia et rudimenta linguae piruanorum), and in the
vernacular (as José de Anchieta’s7 Arte de grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil); and were
fiercely interested in learning vernacular languages, such as Miguel Ruggieri’s catechism and dic-
tionary in Chinese.8 It comes as no surprise therefore, that Vieira also wrote in Italian and Spanish, as
well as Portuguese and Italian. His small poetical production includes even a few diptychs: some in
Spanish and Portuguese, but also some Latin-Portuguese poems, in a letter exchange with Luís de Sá,
in which both authors showcase their mastery in poems in three languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and
Latin) on the Mondego river (Bortolanza 32–40).
This comes to show that the same processes of interplay between Latin and the vernaculars
that have been explored as happening in Europe9 also had a full life in the colonies. Authors were
able to write in Latin or in vernacular languages, depending on the genre, audience, and goals of
their productions. Mixed-language and multilingual publications by colonial subjects, whether they
managed to reach the publishing houses in Europe or circulated in manuscript form, were also
common. Even not considering the many texts produced as teaching tools or aids that circulated in
Latin America from the early 16th century on—many of them printed in Mexico and Peru, or left as
manuscripts produced by Jesuits all over America (Laird, “Colonial Spanish America and Brazil”)—
we are left with a myriad of translingual writers and multilingual and mixed-language productions
from Latin America still in need of attention and study in relation to their translingualism, and how
that affected those authors and their writing.
Such is the case of Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (1636–1711), arguably the first person born in
Brazil to have a book published. His Musica do Parnaso (Music from Parnassus) is a translingual tour
de force: divided into four parts or choirs,10 as he calls them, the work starts with a section of poems in
his native Portuguese—sonnets, madrigals, décimas, redondilhas and other poetic forms well established
in the Portuguese poetic tradition. The second part is the choir of Castilian rhymes, also composed
of sonnets, décimas, canciones, and other typically Iberian poetic forms. The third choir comprises only
sonnets and madrigals in Italian, while the fourth and last choir includes compositions in heroic
verse and epigrams in Latin. To these four choirs, two short comedies in Spanish, by the same author,
were appended in the edition published in Lisbon in 1705. In the dedication to his patron, D. Nuno
Álvares Pereira de Melo, Oliveira explains the reason why he decided to publish his book: so that
people could see that even in a land where before barbarous people thrived, the Muses, who came
from Greece to Rome, from Rome to Italy, from Italy to Spain and from Spain to Portugal—that
is the order the author himself describes—had also found home, and an artist able to “imitate the
poets of Italy and Spain.” He clearly delineates a noble lineage to his Muses, who move from place to
place and from language to language, a path he will himself take, but backwards, in each step of his
book. In doing so, he respects the aptum of genres and forms—the modern forms in Portuguese and
Spanish, the dolce stil nuovo in Italian, but the correct Classical meters and forms for the Latin poetry.
But when it comes to themes, he shows how certain topics belong to certain languages, while others
can migrate from language to language, adapting in the process. So, for instance, the light verses for
a loved woman are expressed in the vernacular, but not in Latin. Anarda, the poet’s loved one, is the
theme for no fewer than fifty-six poems in Portuguese and thirty-four in Spanish. In style and form,
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they are comparable to similar cycles of variations on an archetypical muse, a silent woman, such
as Marília de Dirceu, by Tomás Antonio Gonzaga, or even Francisco de Quevedo’s Lisi in his Parnaso
Español. On the other hand, the Latin choir has epigrams on the distinctly Ovidian themes of Roman
myths: Leander and Hero,Venus and Adonis, Io and Argos are sung in dactyllic hexameters.The topic
of panegyric, however, is acceptable in all languages, appearing as funeral eulogies in Portuguese (À
morte do Desembargador Jerônimo de Sá e Cunha) and Latin (Quid facis atro luctu Lusitania?), and as laud-
atory poetry in Spanish (Ao Senhor Dom Rodrigo da Costa, vindo a governar o estado do Brasil) and Italian
(A Dom Francisco de Sousa, Capitão da Guarda de Sua Majestade). In the midst of it all, some diptychs
can be found and could be subject to interesting analyses, such as the Italian and Latin poems on the
death of Leander (Leandro amante con notturno giorno and Aequora Leander sulcat sub lumine fixus), or the
ones in Portuguese and Spain on sleeping (Ao sono and Vuela, sueño delicioso). Oliveira says, in the pro-
logue to his work, that he wanted to show how “one muse could sing with many voices” in choosing
the many different languages.
The effects of translingualism are not just observed, however, in works such as Oliveira’s in which
one single author writes in many languages. Sometimes, even when the main body of a publication
is in one single language, the paratexts show the impact of the other languages in the background.
Such is the case with O Uraguay, by Basílio da Gama (1740–1795). That the author was a capable
Latinist is beyond doubt, as a full didactic poem in Latin has been ascribed to his authorship—the
Brasilienses Aurifodinae, as before mentioned—but even when writing in vernacular, his epic diction
mirrors Latin. That can be observed in the text itself of O Uraguay, in which the position of adverbs
and adjectives follows the syntagmatic positioning of Vergilian Latin (Nascimento and Leite). Also
in the footnotes, in which the author writes much of his political commentary on the main topic of
the poem—the war between the Guarani Indians and the Portuguese forces on the Missiones in the
south of Brazil, a massacre for which the author blames the Jesuits—the presence of the controversies
of the time finds space in many languages, such as French and Latin. On page 24, as a commentary
on II.45, Gama cites Vanière’s Praedium Rusticum, published in 1707.
Finally, as Verbeke (34) observes, commemorative volumes of many sorts were common in the
Early Modern era, forming a different genre in which polyglossia is frequent. That was also the case
in Latin America, where volumes of commemorative texts, both in prose and poetry, were often
produced, many of them containing texts in various languages. Such is the case of Jorge de Barros’s
Relação panegyrica, a volume in the memory of John V of Portugal, published in 1753. Jorge de Barros
is the editor of the volume, which actually contains thirty-four epigrams, six epitaphs, seventy-one
sonnets, two romances, two canções, two odes, one eclogue, five elegies, three décimas, one cenotaph
inscription, one anagram, six eulogies, and four glosas, written in Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin. As
with Oliveira’s Música do Parnaso, the relation between language and poetic form follows a decorous
logic, but, since all works are related to the life and death of John V, the intricate relationship between
the poems, in terms of language and imagery, shows the vivid dynamics of multilingualism.
As Laird (“Colonial Spanish America and Brazil”) and Leite have argued, the history of Latin
American colonial literature has in general been constructed on anachronistic bases because they
were contemporary with the construction of the nations themselves and connected to the defin-
ition of identities of nation-states that had not yet come into existence when these texts were being
produced. In most cases, it was also in the interest of such narratives to erase the fact that Latin was
an important language in use and that the Americas were plurilingual spaces. The affirmation of one
single language, as a positive sign of homogeneity of culture, has set the tone for most of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, and not only in Latin America, as the prohibition of languages and
the purposeful negation of the existence of peoples and their cultures in so many places has unfor-
tunately not stopped. Perhaps we might have arrived at a position now in which one can look at
those times and understand the legacy they have left us. If by no means Latin was accessible to all—
education, after all, was and still is a privilege—at that point, both the European vernaculars and Latin
stopped belonging only to Europe. They become mixed with American languages, and constitute,
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Leni Ribeiro Leite
as Laird (“Colonial Spanish America and Brazil”) rightly puts, a creole legacy. The works written in
the America or by Americans, in Latin or in vernacular languages, as well as by Europeans, in Latin
or in other non-European vernaculars they found in America, are part of an essentially multilingual,
translingual environment, that needs to be read and analyzed as part of an unequal but pluralistic
environment, that is still in need of more study if we are to form a better picture of colonial Latin
America.
This endeavor is fortunately already well under way in Europe, where scholars have been careful
in noticing that the vast and diverse production in Latin, spanning at least twelve centuries, is always
the work of a translingual process. That means that, for any given text written in Latin, it is always
possible to question what other languages form the frame according to which that text is woven,
understanding that, no matter what language is on the surface, it is a combination of languages that
actually weave the fabric.
Notes
1 The same author, in a sonnet dedicated to João Xavier de Matos, “who has complained that the author had
criticized a poet, his friend,” defends that a poet could be ingenious in one language, but could never be really
an artist if not multilingual. The last stanza of the poem wraps it up with some sound advice: “Look: learn
French, Italian, /two drops of Latin, a bit of Greek,/and next year we will talk” (Teixeira 377).
2 Also here it would be possible to add a long digression about the discussion on which Latin to use, that is,
how classicizing Latin should be and what models were appropriate for use. An overview of this discussion
can be found in Tunberg.
3 From the many studies on the subject, some of the most important are Willemsen, Black, Grendler, and
Rashdall.
4 A very interesting approach to mapping this kind of dynamics between Neo-Latin and vernaculars is
proposed by Deneire (“Neo-Latin Literature and the Vernacular”), based on Even Zohar’s polysystem theory,
considering the systemicity of literature.
5 Renæssanceforum has devoted two special issues to Latin and the vernaculars in early modern Europe (Hass
and Ramminger) and the role of Latin in linguistic identity and nationalism from 1350 to 1800 (Coroleu,
Caruso, and Laird), which contain numerous interesting case studies.
6 It is interesting to observe that the Brevisima Relación was itself translated into Latin, as Narratio regionum
Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam devastatarum verissima (1598), but from the 1579 French version.
7 Anchieta is also the author of the first American epic poem in Latin, De gestis Mendi de Saa, sent in manuscript
form to Portugal and published anonymously in Coimbra in 1563, as well as of many other letters, poems,
and plays in Spanish, Portuguese, Latin and Tupi. His complete works have only been compiled in the 20th
century, in the Monumenta Anchietana collection.
8 In Portuguese America, works such as the Arte de Gramática da Língua Brasílica da nação Kiriri (Art of Grammar
of the Brazilian Language of the Kiriri nation), by Jesuit Luis Vincencio Mamiani, and the Arte da Gramática
da Língua Brasílica (Art of Grammar of the Brazilian Language), by Luiz Figueira, are of interest to our sub-
ject. Both are grammar books of different native languages, written in Portuguese, but conceptually based
on Latin; that is, even though they use the vernacular as the medium, they follow order, nomenclature, and
concepts of the Latin grammar books, and therefore would probably be of little use to a reader who were
ignorant of Latin.
9 And by this I refer to the many initiatives on studying Early Modern Europe as essentially multilingual, such
as Hass and Ramminger; Deneire and Bloemendal, which still await for robust counterparts related to the
Americas.
10 The idea is that each part of the book is sung by a choir of Muses, the Muses going from one place to the
other, changing the language in each part.
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IV
Universal Literary Translingualism

9
IN ESPERANTO
Sabine Fiedler
Introduction
Literary translingualism is the phenomenon of authors who write in a language other than their native
tongue (Kellman and Lvovich 2015). This chapter deals with literary translingualism in the planned
language Esperanto. Since the language is basically learned as a second language, all Esperanto authors
are therefore translingual.1 While as regards ethnic languages, war, crises, and political oppression are
the main reasons why writers leave their home countries and have to switch to another language
(Kellman 2000, 2020), Esperanto authors seem to write in this language for other reasons. This
chapter addresses the question of why, at the very least, bilingual writers have chosen Esperanto as
their language of artistic expression. It introduces three Esperanto writers and their works. These are
William Auld and Spomenka Štimec representing the group of “monolingual translinguals” (Kellman
2000: 14) as well as Trevor Steele who has published works in both his native language and Esperanto.
Against the backdrop of the little that is known about this planned language,2 it seems useful to start
this chapter with an introduction to Esperanto.Therefore, the first section will contain a brief presen-
tation of Esperanto and its speech community with a special focus on its literature.
The Planned Language Esperanto

Planned languages (also called “artificial languages,” “international auxiliary languages (IALs),”
“constructed languages,” or, especially in the past, “universal languages”) are language systems that
were consciously created by an individual or group of people, in accordance with defined criteria,
with the goal of facilitating international linguistic communication (cf. Blanke 2018: 9, following
Wüster 1931). Their number has probably reached almost 1,000 already, and new systems are still
emerging.
There are different ways of classifying planned language systems. The traditional typology of
Couturat and Leau (1903) is based on the relationship between planned language systems and ethnic
languages, especially with regard to their lexical material. The authors subdivide (a) a priori systems,
(b) a posteriori systems, and (c) mixed systems. An a priori language forms its phonological and lexical
system on the basis of philosophically motivated classifications of human knowledge, independently
of the models in ethnic languages. Examples are the systems created by George Dalgarno (1661) and
John Wilkins (1668), who present a kind of encyclopedic worldview with their classifications of ideas.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-9 113

Sabine Fiedler
Such systems represent their authors’ knowledge and understanding of the times in which they lived.
Due to the fact that these systems are closed, changes to the entire class are necessary in accordance
with global evolution.
An a posteriori system borrows lexical material from specific ethnic languages and adapts it to
its structure. Within the a posteriori systems it is possible to find an autonomous subgroup (with
members such as Esperanto and Ido) with a high degree of regularity in morphology and word der-
ivation. In contrast, the naturalistic subgroup (with the typical representatives Occidental-Interlingue
and Interlingua) is characterized by imitation of (Romance) ethnic languages by incorporating their
arbitrary nature and irregularities. The mixed systems (such as Volapük) combine both a priori and a
posteriori traits.
Blanke (1985) suggests a classification according to the real role of communication that certain
languages played or play and thus takes into consideration that a language is a social phenomenon
and cannot be reduced to structural elements.Whereas the majority of all systems remained language
projects without real-life applications, a small group of systems have gained a moderate degree of
dispersion (e.g.Volapük, Occidental-Interlingue, Ido, Novial, Latino sine flexione, Interlingua, and
Basic English). However, after having begun to take shape as languages, the majority of them ceased
to develop and eventually vanished (cf. Fiedler forthcoming). According to Blanke, Esperanto is the
only planned language project that has become a functioning language.
Esperanto was initiated with the original name, Lingvo Internacia (‘international language’), in
Warsaw in 1887. Its author, Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist, used the pseudonym
Doktoro Esperanto (‘one who hopes’), which eventually became the name of the language. Zamenhof
grew up in the town of Białystok, in a part of the Russian empire that is now Eastern Poland, with his
mother tongues Russian and Yiddish in a multi-ethnic setting where Polish, German, and Lithuanian
were also spoken. In addition, he learned French, Latin, Classical Greek, and Hebrew. From his earliest
youth he felt the language barriers among the ethnic groups to be the main reason for inter-ethnic
hostility and ignorance, and he began to develop the idea of overcoming these problems and mutual
hatred through a neutral tongue that could serve as a means of communication.
The rules of the language were published in the Unua Libro ‘First Book’ (Zamenhof 1887),
together with a dictionary for Russian learners and first Esperanto texts (a translation of a part of
the Bible and of a poem by Heinrich Heine as well as two original poems). Despite their skeletal
structure, these rules enabled people to learn and use the language at once. The Romance languages
provide approximately 75% of the Esperanto vocabulary, especially Latin and French (e.g. filo ‘son’,
manĝi ‘eat’), about 20% are of Germanic origin (e.g. haŭto ‘skin’, trinki ‘drink’), and the rest are
derived from various other sources, especially Slavic languages (e.g. krom ‘apart from’, ĉu ‘whether/if
’) (see Janton 1993: 51). In typological terms, Esperanto is highly agglutinating, but also has features
of inflectional and isolating languages. The agglutinating nature of Esperanto allows for its words
to be divided into stable and unchanging units of meaning. For example, the word malsanulejo
(‘hospital’) consists of the following morphemes: mal- ‘opposite’, san-‘sound, healthy’, -ul- ‘person’,
-ej-‘place’, and so it is literally a place for ill people, similar to the German Krankenhaus. It is worth
mentioning that affixes can be combined with the suffixes marking word classes (-o for nouns, -a
for adjectives, -i for the infinitive of the verb, -e for adverbs), so that, with reference to the example
of malsanulejo above, for example, malo (‘opposite’), male (‘on the contrary’), ulo (‘person’), and ejo
(‘place’) could be formed. The fact that the affix system is applied consistently makes the language
easy to learn and use and it encourages linguistic creativity. Similarly, the syntax of Esperanto is
highly flexible due to a relatively free word order, facilitated by the existence of the accusative and
of adjectival agreement.3
There are no reliable data on the number of Esperanto speakers. According to the Ethnologue,
the standard reference for living languages, Esperanto is the second language of 2 million people,
while according to membership-based statistics, the number of Esperanto speakers amounts to only
approximately 150,000 (Fettes 43). A modern approach to assessing the number of Esperanto speakers
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Literary Translingualism in Esperanto
should not ignore the major impact that the Internet has on the use of the language. Wandel suggests
an updated estimate of the number of Esperanto speakers worldwide based on the number of people
on Facebook indicating they speak the language: “A simple calculation accompanied by reasonable
refinements leads to a number of approximately 2 million Esperanto users within the internet com-
munity alone, probably significantly more worldwide” (318).
In a similar way, the number of native speakers of Esperanto is difficult to determine. In Esperanto,
a mother tongue speaker of this language is usually referred to as a denaskulo (de-nask-ul- ‘from-birth-
person’), which is a short form of denaska Esperantisto (‘Esperanto speaker from birth’). Figures are
rarely mentioned in studies on the topic. Corsetti (265) points to there being 285 registered fam-
ilies using Esperanto in January 1995. It has to be considered that, for these children, Esperanto is
only one mother tongue4 among several, such as the parent(s) language(s) and the language of their
environment, so that it is relatively easy to give up the language when they are able to decide for
themselves. This usually occurs in adolescence, and studies show that about 50% of denaskuloj do so
(Papaloizos 1992).The most important difference between a native speaker of an ethnic language and
an Esperanto denaskulo, however, is their status in the speech community. As there are no sounds in
this language the production of which needs to be acquired in early childhood, and accents resulting
from speakers’ mother tongues are considered to be normal and are generally tolerated in the speech
community, it can be learned successfully by adults and Esperanto “native speakers” can hardly be
identified on the basis of linguistic criteria. Their language use is not norm-providing and they do
not hold a prestigious position in the speech community (Lindstedt 2010, Fiedler 2012). This is also
true for its literature, which is predominantly the poetry and prose of non-native speakers produced
for the non-native speech community.
Sociological studies reveal that Esperanto speakers have a higher educational level than the average
population and extensive language skills (Forster, Rašić, Stocker, Alòs i Font). Other characteristic
properties are the speakers’ developed metalinguistic awareness and linguistic loyalty: For many
speakers, the planned language is more than simply a foreign language. They identify with Esperanto
as an equitable means of communication that unites people irrespective of their origin, race, sex,
age, religion, or native language—a goal related to Zamenhof ’s original motivation (generally called
Esperanto’s ‘inherent idea’, Interna Ideo).The fact that the use of Esperanto as a mother tongue, which
was mentioned above, is not just found in international families also throws light on the character of
the community. For its speakers, the planned language holds a high position in a scale of values and is
worth being maintained and disseminated.
An important element constituting the common culture of the diaspora-like community is its
literature. Strictly speaking, Esperanto has been a literary language from its earliest beginnings. As
mentioned above, the 1887 Unua Libro included original poetry as examples of texts in the new lan-
guage. Soon afterwards, Zamenhof and other Esperanto pioneers started to translate important pieces
of world literature, such as Dickens’ The Battle of Life (1891), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1894), Gogol’s
Ревизор (The Government Inspector) (1907), Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (1908), Schiller’s Die Räuber
(The Robbers) (1908), Molière’s George Dandin (1908), Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (Grabowski, World
War I), and Orzeszkowa’s Marta (1910). Translating literature helped to develop the expressive qual-
ities of Esperanto and to stabilize the language and it has also been regarded as a proof that the lan-
guage is capable of presenting work from other cultures (Cool 73, Minnaja 177).
The short list of early translations already illustrates a peculiar feature of the translated litera-
ture in Esperanto. It is highly international and fundamentally democratic. Esperanto translations
include a large variety of source languages, “big” ones like English and French and “small” ones
like Macedonian and Czech alike (cf. Fiedler 1999: 283–284), in contrast to the situation in ethnic
languages.5 Market strategies seem to be less important here than some Esperanto speakers’ wishes
to make the members of the speech community familiar with the culture of their home country. Of
course, we have to consider that the literary output in Esperanto (including translations) altogether is
a drop in the ocean compared to that in, say, English or German.
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Sabine Fiedler
Figure 9.1 Development of the Esperanto book market (1889-2018) (Becker 2017)
Esperanto literature has kept its important role in developing the language and its community, and
specialist literary journals, literary competitions, and prizes contribute to its advancement. Referring
to the survey of original Esperanto literature by Sten Johansson, Minnaja points out that between the
year 2000 and January 2014, more than 2,600 titles were published, which amounts to more than 170
titles per year. Figure 9.1 provides an overview of the development of the Esperanto book market
from 1889 to 2016.6
Sutton’s comprehensive presentation of Esperanto literature provides an overview of Esperanto’s
most important original works, their authors and, by including reviews, speakers’ opinions on these.
It illustrates the rich history of Esperanto literature including various literary genres and schools,
without ignoring special trends such as the Prague group of writers that made Esperanto a linguistic
battlefield in the 1970s and 1980s with their lexical innovations. Sutton explains the dominance of
Esperanto poetry (over prose) by the fact that especially in Esperanto’s early days its linguistic struc-
ture encouraged authors to use the language’s potentials in poems. It is only in the middle of the
1970s that Esperanto novels caught up with its poetry. Sutton presents a classification of Esperanto
literature into the following five periods: The First Period (1887–1920) Primitive Romanticism and the
Establishment of Style; The Second Period (1921–1930) Mature Romanticism and a Literary Flowering;
The Third Period (1931–1951) Parnassianism7 and the Coming of Age; The Fourth Period (1952–1974)
Post-Parnassianism and Modernism; The Fifth Period (1975–) Popularisation of the Novel, Experimental
Poetry, Postmodernism.8
What makes Esperanto literature, both its original works and its translations special, is, first, the fact
that its authors produce their works in a language that is not their native tongue but was acquired by
them as a foreign language. They are translingual writers according to the definition of this volume.
Second, Esperanto authors write for an international audience, i.e. for the Polish and for the Javanese
reader alike. Both these aspects will play a role when in what follows Esperanto translingualism will
be studied in more detail using the examples of three outstanding authors.
Writing in a Planned Language: Examples

There are two groups of Esperanto authors: monolingual translinguals, who write only in the planned
language, and those who write both in Esperanto and their ethnic language. The following sections
will present members of both these groups.
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William Auld
If it is correct that each nation has its own bard, then within the community of Esperanto speakers
this function is doubtlessly fulfilled by William Auld (1924–2006). The British poet, essayist, and
translator, sometimes called the Master (Setz), literary lighthouse (Boulton) or simply “the leading
Esperanto poet of the post-war era” (McKay 12), seems to be the only author who is known beyond
the Esperanto speech community. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999,
2004, and 2006.
His masterpiece, La Infana Raso (The Child Race) (1956) is regarded by many as “the single most
outstanding work of Esperanto literature” (Sutton 241). This is due to both the topicality of its con-
tent and the artistic expression. The 25-chapter poem tackles nothing less than the entire history of
mankind, the life of the human race on the planet from its emergence to the present. Auld sees man
as still a child (hence the title), but it is part of the author’s philosophy that mankind will grow up.
The epic poem touches all facets of life from man’s ambition to travel to other stars to a little boy’s
experience on a beach, as in the passage below (Chapter XIV). Auld, in his footnotes, writes about
it: “Both are, or could be, aspects of the human condition; in both cases people act on dimly under-
stood impulses” (McKay 89).
Ni, pioniraj homoj de l’ spacovojoj, Pathfinders we, a people of the spaceways,

Trovas neniun ŝlosilon. Nia atome No clue to guide us. Our atomic vessel
Pelita ŝipo sagas lumorapide Darts at the speed of light across the vastness
Tra l’ kosmovastoj, cele alian sunon. Of the still Cosmos, bound for other planets
Por ni tagon ne sekvas nokto, nokton For us no day succeeds the night, nor
night-time
Ne sekvas tago, ekstere nokto eternas, Follows the day; perpetual night surrounds us.
Interne elektrolumo ŝajnigas tagon Within, electric lighting mimics daytime
Senfinan kaj senkomencan. Kalendaroj, Which neither ends nor dawns. The yearly
cycle,
Horloĝoj kaj dormo perdis sian principon. The days and hours, are meaningless to us now.
Ni ne vidos la celon; ni estos mortaj, We shall not know the Purpose; we shall perish
Kiam gefiloj niaj en novan orbiton When, in an unknown orbit, children’s children
Gvidos la ŝipon kiu fariĝis mondo Will guide the ship that has become a planet
Por ni, orfuloj de l’ tera sunsistemo. For us, Earth’s orphans, of our Solar System
… …
Estis marbordo, mallaŭta susuro de ondoj, There was a seashore, the still whisper of waves
Kvazaŭ de malproksimo. Blankaj sableroj As if far off; white grains of sand
Sin kroĉis al miaj piedoj, etaj piedoj. Clung to my feet, small feet.
Salo krustiĝis ĉirkaŭ miaj kruretoj. My small legs encrusted with sand
Spuron de miaj paŝoj akvo plenigis, My footprints filled with water.
Neniu dividis mian izolan imunon. No one shared my isolated immunity.
Silento tegis mantele tiun golfeton, Silence covered the little bay.
Sola mi ludis en memsufiĉo tenera. Alone I played in a gentle self-sufficiency.
Rokoj leviĝis altaj apud la strando, Rocks loomed aloft beside the beach.
La blanka sablo brilis ĝis horizonto The white sand gleamed to the horizon’s end.
Pale nebula, kie la maro grizas; Misty and pale where all the sea is grey:
Pretere estas Kanado, oni sciigis Beyond lies far-off Canada they say
Iam? Kiam? Antaŭ aŭ post la momento? Once? When? After the moment or before?
… …
Ekstere ŝvebas la astroj. Lumorapide Outside the stars, and at the speed of light
Traarkas ni la vakuon, tamen ni ŝajnas We arch across the void, and yet we seem
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Sabine Fiedler
Senmovaj sur mondo malgranda kiel polvero, Motionless on a world, a grain of sand
Kie la tempo, homa kreaĵo, mortis.9 Where time, a human construct stopped and died.10
As for the linguistic form, Auld’s mastery becomes evident, for example, in Chapter IV, when the
author, who served himself in the Royal Air Force during World War II, turns to the topics of pol-
itics and war. The verse consists of distorted (but still recognizable) words, in this way conveying the
impression that ordinary language is not adequate to describe the immorality and absurdities of war.
In gonoraloj (instead of generaloj [‘generals’]) resonates gonoreo (‘gonorrhoea’), in kunpremeble (instead
of kompreneble [‘of course’; from kompreni ‘understand’] we recognize the root prem- (‘oppress’), and
akiras gloron (‘acquire glory’) turns into hakiras gloron with haki (‘chop’) to mention only three of the
examples.
Laŭ gonoraloj, la milit’ necesas — According to the Gonorreals we need wars

nu, kunpremeble, ĉar per ĝi inspezas obliviously, for infestors fill
tiaj fraponoj, kaj hakiras gloron; their coffers and the gLand a glorious gain
dum ve kaj mi ekiras nur doloron, inquires; men win laurels when they kill
aspuras la soldat’ per murdo laŭron. while ye and me obgains us only pain.
Polatakistoj fiaflanke vokas, For their pert, Politricians basely bleat
durante, ke la tuta mendo mokas saying that all the Whurled shows skint respect
nian nocion kaj ĝin ne rasplektas for what we think, and slogans we repeat
kaj nur larmejo brava nin protektas: and only our brave Shoulders can protect.
kanonoj, bomboj kaj fuŝiloj baras Field gums and bombs and riffles keep at boy
la malumikon, kiu akuparas. the Enemas who trap us and annoy.
Pestroj, ĉu Kakolekaj, Pratustintaj, Pesters, both Cackolick and Prostitant,
Hebruaj, aŭ aliaj verofintaj, The Rabbits, Prats and many a sycophant
eldonas sian vaĉon por la plano they raise their vices flavouring the floor
de sia apuganta ... buterpano.11 that will ensure their butter and their bread.12
Other verses of Auld’s magnum opus are reminiscent of concrete poetry and the innovative poems of
E.E. Cummings. The poet’s predilection for linguistic experiments in Esperanto also becomes evi-
dent in Kvarope (1956), where he imitates the speech of a drunkard. Auld’s oeuvre cannot be reduced
to his anthologies of poems, however. He was also a prolific translator (e.g. of Tolkien’s The Lord of
the Rings 1995), author of Esperanto textbooks13 as well as essays and books on Esperanto.14 In one
of his publications in the last mentioned category, Auld writes that he “made a conscious choice of
Esperanto in preference to his native tongue for creative writing” because he “found the potentialities
of Esperanto as fascinating as, for example, those of English were in the sixteenth century, and wanted
to explore them” (Auld 1976, 1).
Spomenka Štimec
The Croatian writer Spomenka Štimec (b. 1949), a teacher of German and French, worked for the
Internacia Kultura Servo (International Cultural Service) in Zagreb for more than twenty years and,
among other things, organized very successful Festivals of Puppet Theatre. She published her first
collection of stories (Darija) in 1975 and since then has been an important Esperanto author winning
several prizes in the literary competitions at World Esperanto Congresses. Several of her novels and
travel accounts were translated into German, English, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages. She
achieved her breakthrough with the novel Ombro sur interna pejzaĝo (Shadow on an internal land-
scape) (1984), an intimate autobiography in which she describes the separation from her life partner.
Another work that has appeared in translation in several countries is Štimec’ Kroata Milita Noktlibro
118
(Croatian War Nocturnal) (1993) in which she uses the language created to pacify mankind for her
description of the daily horror of the war in formerYugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s. Including
examples from her own family she observes how fast hate is growing and what consequences the sep-
aration of the Croats and the Serbs had for people’s lives, families, and languages.
In her novel Tilla (2002), a biography of the Vienna-born actress Tilla Durieu—often called the
most painted woman of the last century—who fled Nazi-Germany in 1934 to live in Zagreb till
1952, Štimec analyzes the loss of one’s mother tongue and the situation of linguistic isolation:
Kion fari Lutz? Mi estas la aktoro kiu perdis sian lingvon. Kiel ludi nun en la germana? La ambicio
de Hitler senigis min je teatro. Mi estas superflua. Ne pro mia juda edzo mi devis fuĝi. Mi devis fuĝi
ĉar mia lingvo ne plu havas publikon.
(114)
[What can I do, Lutz? I am an actress who has lost her tongue. How can I play in German
now? Hitler’s ambitions have cut me off from the theatre. I am superfluous. Not because of
my Jewish husband do I have to flee. I have to flee because my language no longer has an
audience.]15
On several occasions, Štimec called attention to the role of Esperanto as a bridge between cultures
and a chance for small languages to attract larger audiences. In October 2004, she was invited by the
Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Croatia to present Croatian works which were translated via Esperanto
into Chinese, Persian, and Japanese. In an interview with Radio Pekino (Radio Bejing), she focused
on contacts between Croatian and Chinese citizens by means of Esperanto and mentioned that
the translation of the very first Croatian book into Chinese was mediated by Esperanto. “Grandaj
lingvoj ne bezonas Esperanton kiel lingvan ponton, ĉar oni automate tradukas ilin, sed al malgrandaj
lingvoj Esperanto helpas kiel lingva ponto,” she said (Big languages don’t need Esperanto as a lan-
guage bridge, as one translates them automatically, but for small languages, Esperanto is helpful as a
language bridge). As regards her decision to choose Esperanto as her language of literary expression,
Štimec wrote:
Mi ne estas grand-formata aŭtoro. Ĉu mi verkas aŭ ne, mia nacia lingvo kaj la literaturo en
ĝi bone fartas. Sed se mi verkas en Esperanto, eble mi iom kontribuas al ĝia riĉo. Eble la
literaturo en Esperanto per mia teksto havos unu tavolon pli. Eĉ se tre maldikan.
[I am not an author of great formats. Whether I write or not, my national language and
the literature in it are well-off. But when I write in Esperanto, maybe I have something to
contribute to its wealth. Perhaps the literature in Esperanto will have a layer more because
of my text. Even if a very thin one.]
Trevor Steele
The Australian writer Trevor Steele (b. 1940) has published nine novels and three collections of
stories. The former teacher of history and German spent many years abroad, and a number of his
books bear autobiographical features reflecting his work and life in Australia or including his travel
impressions. Most of his books have a historically ethical orientation condemning colonialism and
the dispossession and oppression of indigenous people. His first book, the more than 400 pages long
historical novel Sed nur fragmente (1987), for example, is the story of a Russian anthropologist who
while doing research in New Guinea begins to doubt the superiority of the white race. He tries to
protect the local people against the British and German oppressors and dies murdered by a native
(Minnaja et al., 536). Other topics are the horrors of Nazi concentration camps (Apenaŭ papilioj en
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Sabine Fiedler
Bergen-Belsen) [Hardly any butterflies in Bergen-Belsen] (1994) and the Aborigines’ suppressed cul-
ture in Australia. With his main message “respect for other people and the cultures of others” he is
therefore sometimes called a typically ‘Esperantist’ author (Sutton 511). In a recent interview, when
asked why these themes are so tenacious in his works, Steele (2020) said:
Eŭropdevenaj aŭstralianoj—mi estas unu el ili—pli kaj pli konscias, ke ni vivas en tiu
ĉi relative prospera kaj paca lando dank’ al monstraj krimoj de niaj samrasaj antaŭuloj.
Ho jes, tiu rasismo tute ne formortis, sed laŭ mi ni havas devon kontraŭi ĝin. Kaj kiam
ni rigardas la mondon ekster Aŭstralio, ni konstatas, ke preskaŭ ĉie la historio donas
ekzemplojn de maljusteco inter gentoj kaj ene de gentoj. Mi vidas en Esperanto ilon por
kontraŭi tiun maljustecon sur unu kampo, la lingva, kaj la internacia lingvo estas parto
de mia ideologio. La batalo estos ankoraŭ dum longa tempo necesa, sed ĝi donas dignon
al nia vivo.
[Australians of European descent—I am one of them—are increasingly becoming aware

that we live in this relatively prosperous and peaceful country thanks to horrible crimes
committed by our ancestors of the same race. Oh yes, this racism did not die at all, and
according to me we have the obligation to oppose it. And when we look at the world
outside Australia, we realize that almost everywhere history presents examples of injustice
between races and inside races. I see in Esperanto an instrument to oppose this injustice
in one field, the linguistic field, and the international language is part of my ideology. The
fight will still be necessary for a long time, but it gives our lives dignity.]
Steele is praised for his mastery of the language and the characterization of his characters by
means of their language use. He shows convincingly that Esperanto is able to be expressive on the
most diverse stylistic levels. In “Heroo de nia epoko” (A Hero of our Time) (1992), for example, Steele
uses slang and vulgar expressions to recount the story of a rich and crude entrepreneur (cf. Fiedler
1999: 287–288).
Steele publishes his works in both Esperanto and his native language English, with Esperanto
always being the first or original version. To him, as he says, the change of the language is not prob-
lematic: “Mi ne konstatas grandan diferencon en la du lingvoj el verk-vidpunkto. Mi havas mensajn
bildojn kaj provis esprimi tiujn en la koncerna lingvo” (I do not find a huge difference in the two
languages from the perspective of the work. I have pictures in my mind and tried to express these in
the language concerned) (Steele 2020). His autotranslations are not literal translations, however (“I
feel free to vary the text if I think it sounds better to do so”—Steele 2014). A comparative analysis
makes those modifications obvious. Steele’s story Memori kaj Forgesi (1992), which is based on the
author’s childhood experiences in the 1950s and 1960s and depicts the friendship between a white
boy and two children of mixed race, appeared in English in 1995. In the English version, the author
represents the background scenery by the rich vocabulary typical of Australia’s geography and flora,
such as creek, bush, blue gum, stringy bark, iron bark, applewood (which are absent in the Esperanto ori-
ginal), so that an introduction of the protagonist (who dreams himself away) as an Australian boy is
no longer necessary.
Esperanto version:
Jam tiuj ĝenoj ne plu ekzistis … Mi ne havas Paĉjon, kiu bedaŭras, ke li ne plu estas bona
sportulo, kaj tro drinkas … mi ne havas Panjon, kiu ofte koleras … ne estas la jaro 1950
… mi ne estas naŭjara … mi ne loĝas en Cedra Rivero en Aŭstralio … mi ne estas Bram
Jeffreys.
(Steele 1992: 12)
120
[Already these inconveniences did not exist anymore … I don’t have a Dad who bemoans
not being a good sportsman anymore and who drinks too much … I don’t have a Mum
who often grumbles … it’s not the year 1950 … I’m not nine years old … I don’t live in
Cedar Ridge in Australia … I’m not Bram Jeffreys.]
English published version:
Already those things did not exist … “I don’t have a Dad who drinks too much … I don’t
have a Mum who is always grumbling … it’s not 1950 … I’m not nine years old … I don’t
live in Cedar Ridge … my name’s not Gordon Lanagan.”
(Steele 1995: 9)
In a similar vein, the author does not feel the need to mark varieties of English, such as the protagonist’s
parents’ casual speech and the Aboriginal’s in a special way, while, as Esperanto does not have dialects,
metacommunicative signals seem to be useful for Esperanto readers.
Esperanto version:
Kiam Bram venkis, Danny senzorge ridetis kaj gratulis en tiu stranga formo de la angla
uzata inter duonindiĝenoj: “Vi bon‘ kur’s ‘odiaŭ, Brammy.”
(Steele 1992: 14)
[When Bram won, Danny smiled a bit carelessly and congratulated in this strange form
of English that people of mixed race used: “You run well today, Brammy.”]
When Gordon won, Jimmy just gave one of his usual grins and said, “You run good today,
Gordon.”
And, to mention a final example, Steele, being aware of his international readership, refrains from
culture-specific allusions, such as to an actor famous between the 1930s and 1960s that might be
appreciated in the Western world, but hardly by a Chinese or African Esperanto speaker from the 1990s.
Esperanto version:
Kaj vere estis. Li sciis, ke esti tiu knabo Bram Jeffreys estas ia rolo, ne io por eterne deviga,
eĉ se foje la rolo kontentigas.
(12)
[And it was true. He knew that being this boy, Bram Jeffreys, is a role, nothing compulsory
for ever, even if sometimes the role satisfies him.]
And it really was true. He knew that being Gordon Lanagan was not something he had
always done and would for ever keep on doing. Even if it usually was not a bad role, it was a
role. Clark Gable changed roles from picture to picture, even if he always looked
the same.
(9)
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Sabine Fiedler
The international audience means a challenge for Esperanto writers, but it also gives them new
impetus and satisfaction. Marjorie Boulton (1924–2017), another Esperanto author who wrote in
both English and Esperanto, describes the unique position of Esperanto writers as follows:
Do, serioza esperanta verkisto pli- malpli konscias pri legantaro tutmonda, kvankam
malgranda; kaj ni verkas, almenaŭ intencante esti kompreneblaj en ĉiuj landoj.
Ekzemple, mi emas eviti aludojn, kiujn alilandanoj plej ofte tute ne komprenus … Ni
devas trovi frazon, kiu internacie donas la ideon, aŭ, se ni volas uzi pitoreskan idiotismon
por sugesti fonon aŭ etoson, kulturon aŭ epokon, ni kompatu la legantojn kaj aldonu
piednoton.
…
Estas ankaŭ valora stimulo, ia speciala plezuro, kiam iu el fremda lando skribas al verkisto,
aŭ eble salutas en Universala Kongreso, esprimante estimon. Jes, mi estas en malgranda
minoritato—tamen, en Ĉinujo, iu legis mian libron.
…
Ni esperantistoj havas situacion iom unikan rilate al prestiĝo. Nia prestiĝo estas iom
paradoksa, nia gloro tre ambigua; ni povas esti vere ‘mondfamaj’ kun laŭdoj aŭtentikaj el
Ĉinujo, Brazilo, Islando, Aŭstralio, Uzbekistano, Nepalo—sed en mondo pupdomece
miniatura.
[Well, a serious Esperanto writer is more or less aware of their international readership,
although it is small; and we write, at least with the intention to be understood in every
country.
For example, I tend to avoid allusions that people from other countries would often not
understand at all … We have to find a phrase that expresses an idea in an international way,
or if we want to use a picturesque idiomatic expression to suggest a background or atmos-
phere, culture or epoch, we should have compassion on the readers and add a footnote.
…
It is also a valuable stimulus, a special pleasure, when someone from another country
writes to an author or maybe greets at a World Esperanto Congress expressing esteem.True,
I am a member of a small minority—nevertheless, in China someone read my book.
…
We esperantists have a situation that is to a certain extent unique concerning prestige.
Our prestige is a bit paradoxical, our glory is very ambiguous: We can be really ‘world-
famous’ with authentic praise from China, Brazil, Iceland, Australia, Uzbekistan, Nepal—but
in a dollhouse-like miniature world.]
Steele, who speaks fluent German, said in an interview that he would never feel confident writing
in it, since it is not his native language: “I can write in German, and have done some original stories
in that language. However, there is often a tiny doubt as to whether I have used exactly the right
expression, so I have to check and check again, a wearisome process” (2014). In Esperanto, in contrast,
the author feels at home and what is more, the planned language formed the stepping stone for his
career as a writer in English:
Why did I choose the international language? That’s a long story, but to make it brief: I
always wanted to write, but thought I had nothing new to say in English. But the fledgling
literature of Esperanto has wide gaps for any new writer. Having gained recognition for
my Esperanto books, I found I could add something to the enormous English literature as
well. (ibid.)
122
About the future of the language, Steele (2020) said:
Ke Esperanto estas matura lingvo kaj donas plej subtilajn esprim-eblojn, tio estas nun tute
klara. Se iam ĝi estos akceptita en la role, kiun Zamenhof intencis por ĝi, tre talentaj aŭtoroj
ĉiulandaj ekuzos ĝin –kaj la potencialo estas neimagebla.
[That Esperanto is a mature language and gives most subtle expressiveness, this is clear now.
If one day it is accepted in the role that Zamenhof intended for it, very talented authors
from all over the world will use it –and the potential is unimaginable.]
Conclusion
Literary translingualism in Esperanto is deliberate translingualism. Esperanto authors do not have to
leave their native languages behind as in the case of migrants or expatriates who become bilingual as
a result of war, political oppression, or economic crises. Therefore, Esperanto literary translingualism
is not connected with loss of language and identity, but enrichment.The three examples of Esperanto
writers that have been presented in this chapter help us find an answer to the question of why people
decide to write in this language. First and foremost, it has to do with the character of the language.
Esperanto’s productive word-formation and flexible syntax invites its users to be self-confident and
creative and has made it a literary language which does not lag in its expressiveness behind ethnic
languages. Its authors feel at home in this language and use it because of its merits. They do not have
to adapt to a new or foreign language, but the language adapts to them. They are, as Auld put it, “not
merely writing in Esperanto but living in it” (3).That is why authors who would never write in a for-
eign language despite their proficiency in it turn to Esperanto, as we saw in the case of Trevor Steele.
Esperanto can build bridges between languages and cultures and it is a language that is associated
with the ideas of international understanding and linguistic justice. The majority of its users support
the language because of these values, and its authors feel the desire and responsibility to make their
contribution to Esperanto’s further development as a literary language. As they write for a small com-
munity, it is relatively easy for them to gain a good reputation and they enjoy the feeling of being
internationally known. Esperanto literary translingualism can be regarded as a passionate argument
for the expressiveness of the language and its users’ strong commitment to preserve and disseminate it.
Notes
1 An exception is Sara Larbar (pseudonym of Lilia Ledon da Silva), a Brazilian teacher of French who was
brought up to speak Esperanto. Her first novel was published in 1987 (Sutton 2008: 15, 516).
2 In fact, inaccurate presentations or misapprehensions relating to Esperanto and its present use abound (cf.
Fiedler 2015). An example is the distinguished French philosopher and philologist Barbara Cassin, who said
in an interview about Esperanto: “It does not work because how could one turn it into a language? …
Esperanto does not work because it is artificial, insufficient, without any thickness of history nor of the
signifier, without authors and works –‘desperanto,’ as the poet Michel Deguy put it. As dead as a dead lan-
guage, Esperanto is no one’s maternal language” (e-flux conversations. https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/
the-power-of-bilingualism-interview-with-barbara-cassin-french-philosopher-and-philologist/6252. The
interview is a translation of the French original: Barbara Cassin. 2012. Plus d’une langue. Montrouge (Bayard
Culture).
3 For further details of the linguistic features of Esperanto, see Janton (1993), Nuessel (2000), Wennergren
(2005).
4 As the title of Corsetti’s (1996) paper reveals, it is fathers, above all, who speak Esperanto with their children.
5 Statistics on the source languages of translated literature in Germany, for example, show that the most
important languages in 2017 were English (66.5%), French (11.9%), Japanese (6.4%), Italian (2.7%) and
Swedish (2.5%) (https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/194342/umfrage/buchmarkt-hoerbuch-
umsatz-nach-warengruppen/).
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Sabine Fiedler
6 Figure 9.1 is based on data published in the Esperanto journal La Ondo de Esperanto 5/2017 (Kaliningrad,
Russia). It was created by Ulrich Becker and presented during his talk within the series “Soros Lectures in
New York 2016–2017” held on November 10, 2017 (Becker, 2017). I thank Ulrich Becker for his permission
to include the figure in this chapter.
7 This term refers to the publication of the book Kiel Fariĝi Poeto aŭ Parnasa Gvidlibro [How to become a poet
or a guidebook to Parnassus] by Kalocsay, Waringhien, and Bernard (1932), which described the rules of
Esperanto prosody and had an enormous influence on the creation of quality poetry in Esperanto.
8 For the classification of Esperanto literature, see also Pietiläinen (2005).
9 Auld (1956: XIV).
10 Translation by McKay (2015: 50/51).
11 Auld (1956: IV).
12 Translation by McKay (2015: 24).
13 E.g. Esperanto. A New Approach (1965) and Paŝoj al Plena Posedo (1968).
14 E.g. La Fenomeno Esperanto (1988).
15 If not indicated otherwise, all translations are by the author of this chapter.
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Couturat, Louis, and Léopold Leau. Histoire de la langue universelle. Hachette, 1903.
Dalgarno, George. Ars signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica. Hayes, 1661.
Fettes, Mark.“The geostrategies of interlingualism.” Languages in a Globalising World, edited by Jaques Maurais and
Michael A. Morris, Cambridge UP, 2003, pp. 37–45.
Fiedler, Sabine. Plansprache und Phraseologie: Empirische Untersuchungen zu reproduziertem Sprachmaterial im Esperanto.
Peter Lang, 1999.
———“The Esperanto denaskulo:The status of the native speaker of Esperanto within and beyond the planned
language community.” Language Problems & Language Planning, vol. 36 no. 1, 2012, pp. 69–84.
———"The topic of planned languages (Esperanto) in the current specialist literature." Language Problems &
Language Planning, vol. 39 no. 1, 2015, pp. 84–104.
——— “Planned languages” (chapter 39) Routledge Handbook Language Planning and Language Policy, edited by
François Grin, and Michele Gazzola, forthcoming.
Forster, Peter G. The Esperanto Movement. Mouton, 1982.
Janton, Pierre. Esperanto. Language, Literature, and Community, edited by H. Tonkin. Translated by H. Tonkin,
J. Edwards, and K. Johnson-Weiner (Originally published as L’ESPÉRANTO, Presses Universitaires de France
1973). State University of New York Press, 1993.
Kellman, Steven G. The Translingual Imagination. U of Nebraska P., 2000.
——— Nimble Tongues. Studies in Literary Translingualism. Purdue University Press, 2020.
Kellman, Steven G. and Natasha Lvovich. “Literary translingualism: multilingual identity and creativity.” L2
Journal vol. 7, 2015, pp. 3–5.
Lindstedt, Jouko. “Esperanto as a family language.” Lingua francas. La vehicularite linguistique pour vivre, travailler et
etudier, edited by Fred Dervin, L’Harmattan, 2010, pp. 69–80.
McKay, Girvan. William Auld’s “La infana raso” in Translation—English, Scots and Gaelic, Lulu Enterprises, 2015.
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Minnaja, Carlo. “Aliro tra la literature [Approach through literature].” Aliroj al Esperanto, edited by Christer
O. Kiselman, Kava-Pech, 2018, pp. 169–179,
Minnaja, Carlo, and Giorgio Silfer. Historio de la esperanta literaturo. La Chaux-de-Fonds: LF-koop, 2015.
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Setz, Clemens J. Ein Meister der alten Weltsprache. Wunderhorn, 2018.
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——— Interview in La Ondo de Esperanto (May 14, 2020) https://sezonoj.ru/2020/05/steele-3/
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V
Literary Translingualism in European

Languages
10
ENGLISH-FRENCH
TRANSLINGUALISM
ACROSS THE CENTURIES
Sara Kippur
In her landmark study The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova makes the case for language as
a “major component of literary capital,” arguing that “certain languages, by virtue of the prestige of
the texts written in them, are reputed to be more literary than others” (Casanova 2004, 17). It should
come as no surprise, given the global dominance of certain literary markets, that the two languages
Casanova holds up as most embodying such literary prestige are French and English. Her study
focuses mainly on the 19th and 20th centuries and shows how Paris, the post-Enlightenment literary
center, drew writers from all over the globe who sought out fame and recognition through various
engagements with French language and culture. Writing at the cusp of the 21st century, Casanova
concedes that “we find ourselves today in a transitional phase, passing from a world dominated by
Paris to a polycentric and plural world in which London and New York, chiefly … contend with
Paris for hegemony” (Casanova 164).
This chapter takes as its starting point the recognition that English and French, well before the
early 21st century, had a long and complicated literary relationship. As two of the world’s dom-
inant languages, English and French frequently came into contact with each other on the political,
linguistic, and cultural stage. We can trace that contact all the way back to the Norman Conquest,
and while linguists have amply demonstrated how the English language, especially, was modified by
virtue of proximity with French (Crystal 2004), literature scholars have also shown the strong lit-
erary influences that took place between France and England during the Hundred Years War, and that
produced such cross-linguistic tongues as Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French jargon (Butterfield 2010).
Knowledge of French and English—and an ability to compose poetic verse in both with relative
ease—was not so unusual in the early modern period, especially as it reflected a polyglot cosmopolit-
anism and aided international diplomacy (Forster 1970, 41–51). And of course, when we think of the
19th and 20th centuries, countless examples of writers come to mind who switched from English to
French, or French to English, or who wrote consistently in both languages.
Historical and political contexts certainly matter when we attempt to understand why, when,
and how writers compose texts in multiple languages. Rather than taking a purely chronological
approach to examining the history of French-English translingualism, this chapter suggests that
patterns emerge across the centuries that can provide some measure of continuity for studying writers
who have shifted between the two languages. For various reasons—some pragmatic, some personal,
some political, and some just plain haphazard—Anglophone writers have penned poems and prose
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-10 129

Sara Kippur
in French, just as Francophone writers have elected to do so in English. We should be cautious about
drawing reductive or definitive conclusions about why translingual authorship takes place: sometimes
what looks to be a calculated move designed to expand readership, increase literary prestige, or make
a political or aesthetic point might have a more complicated set of underlying rationales. In what
follows, we will take a look at some common threads that, while certainly not exhaustive, can anchor
our understanding of French-English translingualism across the centuries.
Ambilingualism, at Least Temporarily

Steven Kellman makes the important distinction, in The Translingual Imagination, between two
types of translingual writers: while monolingual translinguals write in only one, non-native tongue,
ambilinguals produce works in more than one language (Kellman 2000, 12). When we think of
the history of English-French translingualism, we are confronted with a host of different types of
ambilingual writers. In this section, we consider writers who produced works in both English and
French, but for whom one language often carried considerably more weight and recognition in
their literary corpus.
English-French translingualism was a political and cultural reality in the wake of the Norman
Conquest of England in 1066. Contact between the two languages produced the “Law French,” an
archaic juridical language related to Old Norman and used for centuries in English courts. Until
the end of the 13th century, as Butterfield argues, “French [was] the dominant cultural vernacular of
England as well as many other areas of the continent, a familiar language, shared between peoples who
were themselves part of more than one culture and landscape” (Butterfield 2010, xxvii). While there
has been debate among philologists and historians about how widely French was spoken throughout
all of England, and whether it was reserved for use by the upper classes and educated elites (see Calin
1994), scholars agree that medieval England was home to a rich intersection of vernaculars and lit-
erary exchanges. In this translingual reality, where French, English, and an English vernacular of
Anglo-French shared a common space (alongside Latin, of course), writing in multiple tongues was
less an anomaly than a logical eventuality. Butterfield, contesting rigid linguistic distinctions, puts it
this way: “writers of Middle English cannot have had an exclusive sense of writing English. To put it
more starkly in linguistic terms, anyone capable of putting English into writing had prior competence
in Latin, and most likely, French” (Butterfield 2010, 239).
In this framework, an author like Chaucer, who scholars agree was heavily influenced by French
verse, particularly in his early writings, might be read as a French-English translingual.1 But if
we adhere to our modern-day notions of linguistic difference, one of the earliest examples of
English-French translingual writers was the 14th-century poet John Gower (1330–1408), a contem-
porary of Chaucer, who, while known primarily in an English context, published verses in French
and Latin as well. Gower composed a total of three works in French: Cinkante Balades, Mirour de
L’Omme, and Traitié pour essampler les Amantz marietz. His translingual practice epitomizes a version
of cosmopolitanism characteristic of the late medieval period, where poets from both sides of the
channel—Chaucer, Gower, Jean Froissart, Jehan de la Mote, Eustache Deschamps, and others—were
aware of one another’s works and engaged in literary exchanges, often through such venues as puy
competitions (see Butterfield 2010, 237). While some scholars have read Gower’s later poem in
English, “In Praise of Peace,” as the pinnacle of his writing career (Fisher 1964)—an explanation,
besides Gower’s birthplace, for why he is most familiar in Anglophone circles—his decision to write
part of his poetic corpus in French is critical to his literary legacy, and reflective of the linguistic
fluidity of the time.
Some writers have written temporarily in their non-native tongue as a result of political
circumstances. This was the case for Charles d’Orléans (1394– 1465), a French writer who
straddled the late medieval and early modern periods, and who was taken prisoner in England
during the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). Captured in 1415 and not released until 1440,
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English-French Translingualism
Charles d’Orléans devoted years of his captivity to writing verse, both in French and English. We
can understand his bilingual poetic practice as indicative of his geographic location and “enforced
exile” in various English noblemen’s estates over the course of twenty-five years (Hokenson
2013, 56); it’s difficult to imagine that he would have written in English otherwise, especially
considering that he learned English while imprisoned. Scholars of Charles d’Orléans’ works have
tried to understand why he left much of his English poetry behind him when he returned
to France, and what connections can be drawn between the roughly 13,000 lines of verse he
composed in French and English. Though broadly a parallel oeuvre, the French text would go
on to be significantly revised and updated after 1440, a far more “open-ended” and evolving
work than the English verses left behind (Arn 2000, 77). A.E.B. Coldiron has shown that, though
Charles d’Orléans has always been a part of French literary history, manuscript studies reveal
that his poetry was also read and owned by a middle-class, commercial audience well into the
Renaissance (A.E.B. Coldiron 2000a, 80–85). Translingualism was largely situational, in Charles
d’Orléans’ case, and in that sense the resulting French-English manuscripts serve as an important
historical document testifying to the “final separation between two nations that had been as one
since 1066” (A.E.B. Coldiron 2000b, 183).
We can trace this notion of temporary ambilingualism well into the Renaissance and modern
era. Multilingualism was expected among European court poets, who could ably switch between
languages to address different audiences. The German court poet George Rudolf Weckherlin (1584–
1653), as one example, wrote poetry in English and French when welcoming ambassadors from
other countries. This was part of a polyglot culture, Leonard Forster argues, in which for Weckherlin
and other “men of their time, there is no mystique about languages; there are simply different media
in which a poet can work—and can be expected to work” (Forster 1970, 47). The fluidity between
tongues, and the expectation that one—and especially one with means—could freely move between
them, can help us understand why a poet like Goethe would have composed verses in English and
French, or that a wealthy English merchant like William Beckford (1760–1844) could write a novel
in French, Vathek, in 1786, without anyone thinking it “odd” or “disgraceful” (Forster 1970, 54). Part
of the reason for that might very well be that the book was published in English translation—and
praised by such literary voices as Lord Byron—before the French versions came out, in editions
unauthorized by Beckford (Keymer 2013). An orientalist novel inspired by Beckford’s knowledge of
Arabic texts, and that has been called an early example of “queer Gothic” literature (Haggerty 2006),
Vathek stands out in Beckford’s corpus as both his only French-language work, and the book that
would earn him praise from later writers and critics, from Stéphane Mallarmé and André Gide, to
Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag.
A temporary foray into French sometimes had political and pragmatic motivations. Such was the
case with the late 18th-century writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813). Born into
a wealthy French family in Normandy, Crèvecoeur immigrated to America in 1755, at the age of
twenty, living first in New France before moving to the province of New York. Crèvecoeur became
known for his volume of fictional letters, written in English and titled Letters from an American Farmer
(1782) that describe American society upon the nation’s birth. Crèvecoeur considered himself an
American writer, so much so that when he returned to France in 1781, and was asked to write dir-
ectly in French, he balked at the opportunity, saying that his French-language ability was not up to
the challenge. Crèvecoeur had become something of a celebrity in the late 18th-century salon cul-
ture of Paris, and French readers without a strong working knowledge of English were eager to learn
more about a Frenchman’s firsthand account of American cultural life. With the help of the salonnière
Madame d’Houdetot and her literary circle, Crèvecoeur went on to translate and publish a French
version of his Letters—an act that some have read as a testament to Crèvecoeur’s cosmopolitanism
and cultural diplomacy (Moore 2011). Indeed, Crèvecoeur’s decision to self-translate, despite seeing
himself as first and foremost an American writer, signaled his willingness to serve as a cultural ambas-
sador of sorts between the two nations. The early 19th century would see other such ambassadors
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Sara Kippur
who traveled to the United States and reported back to French readers about their impressions of
American culture and politics—François-René de Chateaubriand’s Voyage en Amérique (1826) and
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Démocratie en Amérique (1835), for example. Crèvecoeur’s success not only
anticipated this cultural phenomenon; it also singularly demonstrated how literary bilingualism, even
if practiced briefly, could cultivate distinct reading publics on both sides of the Atlantic.
A century later, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé reminds us of other political reasons for language choice.
Written originally in French in 1891, Salomé stands out as a linguistic outlier among the Irishman’s
other plays, novels, and essays. Wilde (1854–1900) wrote Salomé while living in Paris, which explains
in part his language choice. Wilde is reported to have explained his decision to write in French as a
personal aesthetic challenge:
I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language. There
was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this
new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it.
(qtd in Ellmann 1988, 337)
There may have been political reasons for Wilde’s choice, too: at a time in British law when
depicting biblical stories was forbidden, Salomé had a better chance of reaching the stage in Paris than
in London.2 This was especially the case since France had lifted its laws against crimes of “offenses
against public and religious morality” ten years earlier, in 1881.3 Wilde’s linguistic choice, in that sense,
anticipates 20th-century tropes of France, and the French language, as a safe haven for artistic expres-
sion (see, for example, Casanova 2004, 30–31).
When we look at the history of French-English translingualism in the 20th century, we
find many writers who wrote consistently and extensively in both languages, and who will be
discussed in the next section. A notable exception was Julien Green (1900–1998), born in Paris
to American parents, who made a literary career primarily in the French language. Green is
remembered in France as the first foreigner to be elected to the Académie française—a consider-
able honor and confirmation of his acceptance in the world of French letters—while he is far less
familiar to English-language readers. The prolific Green wrote dozens of novels, plays, and auto-
biographical texts in French, but only a select few works in English, mainly self-translations from
the French including Memories of Happy Days (1942), South (1959), and the facing-page bilingual
works Le langage et son double (1985) and L’homme et son ombre (1991). Some scholars, comparing
Green’s work in French and English, have argued that his simple, refined style lent itself well
to translation (Hokenson and Munson 2007, 188). Writing in English was, for Green, a way to
connect to his family’s southern American heritage—and this especially for a writer whose reli-
gious faith, converting as he did from Protestantism to Catholicism after his mother’s death, was
a frequent preoccupation in his writings. Writing in English also taught Green, as he expressed
it in the essay “An Experiment in English” published in Le langage et son double, to appreciate the
problem of literary translingualism:
It [writing in English] hasn’t helped me much in understanding the relationship of language

to human beings—in a way it has made it seem even more mysterious than I fancied—but it
has enabled me to apprehend more clearly the problem of foreign writers who are at present
experimenting with the English language.
(Green 2004, 196)
In that sense, we can understand Green’s literary practice as one in which occasional self-translation
into English allowed him to connect to a larger community of translingual writers. His bilingualism
was not a “struggle for linguistic legitimacy” (Casanova 2004, 278), to return to Casanova, but rather
a productive opportunity to think and write like a foreigner.
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In considering transient translingualism between English and French, we would be remiss not to
mention writers for whom experimentation in French was often a means to an end, or a momentary
phase of their career. T.S. Eliot’s four “practice pieces” in French have been cited as successful poems
in their own right and are included among his published works (Forster 1970, 75). Other writers,
who were neither Francophone nor Anglophone by birth, sometimes found themselves de passage
in the French language, en route to English. Such was the case for translingual writers like Vladimir
Nabokov, who wrote “Mademoiselle O” (1936) and “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable”
(1937) in French before turning definitively to writing in English, or even Joseph Conrad, who,
while never publishing in French, was reported to have said “When I write I translate the word of my
thoughts in French. This is an impossible process for one desiring to make a living by writing in the
English language” (qtd in Ford 2013, 37).4 The vagaries of life—Conrad leaving France to join the
British merchant navy, or Nabokov’s immigration to the US—would sometimes be enough to create
Anglophone writers, but whose translingual ties to the French language should not be undervalued.
As this rough schema suggests, writers for nearly a millennium have found themselves at the cross-
roads of English and French. While the bulk of their literary output may have been in one of those
languages, they found reasons to venture—even temporarily—into another tongue, which sometimes
had profound effects on their aesthetic project and literary legacy.
Integral Literary Bilingualism

Why would writers devote an entire career to writing original works in two languages? This question
has been taken up by scholars working in a variety of linguistic disciplines. Dan Miron, for instance,
asks why the 19th-century Hebrew-Yiddish writer S.Y. Abramovitsh, more commonly known as
Mendele the Book Peddler, would have bothered to write “the same text twice, with no practical
necessity justifying the effort of duplication” (Miron 2010, 297). Miron calls this a practice of “inte-
gral literary bilingualism,” as distinct from a diglossic practice that he labels “differential literary bilin-
gualism,” and he goes on to explain Mendele’s choice in terms of the competing cultural identities of
Hebrew and Yiddish in the second half of the 19th century. The “integral literary bilingualism” that
we see among many French-English writers, particularly in the modern era, has an entirely different
set of explanations that cannot be unequivocally understood, either, by Pascale Casanova’s depiction
of language choice as “explained only by the weight of the unequal structure of the literary world”
(Casanova 2004, 281).To narrow the question that opens this section: why would an author choose to
write consistently in English and French, two of the world’s most dominant literary languages? And
how does the fact of writing in both languages affect their work and its reception?
Most of the examples we have of writers engaged in a committed practice of French-English
bilingualism hail from the 20th century. Some of the ambilingual writers that we encountered in the
last section, such as Charles d’Orléans and Julien Green, did practice integral literary bilingualism for
a select number of their writings, but not with the degree of consistency and exhaustivity of French-
English writers like Samuel Beckett, Raymond Federman, and Nancy Huston.
The legacy of Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) looms large over the 20th century, and not just in the
realm of literary bilingualism. The famed Irish Nobel prize winner exploded literary conventions
across his radically innovative plays and novels. That he persisted in doing so by committing him-
self to writing and translating nearly all his works between English and French has been a source of
many scholarly studies.5 Scholars and biographers have offered many reasons for Beckett’s turn to
French—his dissatisfaction with the quality of the English translations; the chance to differentiate
himself from James Joyce; the possibility, quoting Beckett, that in French he could write “sans style,”
without style. Sinéad Mooney describes the exact moment, in February 1946, when Beckett first
wrote prose in French: composing a text that would later be called “La Fin,” Beckett “drew a line
across the page, translated the previous paragraph into French, and continued the rest of the story in
that language” (Mooney 2011, 81). Beckett wrote many of his novels first in French, and many of
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his plays first in English, carefully translating the work into the other language, often with massive
excisions, additions, and alterations between the two. Beckett was exacting in his lexical and stylistic
choices, which may explain why he found the task of self-translation so excruciating. His personal
correspondence with the American theater director Alan Schneider is riddled with references to
the painfulness of translation—“Perspiring over French translation of That Time—Footfalls,” Beckett
wrote in 1977, adding, “Hopeless thankless chore” (Harmon 1998, 355). Authors’ claims about the
misery of self-translation are not uncommon, as Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour (1989) reminds us. With
Beckett, we can add that pain and misery are baked into his literary project, evident among all the
wandering derelicts, unnamed strangers, and disembodied voices that populate his fictional universe.
In that sense, we might also read Beckett’s self-imposed integral literary bilingualism as a linguistic
analogue to his literary and philosophical vision of the world.
There is little doubt that Beckett’s model for translingual writing inspired a host of other writers
to follow in his footsteps. Raymond Federman (1928–2009) openly said as much, and his literary
career—bookended by a dissertation on Beckett in 1963 and by an autobiographical tribute, The Sam
Book (2006), on the other—reveals the tenacity of this influence. Federman’s linguistic shift went in
reverse and was largely motivated, at least initially, by historical circumstances: born into a Jewish
family in the outskirts of Paris, Federman saw his parents and two sisters arrested in the July 1942 Vel
d’Hiv round-ups, never to return. The closet where Federman hid would become a frequent motif
and reference point in his writings, as would the farm in the south of France to which he escaped and
lived out the war. Federman immigrated to the United States in 1947, with the help of a relative who
lived in Detroit.Though his personal narrative in many ways reflects a familiar immigration story, the
literary style he would go on to develop—highly experimental and metafictional, with strong ties
to concrete poetry—is anything but conventional. With a few exceptions,6 Federman published pri-
marily in English in the early decades of his career, but when he was re-discovered in Parisian literary
circles in the early 21st century, he set out to translate nearly the entirety of his works into French,
while also taking on new writing projects directly in that language (Kippur 2015, 49–52). We could
say, then, that Federman’s practice of translingualism had strong ties to the demands and interests of
the literary market: once he had an audience in France, and an editor eager to publish the ensemble
of his works, he wrote in French at a feverish pace. At the same time, writing and publishing across
languages allowed Federman both to enact his connection to his literary mentor and to further cer-
tain experimental techniques he had honed, such as unsettling the boundaries between genres, words,
and languages, or calling into question the accuracy of memory by publishing competing accounts of
the same event. Federman once wrote that a book of his “feels unfinished if it does not exist in the
other language” and that he “want[s]‌the two languages in me to corrupt one another” (Federman
1993, 79 and 83). The ability to publish on both sides of the Atlantic allowed Federman to achieve
those personal and narrative goals.
When prompted to explain her translingual project, the Anglophone Canadian writer Nancy
Huston (b. 1953) frequently calls upon Beckett: “When people ask me what it feels like to trans-
late my own work, my answer is again the same as Beckett’s, i.e.: ‘Self-translation is the only form
of political torture I know’ ” (Huston 2008, 57). The Beckett quote may be spurious—there is no
clear record of it—but it once again signals his critical role as a reference point for French-English
translingualism. Like Beckett, Huston is a native English speaker who made France her home and
developed a careful and committed practice of self-translation. Unlike Beckett, Nancy Huston’s inte-
gral literary bilingualism relies on a unique principle: ever since 1993, when she composed her first
self-translation, Huston chooses her original language of composition based on the linguistic abil-
ities of her characters. Thus if her characters are French speakers, the book will be written first in
French before Huston translates it into English, and vice versa. Huston’s compositional practice made
headlines in 1993 when her novel Cantique des plaines, composed initially in English as Plainsong
because of its setting in Alberta, was nominated for (and won) Québec’s top literary prize, Le prix
du gouverneur-général. Critics argued that a translation, even one penned by the author and published
134
simultaneously with the English edition, should not be eligible for an award in the category of
“romans et nouvelles de langue française” (“French-language fiction and short stories”).7 The argument
failed to convince the jury, and Huston went on to solidify her compositional practice across dozens
of novels, some written first in French, others in English, and all translated into the other language.
Huston’s pretense to the accurate diegetic representation of language—what translation scholars have
called “vehicular matching” (Sternberg 1981) or “verbal authenticity” (Kellman 2000, 104)—is radic-
ally undermined by her twin commitment to translation, a productive tension that illustrates Huston’s
distinctive contribution to French-English translingualism: for her, integral literary bilingualism can
call attention to those moments of dépaysement, of linguistic culture shock, that, well beyond her two
literary languages, are endemic to our contemporary global world.
For writers like Beckett, Federman, and Huston, we have seen a distinct choice to write in French,
even for an author, like Federman, for whom it was his native tongue. Robert Jouanny would situate
these cases as part of a broader 20th-century phenomenon of “multidirectional internationalism”
[“internationalisme multidirectionnel”] that produced many French writers not born in French-
speaking territories (Jouanny 2000, 17). In the decision to remain steadfast in their commitment
to Miron’s “integral literary bilingualism,” or what Hokenson and Munson have aptly labeled “the
bilingual text” (2007), these writers demonstrate that a translingual practice in English and French
can serve, in varying ways, to index the linguistic, philosophical, and psychological complexities of
modern life.
Language and Migration

While many French-English translingual writers have written in both languages, whether temporarily
or consistently across their careers, other writers have opted to swap one language for another. These
writers belong to Kellman’s category of “monolingual translinguals” (Kellman 2000, 12). Writing in
a second language is a conventional feature and subject of more narratives of American immigration
than one could reasonably count—such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), Nabokov’s Speak,
Memory (1951), and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989), to name but a few. In the context of
French-English translingualism, language-swapping is often less a personal choice than a necessary
reality based on a writer’s language abilities and chosen literary community. “My internal monologue
ever so gradually shifted from French into English,” reflects the Belgian writer Luc Sante, whose
family immigrated to America when he was five years old (Sante 2003, 160). Sante’s decision to write
in English, often to tell personal tales of growing up in New York, was ultimately not a decision at
all: “English became my rod and my staff, my tool and my weapon, at length my means of making a
living” (Sante 2003, 160). A native tongue simply becomes impractical if little practiced.
In this light, while we might label a particular writer “American,” “English,” or “French”—or
“Belgian,” as the case may be—because of their birthplace, their literary upbringing can take place
in another tongue. Such was the case for the poet Stuart Merrill (1863–1915), who was born in
New York, but whose family moved to Paris when he was three years old. Merrill’s education and
literary formation occurred in French, making the fact that he wrote poetry in that tongue unsur-
prising. Under Stéphane Mallarmé’s tutelage, Merrill aligned himself with the Symbolist poets and
published several poetry collections in the late 19th century that earned him recognition. In his
collection Les gammes (1887), for instance, nearly each of Merrill’s poems is dedicated to another
late 19th-century French author or poet—Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,
Paul Verlaine—thereby recording his firm ties to contemporaries in the French literary community.
Merrill was nonetheless always marked as a linguistic outsider, as signaled in the title of one of the
only monographs dedicated to his work, La contribution d’un Américain au symbolisme français (Ilsley
1927). Merrill once self-translated a collection of his poetry into English, Pastels in Prose (1890), but
he remained largely unknown in America, a sign of the challenge for translingual writers to belong
fully in either linguistic context.
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Sara Kippur
One could make a similar case for the contemporary writer Jonathan Littell, an American born in
New York, but educated through high school in France. Littell made a huge literary splash in 2006 with
his novel Les Bienveillantes, a Holocaust narrative told from the perspective of a Nazi perpetrator.When
asked why he wrote the novel in French, Littell claimed that he was seeking a stronger connection
with his French literary models, Gustave Flaubert and Stendhal. The ambitious novel, both in topic
and scope (it’s nearly a thousand pages) won two of France’s most illustrious literary prizes, the Prix
Goncourt and the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française, the first time an American had earned
either honor. Littell’s consecration aligned with that of other writers that year who similarly were not
born in France but were the beneficiaries of literary prizes. That fact prompted a group of writers to
author “For a World Literature in France” [Pour une littérature-monde en français], a manifesto published
in Le monde that hailed the dawn of a new era where “French” literature could be disentangled from
the nation-state so as to encompass any work written in that language, regardless of a writer’s origins
(“Pour une littérature-monde” 2007). In promoting a more expansive notion of French literature, sig-
natories of the manifesto sought to rupture problematic hierarchies that would place writers not born
in France, such as Littell, at the margins. Somewhat paradoxically, that same month, French author-
ities conferred French citizenship on Littell, citing the success of Les Bienveillantes as proof under the
national code that his “contributions to the glory of France” justified citizenship (Combes 2007).
Littell has published a number of lesser-known novels ever since, all in French.
These examples suggest the ways in which migration to a foreign country, and a literary formation
in that country’s language, can strongly influence language choice. What happens, though, when one
hails from a country or region in which English and French are both official languages?
Language Mixing in Francophone Communities

The stakes of French-English translingualism are specific and unique in communities where both
languages are spoken. The translation scholar Sherry Simon has done extensive work on this sub-
ject in her scholarship on bilingualism in Québec. In her book Translating Montreal, Simon examines
the history from the 1940s to the present of this geographically and linguistically “divided city,”
where crossing literary boundaries between English and French carries significant political and cul-
tural weight. Simon calls attention to the moments of productive interchange between languages—
moments that show how language mixing can reshape dynamics between the Francophone and
Anglophone communities. Works such as A.M. Klein’s poem “Montreal,” Larry Tremblay’s play The
Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, Robert Morin’s film Yes Sir! Madame, as well as poetry and fiction by Gail
Scott, Jacques Brault, Nicole Brossard, and Agnes Whitfield, among others, show how French and
English can move beyond frictions in such a way that “creative interference becomes the basis of a
transcultural poetics” (Simon 2006, 125).
In a Québécois context, language choice can thus be particularly fraught with meaning and sym-
bolism. Agnes Whitfield’s decision to write poetry in French, despite hailing from an Anglophone
Canadian family in Québec, could be read as a kind of linguistic conversion or betrayal, but Simon
cautions against such rigid thinking; Whitfield’s poetic practice, based on an idea of “translation
without the original” hinges on a “meshing of cultures and languages” (Simon 2006, 143). Similarly,
when an author like Daniel Gagnon chose to write a French and English version of his novel La
fille à marier /The Marraigeable Daughter (1984), he instantiates literarily the fact of living in a border
zone, constantly “suspended between languages” (Simon 1999, 71). A case such as this of integral lit-
erary bilingualism, in a linguistically fraught region such as Québec, thus has—quite unlike Beckett,
Federman, or Huston’s examples—enormous political and cultural implications.
We can consider additional border zones between French and English in the Americas, especially
considering the mass migration of French-Canadian writers into the United States in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. One such immigrant family, the Kerouacs, produced one of America’s most
celebrated writers, born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac before changing his name officially to Jack
136
(1922–1969). Kerouac spoke only French as a child and lived in the largely French-speaking commu-
nity called Centralville, in Lowell, Massachusetts, until he was ten (Johnson 2012, 31). Scholars have
recently uncovered some of Kerouac’s earliest unpublished writings, including La Nuit est ma femme
(The Night is my Wife) and Sur le chemin (On the Road), discoveries that demonstrate transparently not
just the translingualism of Kerouac’s literary trajectory, but also—as evinced in the name—the French
underpinnings of what would become one of the great American novels.
Beyond the Americas, other regions have been sites of contact between French and English.
On the African continent, as Kellman notes, “it is colonialism, European domination not only of
Africa’s economies and politics but its cultures as well, rather than relocation that accounts for most
translingualism” (Kellman 2000, 42). A country like Cameroon, divided between French and British
rule in the wake of World War I, has produced many writers in French or English, but rarely both.
A notable exception is the playwright Guillaume Oyônô-Mbia (b. 1939), who has written plays in
both French and English that are frequently performed in middle and secondary schools and that
actively contest political power and social hierarchies (Nkashama 2004). Oyônô-Mbia translated
many of the plays himself—such as Trois prétendants: un mari /Three Suitors: one husband (1960)—and
one can understand his translingualism less as a contact zone between two colonial languages than
as a deep engagement, in both French and English, between tradition and modernity, and between
African and western ideologies. As Oyônô-Mbia puts it in his introduction to the play: “the audi-
ence will learn something about the major problem facing Africans today: is it possible to make room
for the new while at the same time preserving the old?” (Oyônô-Mbia and Badian 1988, 3). Of
course, Oyônô-Mbia posed this question in a colonial tongue, a result in part of the French colonial
government’s considerable investment in “cultural expression in its former colonies,” so long as works
were written in French (Bjornson 1988, viii). The fact that Oyônô-Mbia did not write in an African
language serves as a crucial reminder that language choice, especially in a colonial context marked by
structural inequities, can have profound economic and political explanations.
The richness of exchange between French and English, in all its various forms across the centuries,
makes it impossible to catalog an exhaustive list of writers. My aim, rather, has been to frame a his-
torical look at French-English translingualism through a series of categories—whether as a tem-
porary practice, an integral engagement with bilingual poetics, a result of migration, or a product of
Francophone regionalism—that can accommodate many other writers whose work has not been
treated in this chapter. These four categories are certainly not finite, and in several cases, one could
reasonably argue that an author might well exceed the boundaries of the category to which he or
she has been assigned. Fluidity between and across boundaries is, one could say, the defining feature
of translingualism, so I will end by inviting readers to extend this growing corpus with additional
French-English writers who both fit into, and complicate, any clear-cut categorizations.
Notes
1 James Wimsatt (1982) has even suggested that Chaucer may have published original verses in French, in a
manuscript titled “Ch”, a claim that other Chaucer scholars have contested (see Strakhov 2015).
2 This did indeed come to pass: the first staging in Paris took place in 1896, while Wilde was imprisoned
in England for “gross indecency,” whereas the first London performance was only in 1905, five years after
Wilde’s death.
3 For more on legal history and artistic freedom in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds over the 19th and
20th centuries, see Ladenson (2007).
4 For more on Nabokov and Conrad’s connections to the French language, see respectively Foster 1993 and
Hervouet 1990.
5 See, for example, Beer 1994; Cohn 1961; Fitch 1988; Mooney 2011; Sardin-Damestoy 2002; and Scheiner 1999.
6 These include Amer Eldorado (1974), which inspired his book Take It or Leave It, and his bilingual publication,
The Voice in the Closet /La voix dans le cabinet de débarras (1979).
7 For more on this controversy, see Kippur 2015, 28–35, and Yergeau 1994, 141–54.
137
Sara Kippur
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Arn, Mary-Jo. “Two Manuscripts, One Mind: Charles d’Orléans and the Production of Manuscripts in Two
Languages” (Paris, BN MS fr. 25458 and London, BL MS Harley 682).”Charles d’Orléans in England 1415–
1440, edited by Mary-Jo. Rochester: Daniel S. Brewer, 2000, pp. 61–78.
Beer, Ann. “Beckett’s Bilingualism.” The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, edited by John Pilling.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 209–21.
Bjornson, Richard. “Introduction.” Faces of African Independence:Three Plays, by Oyônô-Mbia, Guillaume and Seydou
Badian. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988, pp. vii–xxxvi.
Butterfield, Ardis. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War. New York: Oxford
Calin,William. The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters, translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004.
Cohn, Ruby. “Samuel Beckett Self-Translator,” PMLA 76: 5 (Dec. 1961), pp. 613–21.
Coldiron, A.E.B. Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles d’Orléans: Found in Translation. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2000a.
———. “Translation, Canons, and Cultural Capital: Manuscripts and Reception of Charles d’Orléans’ English
Poetry.” Charles d’Orléans in England 1415–1440, edited by Mary-Jo Rochester and Daniel S. Brewer, 2000b,
pp. 183–214.
Combes, Marie Laure. “American Novelist Becomes French Citizen,” The Associated Press, March 9, 2007.
Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York:Vintage, 1988.
Federman, Raymond. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Fisher, John H. John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer. New York: New York University Press, 1964.
Fitch, Brian T. An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work: Beckett and Babel.Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1988.
Ford, Ford Madox. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Forster, Leonard. The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature. Dunedin: Univeristy of Otago Press, 1970.
Foster, John Burt. Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Green, Julien. Le langage et son double. Paris: Fayard, 2004.
Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Harmon, Maurice, ed. No Author Better Served:The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Hervouet,Yves. The French Face of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Hokenson, Jan. “History and the Self-translator.” Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, edited by
Anthony Cordingley. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 39–60.
Hokenson, Jan and Marcella Munson. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self- Translation.
Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007.
Huston, Nancy. “Traduttore non è traditore,” The Harvard Advocate, 2008 (Winter), pp. 54–57.
Ilsley, Marjorie Henry. La contribution d’un Américain au symbolisme français. Paris: Champion, 1927.
Johnson, Joyce. The Voice is All:The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. New York:Viking, 2012.
Jouanny, Robert. Singularités francophones, ou, choisir d’écrire en français. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000.
Kellman, Steven G. The Translingual Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Keymer,Thomas.“Introduction.” Vathek, by William Beckford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. ix–xxix.
Kippur, Sara. Writing It Twice: Self-translation and the Making of a World Literature in French. Evanston: Northwestern
Klosty Beaujour, Elizabeth. Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration. Ithaca: Cornell
Ladenson, Elisabeth. Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita.” Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2007.
Merrill, Stuart. Les gammes: vers. Paris:Vanier, 1887.
Miron, Dan. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University
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Mooney, Sinéad. A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Moore, Andrew. “The American Farmer as French Diplomat: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in New York after
1783.” Journal of the Western Society for French History, vol. 39, 2011, pp. 133–43.
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Nkashama, Pius Ngandu. “Theatricality and Social Mimodrama.” African Drama and Performance, edited by John
Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Oyônô-Mbia, Guillaume and Seydou Badian. Faces of African Independence:Three Plays. Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 1988.
Sante, Luc. “Dummy.” Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft, edited by Steven G. Kellman.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003, pp. 141–61.
Sardin-Damestoy, Pascale. Samuel Beckett auto- traducteur ou l’art de l’empêchement. Arras: Artois Presses
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Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 175–84.
Simon, Sherry. “Translating and Interlingual Creation in the Contact zone: Border Writing in Quebec.”
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———.Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006.
Sternberg, Meir. “Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis,” Poetics Today, vol. 2, no. 4, Summer-
Autumn 1981, pp. 221–39.
Strakhov, Elizaveta. “The Poems of ‘Ch’.” Taxonimizing Literary Tradition.” Taxonomies of Knowledge: Information
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Yergeau, Robert. A tout prix: les prix littéraires au Québec. Montreal: Triptyque, 1994.
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& Brewer, 1982.
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11
FRENCH IN THE WORLD
Francophone Literary Translingualism
Introduction
Literary translingualism in French is a multifaceted phenomenon located at the intersection of indi-
vidual trajectories and collective destinies, transnational mobilities, and global power structures. This
is illustrated by the history of the French language itself, which has been used as a tool of both
national centralization and colonial expansion while being simultaneously transformed in the works
of writers from all parts of the so-called “Francophone” world. While this “Francophone” epithet
has had its own controversial history, I will be using it here to refer to all writers writing in French
including those for whom French is the mother tongue—for example, writers from France, Quebec,
or Belgium. The translingual writers on whom I will focus in this chapter constitute a smaller albeit
vastly diverse subset of Francophone writers.
The works of translingual writers in French resonate with those of many translingual writers
around the world who, in the process of writing in languages “other” than their “own,” create hybrid
and polyphonic texts that also challenge linguistic boundaries and complicate dichotomies between
“primary” and “secondary” languages. However, translingual writers in French have had distinct his-
tories for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, their literary destinies are wedded to a language,
French, that gave birth to Francophonie, a broad notion and terminology with no equivalent in any
other language. During the second part of the twentieth century, in the wake of many countries’
independence from French colonial domination, the global history of French has given rise to this
unique transnational phenomenon of Francophonie as an overarching umbrella with linguistic, lit-
erary, and institutional definitions under which translingual writers in French should be re-situated
without, however, being confined to it.
As this introductory attempt at terminological definitions already suggests, establishing neat cat-
egories and borders in a field as fluid and diverse as translingual literature in French is a moot project
albeit a productive one. This complexity is compounded by the fact that although many writers of
African and Caribbean descent, for example, write in a language, French, that was not necessarily
spoken in their homes or spoken alongside other languages, many of them were educated in a French-
speaking system that has been a persistent part of the French colonial legacy. This very impossibility
to delineate neat boundaries around the phenomenon of literary translingualism in French is also, and
precisely, an important common denominator for these writers. Indeed, the “trans” in translingualism
does not simply represent a route or passage from one language into another for these writers but,
140 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-11

instead, the literary “destination” itself and the very material of their creative imaginations and lit-
erary enterprises. These writers are therefore working between unity and diversity, within the plastic
and porous borders of “one” language, French, that is tightly connected to the history of France
and French political dominance but that has also been appropriated and reworked by these writers
to express their multiple and particular identities and idiosyncrasies—cultural, national, and ethnic
among others.
The panoramic overview that I offer in this chapter should not be seen as a fixed snapshot but,
instead, as both a limited and open “portal” into the worlds of translingual writers who have chosen
French as a means of literary expression for multiple and sometimes contradictory reasons. Beyond
the broad Francophone category, and even beyond the expansive contours of translingual literature
itself, the works that I cover in this overview are inextricably part and parcel of a translingual shift in
contemporary literature and literary studies, a shift that itself is a response to our increasingly multi-
lingual world. This overview will therefore also, I hope, invite and facilitate further passages into the
multilingual fields of world literature presented in this collective volume.
Translingual Writers in French: Histories and Typologies

In trying to sketch out a general overview of translingual writers in French one can resort to a var-
iety of taxonomies based on historical, geopolitical, and even thematic rubrics. Such taxonomies
first need to be described through the historical and geopolitical lens of French as both a national
and transnational language of cultural, political, and ideological power. While the translingual writers
considered here each have a particular relation to French determined by discreet personal trajectories,
their translingual experiences can also be described along certain commonalities tied to the complex
history of French as a persistent global language.
Signed in 1539 by King Francis I, the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts institutionalized French as
the official language of France by prescribing its use, instead of Latin, in court ordinances and rulings.
In his manifesto Défense et illustration de la langue française published in 1549, the French poet Joachim
Du Bellay advocates the use of French, considered to be barbaric and vulgar by Latin users, as a living
and flexible language that can incorporate new words. In 1635, the creation of the Académie Française
by Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to Louis XIII, seals the relations among language, culture, and
institutions in France. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French is considered to be
the “universal” language of education, culture, and diplomacy. While the development of European
nationalisms and Romanticism emphasize the importance of the “mother tongue” as a site of both
national and literary authenticity during the nineteenth century, French maintains its global status
until the end of World War II when, alongside the rise of the US as a global super-power, English
establishes itself as the new international language.
From the foundation of the Académie Française in 1635 to the creation of the Organisation
Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) in 1970, French has stood as a symbolic bastion of the “one and
indivisible” French Republic, the official language of France, and the carrier of the universal values
of its 1789 Revolution. Natalie Edwards describes “the monolingual imperative in France” as follows:
The Académie continues to publish the definitive dictionary of standard French and advises on a
legal framework that is charged with protecting the language. … In the case of regional languages,
these have been actively discouraged and the French government forbade their teaching in schools
until the 1950s. … More broadly, the Ministère de la Culture, the French Ministry of Culture, is
charged with developing and overseeing policies related to the French language.
(8–9)
Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegalese poet and philosopher, the first president of independent
Senegal in 1960, one of the founding fathers of Francophonie as a global institution, and the first
141
African writer to be elected to the Académie Française in 1983, famously celebrated French as a “Sun
shining outside metropolitan France,” as a “concise,” “precise and nuanced” “language of culture” that
expresses French “humanism,” its “morality,” and “universal character,” thereby echoing Antoine de
Rivarol’s well-known encomium of French, of its “incorruptible” syntax and “admirable clarity” in
his Discours sur l’universalité de la langue française (1783).1
Literary translingualism in French has developed as both a continuing celebration of French and,
to use the title of the Senegalese writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s 1961 novel l’Aventure ambiguë,
as an “ambiguous adventure” shaped by varied individual situations and motivations. According to
Alain Ausoni, literary translingualism in French proceeds from a “double movement”: on the one
hand, by highlighting the rupture of any organic relation between French and national belonging, it
legitimizes the status of a “foreign” literature in French; on the other hand, literary translingualism
in French “demonstrates and reinforces the privileged place occupied by French as a literary lan-
guage” since “the French language is not just another language” and cannot be “entirely foreign”
to its writers because it “remains a literary lingua franca” (23). While the universal preeminence of
French may have faded especially with the rise of English, after World War II and the creation of
the European Union multilingualism becomes particularly important in a globalizing Europe. The
role of France, and especially of Paris, in the first half of the twentieth century as a global and avant-
garde literary and cultural capital and the gathering place, temporarily or permanently, of writers
from around the world also explains why so many non-native French-speaking writers have joined
the French literary scene. As Charles Forsdick notes, although “the early twenty-first century may
be seen as a quintessentially ‘translingual’ moment” because of the “emergence of the phenom-
enon known as ‘world literature’ (littérature-monde)”—a phenomenon we will examine later—“it is
important to recognize twentieth-century precedents, triggered not least by the political upheavals
of revolution and war. Samuel Beckett [born in Ireland], Romain Gary [born in Russia], Joseph
Kessel [born in Argentina], and Nathalie Sarraute [born in Russia] belong to an earlier generation
of such authors” (207). Among the many writers who come into exile and settle in France Milan
Kundera represents a particularly famous and remarkable example of literary integration. Born in
then Czechoslovakia in 1929, Kundera went into exile in 1975 in France to escape the Soviet-
dominated communist regime in his home country and became a French citizen in 1981. Although
he originally wrote in Czech (one of his most famous novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was
first written in Czech), since the 1990s his novels (including La Lenteur, L’Identité, L’Ignorance, and
La Fête de l’insignifiance) have been written directly in French.
Multiple translingual writers are now considered to be an integral part of the French canonical
literary corpus and have even been incorporated into the French literary establishment by being
awarded prestigious literary prizes. Among many possible examples one can mention Elsa Triolet
who, after publishing three novels in Russian, started publishing in French and became in 1944
the first woman to receive the Goncourt prize. Ausoni notes that since the beginning of the 1990s,
translingual writers (including Eduardo Manet, Andreï Makine, Vassilis Alexakis, Boris Schreiber,
Nancy Huston, François Cheng, Shan Sa, Dai Sijie, and Atiq Rahimi) have received about 10 percent
of French literary prizes, a high percentage relatively to their proportional importance in the literary
corpus in French. For Ausoni again, 1995 is a particularly remarkable year in that regard since the
Russian-born author Andreï Makine received the Goncourt, the Goncourt des lycéens, and the Médicis
French literary prizes for Le Testament français while Alexakis also received the Médicis for his auto-
biographical novel La Langue maternelle, in which a Greek protagonist, back in Paris, examines his
relationship with his mother tongue. This same year, the Argentinian-born writer Hector Bianciotti
published Le Pas si lent de l’amour, in which he too examines his arrival in France and “passage” into
French (Ausoni 13–14).
Translingual writers have even been accepted into the French literary Pantheon by becoming
members of the Académie Française themselves—the so-called “Immortels,” thereby integrating an insti-
tution that, as noted above, is considered to be the fervent guardian of the French language. Born
142
in Romania, Eugène Ionesco, a prominent figure of twentieth-century French avant-garde theater,

became a member of the Académie Française in 1970.The election of Senghor at the Académie Française
in 1983 marked an important turn in this institution’s opening to the Francophone world.Translingual
and Francophone writers who have recently become Immortels include François Cheng (born in
China, elected in 2002), Amin Maalouf (born in Lebanon, elected in 2011), Dany Laferrière (born in
Haiti, elected in 2013), Michael Edwards (born in England, elected in 2013), Andreï Makine (born
in Russia, elected in 2016, who replaced Assia Djebar, born in Algeria, in this chair), and Maurizio
Serra (born in England of an Italian family, elected in 2020).
Over the past twenty years, multiple studies have been dedicated to the issue of translingualism and
translingual writers in French and have attempted to map out this multifaceted phenomenon along
a wide range of rubrics and terminologies such as “Francophone singularities” (Jouanny), linguistic
exile and “elsewhere” (Delbart), multilingualism and écriture métisse (Anokhina, Gasquet, and Suárez),
linguistic “adoptions” (Porra), “plurilingualism” (Anokhina and Rastier), and “migrancy” (Mathis-
Moser and Mertz-Baumgartner; Sabo). The fact that translingual writers can belong to multiple cat-
egories simultaneously and are seen as alternately “invited,” “guest” writers of a “hospitable” French
language, plurilingual, multilingual, or migrant further testifies to the incommensurable dimension
of their literary practices and to the eclectic singularity of writers who resist classifications.Vladimir
Nabokov, who only wrote a couple of texts in French, thus told his biographer: “I might have been
a great French writer” (Field 141) while Dany Laferrière, a Haitian-born Canadian writer, provoca-
tively titles one of his novels Je suis un écrivain japonais.
In his extensive study Mémoires d’outre-langue: l’écriture translingue de soi (2018), Alain Ausoni delves into
the varied autobiographical factors and rationales that have led a number of contemporary writers to adopt
French as their language of literary creation. Focusing on six authors who acquired French not as children
but as (young) adults: Andreï Makine (whose native language is Russian), Hector Bianciotti (Argentinian
Spanish), Vassilis Alexakis (Greek), Nancy Huston (Canadian English), Ágota Kristóf (Hungarian), and
Katalin Molnár (Hungarian), Ausoni foregrounds the multiplicity of reasons and dynamics that have led
these authors to make this literary choice. In an attempt to establish a “cartography” of these various
authors’ relationships with French, Ausoni organizes them into three parts and general “postures” or
attitudes vis-à-vis their language of adoption: “conversions” for Makine and Bianciotti, two authors for
whom French represents a kind of ideal rooted in deeply personal and affective memories; “liberations”
for Alexakis and Huston, for whom the “passage” into French represented a kind of personal and creative
freedom; and “Robinsons” (on the model of Robinson Crusoe who becomes shipwrecked on a deserted
island) for Kristof and Molnár, for whom French as a literary language was the fruit of chance and even,
to use the title of Ausoni’s chapter on Kristof, “une langue ennemie.”
From Francophonie to World Literature in French

Alongside the disparate individual trajectories of translingual writers noted above, collective dynamics
need to be studied also to understand how many writers, especially those from former French col-
onies, have adopted French not so much by choice, or as a factor of individual or family dynamics,
but because French was imposed as the language of assimilation under French colonial rule. Asked
whether she feels part of postcolonial French literature, Nancy Huston answers:
I have nothing to do with francophonie in a sense, I happen to write in French, but it’s not
because I grew up in a country that had been colonised by the French. It’s because I had a
fantastic high-school French teacher in the United States (laughing), and that’s why I fell in
love with the language. There are psychological reasons for which I needed it as a foreign
language, but it could have been any other, it wasn’t necessarily French. So it has nothing
to do with political history.
(Shread 250)
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In contrast, many translingual writers in French ended up writing in French “by force” rather
than “by choice.” For them the use of French has everything to do “with political history.” Although
they deploy their analysis of translingual writers in French in relation to Francophone studies and
world literature in French, neither Ausoni nor Forsdick consider postcolonial writers to be part of
their main analytical corpus. Here I propose to extend this category to include writers who grew
up speaking and studying French but who used it alongside other languages, such as Arabic, African
languages, Creoles, or Vietnamese, that were used in their homes and/or communities and countries.
This experience of diglossia (the use of two languages or two varieties of a language within a commu-
nity) has also generated an important kind or form of literary translingualism in French. Additionally,
the multilingual backgrounds and experiences of these postcolonial authors, which complicate and
blur the separation between languages considered as “native,” “primary,” or “mother tongues” on the
one hand and “secondary” or “adopted” languages on the other hand, have become widely repre-
sentative of contemporary translingual writing in French especially, as we will see, in the wake of
various writers’ resistance to the Francophone label and their call for the recognition, instead, of a
“world literature in French.” As Jacqueline Dutton points out in her analysis of what she terms “the
translingual turn” in current research, world literature in French, which includes all writers writing in
French, “has become increasingly linked with translingualism, focusing on the choice of language for
literary expression and its interplay with other linguistic, cultural, and stylistic influences.”This critical
trajectory, she notes, “unfolds across a field that is shared by postcolonial, francophone, transnational,
and trans-cultural studies” (404).
One canonical and telling example of such translingual literary diglossia is the Ivorian writer
Ahmadou Kourouma whose first novel, Les soleils des indépendances (The Suns of Independence) published
in 1970, constitutes a powerful political manifesto for postcolonial African countries and literatures.
As many critics have shown, one of the culturally and linguistically subversive aspects of Kourouma’s
writing is his use of Malinke, the language spoken by the ethnic group to which his family belongs,
to shape and transform the stylistic and narrative forms of his novel. The novel thus opens with the
following sentence: “One week had passed since Ibrahima Kone, of the Malinke race, had met his
end in the capital city, or to put it in Malinke: he’d been defeated by a mere cold” (3). Numerous
other examples could be cited, such as the Guadeloupean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart’s novel Pluie
et vent sur Télumée Miracle (1972), whose narrative style is deeply creolized, and countless novels by
so-called Beur writers (writers who are descendants of North African immigrants in France) since
the 1980s such as Farida Belghoul, Mehdi Charef, Azouz Begag, Leïla Sebbar, or Paul Smaïl whose
works written in a multilingual French incorporate slang as well as Arabic, Berber, and English terms
and expressions.2
Here again it is necessary to offer some historical, linguistic, and even ideological contextualiza-
tion for these postcolonial writers’ experience with and practice of literary translingualism in French.
In contrast to British colonial expansion, French colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies was subtended by the ideology of assimilation, which purported to assimilate colonial subjects
through the teaching of French language, history, culture, and values. Although postcolonial writers
from English-speaking African countries like Chinua Achebe (Nigeria) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
(Kenya) recount similar pressures of having to conform to British educational models, French colonial
expansion differed in the degree of assimilation that it sought and, especially, through its underlying
“promise” that their colonial subjects could become French citizens or “just like” French citizens.
In the colonial territories, the educational system was therefore modeled on the French system and
shaped the works of many of the intellectuals who became prominent political figures and writers
(Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal and Aimé Césaire from Martinique being two notable figures)
in the postcolonial era.
The word “Francophone” itself is a direct heritage of this colonial history. The use of the term
“Francophonie” was noted for the first time in the French geographer Onésime Reclus’ book France,
Algérie et colonies (1880). Reclus used it to designate the growing number of French-speaking people
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around the world as a (positive) result of French colonization. In the 1960s and early 1970s, French
presidents Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou joined leaders of newly independent African
nations such as Léopold Sédar Senghor in Senegal and Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia in their call for
an “idealistic community linked together by a common language (French), and a shared culture based
on the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity” (Majumdar 1). Senghor further extolled
Francophonie as “this integral Humanism, which weaves itself around the earth” (358–363). However,
many scholars agree on the impossibility of articulating a clear definition of Francophonie because of its
multiple and shifting institutional, historical, and linguistic aspects. As we will see in greater detail in
the following section, many of the so-called “Francophone” writers have had a very ambivalent rela-
tion with the “Francophone” label. The writer Anna Moï, born in Vietnam, criticizes the notion that
Non-French, Francophone writers born out of colonization are Madagascan, Maghrebian,

Vietnamese before being writers, as opposed to Samuel Beckett or Nancy Huston. . . . As if
coming from Southern countries was a hindrance to the universality of literary expression.
(54)
Maryse Condé, born in Guadeloupe and one of the most prolific and influential writers and cul-
tural figures in the Francophone world, deplores the folkloric or exotic perception of her work and,
more generally, of Caribbean literature particularly in French newspapers:
In France, I always feel perceived in a somewhat exotic fashion.You should read the reviews
of my books in French papers. For instance, my novel Les derniers rois mages, which is a rather
sad book, is often termed a “humorous” and “savory” tale. In Le Monde there was a review
entitled “Le Tim Tim de Maryse Condé”, which means that the book was immediately
associated with a tale from the West Indian oral tradition. In France I have a rather hard time
counteracting the exotic fashion in which West Indian literature as a whole is perceived.
(Pfaff 105–106)
These so-called “Francophone” writers have therefore often expressed hesitation, skepticism,
displeasure, or even frank rejection toward this label and labels in general. As Fabienne Kanor, a
journalist, novelist, and filmmaker of Martinican origins mockingly wonders: “Am I without
knowing it a Creolofrancophone author? A Negropolitanophone writer? Francoperiphericophone?
Negroparigophone? Francophone?” (241). Tahar Ben Jelloun, born in Morocco and the famed
author of L’enfant de sable (1985) and La Nuit sacrée (1987), for which he received the Goncourt
prize, condemns the “ambiguous matriarchy” in the heart of Francophonie, a Trojan horse for French
hegemony that maintains writers from “elsewhere” both under the control and within the margins of
the French metropolitan literary establishment (117). So-called Francophone writers have therefore
highlighted the persistent political, ideological, and cultural hegemony and the many ambiguities at
the heart of Francophonie’s history, which signals centralizing linguistic oneness on the one hand and
purports to champion global diversity on the other hand.
In 2007 the French newspaper Le Monde published a manifesto titled “Toward a ‘World Literature’
in French” [Pour une littérature-monde en français] signed by forty-four writers from various parts of the
French-speaking world including France. In this manifesto the forty-four signatories proclaimed the
“end” of Francophonie and the concomitant “birth” of littérature-monde en français (Barbery 113). The
fact that several of the most prestigious French literary prizes of 2006 were awarded to foreign-born
French-speaking writers, they argued, was a “historic moment” or “Copernican revolution” that
reveals what the literary milieu already knew without admitting it: the center, from which
supposedly radiated a franco-French literature, is no longer the center. Until now, the center,
albeit less and less frequently, had this absorptive capacity that forced authors who came
145
from elsewhere to rid themselves of their foreign trappings before melting in the crucible of
the French language and its national history: the center, these fall prizes tell us, is henceforth
everywhere, at the four corners of the world.
(Barbery 2010: 113)
A collective volume of essays, Pour une littérature-monde (2007), edited by Michel Le Bris and Jean
Rouaud, was published shortly after the manifesto.3 This collective volume is exemplary in its globally
inclusive representation of French-speaking writers from France, various European countries, and
French-speaking countries and regions around the world.
The publication of this manifesto and its rejection of Francophonie have generated backlash and
criticism, as exemplified notably by French author Camille de Toledo who, in his book Visiter
le Flurkistan ou les illusions de la littérature-monde (2008), stigmatizes the naïve and reductionistic
claims made by the manifesto and, especially, its celebration of a return to the “real world” free
from ideological formulations. In fact, several contributors to the collective volume Pour une
littérature-monde do not explicitly endorse this new terminology and state their defiance toward
confining labels and categories. But the publication of the manifesto, which triggered inter-
national conferences, newspaper articles, and scholarly publications on the topic of “world litera-
ture in French,” also launched the beginning of new literary and scholarly exchanges and debates
that brought the question of translingualism to the forefront. These exchanges and debates have
particularly emphasized translingualism as a central feature of the works of many “world writers
in French,” not just as a function of these writers’ national and cultural origins but as an inherent
part of their creative projects. As Edwards remarks,
What is particularly interesting about twenty-first-century literature in French is the number

of writers who are not leaving their mother tongue in the closet but who are for the first
time incorporating another language—or even other languages—into their literary writing.
(2)
Noting that many writers whose native tongue is not French have become successfully integrated
into the French literary scene—writers such as Nancy Huston, Jonathan Littell, Hector Bianciotti,
François Cheng, Rachid Boudjedra, and Andreï Makine among others—Edwards notes that these
writers had been traditionally expected to “convert” to French and, in the process, to leave their
mother tongue in the closet. The more recent translingual “coming out of the closet” that she points
out, and the concomitant focus on translingualism as the very subject of these authors’ writings, can
therefore be seen as having increasingly marked contemporary literature in French. Nancy Huston
for example continued to write in English and to translate herself back and forth between French
and English.
None of the authors on whom Ausoni focuses in his book Mémoires d’outre-langue (Makine,
Bianciotti, Alexakis, Huston, Kristof, and Molnár) come from the French-speaking postcolonial world
and all of them, as he notes, acquired French later in their lives. Forsdick’s definition of translingualism
in French is similarly narrow; noting that translingual writers play a central role in the debates spurred
by the publication of the 2007 manifesto, Forsdick indicates that
at least four of the manifesto’s forty-four signatories (the Canadian Nancy Huston; the
German-born Esther Orner, of Polish origin and now resident in Israel; the Chinese-born
author Dai Sijie; and the Slovenian Brina Svit) may be seen to belong to that category.
(210)
Both Ausoni’s and Forsdick’s taxonomies of translingual writers reinforce many postcolonial
writers’ argument, also noted above, that some writers, mostly white, mostly of European origins,
146
get seamlessly integrated into the canon of French literature while others are relegated to the exotic
or ethnographic margins of Francophone literature. Many signatories of the manifesto, including
Tahar Ben Jelloun, Maryse Condé, Edouard Glissant, Koffi Kwahulé, Dany Laferrière, Amin Maalouf,
Alain Mabanckou, Anna Moï, Wajdi Mouawad, Nimrod, Wilfried N’Sondé, Gisèle Pineau, Jean-Luc
Raharimanana, Boualem Sansal, Lyonel Trouillot, Gary Victor, and Abdourahman Waberi come from
(or have family ties to) places where other languages, besides French, were spoken in their homes and/
or their home communities and can therefore, in varying degrees, be considered to be “translingual”
writers themselves. Describing Andreï Makine’s translingual writing, Forsdick notes:
Even when he appears to write in a single language—French—Makine does not … locate

himself monolingually, but sees his interstitial location, “between two languages”, as a site of
intense experience and perception, and also of enhanced creativity. As a translingual writer,
he aspires to produce an “intermediary language” that encapsulates the state of being in a
“between-two-languages”.Translation, as a shuttling between languages, is as a result central
to the text, but not in the reductively inter-linguistic sense that posits a binary relationship
between an imagined Russian “original” and a French text passed off as a pseudo-transla-
tion. Translation is seen instead as a form of translingual re-creation.
(214)
Many proponents and practitioners of “world literature in French” similarly emphasize writing as
an in-between space of perpetual creation and recreation, an “inter-linguistic” space, to use Forsdick’s
term, which, regardless of the writer’s national or ethnic origins, is always already shaped by difference
and “otherness.”
In The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First Century France (2018) Oana Sabo traces an evolution toward
increased linguistic and thematic diversity in the works of “migrant” authors writing in French—
including many translingual writers, by identifying several periods in the institutionalization of
“migrant” literature in France. In the 1980s “Beur” fiction, as described above, focused on the banlieue,
intergenerational, and identity issues. In the 1990s Sub-Saharan African Francophone writers such
as Alain Mabanckou, Simon Njami, Nathalie Etoké, and Calixthe Beyala asserted a new innova-
tive “literary voice neither wholly African nor wholly French” (23). The mid-1990s, notes Sabo,
then witnessed the consecration of yet another type of migrant author from southern and eastern
Europe, Latin America, and East Asia including Jorge Semprún, Milan Kundera, Hector Bianciotti,
François Cheng, and Dai Sijie: “They consciously used French to enhance their positive reception
and assure an easier assimilation than that of earlier postcolonial authors” (24). Since the 2000s, Sabo
remarks, literature in French has included a wide range of established and emergent literary voices
(Alice Zeniter, Michaël Ferrier, Mathias Énard, Fabienne Kanor, Fatou Diome, Gauz, Faïza Guène
among many others) that have focused on multiple issues related to the political and socio-economic
hardships of migration, both in France and abroad, the trials and tribulations of migrants on their way
to Europe, the experience of detention centers, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and complex
family sagas on the backdrop of geopolitical crises and upheavals around the world.
The work of the Vietnamese-Canadian writer Kim Thúy is emblematic of such diasporic richness
in contemporary translingual literature in French. In her acclaimed novels Ru (2009), Mãn (2013),
and Vi (2016) Thúy evokes her family’s history in Vietnam under French colonial rule and during
the war, followed by their immigration to Francophone Canada. Thúy’s translingual trajectory from
her Vietnamese-speaking origins to her literary work in French closely follows her transnational
journey. Indeed, Thúy appropriates and inhabits French as a creative home while foregrounding
moments of linguistic, affective, and cultural untranslatability, which, in turn, shape and foster her lit-
erary endeavor in her fictionalized narratives of her and her family’s diasporic displacement. I focus
here specifically on her novel Ru to show how the translingual dimension of her novel illustrates
many of the translingual issues presented in this chapter. The epigraph places the novel under the
147
sign of translingualism and translation: “In French, ru means a small stream and, figuratively, a flow,
a discharge—of tears, of blood, of money. In Vietnamese, ru means a lullaby, to lull.” As the epigraph
suggests, the entire book is, in a sense, placed under the sign, or even born under the sign, of this
translingual situation, between Vietnamese as the maternal language of origins and birth and French
as a both enriching and transformative language of becoming.
As the narrator of Ru, whose experiences closely parallel those of the author, indicates at the
beginning of Ru, she was born in Saigon during the Tet Offensive in 1968 when North Vietnamese
Communist forces launched attacks in South Vietnam. Part of the thousands of boat people or
Vietnamese refugees who fled after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975 with the fall of Saigon to
the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam, the narrator of Ru and her family, like the then ten-year-
old author and her own family, first spent several grueling months in an overcrowded refugee camp
in Malaysia before being able to immigrate to Granby, in Quebec. Toward the beginning of Ru the
narrator recounts her feeling of dizziness at hearing “all the unfamiliar sounds” that greeted them
upon their arrival in Granby (8). She further describes how this transplantation into another country
has both semantic and somatic effects: it destroys the meaning of her name, separates her from her
mother and her origins by creating a generational rupture, and destroys individual and collective
identities altogether:
My name is Nguyễn An Tịnh, my mother’s name is Nguyễn An Tĩnh. My name is simply a

variation on hers because a single dot under the i differentiates, distinguishes, dissociates me
from her. I was an extension of her, even in the meaning of my name. In Vietnamese, hers
means “peaceful environment” and mine “peaceful interior.” …
The History of Vietnam, written with a capital H, thwarted my mother’s plans. History
flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty
years ago. It also stripped our names of their meaning, reducing them to sounds at once
strange, and strange to the French language. In particular, when I was ten years old it ended
my role as an extension of my mother.
(2)
Ru deals with the challenge of “translation,” whether linguistic and cultural, as well as with the
impossibility of such complete and transparent translation. The poetic significance of Thúy’s writing
project is, in many ways, rooted in this very impossibility and in all the means and resources—
imaginary, linguistic, and sensory—deployed by the author to try and express things that cannot be
easily translated. Paradoxically, the meaning and content of the book therefore also reside in the way
it circles around meaning and searches for other kinds of languages, symbols, and signs to express or
at least suggest certain meanings. Ultimately, the narrative, cultural, and socio-political significance of
the book lies in its many silences, in its semantic gaps and aporias, and even in occasional moments
of despair when the “essence” of a cultural experience cannot be fully translated. Conversely, the
multilayered significance of the book also stems from many fleeting moments when meaning is
carried not necessarily by words themselves but rather by poetic glimmers: a smell, a sight, a color, an
elusive thought or a fragmented memory. One such moving and delicate passage is when the author
describes the blue and white bowls in which her paternal grandfather would eat his favorite meal,
rice with thinly sliced roast pork: “If the bowls were held up to the sun, one could see translucent
areas in the embossed parts. Their quality was confirmed by the glimmers that exposed the shades of
blue in the patterns” (67).
As suggested by the difficulty of describing these translucent areas or delicate glimmers of colors,
the words and expressions that Thúy encounters, in either Vietnamese or French, often correspond
to certain practices, habits, or beliefs that have no direct equivalents in other languages. For example,
she recalls seeing a Vietnamese grandmother in Montreal asking her one-year-old grandson: “Thương
Bà để đâu?” and she notes:
148
I can’t translate that phrase, which contains just four words, two of them verbs, to love and to
carry. Literally, it means, “Love grandmother carry where?” The child touched his head with
his hand. I had completely forgotten that gesture, which I’d performed a thousand times
when I was small. I’d forgotten that love comes from the head and not the heart.
The author then lists different Vietnamese words “to classify, to quantify the meaning of love”
such as to love “by taste,” “passionately,” “ecstatically,” “blindly,” and “gratefully” (96). Besides
pointing out the blind spots of translation and tapping into various languages in her attempt to
reconstruct the many aspects and meanings of her and her family’s diasporic experiences, Thúy
also implicitly deconstructs artificial borders between national languages, “primary” and “sec-
ondary” languages, by emphasizing the heterogeneity of “national” languages themselves. She
recounts how, on a market in Hanoi, she is mistaken for a Japanese by one woman who sells cakes
of tofu:
I had to relearn my mother tongue, which I’d given up too soon. . . . I come from the South,
so I had never heard people from the North until I went back to Vietnam. . . . Like Canada,
Vietnam had its own two solitudes.
(79)
Here again the significance of Thúy’s translingual project lies not in the “arrival” of meaning,
in what becomes actually translated, but rather in the “trans” itself, the crossing of meaning (both
as “crossing over” and “crossing of ” or erasure). Rather than a one-way crossing, a crossing into,
this translingual project constitutes a back-and-forth movement, sometimes suspended and some-
times stuck, between the shores and borders of countries, continents, and cultures. This productive
in-betweenness, which illustrates the moving mobility of Thúy’s story and history, points at the
way translingual writers “make themselves at home” not so much between languages, but with many
languages. The “trans” is a passage and movement but also a trans-formation that not only questions
the self-contained purity of nations, languages, and cultures but also draws attention to literature as a
creative space of boundless linguistic and imaginary journeys.
Conclusion
At the beginning of the twentieth century the French writer Marcel Proust emphasized writing as
the creation of a new language and the writer’s difference as an inherent part of this process: “This
idea that there is a French language, existing outside of the writers, and in need of protection, is pre-
posterous. Each writer is forced to create his own language, just as each violinist is forced to create his
own ‘sound’ ” (276). As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida further shows, difference is, in fact,
embedded in the very function or “nature” of language itself. In Monolingualism of the Other, Derrida
describes his own sense of alienation toward a language, French, that is his “only” language yet also
not “his” language since he was born in Algeria and, during the French Vichy regime in World War II,
even temporarily lost his French citizenship. Derrida’s reflection on language is therefore inherently
shaped by otherness or what he also calls “the non-identity with itself of all language” (65), which
opens up a both playful and ethical space because our relationship with others is embedded in this
linguistic non-identity. Many world writers in French similarly describe writing as a fundamentally
othering process. For Anna Moï, writing is the very space of the “universal stranger” and we “always
write in a foreign language, even if it is in our native language” (17, 33). As for the Chadian writer
Nimrod, the “quest for the other” “is the goal of all literary activity worthy of this name”; as he fur-
ther notes, echoing Proust: “The revolution performed by French literature can be measured by the
fact that, from Chrétien de Troyes to Rabelais, and from Corneille to Queneau, it has always been
necessary to invent a new language” (226, 231).
149
By deconstructing rigid dichotomies between “French” and “Francophone” writers, the

“center” and the “periphery,” and highlighting the writing process as a creative form of decentering,
deterritorialization, and othering, translingual writers in French also foreground their transnational
and cross-cultural mobility–for example, many African and Caribbean writers now live and publish in
Europe and North America—and the intricate relations at play between the “local” and the “global,”
the “particular” and the “universal,” the “personal” and the “political,” the “individual” and the “col-
lective” in their works. In their introduction to the collective volume French Global: A New Approach to
Literary History (2010), Susan Suleiman and Christie McDonald state that literature in French, at every
stage of its history, has been informed by multiplicity, migration, and diaspora.The notion of littérature-
monde similarly (re)places “negotiations with otherness and boundary crossings at the very center of
French literary history” (x). In the same vein, for Jacqueline Dutton “the translingual text represents a
kind of contact zone for languages, and by extension the cultures they carry within them—a hybrid
third space where the exchanges and modifications between languages are negotiated by the author
to produce a text that is more than simply the sum of its parts” (415). Translingualism can therefore
be described as a narrative and stylistic activity as well as a thematic choice on the part of writers who
have long demonstrated a deep commitment to both aesthetics and politics, poetics and human rights,
cultural identity and global citizenship.
Notes
1 Antoine de Rivarol was a writer, journalist, and epigrammatist who supported the monarchy during the
French Revolutionary era.
2 Like Martinique, Guadeloupe is an overseas region and department of France and, as such, an integral part of
France. Although French is the official language of Guadeloupe, Guadeloupean Creole, born from a mixture
of French, English, and African languages, is considered to be a regional language in Guadeloupe.
3 Another collective volume was published in 2010: Je est un autre: Pour une identité-monde, co-edited again by
Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, with Nathalie Skowronek (Gallimard).
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Majumdar, Margaret. “The Francophone World Moves into the Twenty-First Century.” Francophone Post-Colonial
Cultures: Critical Essays, edited by Kamal Salhi, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003, 1–13.
Mathis-Moser, Ursula and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner editors. Passages et ancrages en France: dictionnaire des écrivains
migrants de langue française, 1981–2011. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2012.
Moï, Anna. Espéranto, désepéranto: la francophonie sans les français. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Translation Mine.
Nimrod. “’La Nouvelle Chose française’: Pour une littérature décolonisée.” Pour une littérature-monde, edited by
Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud, Paris: Gallimard, 2007, 217–235. Translation mine.
Pfaff, Françoise. Conversations with Maryse Condé. U of Nebraska P, 1996. Translation mine.
Porra, Véronique. Langue française, langue d’adoption: une littérature “invitée” entre création, strategies et contraintes
(1946–2000). Hildesheim, Zürich and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2011.
Proust, Marcel. “Lettre du 6 novembre 1908 à Mme Straus, ” Correspondance, edited by Philip Kolb, Paris, Plon,
21, tome VIII, 1973–1993.
Sabo, Oana. The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First Century France. U of Nebraska P, 2018.
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Liberté I: Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Seuil, 1964. Translation mine.
Shread, Carolyn. “Interview with Nancy Houston.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 2, no 2,
1998, pp. 246–252.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin and Christie McDonald. “Introduction: The National and the Global.” French Global: A
New Approach to Literary History, edited by Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman, Columbia UP,
2010, ix–xxi.
Thúy, Kim. Ru, translated by Sheila Fischman, New York, Bloomsbury, 2012.
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12
WITHIN THE ITALIAN CONTEXT
Toward New Debates on the Italian Language
Mariagrazia De Luca
Introduction
This chapter analyzes authors who move between and across languages by writing in more than one
language, or in a language that is not their native one, within various Italian contexts. In particular,
I engage with a selection of translingual writers who migrate into Italian and its progenitor Florentine
(“fiorentino”), who move away from Italian, and who move in between the languages of Italy and
beyond.1 While my focus throughout will primarily analyze contemporary literature, I adopt a trans-
historical perspective, demonstrating how debates about what constitutes the “Italian” language have
shaped the peninsula’s literary traditions from as early as the thirteenth century, when the “three crowns”
(tre corone) of the Italian canon (i.e., Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Giovanni Boccaccio)
experimented with questions of translingualism across their writings in Latin and Florentine.
Let us begin by looking at the Italy that stands before us today: an officially monolingual nation,
but one that is characterized not just by the Italian that is taught in schools and which is spoken by
most citizens, but by the presence of a variety of dialects, regionalisms, and official minor languages, as
well as the existence of many different languages and linguistic contaminations produced by migrants
and translingual authors. Since antiquity, Italy—the geographical territory of the Italian peninsula
that, only in 1861, unified as a single nation—has always been characterized by a proliferation of
languages other than Latin, many of them derived, however, from Latin.2 After the Unità d’Italia, the
Italian language, which was based on the Florentine dialect, became the “official language” of the
newborn nation. However, it would take roughly a century before every Italian citizen would have
the chance to formally learn the national language. According to the linguist Tullio De Mauro, in the
years of Italy’s national unification, roughly 160,000 people out of Italy’s population of 20 million
had learned the Italian language.3 In addition to the establishment of universal education, a surge of
literacy occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, when the “economic boom” allowed Italian families to
purchase televisions and begin watching programs directed towards adult literacy, such as the popular
Non è mai troppo tardi: Corso di istruzione popolare per il recupero dell’adulto analfabeta [It’s Never Too
Late: The People’s Education Course for the Illiterate Adult’s Recovery].
Central to my arguments articulated herein are three categories of authors with which I will
engage, according to the type of language in which they write: writers of “italiano di ritorno,” a
termed coined by the Somali writer Ali Mumin Ahad in his “Per un’introduzione alla letteratura
postcoloniale italiana” [Towards a Critical Introduction to an Italian Postcolonial Literature] (2005),
152 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-12

Toward New Debates on Italian Language
when referring to the Italian language written by postcolonial writers; writers of “italiano di arrivo”
(Italian of arrival)—a term that I am coining—which refers to writers who do not have a colo-
nial relationship with Italy, but embrace the Italian language for other reasons, such as migration
or a personal attraction to the language; and writers of “italiano di partenza”—another term that
I am proposing in this chapter—the language of those who leave the Italian language behind in
order to write in a language other than their mother tongue. In the first part of this chapter, I will
elaborate upon how these authorial categories intersect with and differ from one another. I will
then move on to investigate how Ahad’s concept of “italiano di ritorno” raises important questions
about the linguistic “norms” that have come to shape both the Italian language and the study of
Italian as an academic subject. Are there new sides of the centuries-old “questione della lingua” to
which translingual Italian authors bring attention? If so, in what ways do these writers allow us to
engage more clearly and carefully with the borderless aspects of the Italian language and its cultural
memory?
Translingual Writers of the “Italiano di ritorno”

By looking at non-Italian writers who embrace the Italian language, it is fruitful to employ Ali
Mumin Ahad’s concept of “italiano di ritorno.” Ahad has been defined by Armando Gnisci as the first
postcolonial Italian writer, and by Caterina Romeo as the author of “[la] letteratura postcoloniale
diretta” [direct postcolonial literature].4 This term refers to literary production by authors with
national origins in countries that have a direct link with Italian colonialism. Born in Somalia during
the AFIS—Amministrazione fiduciaria italiana idella Somalia, or the Trust Territory of Somaliland
Under Italian Administration—5 Ahad studied in Italian schools at Mogadishu, and later moved to
Italy, where he began an academic career as a historian. Ahad left Italy in the early 2010s to move
to Australia, after struggling for many years to obtain citizenship for his children, all of whom were
born in Italy, but who, because of the limitations of the ius sanguinis and the discriminatory Bossi-Fini
laws that restrict access to political rights for migrants, are still not considered legal “Italians.” In the
face of such political pushback, which attempts to determine who may and may not be considered
“Italian,” Ahad and other authors have found ways to creatively defy the nation’s political and terri-
torial borders through their use of language.
It is worth asking why some Somali writers would write in Italian, given that this was the language of
their colonizer. From Ahad’s perspective, the use of Italian serves a therapeutic function: understanding
language as a means to recover memories, Ahad chose to write in Italian—both in his novel and his
historical essays—as part of an overall project to retrieve the historical bond between Somalia and
Italy, which many Italians have forgotten, or of which they were never made aware. In his own
words, the use of Italian “si ricollega al passato coloniale, alle culture dei paesi dell’ex impero italiano
rimettendo a posto, nella lingua e nella memoria, ciò che è stato rimosso” [reconnects to the colonial
past, to the cultures of the countries of the former Italian empire, putting back in place—into the
language and the memory—that which was removed] (Ahad 2005, 199–200). Serving as a bridge to
memory, language is able to “rimettere a posto,” to put back in place voices and experiences that have
been suppressed. The “repressed” (il rimosso) is part of the traumatic experience of the colonized
Somali people, but is also an element embedded in the country’s collective “amnesia,” or lapse in
memory of the former colonizers whenever Italians dismiss their colonial history.
Ahad’s “italiano di ritorno” thus emerges as the result of the real encounter between Somali and
Italian idioms: an “indigenized”6 Italian language that interrogates the intersection between colonial
memory and the fragmented, even misrepresented, present. Historically, Italians brought the Italian
language to the colony as part of their occupation of Somalia. Italian schools were founded and Italian
served as the dominant political language of the local administration. We might term this transfer of
language the “italiano di andata” [outward Italian], or perhaps “colonial Italian.” At the end of this
linguistic “round trip,” which concluded with Somalis writing in Italian, the Italian language appears
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transformed, “indigenized” insofar as it incorporates elements of Somali language and culture. The
indigenization is embedded in different layers of the language, from the lexical to syntactical. This
phenomenon emerges in works by writers who come from former Italian colonies, such as Gabriella
Ghermandi from Ethiopia, Cristina Ali Farah, Garane Garane, and Ali Mumin Ahad, and others.7 For
instance, Ahad’s unpublished memoir, Memorie del fiume ed altri racconti del Benadir [Memories from the
River and other Stories from Benadir] is filled with words that are the result of a linguistic and cul-
tural encounter between Italian and Somali language, including Muso-Lini, Taliani, and Parlamanka.
Garane’s Il latte è buono [The Milk is Good] features a myriad of Somali words woven into the Italian
text, such as the description “la sua barba era piena di cilaan” (2005, 8). Il latte è buono is written, in
part, with entire sentences in Somali: “Pregheranno di fronte a me. Tutto quello che chiederò è che i
loro sederi siano puliti come quelli delle scimmie! Waxaan weydisanayaa in dabadooda nadiif ay ahaato
sidii dabada daanyeerada” (10). The text further features Arabic words (e.g., halal, haram) that bear a
religious (Islamic) significance. In Regina di fiori e di perle [The Queen of Flowers and Pearls], the
Ethiopian Ghermandi includes Amharic words emphasized in italics: “ ‘Non sono un monaco’—mi
sussurrò—‘sono un guerriero.’ Era un arbegnà!” (Ghermandi 149). Through the indigenized “italiano
di ritorno” by these writers, la lingua di Dante—which is the label Ahad associates with the Italian
language8 becomes revitalized, reinvented, and ultimately enriched by the cultural aspects of African
lived experiences. Ahad describes this phenomenon in the following words:
Si tratta di un italiano di ritorno, assimilato, adattato alla cultura ed ai costumi delle

popolazioni delle ex colonie, re-inventato nella forma. ... La lingua italiana che utilizzano
[gli scrittori postcoloniali] è sempre un italiano corrente, ma ricco di sfumature e concetti
culturali della realtà africana, di termini e vocaboli che appartengono alla madrepatria
che sono destinati prima o poi ad aggiungersi al dizionario italiano così come i numerosi
vocaboli di derivazione inglese o francese.
(Ahad 2005, 199–200)
It is about the Italian of those who “return” from a colony to the motherland, assimilated,
adapted to the culture and to the customs of the populations of the ex-colonies, its form
reinvented. The Italian language that [postcolonial writers] use is always a current Italian,
but rich in nuances and cultural concepts from the African reality, in terms and words that
belong to the motherland, which are destined, sooner or later, to be added to the Italian
dictionary, as occurred with many words of English or French derivation.9
It is worth pausing on Ahad’s reference to “dizionario” [dictionary], which represents the

most formalized tool of the norms of the Italian language. Metaphorically, by including the dic-
tionary, Ahad seems to express the desire to see the Somali’s influence on Italian language officially
recognized, but also to see this acknowledgment extended toward political and civil rights, such
as citizenship and the formal reconciliation between the country of Italy and the residents of its
former colony. The resistance with which the Italian language (and those who seek to “protect”
it) has largely marginalized the literary efforts of postcolonial authors10 in many ways mirrors the
nation’s political and social resistance to accept and to provide human and civil rights to migrants
and their descendants born on Italian soil.11 In other words, the effort to include and document
African influences into the “italiano di ritorno” reflects in the broader desire to expand the concept
of Italianità [Italianness] by breaking down barriers and borders that attempt to circumscribe where
and by whom Italian is spoken.12
This shift is most visible in the literary experiments conducted by authors who write in Italian
as their principal means of expression, even if they are not “Italian” by birth, as well as those who,
despite being born on Italian soil, are still referred to as the discriminatory term “second-generation
154
immigrants.”The writer Igiaba Scego, who was born in Rome to a family of Somali parents, has been
defined by many as a “second-generation” Somali writer. Scego has publicly contested this label in an
article printed in the Italian magazine Internazionale in 2015, which protests the ius sanguinis:
Purtroppo però a livello legislativo la situazione è rimasta la stessa. Continuano a definirci

immigrati di seconda generazione. Lo vedo scritto ovunque in questi giorni. Immigrati da
dove? Dal ventre di nostra madre? Gabriella Kuruvilla me lo chiede sempre: “Ma da dove
siamo migrate, Igiaba?”, e io penso che sì, ho un po’ migrato da Roma nord a Roma est, il
più grande spostamento della mia vita, a pensarci bene. Sembra quasi che l’immigrazione
sia una tara genetica, qualcosa che si passa di generazione in generazione e che, come
l’ergastolo, paghi per tutta la vita.
(Scego, Internazionale, 2015)
Unfortunately, however, the situation has remained unchanged at the legislative level. They
continue to define us as “second-generation immigrants.” I see this written everywhere
these days. Immigrants from where? From our mother’s womb? Gabriella Kuruvilla always
asks me: “But where did we migrate from, Igiaba?” And I think that yes, I migrated a bit
from north Rome to east Rome, the biggest move of my life, if you think about it. It almost
seems that immigration is a genetic defect, something that is passed down from one gener-
ation to the next and that, like a life sentence, you pay for your whole life.
Translingual Writers of the “Italiano di arrivo”

My second category of translingual writers who migrate into the Italian language concerns those
who I consider writing in an “Italiano di arrivo” [Italian of arrival]. These authors differ from the
writers of the “italiano di ritorno” for they lie outside Romeo’s category of “colonialismo diretto,”
and therefore do not have any direct historical relationship with Italy in colonial terms. In the case of
these authors, there is instead an Italian language that is the product of the unique relationship forged
between the writers themselves, their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and Italian language and
culture.The reasons why such writers embrace the Italian language are many, ranging from migration
to motivations concerning personal sentiment.13
Among the translingual authors who embrace Italian is the unique case of the American writer
with Bengali background, Jhumpa Lahiri.Though Lahiri never physically, nor permanently “migrated”
to Italy, but only visited for brief periods of time, the New York-based author’s passion for and interest
in language brought her to migrate towards the Italian language and culture through her writing.
Lahiri writes in Italian, precisely about Italianità, from a distance. She embraces Italianità for “senti-
mental reasons,” as she describes in her book In altre parole (2015), published again in 2016 as In Other
Words, which is written with Lahiri’s Italian and the English translation by Ann Goldstein appearing
side by side. In altre parole narrates the amorous journey through which the narrator came to acquire
Italian. The love and desire the narrator feels toward Italian resembles the feelings a lover might have
toward her beloved:
Quando ci si sente innamorati, si vuole vivere per sempre. Si vagheggia che l’emozione,
l’entusiasmo che si prova, duri. Leggere in italiano mi provoca una brama simile. Non voglio
morire perché la mia morte significherebbe la fine della mia scoperta della lingua. Perché
ogni giorno ci sarà una nuova parola da imparare. Così il vero amore può rappresentare
l’eternità.
(Lahiri 2016, 44)
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When you’re in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you
feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don’t want to die because
my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there
will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.
(45)
The narrator begins in 1994, when the first encounter between her and Italian occurred. That
year, the narrator traveled to Florence together with her sister, where she experienced “love at
first sight” (15) with the language. Looking closely at this very moment reveals what it was in par-
ticular that struck Lahiri about Italian: the acoustic and visual parts of Italian life attracted her the
most, from the palaces, churches, museums she visited, to the “humming” of Florence she heard
throughout the city. The city’s sounds echo throughout every street and nearly every body, rever-
berating in Lahiri’s sonic descriptions. The narrator recounts how excited the voices of children
sounded when wishing their families Buon Natale (Merry Christmas), the voice of a hotel staff
person asking Avete dormito bene? (Did you sleep well?), and a man on the street walking behind
her who asks her politely Permesso? (May I?) (14). The narrator’s immersive relationship with
Italian acoustics brings into relief the actions surrounding the Italian word “innamoramento,”
which cannot be fully translated by its English counterpart “falling in love,” but is more properly
rendered by the turn of phrase “entering into love.” By considering the intertwining relationships
among the visual, the spatial, and the auditory in Lahiri’s text, we might assume that language
cannot be separated from the culture to which it “belongs.” The narrator of In altre parole is in
love with something greater than simply the Italian language: she is in love with Italian architec-
ture and art, as well as the variety of sounds, not just words, pronounced in Italian. Language is
embedded in both the words and experiences of Italian life.
Besides love and desire, the narrator’s feeling toward the Italian language and culture appears more
complex when we put it in relation to her mother tongue, Bengali, a language that the author iden-
tifies as her own “madre” [mother]:
Mi vergognavo di dover parlare in bengalese davanti alle mie compagne americane. Odiavo
sentire mia madre al telefono se mi capitava di essere da una mia amica. Volevo occultare,
quanto più possibile, il mio rapporto con quella lingua. Volevo negarlo. Mi vergognavo di
parlare bengalese, e al contempo mi vergognavo di provare vergogna.
(150)
I was ashamed to have to speak Bengali in front of my American friends. I hated hearing my
mother on the telephone if I happened to be at a friend’s house. I wanted to hide, as far as
possible, my relationship with the language. I wanted to deny it. I was ashamed of speaking
Bengali and at the same time I was ashamed of feeling ashamed.
(151)
Lahiri is ashamed for her poor command of Bengali, as well as for her American friends’ indiffer-
ence toward her maternal language and culture.The idealized and romanticized Italian language comes
to represent a “volo” [flight] as well as a “fuga” [escape] not only because of the author’s relationship
with her mother tongue, but from the everlasting conflict in the narrator’s life between Bengali and
“la lingua imposta” [the imposed language] English which she refers to as her “matrigna” [stepmother]:
Credo che studiare l’italiano sia una fuga dal lungo scontro, nella mia vita, tra l’inglese e il
bengalese. Un rifiuto sia della madre sia della matrigna. Un percorso indipendente.
(152)
156
I think that studying Italian is a flight from the long clash in my life between English and
Bengali. A rejection of both the mother and the stepmother. An independent path.
A different case of writing in which shame serves as compelling motivation for leaving behind
one’s own language in favor of Italian is that of Helga Schneider, who was born in German-occupied
Poland, but spent her childhood growing up in Nazi Germany speaking German. Abandoned at a
young age by her mother, who joined the Nazi party and became an SS officer at a concentration
camp, young Helga experienced the destruction of World War II firsthand. In her autobiographical
novel Il rogo di Berlino [The Bonfire of Berlin], among the childhood memories the narrator recounts
is how, during a school field trip, she came to meet the Führer in his bunker, an event organized for
propaganda purposes. After spending three decades without seeing her mother, and having lived in
Italy for many years, Schneider succeeds in locating her mother in Vienna and goes to visit her. The
narrator of Il rogo di Berlino, Helga, describes the mother-daughter reunion and the accompanying
feelings of nostalgia and distance she experienced as a result. Feeling as if she has lost her mother for a
second time, the narrator revisits the sense of alienation and disgust she felt when her mother invited
her to try on her old SS uniform, only to share with her daughter how she suffered from nostalgic
memories of her former Nazi community. As the mother describes, belonging as a Nazi allowed
her to feel like she was “someone,” while now, even when she is reunited with her daughter, she is
unable to recognize within herself her role as a mother, and thus chooses to abandon her family again.
Helga recounts her experience of this moment in the following words:
Mi raggelò. E se lei, nel 1941, aveva deciso di non volere questa figlia, ora ero io a non
volere questa madre! Io e mio figlio tornammo in Italia col primo treno. Renzo piangeva
deluso. Come avrei potuto spiegargli il motivo per cui io non avevo trovato una madre né
lui una nonna? Aveva solo cinque anni. Perdetti mia madre per la seconda volta. Non so se
sia ancora viva. Ogni tanto qualcuno mi chiede se l’ho perdonata.
(6)
It gave me chills. And if she, in 1941, had decided that she didn’t want this daughter, now
it was I who didn’t want this mother! My son and I returned to Italy on the first train.
Disappointed, Renzo cried. How could I have explained to him the reason why I hadn’t
found a mother, nor he a grandmother? He was only five years old. I lost my mother for
the second time. I don’t know if she is still alive. Every now and then someone asks me if
I have forgiven her.
Helga’s final rejection of her mother is reflected in her decision to abandon her mother tongue
and mother country. In Rosanna Morace’s study of the multifaceted presence of shame in works by
translingual authors, the Italian language for Schneider represents the possibility of liberating herself
from the historical guilt of Nazism.
The final author of “italiano di arrivo” I will consider is Amara Lakhous, a translingual author
who has expressed on multiple occasions his desire to become a “quadrilingual” writer of Arabic,
Italian, English, and his native language Berber. Lakhous, who escaped the Algerian civil war in the
early 1990s by emigrating to Italy, embraces Italian as his primary language in his writing. However,
observing Lakhous’ linguistic trajectory from Arabic to Italian, one observes a fluid, but not unidir-
ectional journey: it consists of oscillatory movements between two languages. He first wrote a short
novel in Arabic and then, with the help of the translator Francesco Leggio, he published it as the
dual-language novel Le cimici e il pirata [The Bedbugs and the Pirate] (1999) in Arabic and Italian.
Lakhous’ second novel, Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore in Piazza Vittorio [Clash of Civilizations Over
an Elevator in Piazza Vittoria] (2006) was written first in Arabic and later translated by the author
into Italian, an edition that Lakhous then consistently revised in each of the book’s over twenty
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subsequent manuscripts. By becoming, in this way, a “creative” translator of his own work, Lakhous
erases any sense of hierarchy between an “original” text and its “translation.” As a result, the Arabic
and Italian versions of the story share certain similarities (e.g., characters, main plot, etc.), but differ in
many other aspects, starting from the title itself (i.e., the Arabic title of Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore
a Piazza Vittorio reads How to get yourself suckled by the she-wolf without her biting you). After Scontro di
civiltà, Lakhous began writing books directly in Italian, whose stories and settings have been inspired
by the author’s experience of migration from Rome (Divorzio all’Italiana a Viale Marconi [Divorce
Islamic Style]) to Turin (Contesa per un maialino italianissimo a San Salvario [Dispute Over a Very
Italian Piglet] and La zingarata della verginella di Via Ormea [The Prank of the Very Good Virgin of
Via Ormea]). In 2016, when the author relocated again from Italy to New York, he published his first
short story in English, titled “On the Quest to Write in a Third Language: Amara Lakhous Dreams of
Green Cheese and Being Reborn into New York City,” in which the narrator describes each migra-
tion to a new place and into a new language as a rebirth—now into the States, the English language,
and the American Dream:
So now I am raising my standards: I’d like to make English my third working language. In
translation, this means I am working hard to become a trilingual writer: my personal version
of the American dream.
(Lakhous, “On the Quest”)
Multilingualism saturates Lakhous’ writing, even in cases where words from French, Albanian,
Nigerian, Romanian, English, and Latin appear in books written in Arabic and Italian. In addition
to these languages, characters across Lakhous’ novels speak a variety of dialects, from Neapolitan to
Sicilian, Roman to Piedmontese; thus Italian as a language never appears monolithic in Lakhous’
writing, but rather rich in nuances and always linked to regionalisms. For instance, the narrator often
embeds the pronunciation of non-Italian characters into the Italian text. This emerges, for example,
in a dialogue between two Egyptians, where the narrator substitutes each “p” sound from the Italian
with “b” to reproduce the Egyptian characters’ pronunciation of certain words.
“Amico mio, bassato trobbo timbo. Chi biacere rividerti”.

“Biacere mio”.
“Ma duvi stato, Barma?”
“No Barma, Barigi. Sono stato bir lavoro”.
“Ancura fari bezzaiolo”.
“Sì, diventatu ezberto bizze”.
(Lakhous 81)
“My friend, too much time has bassed. What a bleasure to see you.”
“The bleasure is mine.”
“Where have you been, Barma?”
“Not Barma, Baris. I went there to work.”
“Still a bizza maker?”
“Yes, I’m really an exbert at bizza.”
(Goldstein 81)
Lakhous’ decision to write in Italian, instead of French—the “colonial” language he studied at

school in Algeria—is not simply a result of “migration.”14 As in Lahiri’s case, Lakhous seems to have
gravitated towards Italian language and culture for “sentimental reasons,” but the approach he has is
quite different. While Lahiri’s relationship with Italian becomes exclusive, since she leaves English
158
behind so that she may write in Italian, for Lakhous, this process is more fluid, as he moves back and
forth between Arabic and Italian. As the autobiographical narrator of “On the Quest to Write in a
Third Language” claims, the writer’s relationship with languages is that of a “linguistic polygamist”:
I write in Arabic and Italian but my life also encompasses Berber, French, and English. I can
say that I am a linguistic polygamist of sorts, and so linguistic mediators, such as interpreters
and translators, have always fascinated me. My own literary goal has become to mix and
“contaminate” my many languages with each other through literature.
(Lakhous, “On the Quest”)
Literary Translingualism in the “Italiano di partenza”

There are Italian-born authors who leave behind Italian and embrace a different language, a category
of authors who belong to an “italiano di partenza,” a group I consider to be speakers of Italian who
depart from their native language. In their movement across languages, these authors bring with
them some elements of their linguistic and cultural backgrounds to their new adopted language. The
writer Francesca Marciano, who was born in Rome in 1955, writes novels in English that often fea-
ture Italian characters and settings. Marciano learned English as a teenager, just as Lahiri had studied
and grown fond of Italian in her youth. Lahiri’s concept of “imperfection,” in which she finds fuel
for her creativity, resonates with Marciano’s formulation of “insecurity,” or the difficulty one faces in
discovering one’s voice in specific contexts. Lahiri titled one chapter of In altre parole “L’imperfetto”
[The Imperfect], in which the narrator discusses not only how she struggled to learn the imper-
fect tense in Italian grammar, but how she came to embrace the “imperfect” as a metaphor for her
learning process more generally:
Perché mi interessa, da adulta, da scrittrice, questa nuova relazione con l’imperfezione? Cosa
mi offre? Dire una chiarezza sbalorditiva, una consapevolezza più profonda di me stessa.
L’imperfezione dà lo spunto all’invenzione, all’immaginazione, alla creatività. Stimola. Più
mi sento imperfetta, più mi sento viva.
(Lahiri 2016, 112)
Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new relationship with imperfection?

What does it offer me? I would say a stunning clarity, a more profound self-awareness.
Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity. It stimulates.The more I feel imper-
fect, the more I feel alive.
(113)
As part of this self-discovery, the author discovers a new voice: “buried under all the mistakes, all
the rough spots, is something precious. A new voice, crude but alive, to improve, to elaborate” (63).
Similarly, the Italian Marciano finds in the “insecurity” of writing in English the path of finding her
truest voice. If Lahiri feels like a soldier lost in the desert when speaking a language other than her
own, Marciano feels like a hiker making her way up a mountaintop. Each author’s writing challenge
is both linguistic and physical. In Marciano’s words, while writing in a language different from her
mother tongue:
there’s always a fraction of the language that I feel I’m not in control of completely and that
little insecurity that I have a) is a challenge, and b) forces me to –someone said it’s like going
on a hike with less gear.You still go up the mountain.
(Kellman 2016, 191)
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Mariagrazia De Luca
Allowing this authorial experience to penetrate those of her characters, Marciano creates fic-
tional figures who similarly move from their own idiom to the next. Exemplary is the main character
Emma of the short story “The Other Language,” a title which evokes Lahiri’s book. Emma’s learning
of English shapes how she views her identity. From the very beginning, she “loved” the sound of
English, and desired to be able to speak it. By learning English, Emma aimed to “pry open the secret
of the language” (17) that will allow her to acquire new elements as part of her journey toward self-
discovery. The narrator recounts this transformation in the following terms:
her English was fluent and flawless, and she hardly had a trace of accent. She made
sure to pick up every mannerism and colloquial expression that might polish her new
identity.
(45)
Learning a new language is a total experience for Emma which allows her to transform and become
what she desired to be, as it seems to be also for other translingual authors.
She felt she finally became the person she had always wanted to be. Someone who thought,
dreamed and made love in a different language, who had acquired different habits and
conformed to different rules of behavior.
(45)
Linguistically, according to Steven G. Kellman in “An Italian in English: The Translingual Case
of Francesca Marciano,” the main stylistic feature in Marciano’s English is the quality of leggerezza
(lightness). Although leggerezza brings up clarity in her style, her writing is at times characterized by
code-switching, when she inserts Italian words and sentences in the text and includes calques, which
Kellman defines as “instances in which Marciano, despite having been copyedited by one of the most
prestigious publishing houses in the United States, might have been thinking in Italian and trans-
posing literary into unidiomatic English” (Kellman 2013, 189).
Toward a “New” Questione della lingua

The translingual writers I have discussed in this chapter claim the right to embrace Italian as their
own, envisioning an inclusive pathway to fostering a unique identity by expressing themselves via
language(s).Transnationally and multiculturally constituted, their writing in Italian traverses and blurs
national boundaries. By doing so, they are implicitly questioning whether Italian only belongs to
native speakers born on Italian soil by Italian parents. This would seem not to be the case if we agree
with Ahad when he claims that language is a “bene comune” [common good]:
La lingua di Dante [emphasis mine] diventò anche la lingua di scrittrici e scrittori “italiani”
le cui radici culturali sono radicate in contesti culturali e storici non propriamente italiani.
Scrittrici e scrittori moderni (non postmoderni, ma postcoloniali sì) scrivono nella lingua
italiana, senza essere italiani.Vivere in Italia, vivere-con e condividere la cultura italiana, fa
di loro degli italiani più che un semplice atto d’ufficio. Beninteso, un riconoscimento come
la cittadinanza sarebbe la cosa più giusta nei confronti di chi con il suo lavoro contribuisce
al bene pubblico. E la lingua è un bene pubblico ... Ciò non toglie che essi possano
riconoscersi anche nelle loro radici culturali primarie. Proprio qui sta, secondo me, il valore
di quella ricchezza a cui accennavo prima. Un reciproco contribuire all’accorciamento
delle distanze.
(Ahad 2012, 2–3)
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The language of Dante also became the language of “Italian” female and male writers
whose cultural roots are rooted in cultural and historical contexts that are not strictly Italian.
Modern—not postmodern, but postcolonial, yes—female and male writers write in the
Italian language, without being Italians: living in Italy, living with and sharing Italian culture
makes them Italians more than a simple official act [would]. Of course, a recognition such
as citizenship would be the right thing for those who contribute to the public good with
their work. And language is a public good. This does not prevent them from recognizing
themselves also in their primary cultural roots. In my opinion, it is precisely here where the
value of that wealth I mentioned earlier lies. A reciprocal contribution to the shortening of
distances.
The feeling of belonging to la lingua di Dante among those “female and male writers who write
in the Italian language, without being Italians” appears even stronger than the desire to belong to the
Italian nation itself, since this bond—this “bene comune”—participates in a broader social life and
thus overcomes national and political constraints. By embracing la lingua di Dante from locations out-
side Italy’s territorial borders, the writers discussed above reconfigure the contours of the centuries-
long debate, which have lasted from Dante to today, on Italian language norms. This questione della
lingua [language question] is not anymore only a “national” concern, but one that goes well beyond
territorial limits.15 Debates about the Italian language have as much to say about discursive and lit-
erary traditions, as they do about the nation’s cultural and political identity. From the thirteenth
through the nineteenth century, writers, intellectuals, educators, linguists, and historians of language,
as well as politicians, have been engaged in heated debate over what constitutes the Italian language.
Such discussion began as a debate between those who advocated for the use and development of the
Italian vernacular, the “idioma moderno,” and those who defended Latin, the “idioma antico,” as the
only language in which to write. Since the very beginning of the questione della lingua, the “idioma
moderno” Florentine became the leading candidate for the Italian vernacular, the “volgare illustre”
[illustrious vernacular] as it was termed by Dante, who considered alternative northern and southern
dialects unsuitable and undesirable for a standardized language. In Pasquale Verdicchio’s words:
Dante himself declared in his De Vulgari Eloquentia (1.13), that the heavy and rough (rozza)
pronunciation common to the Pugliesi (meaning Southerners) made the candidacy of their
dialect as a vernacular aulic language unthinkable.
(1997, 11)
Following these initial discussions over Latin versus the vernacular, debates on linguistic norms
continued to become increasingly more complex in later centuries: it was especially in the nine-
teenth century, as Italy began to unify as a single nation, that the issue of language became more
linguistically and politically pertinent. As the Italian language grew as an educational tool, it also
represented a symbol of Italian national identity, “[un] simbolo dell’unità spirituale del paese” [a
symbol of the spiritual unity of the country] (12). According to Marazzini, the Italian language
predated the Italian nation and served as the “segno ideale della nazione stessa” [the ideal sign of the
nation itself] (16–17).
If Marazzini and others have traced the development of the Italian language alongside the devel-
opment of the Italian nation, what does “Italian” then represent today, and which dominant type
of Italian is afforded sociopolitical and cultural representation within the nation now? Translingual
writers in Italian illustrate the changing nature of the relationship between political and linguistic
centers and peripheries. What was once perhaps a homogenous conception of Italianità and its
uniformity—the nation-state Italy and its official language Italian—has now become a larger conver-
sation about polysemic identities, representations, and forms of expression.
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Recent focus on the “expiring” nature of the Italian language has adopted some terminology
related to “death,” “crisis,” and “danger” in important discussions regarding the future of Italian. In
his last chapter of Da Dante alla lingua selvaggia [From Dante to the Wild Language] (1999) titled “La
morte dell’italiano?” [The Death of Italian?], Marazzini invokes a defense of the Italian (colonial?)
language:
Una lingua, è chiaro, non si difende solo attraverso il parlato. Come ci insegnava Ascoli,
ci vogliono i libri, ci vuole l’agitarsi operoso delle penne dei dotti, che deve tradursi in
educazione intesa come valore civile. E gli obiettivi della difesa della lingua, soprattutto di
quella scritta, sono tra i più importanti di una società evoluta.
It is clear that language does not defend itself through speech alone. As Ascoli taught us, it
requires books, it requires the industrious agitation of the pens of the learned, which must
translate into education understood as a civil value. And the objectives of the defense of
the language—especially written language—are among the most important of an evolved
society.
What can we learn if we look at the history and expansion of the Italian language not through the
lens of an ongoing dispute and political conflict, but rather as a series of opportunities for reinvention,
enrichment, and multicultural exchange? It is certain that we can look to the language of possibility
and opportunity by making the term “Italian” more socially, politically, and linguistically inclusive,
and by accounting for the indigenized “italiano di ritorno.” Such momentum towards inclusivity and
diversity may lend positive influence upon the future of Italian and Italian Studies curricula. While
discussions of how “foreign” words influence standard Italian, especially those from English and
dialects of the Italian language, may still be fruitful in certain respects, the centuries-long debates of
the questione della lingua deserve today a renewed and more transnational attention. Dante promoted
the vernacular in the Commedia by creating a myriad of neologisms, many of which became part
of the “official” language used today. Why should such innovation not be possible, then, when new
words are created in works by Dante’s linguistic heirs and translingual Italian followers?
Notes
1 Here, I am in dialogue with Steven Kellman’s definition of translingual writers: “Translingual authors—those
who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one—are the prodigies of
world literature. By expressing themselves in multiple verbal systems, they flaunt their freedom from the
constraints of the culture into which they happen to have been born,” in Steven Kellman, Switching Languages
(University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln: 2003), ix.
2 Some languages (e.g., Sicilian, Friulano) have been officially recognized as such. Literary production in dialects
has been consistently prolific.
3 Tullio De Mauro, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (Bari: Laterza, 1963).
4 Caterina Romeo, Riscrivere la nazione. La letteratura italiana postcoloniale (Milan: Mondadori Education, 2018), 27.
5 Italian colonization in Somalia officially began in 1905, when the Italian government, under Giovanni Giolitti
(1901–1914) bought the region from the Italian Benadir Company and the British government. Under
the Fascist regime, from 1936 to 1941, Somalia became part of Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI) and, more
generally, of the Italian Empire. When World War II came to a close, Italy lost both the war and its colonies
in one fell swoop. Italy received a United Nations’ mandate of trusteeship from 1950 to 1960—the afore-
mentioned AFIS—with the purpose of helping Somalia become a “modern nation.” This measure played
an important role in Somalia’s transformation from a former colony to an independent nation in 1960. See
the four volumes on Italian colonialism in East Africa by Angelo Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale
(Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 2009).
6 Throughout this chapter, my use of “indigenization” stems from Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation
[2006] (London: Routledge, 2013). However, while Hutcheon uses this term to describe the adaptation of
literary classics by postcolonial writers, I employ this term as a tool for reading the indigenization of language
by postcolonial writers.
162
7 Except for Cristina Ali Farah, who was born in Verona, but lived in Mogadishu from 1976 to 1991, all these
writers were born either in Ethiopia (Ghermandi) or Somalia (Garane and Ahad).
8 See “Da un emisfero all’altro,” Kuma&Transculturazione, no. 1, March 2012.
9 Unless specified otherwise, all translations are the author’s own.
10 In referring to “postcolonial authors,” I intend not only the “direct” postcolonial writers who come from
former Italian colonies, but also the indirect postcolonial writers, who come from areas other than Italy’s
former colonies. See Romeo, Riscrivere la nazione, p. 27.
11 The ius sanguinis stands as an anachronistic regulation whose origins date back to the 1960s. This principle
favors blood lineage, particularly the Italian and Italian descendants whose parents emigrated (mostly after
World War II during the Great Migration). Ius sanguinis fails, however, to recognize individuals who are
born and raised in the country by non-Italian citizens, as well as those who migrated to Italy and have lived
there for many years. See Giovanna Zincone, “Citizenship Policy Making in Mediterranean EU States: Italy,”
European University Institute, 2010.
12 For the definition of “Italianità,” I refer to the Treccani online dictionary: “l’essere e il sentirsi italiano;
appartenenza alla civiltà, alla storia, alla cultura e alla lingua italiana, e soprattutto la coscienza di questa
appartenenza” [The state and feeling of being Italian; the state of belonging to Italian civilization, history,
culture and language, and above all the awareness of such belonging]. www.treccani.it/vocabolario/italianita/
#:~:text=italianit%C3%A0%20s.%20f.%20%5Bder.,%2C%20e%20sim.%3A%20i.
13 While I do not intend to provide an exhaustive list of such authors in this study, a reader interested in
this subject could refer to BASILI&LIMM, Banca dati degli Scrittori Immigrati in Lingua Italiana e della
Letteratura Italiana della Migrazione Mondiale, founded by the Italian professor Armando Gnisci. https://
basili-limm.el-ghibli.it/
14 “The choice of languages is usually connected to my life, where I’m living. In 2009 I also went to Berlin,
in Germany, but I haven’t written in German. I have no problems with French itself. I have problems with
French colonialism, but not the language. I love all languages. The reason I decided not to use French is
that many Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan writers write in French.” (Amara Lakhous, Personal interview, 2
April 2016).
15 For the history of the questione della lingua, which evolved from Dante, Pietro Bembo and the Accademia della
Crusca, to Alessandro Manzoni and Benito Mussolini, see Claudio Marazzini. Breve storia della questione della
lingua (Rome: Carocci, 2018).
Works Cited
Ahad, Ali Mumin. Memorie del Fiume ed altri Racconti del Benadir. Unpublished.
———. “Per un’introduzione alla letteratura postcoloniale italiana, con brani di Garane Garane, Gabriella
Ghermandi, Ubax Cristina Ali-Farah, Stefano Rizzo, Igiaba Scego.” Filosofia e questioni pubbliche, no.3, 2005,
pp. 193–240.
———.“Da un emisfero all’altro,” Kuma&Transculturazione, no. 1, March 2012.
———. “Towards a critical introduction to an Italian postcolonial literature: A Somali perspective.” Journal of
Somali Studies, vol. 4, 2017, pp. 135–159.
Ali Farah, Cristina. Madre piccola. Milan: Frassinelli, 2007.
De Mauro, Tullio. Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. Bari: Laterza, 1963.
Garane, Garane. Il latte è buono. Isernia: Iannone, 2005.
Ghermandi, Gabriella. Regina di fiori e di perle. Rome: Donzelli, 2007.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation [2006]. London: Routledge, 2013.
Kellman, Steven G. Switching Languages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 2003.
———. “An Italian in English: The Translingual Case of Francesca Marciano,” Papers on Language and Literature,
vol. 52, no. 2, 2016, pp. 177–193.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. In altre parole. Milan: Guanda, 2015.
———. In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Knopf, 2016.
Lakhous, Amara. Le cimici e il Pirata. Rome: Arlem, 1999.
———. Scontro di Civiltà per un Ascensore a Piazza Vittorio. Rome: E/O, 2006.
———. Divorce Islamic Style, translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions, 2012.
———. Divorzio all’islamica in Viale Marconi. Rome: E/O, 2012.
———. “On the Quest to Write in a Third Language. Amara Lakhous Dreams of Green Cheese and Being
Reborn into New York City,” Literary Hub, May 4, 2016.
———. Personal interview. 2 April 2016.
Marazzini, Claudio. Da Dante alla lingua selvaggia. Sette secoli di dibattiti sull’italiano. Rome, Carocci, 1999.
———. Breve storia della questione della lingua. Rome: Carocci, 2018.
163
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Morace, Rosanna. “La vergogna della lingua: gli scrittori dell’esilio tra XX e XXI secolo,” Archivio delle emozioni.
Ricerche sulle componenti emotive nella letteratura, nell’arte, nella cultura materiale, vol. 1, no. 1, January 2020,
pp. 135–150. doi:10.14275/2723-925x/20201.mor
Romeo, Caterina. Riscrivere la nazione. La letteratura italiana postcoloniale. Milan: Mondadori, 2018.
Scego, Igiaba. “Siamo ancora pecore nere,” Internazionale, 21 gennaio 2015. www.internazionale.it/opinione/
igiaba-scego/2015/01/21/siamo-ancora-pecore-nere. Accessed December 1 2020.
Verdicchio, Pasquale. Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora. 1997. New York:
Bordighera Press, 2016.
Zincone, Giovanna. “Citizenship Policy Making in Mediterranean EU States: Italy,” European University
Institute, 2010.
164
13
NORDIC LITERARY
TRANSLINGUALISM
Julie Hansen and Helena Bodin
Despite its peripheral place on the world map, the Nordic region has always been a crossroads of
cultures and languages. The sparse populations of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden
belie a diversity of languages and dialects, as well as complex linguistic situations.1 Due to colon-
ization, migration, and trade, the languages spoken and written around the Baltic Sea have always
extended beyond national borders.
The languages of the Nordic countries today belong to three different families: Scandinavian
(Danish, Faroese, Islandic, Norwegian, and Swedish), Finno-Ugric (Finnish and Sámi), and Inuit-
Yupik-Unangan (Greenlandic). At various points in history, other Germanic, Romance, and Slavic
languages have traveled there over the Baltic and North Seas. More recently, labor and refugee immi-
gration have added new languages to the mix, including Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Somali, Thai, and
Turkish. In addition to indigenous and minority languages, approximately 200 languages from around
the world are spoken in the Nordic region today (Grønn 4).
The Nordic countries are home to a multitude of dialects that live on despite the homogenizing
influence of mass media, and these are reflected in literature as well. The Swedish writer Kerstin
Ekman (b. 1933) weaves the dialect of the Jämtland province into her novel Guds barmhärtighet (1999,
God’s Mercy), while the Finland-Swedish poet Ralf Andtbacka (b. 1963) makes creative use of the
Ostrobothnian dialect in his collection Wunderkammer (2008, Cabinet of Curiosities).
The long history of Nordic multilingualism includes the codification of Danish, Finnish, Icelandic,
Norwegian, and Swedish as national languages, as well as the colonization of the Faroe Islands,
Greenland, and Sápmi. A particular feature of this region is pluricentricity, i.e., the geographical spread
of different variants of the same language, such as with the two variants of standard Swedish used in
Finland and Sweden. Shifting borders, politics, and social processes have all shaped language use over
time and led to the pluralism that characterizes the region today. After a brief overview of contem-
porary linguistic contexts, this chapter will explore Nordic translingualism through literary examples.
Contemporary Nordic Language Contexts

The Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish languages are similar enough to be mutually comprehensible
with some effort. By contrast, speakers of these Scandinavian languages must study the more archaic
Icelandic and Faroese languages in order to understand them. Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric
(rather than Scandinavian) language family, which includes Sámi.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-13 165

Julie Hansen & Helena Bodin
Characteristic of Nordic language contexts is parallel lingualism, in which speakers of mutu-

ally comprehensible languages each use their own language without code-switching or translation.
A good example of the literary potential of this practice is Swedish author Johanna Frid’s novel
Nora eller Brinn Olso brinn (2018, Nora, or Burn Oslo Burn), in which the Swedish narrator obsesses
over her Danish boyfriend’s Norwegian ex-girlfriend. The narrative uses all three of the characters’
languages, leading one reviewer to praise it as a pan-Scandinavian novel (Eriksson, n.p.). Frid debuted
with the translingual long poem Familieepos (2017, A Family Epic), co-authored with Gordana Spasic,
the lines of which integrate Swedish and Danish, as well as some English.2
Each of the Nordic countries has minority languages, some of which are indigenous and some
of which originated from immigrant communities. Several Nordic language communities have been
subjected to colonialism, assimilation, discrimination, suppression, and even extinction. Some of these
now have minority status, and recent language policies have made them more visible in literature as
well as society as a whole. One such example is the novel by Thom Lundberg (b. 1978) För vad sorg
och smärta (2016, For What Sorrow and Pain), which incorporates lexical elements from Romani
into the Swedish narrative in a way that enables the reader to learn some Romani words and phrases
over the course of the reading process (Wischmann, “Repräsentanz” and “Self-Reflective ‘Minority
Literature’ ”).
As none of the official languages of the region qualify as world languages, different linguae francae
have been used throughout history, including Latin, German, Dutch, French, and English. It has been
argued that “German influence on Danish, Norwegian and Swedish during the Middle Ages was far
more pervasive than the influence of English on these languages in the 20th century” (Runblom
21–22).3 This is saying a lot, considering the near universality of English as a second language in the
Nordic countries today. English is an obligatory school subject, and proficiency is supported by media
and internet use, as well as by the influx of Anglophone popular music, television series, and films,
which are not dubbed in Scandinavia (except for young children). English is often used alongside
official languages in Nordic higher education.
It would be difficult to live monolingually in the Nordic countries today, where playing “bilin-
gual games”—as Doris Sommer calls on readers to do (xii)—is arguably a commonplace of daily
life. Considering how languages have always transcended borders in this region, Nordic literatures
cannot be sorted into neat categories according to language or nation. For example, Finnish is spoken
in Sweden, Swedish in Finland, and Sámi in all three countries of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The
nations of the region are brought together by the mutual intelligibility of some of its languages. Yet
each of the contemporary Nordic countries has been shaped by distinct language situations and pol-
itical agendas, past as well as present.
Nordic Writers Through a Translingual Lens

Four of the most iconic Nordic writers, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edith Södergran, and
Karen Blixen (pseudonym Isak Dinesen), look different when viewed through a translingual lens. As
Juliette Taylor-Batty has shown, multilingualism is at the heart of modernist literature. The period
known as the Modern Breakthrough (1870–1905) in Nordic literary history grew out of multilin-
gual European milieus.4 The founder of modern drama Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) wrote historical
dramas and poems in Norway in the 1850s, when Norwegian was emerging as a national language
distinct from Danish and a Norwegian theater was established, with Norwegian actors performing
Norwegian plays (Fulsås and Rem 16). From 1864, he spent 27 years in Italy and Germany, where
he began to write in a new way that brought his work onto the international stage. Although it is
not a translingual text, the production history of Ibsen’s play Et dukkehjem (1879, A Doll’s House),
first staged in Germany under the title Nora, provides an interesting example of how a work of world
literature evolved out of translation and reception in multiple languages (Fischer-Lichte, Gronau,
and Weiler).
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Nordic Literary Translingualism
August Strindberg (1849–1912) was a highly productive writer for four decades, beginning in
the 1870s. Although he published in many literary genres and also wrote journalistic articles, he is
most renowned internationally for his plays. Less known is that fact that Strindberg was a translingual
writer and self-translator who wrote some of his works in French and translated others from Swedish
to French, exclaiming enthusiastically to a friend that “the brain crackles when the right word is born
in the foreign language” (qtd. in Engwall 35). Strindberg had studied French at school, at Uppsala
University, and later in Switzerland in the 1880s (Engwall 36–38).
Canonical Swedish literary history tells us that Strindberg lived for a long time in voluntary exile,
residing in France, Switzerland, and Germany from 1883. It was not until 1908 that he re-settled in
Stockholm for what turned out to be the last four years of his life.When Strindberg’s career is viewed
from the perspective of world literature, however, an alternative narrative emerges—one in which the
young and confident Strindberg abandons his native Sweden in order to seek literary fame in Paris.
He can be said to have been operating within what Pascale Casanova calls the paradigm of littérisation,
in which higher literary status is attained through “translation, self-translation, transcription, direct
composition in the dominant language—by means of which a text from a literarily deprived country
comes to be regarded as literary by the legitimate authorities” (136). Strindberg’s literary use of
French was motivated by his idea of it as the universal language that every Swede should know besides
their mother tongue (Strindberg, “Nationalitet och svenskhet” 126).5 In letters to friends in 1885,
Strindberg declared his intent never to become a French writer or a Frenchman; he was merely using
French as a universal language—or, paradoxically, in lieu of a universal language (Brev 5: 80, 122).
Strindberg’s self-translations from Swedish to French include three plays: Fadren (Père;The Father),
produced with the help of a “Parisian littérateur” (Engwall 38) and published in 1888, with a preface
by Émile Zola; Fordringsägare (1888, Créanciers; Creditors); and Ett drömspel (Rêverie in Strindberg’s 1902
translation; also Le Songe; A Dream Play). The French manuscripts show him to have been a careful
and accurate translator, who followed his Swedish source text closely yet sometimes deliberately
francofied the Swedish context as well as characters’ names (Engwall 39–44). Gunnel Engwall notes
numerous linguistic errors in Strindberg’s translations, but also an impressive vocabulary. She argues
that Strindberg’s texts are as bold in French as they are in Swedish, and that his self-translations helped
to ensure a continued audience in France (Engwall 49).
In early 1888, Strindberg completed Le plaidoyer d’un fou (The Confession of a Fool), his famous
hybrid of autobiography, love story, and indictment. The circulation history of this text is intriguing,
since Strindberg’s original French manuscript was lost until it resurfaced in Oslo in 1973 (Le plaidoyer
d’un fou 2: 9). What was published in Paris in 1895 was a radical reworking of Strindberg’s French
text by Georges Loiseau (Le plaidoyer d’un fou 2: 31–33). There are thus two different French source
texts, leading to a complicated chain of translations and receptions in various languages. The original
French manuscript was not translated into Swedish until 1976. The autobiographical Inferno (1897)
and the main part of its sequel Legender (1898, Legends) were composed in French during a period
when Strindberg was staying in southern Sweden; these were translated into Swedish without delay.
Strindberg also produced numerous articles in French, published between 1894 and 1902 in the
Parisian daily press and cultural journals (Grimal). His oeuvre is thus characterized by a great breadth
of genres in both Swedish and French.
The Finland-Swedish modernist poet Edith Södergran (1892–1923) was born and raised in
St. Petersburg, Russia. Until her early death from tuberculosis, she lived mostly in the small Karelian
town of Raivola, which was part of Finland at the time. Södergran played a central role in the
introduction of free verse in Swedish, and her oeuvre is one of the most studied in Nordic literary
history. While many scholars have noted Södergran’s multicultural, polyglot background, the par-
ticular translingual qualities of her work have been explored in detail by Gisbert Jänicke (1984), who
presents her as a poet in two languages, Swedish and German.
From childhood, Södergran spoke Swedish, German, Finnish, and Russian in different contexts,
which was not uncommon for this time and place.6 She attended a German school in St. Petersburg,
167
learned French at school, and later improved her Finnish. She also studied English and picked up
some Italian during her stay at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. She is said to have regarded
German and Swedish as her best languages, both of which she likely used with her mother
(Jänicke 17–20).
From an early age, Södergran composed poems in notebooks, one of which has been edited and
published: Vaxdukshäftet (The Oilcloth Notebook), containing poems dated 1907–1909. Of these,
206 are in German, 27 are in Swedish, four in French, and one in Russian (Södergran, Samlade skrifter
1: 201–352). Most are written in traditional verse forms with typically romantic themes, including a
crush on her French teacher. The Russian poem, “Tikho, tikho, tikho” (no. 56, Quiet, quiet, quiet),
appears to have been inspired by revolutionary sentiments and depicts the mythical cycles of death–
resurrection–death and sowing–harvest (Samlade skrifter 3: 456–457). Several poems employ more
than one language—for example, the Russian word for kitten, kotik, appears in an otherwise German
poem (no. 25; other examples are no. 101 and 142). The last poem in German (no. 219) asks: “Ich
weiss nicht, wem meine Lieder bringen, /Ich weiss nicht, in wessen Sprache schreiben, /Ich weiss
nicht, zu wessen Herzen dringen” (I do not know, to whom to bring my songs, /I do not know,
in whose language to write, /I do not know, whose hearts to reach) (Samlade skrifter 1: 336–337).
Since the subsequent poems are in Swedish (with the exception of one in French), the line about not
knowing “in whose language to write” has been taken by some scholars as evidence that Södergran
made a conscious decision in September 1909 to switch from German to Swedish as her literary lan-
guage, but this argument has been convincingly refuted (Samlade skrifter 3: 576–577).
Södergran’s first poetry collection, from 1916, appeared in Finland in Swedish, as did her subse-
quent collections. There is evidence, however, that she continued to write in German, especially in
1921–1923, when she was translating other modernist Finland-Swedish poets’ work into German
(Jänicke 67–88). Only a few of her translations from German, French, and Russian were ever
published; these were poems by Friedrich Adler, Edmond Fleg, and Igor Severyanin published in
Finland-Swedish journals in 1922 (Samlade skrifter 3: 607).
Thus, as a poet, Södergran lived and worked beyond any one mother tongue, and beyond a single
homeland. Although she had strong ties to Raivola, one of her late poems asks: “Vad är mitt hemland?
Är det det fjärran stjärnbeströdda Finland?” (“What is my home country? Is it distant, star-sprinkled
Finland?”). The next line answers, “Likgiltigt vad” (“No matter which”), and the poem seems to
suggest that the poet needs no homeland (Samlade skrifter 1: 141).This cosmopolitan ideal is expressed
in the work of other Finland-Swedish modernists as well.
The writer Karen Blixen (1885–1962) grew up in Denmark and spent seventeen years of her adult
life in Kenya, which was at that time a British colony (Brantly 13). She pursued a writing career first
after her return to Denmark in 1931—not, however, in her native language of Danish but in English,
under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen.7 Blixen stated that English came naturally after so many years
in Kenya (Brantly 13), but there was also an economic incentive: the Anglophone literary market was
larger than the Danish one, and having lost her farm in Kenya, Blixen needed income. She explained
her use of English as a strategic choice, convinced as she was that Seven Gothic Tales (1934) could not
succeed in Denmark (Kjældgaard 201). Blixen’s literary style and themes were out of sync with con-
temporary trends in Denmark—the social realism of the 1930s and postwar modernism. Lasse Horne
Kjældgaard notes that Blixen “explicitly did not intend to become a Danish author” (201) and argues
that Seven Gothic Tales “was born—or constructed—as a world literary classic rather than a work of
any national literature” (200).
Seven Gothic Tales met with acclaim in the Anglophone world and was subsequently translated and
reworked into Danish by the author herself. It was published in Denmark seventeen months later
under the name Karen Blixen and the title Syv fantastiske Fortællinger (replacing the genre marker
“Gothic” with “fantastic”). Until her death in 1962, Blixen continued to write works in English and
then translate them into Danish, adapting them to different readerships and sometimes adding new
passages to the Danish versions (Brantly 2). Susan Hardy Aiken argues that “we should read ‘Karen
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Blixen’ and ‘Isak Dinesen’ as different though intricately intertextual authors” (xxiv).This oeuvre thus
offers a rich case study of translingual writing and literary self-translation.
Blixen’s second and most internationally popular book, also composed in English, was the auto-
biographical Out of Africa (1937), published almost simultaneously in Denmark, England, Sweden,
and the United States to different critical receptions. Out of Africa has been criticized by postcolonial
scholars, including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who writes that its “racism is catching, because it is persua-
sively put forward with love” (qtd. in Brantly 86). Blixen’s depiction of her home country is arguably
more subversive of colonial hierarchies. The tales set in Denmark, Kjældgaard notes, “attempt to see
Europe through a foreign gaze” (204).
While the works of Ibsen and Strindberg came to be seen as part of world literature through
translation and reception in other languages, the work of the novelist, travel writer, poet, essayist, and
translator Kjartan Fløgstad (b. 1944) can be said to follow the reverse trajectory, by bringing elem-
ents of world languages into his Norwegian texts. From his vantage point in the nynorsk variant of
Norwegian,8 he has integrated Spanish (primarily Central and Latin American), German (of the Nazi
period), and Russian (of the Norwegian-Finnish-Russian borderland), along with their cultural and
political contexts, into his particular literary world. In this way he enters into an intertextual dialogue
with world literature, drawing on works by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.
As Anne Karine Kleveland has demonstrated, multilingualism has several functions within
Fløgstad’s aesthetic project, initiated in 1968–1969 with his first two poetry collections, Valfart and
Seremoniar (Pilgrimage; Ceremony). For Fløgstad, it is a means of writing in “a total language” (“et
totalt språk”), inspired, as it seems, by Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as Roland Barthes (Kleveland,
“Meningspotensialer” 184–187). Consequently, multilingual strategies, often ludic or punning, are
essential to Fløgstad’s literary style. The two novels Grense Jakobselv (2009)—the title of which
contains the name of a Norwegian village on the Barents Sea, where Norwegian, Russian, Finnish,
and various Sámi languages are spoken daily—and Nordaustpassasjen (2012, The Northeast Passage),
set on several continents, provide rich examples of what Fløgstad himself has called “a world
guided by language” (“ei språkstyrt verd”) (qtd. in Kleveland, Den hemmelege 238). Other works,
such as Pampa Unión (1994), engage with Spanish within the context of the author’s travels to Latin
America.
Language Choices in Postcolonial Contexts

Colonial and postcolonial policies and practices have shaped Faroese, Greenlandic, and Danish
writers’ language choices. The Faroe Islands were colonized by Denmark already in the fourteenth
century but attained self-governance in 1948, at which point Faroese was declared the official lan-
guage. Greenland was a colony of Denmark from 1721 until 1953, when it became an autono-
mous province. Suppression of the Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) language through Danification policies
continued until self-governance was attained in 1979. Recent language policies in support of Faroese
and Greenlandic have contributed to the publication of more literary works in these languages. The
population of each is around 50,000, with additionally about 20,000 Greenlanders and 20,000 Faroese
living in Denmark. Partly as a result of these demographics, Greenland and the Faroe Islands continue
to be part of the Danish literary system alongside their own. Malan Marnersdóttir argues that “one
of the main themes in Faroese literature is the relationship with Denmark and Danish culture which
covers both opposition to and acceptance of Danish influence on lifestyle and culture” (73).
Different Greenlandic and Faroese authors have made different choices with regard to language.
For example, the Faroese author William Heinesen (1900–1991) wrote in what Kirsten Thisted
describes as “a rather unusual Danish which to the Danes sounds very ‘Faroese’ ” (“Grey Areas”
48). The poetic language of Carl Jóhan Jensen (b. 1957) plays with the close relation of Faroese
to Icelandic and Old Norse (Marnersdóttir 76). The Greenlandic artist and writer Hans Lynge
(1906–1988) wrote his memoirs in Danish and self-translated them into Greenlandic. Greenlanders
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Mâliâraq Vebæk (1917–2012) and Ole Korneliussen (b. 1947) moved as adults to Denmark but have
published works in both Danish and Greenlandic. Bilingual editions are another option, as with
Aqqaluk Lynge’s (b. 1947) Danish/Greenlandic collection Til hæder og ære/Tupigusullutik angalapput
(1982, In Honor and Glory), which Birgit Kleist Pedersen cites as typical of the genre of rebellion
literature aimed at Danish readers (59). The collection Morgun í mars (1971, Morning in March)
by the first female Faroese poet Gurðið Helmsdal (b. 1941) contains poems in Faroese and Danish.
The Greenlandic poet Jessie Kleemann (b. 1959) debuted in 1997 with the collection Taallat. Digte.
Poems containing original poems in Greenlandic as well as translations (by others) into Danish and
English. As Elisabeth Friis has shown, translingual elements in Kleemann’s poem “Eskimuuara/
Eskimother” (2012) highlight how the Greenlandic language has been shaped by colonial Danish
(Friis 284).
After Danish colonization came to be viewed as negative in the late 1960s, Danish writers were
reluctant to write about personal experiences of the Faroe Islands and Greenland (Pedersen 50;
Thisted “Hadet i kroppen” 204), but this is changing. An interesting translingual example is Danish
writer Lotte Inuk’s (b. 1965)9 autobiographical novel Sultekunstnerinde (2004, The Female Hunger
Artist), in which the protagonist moves from Denmark to Greenland as a child in 1976 and finds
herself at the bottom of the schoolyard pecking order. Although the protagonist does not master
the language, Greenlandic words, such as rock lyrics, are woven into the Danish text (Pedersen 53).
International readers are more likely to be familiar with Danish writer Peter Høeg (b. 1957) and his
bestselling postmodern thriller Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (1992, Smilla’s Sense of Snow), which
incorporates isolated Greenlandic words in the Danish text.10
Minority Literatures and Linguistic Pluricentrality

Minority languages have become more visible in Nordic literatures since the turn of the millen-
nium, which saw the ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
and the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.
This prompted Nordic countries to grant minority status and publication subventions to sev-
eral languages long spoken in the region, resulting in increased literary production (Gröndahl,
“Kven” 82). As Satu Gröndahl observes, although “literature in Finnish and Sami has been written
on Swedish territory ever since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (“Multicultural or
Multilingual Literature” 188), it is only recently that the Nordic literary canon has been extended
beyond monolingual, ethnocentric categories (“Kven” 79).
Denmark has one official language, Danish, and three minority languages: Faroese, German, and
Greenlandic. Norway has two official languages, Norwegian and Sámi, and the following minority
languages: Kven, Romanes, and Romani. Swedish is the official language of Sweden, which has five
minority languages: Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani Chib, Sámi, and Yiddish. Both Finnish and Swedish
are the official languages of Finland, while Finnish Sign Language, Karelian, Romani, and Sámi all
have minority status.
The pluricentrality of Nordic languages means that some minority literatures can circulate
transnationally without translation. Finnish, for example, is both a majority language in Finland
and a minority language in Sweden, while the Sápmi region stretches across northern Norway,
Finland, Sweden, and Russia. Another interesting case is that of the related languages of Meänkieli
in the Tornedalen region of Sweden (classified in Finland as a Northern Ostrobothnian dialect
of Finnish), Kven in Norway, Finnish spoken by Sweden-Finns, and standard Finnish. Literature
in these languages can potentially reach readers in three different countries without need of
translation.11
A bestselling novel which deploys Meänkieli along with Finnish and a little Esperanto in the
predominantly Swedish text is Populärmusik från Vittula (2000, Popular Music from Vittula) by the
Tornedalian writer Mikael Niemi (b. 1959). This carnivalesque novel narrates the friendship of two
170
boys growing up in the 1960s and 1970s on the outskirts of Pajala in Northern Sweden.12 The
plot contains linguistic failures as well as discoveries, which all contribute to the humor and magic
realism of Niemi’s storytelling. In director Reza Bagher’s film adaptation of 2004, the characters
speak Meänkieli, Swedish, and Finnish and understand each other without difficulty. The same
cannot necessarily be said of the film’s audience, however, and different parts of the film had to be
subtitled for different audiences in Sweden and Finland.
Numerous works make use of Sámi languages in creative ways. Synnøve Persen (b. 1950) publishes
her works in Sámi and Norwegian simultaneously (some of the latter in self-translation), and also
continues the Sámi tradition of illustrating them herself, thus adding visual language to the whole.
The novel-in-verse Palimpsest (1987) by Aagot Vinterbo-Hohr (b. 1936) is written in Norwegian,
yet “some Sámi words and expressions find their way into the text, and in the end Sámi rather takes
over with quotations from another Sámi writer, the lyricist Rauni Magga Lukkari” (Thisted, “Grey
Areas” 49).
Migration’s Transformation of the Literary Landscape

Labor migration to Sweden began in the 1940s, to Denmark in the 1950s, and to Norway in the
1960s. In addition to inter-Nordic migration, workers came primarily from the European continent.
Since the 1970s, the Nordic countries have received more refugees. Starting in the 1990s, increased
globalization brought new migrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as from war-torn
former Yugoslavia. The percentage of foreign-born residents of the Nordic region is currently higher
than ever before (Svanberg 11).
Of all the Nordic countries, Sweden has received proportionally the largest number of immigrants
and refugees.13 Yet long before Sweden’s late-twentieth-century transition to a multicultural country,
it had been marked by emigration, with around 1.5 million Swedes estimated to have emigrated
to North America between 1850 and 1920. This particular kind of immigrant experience was
immortalized in the four-part novel suite Utvandrarna (1949–1959, The Emigrants) by Vilhelm Moberg
(1898–1973). Moberg’s depiction of the life of Karl Oskar and Kristina as settlers in Minnesota
is translingual in that the Swedish-language text contains English words and phrases related to
American life. Today numerous translingual writers are injecting the Nordic national canons with
new impulses—a development that can be traced back to the early 1970s in Sweden, the mid-1980s
in Norway, and the late 1980s or early 1990s in Denmark (Kongslien 35).
Immigrant experiences are often thematicized and problematized in translingual works. A prom-
inent example is the oeuvre of Theodor Kallifatides (b. 1938 in Molai, Greece), a writer whose novels
in Swedish have been translated into several languages. Kallifatides moved to Sweden as a student
in 1964, due to the political situation in Greece (Wulff). He debuted in Swedish with the poetry
collection Minnet i exil (1967, Memory in Exile) and has published around 30 novels ranging from
love stories and detective stories to an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad.14 He recently returned to Greek
in Mia zoi akoma (2016), which he self-translated into Swedish as Ännu ett liv (2017; Another Life).
This autobiographical novel narrates the trauma of not being able to write and depicts emigration
as a kind of suicide through loss of language (Ännu ett liv 63). Yet the novel ends happily when the
author puts down its first five words in his mother tongue of Greek (Ännu ett liv 136–137). In the
novel Kärlek och främlingskap (2020, Love and Alienation), Kallifatides revisits his first years in Sweden,
narrated here through the eyes of the Greek immigrant Christos, who successfully learns Swedish but
senses that his personality changes in the process: “Det räcker inte att lära sig ett språk. Man måste
också byta inälvor” (“It’s not enough to learn a language. One has to change one’s intestines, too”)
(Kärlek och främlingskap 49).
The turn of the millennium saw the debuts of a new generation of translingual writers, who
were either born in Sweden or moved there as children. One of the most acclaimed is Jonas Hassen
Khemiri (b.1978), whose debut novel Ett öga rött (2003, One Eye Red) is a fictional diary kept by the
171
teenage immigrant Halim, who strives to improve his native Arabic while his father pushes him to
learn perfect Swedish. Ett öga rött was popular with readers and critics, who focused on its language,
described as multi-ethnic youth slang, or “broken Swedish” (Nilsson 50–51; Gröndahl, “Multicultural
or Multilingual Language” 182). This “brokenness” is represented as a conscious choice by both the
code-switching narrator and the author. As Magnus Nilsson has shown, Ett öga rött contains a satir-
ical critique of immigrant literature as a discursive category (50), something which also occurs in the
novel Kalla det vad fan du vill by Marjaneh Bakhtiari (b. 1980) (2005, Call It Whatever the Hell You
Like). Nilsson describes this debut novel as “an example of textual bilingualism,” in which immigrants
from Iran and native Swedish characters alike speak with an accent (either foreign or dialectal) (54).
Swedish with a foreign accent is also depicted in Khemiri’s second novel Montecore: En unik tiger
(2006, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger), an epistolary novel in which Tunisian French permeates
passages in the Swedish-language text.15
Although literary translingualism in connection with migration has been most prominent in
Sweden, examples are to be found in Denmark, Finland, and Norway, as well.16 Writers in Finland
with roots in Russia comprise a special chapter within translingual Nordic literary history. Due to the
fact that Finland belonged to the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917 (previously Finland had been
part of Sweden for nearly 700 years), Russian has long been spoken on Finnish territory, and today
Russian writers are the most visible of migrant groups on Finland’s literary scene (Heith, Gröndahl,
and Rantonen 22). They publish in Russian, for example, in the Finnish-Russian literary magazine
LiteraruS (literarus.org) edited by the Russian writer Liudmila Kol’. Founded in 2003, LiteraruS serves
as “a ‘contact zone’ facilitating intercultural exchange in matters of literature, culture and history
in Finland and in Russia” (Sorvari, “Native” 65).17 Russian writers in Finland also publish work in
Finnish translation and/or write directly in Finnish and Swedish (Sorvari, “Native”), though most
publish in Russian or Finnish. The acclaimed writer Zinaida Lindén (b. 1963) has written all of her
novels in her adopted language of Swedish, which is the minority language in Finland,18 and sub-
sequently self-translated her work into Russian (Hansen; Klapuri; Sorvari, “Altering Language” and
“ ‘On Both Sides’ ”). The presence of Russian in contemporary Finnish life is also reflected in the
novel Du eller aldrig (2006, You or Never) by Finland-Swedish author Malin Kivelä (b. 1974), who
embeds Cyrillic words in the text (Bodin, “Heterographics”).
Translingual Reading
From early on, waterways have mediated linguistic contacts in the Nordic region. This circumstance
is thematized in multilingual works by the Swedish poet and Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer
(1931–2015), as well as the French-Norwegian poet and sound performance artist Caroline Bergvall
(b. 1962), who currently lives in England.
In his long poem Östersjöar (1974, Baltics), akin to a musical suite in six parts,Tranströmer explores
his grandfather’s piloting of the Baltic Sea as a metaphor for reading, writing, and interpreting.
The setting is the grandfather’s workplace on a boat in the Stockholm archipelago and the waters
between Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic countries. As Markus Huss has shown, the poem contains
words in Old Swedish, English, Latin, French, and Old Norse, making partial comprehension—or
even incomprehension—a salient feature of the poem. Conversations occur in “misspelled English”
(“felstavad engelska”), and the untranslatable script of lichen on the stones of the cemetery of the
archipelago folk offers the reader “an unknown tongue” (“ett okänt språk”) written by nature itself
(Huss 183, 193).
Bergvall’s multimedial work Drift (2014) comprises not only a print book, but also art installations
and exhibits, performances, and a 2017 theoretical reflection (Nykvist 155). The word drift occurs in
several European languages with connotations of slow movement, such as on currents of water. In
Bergvall’s work, the water is the Mediterranean Sea during the disastrous episode of what has come
to be called the “left-to-die” boat case, in which only nine of 72 refugees survived after drifting on
172
the sea for two weeks in Spring 2011. Karin Nykvist examines how Bergvall deploys Old English
and Old Norse, as well as a number of multilingual literary devices, such as homophonic associ-
ations between languages, stuttering, and deliberate, creative mistranslations of the Old Norse poem
Hávamál (Nykvist 160) in order to actualize political, philosophical, existential, and ethical problems.
In this way, issues of migration, which are front and center in contemporary translingual literature,
become grounded in the shared linguistic past of the Nordic region.
The work of the Finland-Swedish poet and performance artist Cia Rinne (b. 1973 in Sweden
and raised in Germany) makes creative use of sound, languages, and alphabets. In Rinne’s collections,
among them zaroum (2001), notes for soloists (2009), l’usage du mot (2017), and sentences (2018), readers
may construe the poems in multiple languages, such as English, Finnish, German, French, and Spanish.
In this way, Rinne’s poetry “enacts processes of linguistic bordering,” inviting readers to become co-
creators of literary multilingualism (Tidigs and Huss 221–222).
It is with readers we choose to conclude this necessarily selective overview of literary translingualism
in the Nordic region. In the effort to survey a rich and varied literary landscape, the role of readers
is sometimes overshadowed by that of authors and works. As recent works by Nordic scholars of lit-
erary translingualism demonstrate, however, readers also play an active part in creating the translingual
worlds of contemporary Nordic literatures.19
Notes
1 As of 2019, the population of the entire region was just over 27 million.
2 Both Frid and Spasic were born in 1988 and grew up in Sweden (Spasic is originally from Belgrade).
3 The writer August Strindberg joked that “Swedish is Low German in twelve dialects” (qtd. in Runblom 21).
4 The term was coined in 1883 by the Danish critic Georg Brandes.
5 In a footnote, Strindberg calls English a non-European, colonial language (Samlade verk 17: 126). Many years
later, in 1908, Strindberg’s dabbling in historical linguistics inspired him to announce cuneiform as a universal
language pre-dating Babel, though he still believed French to be a legitimate universal language due to its
grammar (Samlade verk 66: 752, 843).
6 Tito Colliander was another Finland-Swedish writer with a multilingual background (Bodin, “So let me”).
7 Blixen’s chosen pseudonym is translingual, employing the Hebrew word “Isak,” which means “the one who
laughs” (Brantly 5).
8 There are two variants of written Norwegian with equal status as official languages: bokmål and nynorsk.
Bokmål is based on written Danish, which was the official language in Norway from 1380 until Norway’s
independence from Denmark in 1814. Nynorsk was constructed by the linguist Ivar Aasen in the 1850s,
on the basis of Western Norwegian dialects, as an alternative to the Danish-influenced written Norwegian
language.
9 The author’s chosen surname is the Greenlandic word for “a human.”
10 For critical discussions of Høeg’s depiction of the Danish-Greenlander postcolonial situation, see Poddar and
Mealor; and Thisted “The Power to Represent.”
11 Meänkieli, which literally means “our language,” was previously called Tornedalian Finnish. For a detailed
survey (in Swedish) of Meänkieli literature, see Gröndahl, Hellberg, and Ojanen.
12 For a discussion of the intercultural theme of this novel, see Gröndahl, “ ‘Att bryta på svenska” 62–65.
13 19.7% of Sweden’s population was foreign-born as of 2020 (“Utrikes födda i Sverige”).
14 On bilingual transformations in the work of Kallifatides, see Kallan.
15 For a discussion of the intercultural aspects of Khemiri’s depiction of language in Montecore, see Gröndahl,
“ ‘Att bryta på svenska” 59–62.
16 For scholarly works in English on translingual writing in the context of migration in Denmark, Finland, and
Norway, see Gaettens; Frank; Gröndahl and Rantonen; Grönstrand, Huss, and Kauranen; and Kongslien.
17 LiteraruS publishes quarterly issues in Russian, as well as annually in both Finnish and Swedish (Sorvari,
“Native” 66).
18 Approximately 5% of the current population of Finland have Swedish as a native language (af Hällström-
Reijonen, n.p.). On Lindén’s work, see Hansen; Sorvari, “Altering Language” and “ ‘On Both Sides’ ”; and
Klapuri.
19 See Grönstrand, Huss, and Kauranen, and the special issue of Edda: Nordisk tidsskrift for litteraturforskning 107.3
(2020) (available open access: www.idunn.no/edda/2020/03).
173
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Gröndahl, Satu. “Multicultural or Multilingual Literature: A Swedish Dilemma?” In Literature for Europe?, eds.
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gränsland: Invandrar-och minoritetslitteratur i nordiskt perspektiv, ed. Satu Gröndahl (Uppsala: Centrum för
multietnisk forskning, 2002). 139–170.
Gröndahl, Satu and Eila Rantonen, eds. Migrants and Literature in Finland and Sweden. Helsinki: Finnish Literature
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14
GERMAN-ENGLISH LITERARY
TRANSLINGUALISM
Sandra Vlasta
The Historical Context

Although German and English share a long history, German-English literary translingualism is a
fairly recent phenomenon. Apart from early individual exceptions of authors who used either or
both languages (mostly to better address their readership), it is only from about 1900 onwards that
the language choices were made mainly for aesthetic reasons (using multilingualism for creative
innovations). Several decades later, with many people fleeing Nazi Germany for the U.K. and the
U.S., English became the adopted language of many (former) German writers. Today, German-
English translingualism is mainly taken up by authors who are in large part cosmopolitans and who,
like some of their predecessors, use one or both languages chiefly for aesthetic purposes.
The story of German-English translingualism begins with the common roots of the two languages:1
Indeed, it was the Germanic tribes of the Angles and the Saxons who settled in Great Britain in
the post-Roman period, about 400 to 500 ce. These tribes brought their languages with them, i.e.
Anglo-Frisian dialects that formed a common language known as Anglo-Saxon or Old English. This
language, at least in the southern parts of Great Britain, replaced Celtic and Latin and became a pre-
cursor of modern-day English. In the later development of English, contact with German was more
limited, not least due to the strong influence of French after the Norman conquest of England in
1066. Nevertheless, several points of contact throughout history can be observed, for instance when
the Electorate/Kingdom of Hanover was ruled in personal union with Great Britain and Ireland
(1714–1801) and the United Kingdom (1801–1807 and 1814–1837), respectively. This political con-
stellation certainly increased German interest in England, with Anglophilia being a widespread phe-
nomenon in Germany in the eighteenth century, not least for religious reasons (Protestantism) and
economic reasons (trading relations between England and the Hanseatic League) (Maurer). Many
German scholars (such as Johann Reinhold Forster and his son, Georg Forster), writers (such as Karl
Philipp Moritz, Sophie von La Roche, and Johanna Schopenhauer), and other artists (most famously
Georg Friedrich Handel) traveled to and at times even lived and worked for some time in Britain
(in particular in England), becoming mediators between the two cultural and linguistic realms. This
particular connection ended when Queen Victoria (herself a member of the House of Hanover)
ascended the throne since women were excluded from succession in the Kingdom of Hanover.
However, the strong links between the British throne and German nobility were maintained, as
Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, belonged to the German House of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-14 177

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and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, as it was called from 1826.2 Furthermore, the last German Emperor,
Wilhelm II, was Queen Victoria’s grandson.
Another strong point of contact can be observed in the form of the historic presence of Germans
and the German language in the U.S.A. German emigration to the U.S.A. has been continuously
high, and there are currently nearly 45 million German-Americans, i.e. Americans with (at least par-
tial) German (or Austrian) ancestry (United States Census Bureau). Indeed, it was a common (but
mistaken) belief (the so-called “Muhlenberg myth”) that, because of steady immigration, German
nearly became the official language of the U.S.A. toward the end of the eighteenth century. In
Pennsylvania, for instance, teaching was performed in German, and official documents were translated
into German well into the nineteenth century. In Texas, the Mainzer Adelsverein (Nobility Society,
organized in Mainz in 1842) attempted to establish a German colony within the state, a campaign
that was abandoned in 1853 for financial reasons. Finally, traditional food such as hamburgers and
hot dogs, but also traditions such as decorating Christmas trees, were introduced to the U.S.A. by
German immigrants.
The comparatively short but violent period of German colonialism in Namibia (then called
German South West Africa) from 1884 to 1915 was the basis for further close contact between the
German and the English languages. Around 30,000 people of German descent still live in Namibia
and enjoy local media in German. German literature is represented in Namibia by bilingual writers
such as Giselher Hoffmann (1958–2016) and Lisa Kuntze (1909–2001).
This brief historical introduction shows that German and English have had a long, at times peculiar
(restricted to the nobility but with effects on the wider population), and variable relationship—one
that will be further explored in the course of this chapter. Many different reasons for German-English
translingualism can be observed throughout literary history, and in what follows I suggest that we
group these different reasons and aims, linking them to their respective socio-political contexts.Thus,
we will see that the motivation for German-English translingualism ranges from aesthetic reasons to
practical ones (target audience, place of publication) and may be used to express political stances (for
instance in exile) or ways of living (cosmopolitism).
Early Examples of German-English Translingual Writing

In the religious context, one of the earliest examples of a translingual ambilingual poet (to use
Steven Kellman’s terminology) who used German and English, besides other languages, is Bruder
Hans (Brother Hans, around 1400). He wrote a 5,280-verse poem in praise of the Virgin Mary
that consisted of seven songs, code-switching among German, French, English, and Latin (Montag).
Scholars have shown that Bruder Hans, who we know of only through this one work, adapted the
English, French, and Latin verses to the German accentual meter (Noel and Seláf). Furthermore,
Bruder Hans’s multilingualism was interpreted as an anticipation of the promise of the miracle of the
fiery tongues on Pentecost, and thus as a vision of mutual understanding among languages (Dembeck,
“Sprachwechsel” 130).
By contrast, the author Georg Rudolf Weckherlin (1584–1653) was influenced by the multi-
lingual atmosphere that has characterized European courts since the Renaissance. Accordingly, as
Leonard Forster reminds us, in his role as court poet for the Duke of Württemberg, Weckherlin was
expected to be able to welcome the King of England’s ambassador “with a panegyric in English verse
in 1619” (35). In a similar vein, he also composed poetry in French, in addition to his native German.
These works were of course written by order of the Prince, as Weckherlin himself expresses in the
introduction to the English version of the songs and speeches for a dynastic christening (Forster
35–36). In fact, although Weckherlin continued to write in various languages after his move to
England in 1620, from that point on he published only in German. His linguistic competence was
certainly useful in his important role as assistant to the Secretary of State, but his poetry in foreign
languages—besides English, also in French and Latin—was restricted to manuscripts and to private
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occasions, such as an intimate verse letter to his English wife (Forster 43). Interestingly, in the latter we
see that Weckherlin was able to use an informal conversational style in English that had not yet been
developed in German literature. His earlier works in English (and French), however, harken back to
an older style that, as Forster observes, “look[s]‌back to Spenser; he writes as though Shakespeare and
his contemporaries had never lived” (51). In fact, in German literary history, Weckherlin is noted for
introducing Renaissance themes and forms (in particular from French) into German poetry and for
paving the way for Martin Opitz’s reform of German poetry. Nevertheless, it would take a full cen-
tury for the style of Weckherlin’s private English verses to be introduced into German.
A Focus on the Audience: German-English Translingualism with

a View to Reception
Examples of multilingualism in the Renaissance and the Baroque show that the choice of language
often depended on the audience. For instance, Weckherlin wrote in English in order to address the
English ambassador. He chose French, at times in parallel with German, when he knew that his
(German) audience would understand both languages and would appreciate the added embellish-
ment provided by the French. This focus on the reader can also be observed in later examples of
German-English translingualism. For instance, the young Georg Forster (1754–1794) first wrote A
Voyage Round the World (1777) in English. Together with his father, Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–
1798), he had accompanied James Cook (1728–1779) on his second voyage (1772–1775) to the
Southern Hemisphere and wrote an account of his journey upon his return. At the time of its
composition, the Forsters were still in England and initially thought they had been commissioned
to write the official report, which ended up not being the case (following disputes over the rights
to the account). Their only way to profit from their account (they urgently needed the money) was
to publish it before James Cook published his version. Thus, in a race against time, Georg Forster
worked quickly and diligently, eventually succeeding in publishing his account six weeks prior to
the release of Captain Cook’s. As this version was aimed at an English readership, it was written in
English, a language the young and talented Georg Forster knew very well (definitely better than his
father, who nevertheless provided much of the book’s content).The Forsters also targeted a German-
speaking audience, however, and so Georg had been working in parallel on a German translation,
the first volume of which appeared one year later, in 1778, and enjoyed greater commercial success
than the English version. This very literal form of ambilingualism (publishing the same work in two
different languages, nearly at the same time) gave the Forsters the opportunity to address different
audiences. Interestingly, the two versions of the book were received very differently: To the present
day, the German version has been received very positively. Contemporary readers like Alexander
von Humboldt (1769–1859) emphasized the new era of travel writing that the book ushered in, in
which the study of nature was linked in an innovative way to comparative ethnology and geography
(Humboldt 51). The perceived novelty of Forster’s travelogue has led critics to call him the founder
of modern German travel writing (Vorpahl 615; Keller and Siebers 14), although German scholars
largely disregard the fact that the book was first written in English and tend to refer to the original
only in brief, when describing the genesis of the text. Few scholars have highlighted the similarities
and differences between the two versions (Görbert).
Another German-English ambilingual author whose choice of language largely depended on his
target audience is Charles Sealsfield (1793–1864). Born Karl Anton Postl in Moravia (then part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire), he fled, for reasons that remain unclear, to the U.S.A. in 1823. There, he
changed his name—first to Charles Sidons, and then to Charles Sealsfield—and started writing, both
in English and in German. His travelogue The United States of North America as They Are … was first
published in German in 1827 and then published in a revised English version one year later. Sealsfield
wrote his second book, Austria as It Is, or Sketches of Continental Courts (published anonymously in
1828), in English, just like his first novel, Tokeah; or the White Rose (published in 1829).
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Different factors led to Sealsfield’s choice of language: The aim of Sealsfield’s first travelogue was
to share his experiences of the U.S.A. from the point of view of an American citizen, comparing the
new American political and social system to the outdated European one. It was therefore important to
reach his audience in Europe and in the U.S.A., and for that he needed to use both languages. Austria
as It Is, on the other hand, was a harsh critique of the regime of Austrian Chancellor Klemens von
Metternich (1773–1859), and the Austrian secret police tried their best to identify its author (it was
not until years later that Sealsfield/Postl finally admitted to having written the text). Sealsfield had
chosen to publish the book in Europe (in London), but publishing it in German would have been
too dangerous, and he therefore opted for English (indeed, the book was not translated into German
until the 1990s).
When Sealsfield wrote his first novel, Tokeah, he was still in the U.S.A. and addressed the audi-
ence there. The book was in part a story about Native Americans and was heavily influenced by James
Fenimore Cooper’s very popular Last of the Mohicans (1826). Sealsfield hoped to profit from the success of
Cooper’s work. In fact, when Sealsfield published a German translation of the novel in 1833, he revised
it heavily and gave more weight to the political aspects of the Battle of New Orleans than to the more
romantic story centered on Native Americans. Thus, not only did Sealsfield choose the languages of his
individual works carefully, according to the occasion and his intentions, but this careful choice of language
came along with a conscious adaptation of the content to the target audience. Sealsfield moved back to
Europe in 1830 and, despite several stays in the U.S.A. (which eventually earned him citizenship), wrote
all of his further major works in German (using his English name, Charles Sealsfield).
Frederick Philip Grove’s (1879–1948) story is similar to Sealsfield’s in that Grove also fled Europe
due to personal (financial) problems (Kellman 21). Following a fake suicide, he left for Canada in
1909, where he became a well-known writer, famous for his descriptions of Western prairie life
and Canada’s multicultural society. It was not until the 1970s that Douglas O. Spettigue discovered
that Grove was in fact the German translator Felix Paul Greve.
In 1939, the Lorrainer Yvan Goll (born Isaac Lang, 1891–1950) emigrated to the U.S.A. with
his wife, the poet Claire Goll (1890–1977). He stayed there until 1947, when he returned to
France. Before his exile, Goll had been writing in German and French; in New York, he tried
to publish in English as well, but with little success. Goll’s main languages remained French and
German, and he seemed to live comfortably in both languages. In fact, Forster characterizes him
as a “truly equilingual poet” (81), a writer who was familiar with the literary traditions of both
languages, which he never mixed. Kellman underscores that “[f]‌or Yvan Goll, the decision to write
any one of his poems in either German or French was an aesthetic one” (36). Things were different
when he chose to write in English, a language in which he was less successful when it came to
expressing his images. Goll’s decision to write in English was based not so much on his own
preferences as on the fact that he was in the U.S.A. at the time and wanted to reach an American
audience (Kremnitz 248).
Jeannette Lander (1931–2017) was more successful in switching her literary languages. Born in
the U.S.A. to a Polish Jewish family, she started writing poetry and short stories in both English and
Yiddish. In 1960, she moved to Berlin with her German husband and from then on wrote only
in German, although her novels were often set in Atlanta, where she grew up. Lander succeeded
in attracting a readership in her third literary language as well and received awards and grants for
her work.
Ursula Hegi (born 1946) has done for her American readership what Lander did some time earlier
for her German readers: She uses her translingualism to reach the readers in her adopted home and
to give them an understanding of Germany’s past. Hegi is an example of a translingual writer who
switched from her native German to English. She moved to the U.S.A. from Germany in 1965 and
started publishing books in English from the early 1980s. Floating in my Mother’s Palm (1990) was the
first of four novels set in Germany that dealt in particular with the period before, during, and after
World War II. Her novel Stones from the River (1994) was a bestseller.
180
The work of Stefan Heym (1913–2001) is another example of translingual writing that
was largely shaped by its readership. Heym was born in Chemnitz, Germany, as Helmut Flieg
(Töteberg and Wolfschütz). His family was Jewish, and he was forced to flee from Germany
to Prague in 1933, where he took the name Stefan Heym. In 1935, he received a grant from a
Jewish Student Association to study in the U.S.A. There, he also worked as a journalist, writing
articles for both German and English newspapers. He published his first novel, Hostages, written
in English, in 1942. During World War II, Heym, by then an American citizen, worked for the
Allies, mainly writing texts in German that were meant to reach and influence German soldiers.
Following his return to the U.S.A., he continued to compose his literary texts in English. When,
as a committed socialist, Heym was forced to leave the U.S.A. during the McCarthy era, he settled
in what had become the G.D.R. in 1953. As an intellectual, Heym expressed himself mainly in
German from that point on (in articles for newspapers, but also in non-fiction books); English
remained the language of his literary works, however, which were published in Germany, the
U.S. and in the U.K. Heym translated some of his texts into German himself. Only from the 1980s
onwards did he begin to shift toward German, even in his literary texts.This shift notwithstanding,
his most successful works, which made him one of the most prominent authors of the G.D.R.,
recognized both in the F.R.G. and in the East, were originally composed in English (even though
this ambilingualism has not been given much scholarly attention). It seems that, like Goll, Heym
based his choice of language on his readership when it came to his non-fiction texts. With regard
to Heym’s literary works, however, his language choice seemed to have been more of a personal
matter, perhaps even a necessity. For a long time, he continued to write in English, although his
works were addressed mainly to a German readership.
Around 1800, Karl Philipp Moritz based his choice of language on different grounds. Moritz was
interested in England in part because his native Hanover and Great Britain shared a common ruler. At
the end of the eighteenth century, he was one of many German travelers in the country. Accordingly,
his travelogue of this journey was preceded by many others. In contrast to earlier travel writers,
Moritz presents himself as an insider, and thus as a cultural mediator for his readers: It is made clear
from the beginning of the travelogue that he can speak English and that he is familiar with English
literature and culture, which he studied in depth. Similarly, he shows great interest in the English
language and provides detailed accounts of how things are said and pronounced. Moritz’s familiarity
with English literature in particular is further underscored by the fact that he reads on his journey and
even includes accounts of his reading in his travelogue. The central work referenced in Reisen eines
Deutschen is John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), which tells the biblical story of the fallen
angel who would become Satan, his temptation of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from Eden.
This was certainly not an insider tip; in fact, Paradise Lost was well known to German readers thanks
to translations by Johann Jakob Bodmer (Kofler 1726–1727; Maurer 22). Still, the detailed quotes of
the text in Moritz’s travelogue are all in English, further consolidating Moritz’s image as an expert
in English literature. In this case, the author’s ambilingualism serves different purposes: Whereas the
other authors discussed in this section aimed at being understood by their target audience, Moritz
puts the act of mediation at the center and leaves it to his readers to unriddle (i.e. translate) the
English quotations. His ambilingualism thus points in the direction of an implied (or rather ideal)
reader who, in the act of reading Moritz’s text, likewise becomes ambilingual. Moritz’s later occupa-
tion seems to be consistent with this interpretation: As a teacher of English, he continued to convey
the ambilingualism he himself applied in his travelogue.
German-English Translingual Aesthetics Through the Ages

Across the centuries, we find examples of translingualism that can be characterized as a search for
a new aesthetics by transcending linguistic borders. This is true of the genre of macaronic poetry
that was popular in Europe in the Middle Ages and in local literary groups such as the Wiener
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Gruppe (Vienna Group) in Austria in the 1950s and 1960s. There are further examples of individual
translingual poetics, such as the poetry of Stefan George (1868–1933).
Just like his contemporary James Joyce (1882–1941), Ezra Pound (1885–1972) used macaronic
poetry to create a new multilingual aesthetics. Pound’s Cantos (1925–1970) may therefore also be
cited as an example of German-English translingualism; with that said, it also includes many other
languages (Latin, Greek, French, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Provençal) as Hugh Kenner (215) has
observed. Although Pound keeps the languages distinct (unlike Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake, 1939), this
kind of multilingualism is perhaps best understood as a form of “macaronic verse” that was made “a
serious tool of modernism” (Kellman 54).
The German poet Stefan George sought formal perfection through his writing and, among
other things, experimented with different languages as part of this search. George knew many
languages: Greek, Latin, French, English, but also Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Norwegian. In
addition, he invented two languages: One which he called lingua romana, in which he wrote three
poems included in his collected works, and a mythical language of which we only have two lines
(Forster 56–57). He mainly experimented with French and at one point even considered becoming
a French poet. Still, instead of becoming a “monolingual translingual,” to use Kellman’s terminology
again—that is, instead of deciding to write only in his non-native French—George continued to
experiment. These experiments also included poems in English, a language he knew well and which
he used to converse with his friends.We only have two poems in English by George that he published
in his native German in his lifetime—the English originals were published only after his death.
Several comments by George suggest, however, that writing in foreign languages (and thus also in
English) was more common to his creative process than his published poems would suggest. Leonard
Forster argues that there can be no doubt that George’s writing in foreign languages was integral
to his aim of reforming German poetry (58). Rather than aspiring to become a multilingual writer,
George used his linguistic abilities to develop German literature.
In a similar way, the Wiener Gruppe aimed to reanimate Austrian literature and art after the devas-
tating experience of World War II. Whereas official literary activities sought to further a kind of lit-
erature rooted in conservative movements of the nineteenth century, the artists of the Wiener Gruppe,
active from 1947 onwards, aimed to bring the (neo-)avant-garde into Austrian literature and art in
general, for instance in the form of concrete poetry.This kind of poetry sees language as raw material
and plays productively with the sounds, letters, and shapes of words and languages. Interestingly, Eugen
Gomringer (born 1925), considered the founding father of concrete poetry, is a multilingual poet
himself. Born in Bolivia to a Bolivian mother and a Swiss father, he writes in German, Swiss German,
Spanish, English, and French. In a similar vein, some of the poets loosely affiliated with the Wiener
Gruppe also experimented with different languages. Most prominently, Ernst Jandl (1925–2000), who
worked in Vienna as an English teacher, wrote concrete poetry in German and English or in a mix
of the two languages (and sometimes even more). Multilingualism is only one of many aspects that
characterize his poems. For instance, in Jandl’s “calypso” (1976), not only do we find a mix of German
and an idiosyncratic version of English (see the first stanza: “ich was not yet in /in brasilien /nach
brasilien /wulld ich laik du go”), but the musical element indicated both by the poem’s title and by
the lyrical subject’s desired destination, Brazil, is significant to its reception and interpretation (in fact,
there are several musical versions of the poem). Ernst Jandl also coined the term oberflächenübersetzung
(surface translation) and applied it to the poem “My Heart Leaps Up” (published in 1807) by William
Wordsworth (1770–1850) (Dembeck, “Oberflächenübersetzung”). In Jandl’s adaptation, he renders
the sound of the English poem by using German words that, when read aloud, sound very similar to
how Wordsworth’s original English words would sound if spoken with a strong Viennese accent (for
instance “the” becomes “se”). The result is a kind of nonsense poem that consists of comical images
and surprising juxtapositions. For instance, the first line of Wordsworth’s poem, “My heart leaps up
when I behold /A rainbow in the sky,” becomes “mai hart lieb zapfen eibe hold /er renn bohr in
sees kai” [May hard dear cone yew lovely /he run drill in lake’s pier]. Concrete poetry and the Wiener
182
Gruppe’s search were strongly connected to Germany’s and Austria’s recent past, i.e. the experience of
the rise of the Nazis, the Shoah, and World War II, and the effects these events had on the German
language. These events were the impetus for a further large group of writers and intellectuals to start
writing in languages other than their native German—writers in exile.
Forced German-English Translingualism: Exilliteratur

From the early 1930s onwards, many Jewish (and non-Jewish) writers and intellectuals who were
persecuted by the Nazi regime fled Germany and Austria, many to North America and the United
Kingdom.There, authors applied different strategies of production and dissemination. In what follows,
I will identify what seem to be the most common strategies—continuance of German; switching
to English; ambilingualism; switching to English and later back to German; English as a main lan-
guage throughout—and will give examples of writers for each. Still, due to the enormous number
of writers and intellectuals who had to flee the Nazis, it is impossible to name all of them within the
scope of this chapter. Each group could be complemented by many more names and works, and the
examples should not be seen as exhaustive.
For instance, there were writers such as Elias (1905–1994) and Veza Canetti (1897–1963), Alfred
Döblin (1878–1957), Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), Erich Fried (1921–1988), and Thomas (1875–
1955) and Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), who continued to write and publish mainly in German.
So-called Exilverlage, i.e. publishing houses abroad that published books in German (for instance the
publisher Querido in Amsterdam and Aurora in New York, co-founded by Wieland Herzfelde together
with authors such as Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Maria Graf, and Berthold Viertel), sustained this devel-
opment (Faure). These publishing houses enjoyed a large audience, in part because of the extensive
German-speaking refugee communities.
On the other hand, there are many examples of writers who decided to change the language in
which they wrote. Vicky Baum (1888–1960), for instance, switched to English following her emi-
gration to the U.S.A. in 1931 and the banning of her books in 1935 in Germany. She is still known
today for her novel Menschen im Hotel (1929, written in German), which in 1932 was made into an
award-winning film called Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo. In the U.S.A., Baum also worked as
a screenwriter, writing several screenplays in English. Henry Kreisel (1922–1991) allegedly wrote
his first novel by the age of fifteen in German (“Alberta 150”); at the time, he was still living in his
native Vienna. Kreisel fled to the United Kingdom with his family in 1938 and, during World War
II, was transferred to an internment camp in New Brunswick, Canada. There, he decided on English
as his literary language and referred to the translingual writer Joseph Conrad as a role model. Kreisel
published two novels, various stories, and his diary from the time of his internment. His relation to
English was further cemented when he became a Professor of English at the University of Alberta.
Jakov Lind’s (1927–2007) life was likewise affected by the Shoah: In 1938, his parents managed to flee
from Vienna to Israel; Lind himself, however, arrived in the Netherlands by way of a Kindertransport3
and survived by assuming a different identity. Still, his life as a writer began only later, after settling in
London in 1955. His first books (stories and novels) were written and published in German, and only
subsequently, when setting off to write his autobiography, did Lind choose English as his main literary
language. Many of his works were also successful in German-speaking countries.
Other writers became ambilingual, writing in both languages, i.e. German and English, such as
Stefan Heym (discussed above). For instance, Hermynia zur Mühlen (1883–1951), who emigrated to
the United Kingdom in 1939, had already worked successfully as a writer and translator and started
writing in English as well, an example being her novel Came the Stranger (1946). Still, she remained
an ambilingual writer and did not give up German. Similarly, Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) was
multilingual and wrote in his native German, Hungarian, French, and English. He was one of the
183
Sandra Vlasta
most important English writers of his time and is equally well known in the German-speaking lit-
erary world.
Some of these writers wrote in English for a time but later reverted to German, often when
returning to mainland Europe. Hilde Spiel (1911–1990), for instance, switched to English during her
time in exile in London, especially in her work as a writer at the New Statesman. Her travelogue on
her return to her native Vienna in 1946 was likewise written in English, and Spiel translated it into
German (revising it heavily) only much later, under the title Rückkehr nach Wien (1968; Return to
Vienna). In a similar way, Robert Neumann (1897–1975), who had already published poems, novels,
and most notably parodies in German, started writing in English during his exile in England and
composed six novels in the language before switching back to German following his return to the
Continent.
Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) had lived in the United States from 1921 to 1931 and thus knew
English very well. In fact, following her return to her native Czernowitz in the Bukovina (at the
time of her birth, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Ausländer worked as an English teacher.
Although her first poems were written and published in German, she began to compose her verses
in English only after her return to New York in 1946. Influenced by discussions with the American
poet Marianne Moore (1997–1972) and Paul Celan (1920–1970) (also born in Czernowitz), she
returned to German as the language of her poetry and changed her style to a clearer, more rhythmic,
less solemn approach.
Erika Mann (1905–1969) likewise switched languages during her time in exile. She had previ-
ously published articles and children’s books in German; when in the U.K. and the U.S.A., Mann
lectured in English and worked as a journalist in both languages, including as a broadcaster for the
B.B.C. in programs addressed to the German people. Her younger brother, Klaus Mann (1906–1949),
also started writing in English in the U.S.A. His autobiography, The Turning Point (1942), was ori-
ginally written and published in English, and the German translation (published posthumously in
1952) is a revised and altered version of the English text. Switching from one language to the other
seems to have been easier for Erika than for Klaus, who repeatedly reflected on the fact that he was
not yet at home in English, but also no longer at home in German (Mann). He returned to Europe
as a member of the U.S. Army during World War II and remained there, apart from a prolonged stay
with his parents in the U.S.A., until his death by suicide in 1949.When, like Stefan Heym, the Manns
were forced to leave the U.S.A. due to the anti-communist Red Scare, Thomas and his wife Katia
eventually settled in Switzerland, and their daughter Erika took up German again as the main lan-
guage of her writing. She published mainly children’s books but, because of her many negative past
experiences, was no longer active as a political writer.
Other authors were still very young when they had to flee and were solely authors in exile. They
mostly wrote in English, which had been their language of instruction in school. Helga Michie
(1921–2018), for instance, the twin sister of the Austrian poet Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), arrived
in London on a Kindertransport in 1939 and continued to live there for the rest of her life. She was
mainly an artist but also worked as a translator and wrote poems, which were published for the first
time in 2006. Similarly, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s (1927–2013) family emigrated from Germany to
England in 1939, and the Booker Prize winner and Academy Award-winning screenwriter wrote and
published her works exclusively in English. Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) was likewise a child
when he left his native Berlin for London with his family. He later worked successfully as a trans-
lator from German but wrote his own poetry in English. Interestingly, Hamburger’s verses are better
known in their German translation by Peter Waterhouse (born 1956), himself a writer who grew up
bilingual (German and English) and whose work is characterized by an experimental use of different
idioms (Ivanovic, “ ‘We are translated men’ ” and “Sprache”). Fred Uhlmann (1901–1985) was already
an adult when he arrived in England in 1936 and first took up painting there quite successfully.
It was not until 1960 that he published his memoirs, which he had written in English. A second
book, Reunion, followed in 1971 and received critical acclaim upon its republication in 1977, with
184
a foreword by Arthur Koestler. Its German translation was also well received, especially following its
republication in 1988 and the film version in 1989.
Apart from the writers mentioned in this section, the Nazi regime and World War II forced many
others to emigrate, among them intellectuals, philosophers, and other scholars.As their work was mainly
expressed through language, many of them also had to switch to new languages in order to reach their
intended audiences. As this chapter concentrates on writers and German-English translingualism in
literary history, it will suffice to list some of the German-speaking non-literary authors whose work
is characterized by a shift from German to English and, at times, ambilingualism: The philosophers
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), and Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1889–1951);4 the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990); the psychoanalysts Erich
Fromm (1900–1980) and Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957); the historian Gerda Lerner (1920–2013); the
literary critic and philosopher George Steiner (1929–2020), who claimed to “possess equal currency in
English, French and German” (Steiner 115); and the statesman Henry Kissinger (born 1923).
Individual Migration and Cosmopolitism

Over the past thirty years, the end of the Cold War, the formation of the European Union as a space
without interior borders, and the growing popularity of ever cheaper modes of transport have led to
increased travel and exchange, including on a linguistic level. The status of English as a lingua franca
and its presence in global popular culture has led to its more frequent occurrence in literature in other
languages as well. For instance, many German literary works are interspersed with words or even
whole sections in English. Whereas Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)
could depict a whole conversation in French and be sure that his readers would understand, present-
day authors can assume that English insertions will be no obstacle to their readers. Accordingly, these
passages are usually left untranslated.
Still, apart from such depictions of an increasingly globalized world in literary texts, there are also
a number of German-English translingual authors in contemporary literature who are continuing
the search for aesthetic renovation through translingualism that began with macaronic poetry in the
Middle Ages. These authors can be grouped according to the direction of their translingualism, i.e.
authors who have English as a first language but (also) write in German and those who use English
in their writing although their first language is German.
Isabel Fargo Cole was born in the U.S.A. in 1973 but moved to Berlin in the 1990s to study
German literature. She translates texts into English but writes her own literature in German. In her
highly acclaimed first two novels, she is particularly interested in the time of German division and
scrutinizes it from an interior point of view. Ann Cotten was likewise born in the U.S.A. (in 1982) but
came to Austria at a much younger age, in the late 1980s. Like Cole, Cotten works as a translator and
has started to write her own literary works in German. Still, she is an ambilingual author, working in
both German and English and writing about her experiences with the Japanese language (in German).
Similarly, Paul-Henri Campbell, who was born in the U.S.A. in 1982 but studied and still lives in
Germany, writes poetry in both languages but often mixes English and German within his verses.Thus,
not unlike Ernst Jandl and Eugen Gomringer, authors like Cotten and Campbell continue to open up
a translingual aesthetic space through both sound and the visual elements of language, words, and text.
This reflexive approach to languages and language learning is typical of a number of contem-
porary translingual writers. Emily Walton, for instance, born in Oxford (in 1984) but living in Austria,
reflects on the cultural and linguistic differences between her homeland and her adopted country in
her first novel, Mein Leben ist ein Senfglas (2012; My Life is a Mustard Jar). Sharon Dodua Otoo (born
1972) is another writer who lays bare the many layers and meanings of language, in both English and
German. Otoo is British but studied German in London and has lived in Berlin since 2006. Many of
her first works were written in English but published only in German translation. Otoo was awarded
the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 for a story she wrote in German, and her opening speech
185
Sandra Vlasta
for the same prize competition in 2020 was also composed in German. She continues to write and
publish in both languages.
Alongside Ursula Hegi, discussed above, the Austrian poet Franziska Füchsl (born 1991) is
an example of the opposite direction of translingualism, i.e. the use of English by authors whose
first language is German. Like Campbell, Cotten, and Otoo, Füchsl uses her translingualism as a
poetic tool and combines the two (or more) languages to arrive at surprising similarities. In an
untitled poem in her collection My Haarschwund (2020), for instance, she transcribes a traditional
Christmas carol written in an Austrian dialect into what reads and sounds like an approximation of
the dialect in standard German and English (Ivanovic, “Sprache”). Thus again, Füchsl takes up Jandl’s
oberflächenübersetzung, but rather than choosing a target language, she remains between the languages
and carves out their auditory and visual potential.
Individual migration and cosmopolitan ways of life can also lead to constellations that are not as
bilateral. For instance, Aysel Özakin’s (born 1942) career as a writer can be described by the image of
the triangle: Born in Turkey, she began her literary career in Turkish but had to leave the country for
political reasons. She emigrated to Germany, where she wrote in German, but then migrated to the
U.S.A., where she now writes in English. Other authors grew up bi-/multilingual but have always
written in one language. This is true, for instance, of Anita Desai (born 1937) and Hugo Hamilton
(born 1953), who both had German mothers. The latter wrote of his German family ancestry and
his relationship with the German, English, and Irish languages in his memoir The Speckled People
(2003). Ruth Klüger (1931–2020), on the other hand, despite having lived in the U.S.A. since she
was a young adult, wrote some of her critical works as a literary scholar in English but composed her
literary texts (including the autobiographical Weiter leben. Eine Jugend 1992 and Still Alive: A Holocaust
Girldhood Remembered 2001) in German.
The history of German-English literary translingualism is comparatively short. Nevertheless, espe-

cially from the late nineteenth century onwards, an intense and fruitful relationship between the
two languages can be observed. In this chapter, I have outlined several categories of German-
English translingualism in order to analyze this multifaceted phenomenon in a somewhat structured
way: From its early forms to reader-oriented language choice, from forced language change in exile
to creative experiments with the other language. The present chapter is not exhaustive; the forms
and functions of German-English translingualism and the list of authors whose works exemplify
them can be expanded. Moreover, many of the writers used as examples are borderline cases and are
sure to belong to more than one category. Rather than undermining these categories, however, this
underscores the extent to which they overlap and can be applied simultaneously.
As the above has shown, in many of the individual cases of German-English translingualism,
the language change brings with it creativity and aesthetic renewal. Even authors who have not
experienced migration, were not brought up multilingually, and were not forced to publish in a lan-
guage other than their mother tongue are aware of this. As history from at least the medieval period
onward shows, writers have long been using the potential of translingualism in a productive way.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Norbert Bachleitner, Christine Ivanovic, Steven Kellman, Natasha Lvovich, and
Helga Mitterbauer for their valuable help and suggestions and Carolyn Benson for her invaluable
linguistic advice.
Notes
1 For a history of the English language and its relation to German, see David Crystal’s Cambridge Encyclopedia of
the English Language.
186
2 The name of the royal house (which changed with the accession of Queen Victoria’s son, King Edward VII,
in 1901) became ‘Windsor’ in 1917 due to anti-German feeling in Great Britain during World War I.
3 The Children’s Transport, an effort to rescue Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Poland, and other coun-
tries occupied by the Nazis, was organized by the World Jewish Relief and other institutions and legally made
possible by the British government prior to the outbreak of World War II.
4 Wittgenstein had already moved to Cambridge in 1911, however.
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15
FROM GERMAN INTO RUSSIAN
AND BACK
Russian-German Translingual Literature
Miriam Finkelstein
The German language arrived in Russia in the 18th century as a result of profound political
changes and the country’s territorial expansion. At this time, the Tsardom of Muscovy, for centuries
isolated and little known to Western Europeans, underwent the most incisive changes in its history as
Tsar and later Emperor Peter the Great (1672–1725) decided to radically reorganize his state. Army
and fleet, administration, economy, and education—virtually all spheres of life were to be modernized
and “Europeanized,” i.e. reformed according to Western European models. To help him achieve his
goals, Peter invited architects, engineers, military as well as scientists and physicians from England
and the Netherlands. But above all others, he appreciated professionals and specialists from German-
speaking countries, whom he believed to be the best in their respective fields. Next to these objective
considerations, Peter’s particular fondness of the Germans also had personal reasons—the Tsar himself
spoke German since adolescence and was well familiar with the German culture.
Empress Catherine the Great continued her predecessor’s policies. To increase the number of
peasants in the hitherto thinly populated regions of southeastern Russia, stimulate the agricultural
production in these provinces and eventually raise more taxes, in 1763, she issued an invitation to
European farmers to settle in Russia. Potential settlers, or “colonists” as they were officially called,
were promised financial help and guaranteed a substantial degree of cultural and political autonomy,
religious freedom, and exemption from military service. Suffering from the devastating effects of
the Seven Years War, farmers from Bavaria, Baden, Hesse, and other German states were particularly
responsive; ultimately, thousands settled down in the regions adjacent to the Volga river and later
became known as the “Volga Germans.”
In 1721 and 1795 respectively, the Baltic regions of Livonia and Courland (today Latvia and
Estonia) were seized by the Russian Empire from the Swedish crown; Baltic Germans, who had
lived there since the Middle Ages, now became subjects of the Russian Empire. Many of their
descendants rose to the highest ranks of Russian society; among them were scientists and military
personnel, artists and, of course, poets. It is therefore all the more surprising that until very recently
the translingual oeuvre of writers who changed from German to Russian and vice versa in this time
period has received little public and scholarly attention, both in Russia and in the German-speaking
countries.1
Probably the very first native speaker of German to become a prominent Russian writer was
born in the German town of Stettin in 1729. Fifteen years later, princess Sophie-Auguste-Friederike
of Anhalt-Zerbst, who, like all European nobles, also spoke fluent French, married the heir to the
188 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-15

Russian throne, the future Emperor Peter III. Upon arrival in St. Petersburg, she went to great
lengths to learn Russian as quickly as possible. These language skills weren’t absolutely necessary for
the everyday life at court; rather, her effort was intended to demonstrate to Empress Elizabeth the
young woman’s loyalty to Russia and her affection for the new homeland. After 1762, when Grand
Duchess Ekaterina Alekseevna, as she was now called, staged a coup d’état and ascended the throne
under the name Catherine II, this knowledge became instrumental for the implementation of her
political agendas. Not only was she one of the first rulers to appear simultaneously in the capacity
of an author, but also to understand literature as a highly effective means of what is today called pol-
itical propaganda. Catherine thus promoted her vision of Russia’s political future not only through
laws and decrees, but also in her literary texts. In articles for the satirical journal Vsyakaya vsyachina
(All Sorts and Sundries) she had herself founded in 1769 and in numerous plays, she promoted her
Enlightenment values and polemicized against political adversaries such as the freemasons (Dawson
17–34, Moracci 121–130). She also used her well-known Memoires as well as other genres, like opera
libretti or fairy tales, for the same purpose (Greenleaf 407–426). Soon after Catherine’s death in 1796,
her literary oeuvre was ridiculed and invalidated; generations of fellow poets (and scholars) criticized
Catherine’s language and style as poor, deprecated the overt political instrumentalization of literature,
and even questioned her authorship.
Although not translingual in the strict sense, many poets in the 19th century wrote in Russian,
German, and even in French, a language the Russian nobility and the educated elites spoke fluently
since the 18th century. Romanticists like Vil’gel’m Kiukhel’beker (1797–1846), Elizaveta Kul’man
(1808–1825), and Karolina Pavlova (née von Jaenisch, 1807–1893), were all bilingual speakers of
Russian and German2 and wrote poetry in both languages (Kul’man also wrote in French3). Although
Pavlova’s German poetry was made available to readers in toto in 1994, since then it has attracted little
scholarly attention (Pavlova 10–42). Future research could help understand what audiences Pavlova
was addressing with these texts and whether significant poetic differences exist between the Russian
and German poetry. The German poems Kiukhel’beker wrote as a young man were lost and remain
unknown (Kiukhel’beker 573).
Marina Tsvetaeva’s early German (and French) poems shared the same fate. Tsvetaeva (born
1892), one of the best known and most renowned Russian poets, was a trilingual speaker of
Russian, French, and German too. The latter she learned from her Baltic German mother; her
love for German language, literature, and culture lasted her whole life and was only shaken when
the Nazis came to power and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938 (Wanner, The Bilingual Muse
81–82). Yet another trilingual speaker of Russian, German, and French was Tsvetaeva’s older
contemporary, Lou Andreas-Salomé (born Louise von Salomé in St. Petersburg in 1861 and
lived until1937). Best known as a psychoanalyst (trained by Sigmund Freud), friend and com-
panion of the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée, she was also a prolific writer who
authored numerous novels, stories, and essays. Her language of choice was German—having left
Russia for good in 1880, she lived mainly in Germany and aimed to address German-speaking
audiences. But Russia, its literature and culture, remained of utmost importance for her; she fre-
quently depicted her country of birth and its people, e.g. in the novellas Fenitschka (1898) and
Rodinka (1923).
Moreover, she introduced Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most prominent proponents of German
modernism and her long-time partner, to Russian literature, culture, and philosophy. With her help,
Rilke began learning Russian and he was soon able to converse, correspond, and even write poems in
this language (Schmidt 26, 205–226). For all his fascination with Russia, in the eight poems written
around 1900 (all unpublished during his lifetime), Rilke rarely refers to specifically Russian realities;4
on the whole, these texts address universal issues and don’t seem to create a new and different poetic
system. Unlike his later, much more extensive French poetic oeuvre of the 1920s, writing in Russian
was an experiment limited in time and scope; while it seems improbable that he looked to establish
himself as a Russian poet, the concrete reasons for this experiment remain to be elucidated.
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While the translingual writing of this period was granted little recognition, the opposite is true for
authors from the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia who immigrated to Austria and Germany in
the late 20th century and write in German, their second language.
Russian-German Literature in the 21st Century—The (Short)

Story of an Unexpected Success
The year 2000 saw the publication of Russendisko (Russian Disco, trans. by Michael Hulse, 2002),
the first book by Wladimir Kaminer, a previously unknown author who had lived in Germany for
less than ten years. His humorous short stories about Russian immigrants in Berlin gained enor-
mous popularity with millions of readers. However, this success is, at first glance, puzzling. After
all, Russendisko was not the first book on the subject written by a translingual author who had
switched from Russian into German. Vladimir Vertlib, a Leningrad-born author currently living in
Vienna, had already published two books on a similar subject—the long story Abschiebung (1995,
Deportation) and his first novel Zwischenstationen (1999, Interstations). Moreover, issues such as
immigration experience and the difficult beginnings in the new country were familiar to German-
speaking readers from the novels by Turkish writers who came to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s as
“guest workers” (Gastarbeiter).The prominence of Aras Ören, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafer Şenocak,
and Feridun Zaimoğlu led Leslie Adelson to speak of a “Turkish Turn” in contemporary German lit-
erature (Adelson 2005). But, while their texts were very well received by critics and literature scholars,
the number of non-professional readers remained limited and this linguistically and stylistically ambi-
tious and sophisticated literature never became mainstream. After 2000 the situation of “immigration
literature” (Migrationsliteratur), a term widely used in German scholarship in the 1990s, changed in
a most profound manner—from being largely peripheral, it evolved into a mass phenomenon. The
texts of translingual Russian writers who followed in Kaminer’s path were likewise met with a very
positive reception. Several authors were awarded prizes,5 last but not least the Ingeborg-Bachmann
Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the German-language continuum (awarded in 2012 to
Olga Martynova and in 2013 to Katja Petrowskaja). Today, many publishing houses, among them
some of the most renowned ones like Suhrkamp, S. Fischer, Rowohlt, and DTV, have at least one
Russian translingual writer in their portfolios.6
In order to understand the reasons for their success, in what follows various narrative and linguistic
devices and strategies employed by Russian-German writers7 will be discussed; before that, we shall
attempt to introduce a concise definition of what this literature is. Understanding that any such def-
inition is a mere snapshot of the current situation and that several characteristics are subject to change,
today Russian-German literature can be defined as:
• A literature written by translingual writers whose first language is Russian and who have chosen
to write in German, their second language. Nonetheless, their texts are often multilingual and
include languages other than German. Some writers also write in two languages, German and
Russian.
• A direct result of large-scale immigration from the Soviet Union and its successor states to
Germany (and to lesser extent to Austria and Switzerland) that took place between the 1970s and
1990s and consisted primarily of Jews and ethnic Germans.8 While many writers have emerged
from the former group of immigrants, the number of writers belonging to the latter is significantly
smaller. Many texts are autobiographical and reflect upon the immigration experience of the indi-
vidual writers as well as upon the historical experience of the ethnic groups to which the writers
belong. Most writers were born in the 1980s, the oldest (Olga Martynova) in 1962.
• A genuinely transcultural and hybrid literature insofar as it combines at least two literary and intel-
lectual traditions, Russian and German ones. Moreover, it actively participates in global literary
trends and reacts to both local and global social, political, and other developments.
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• Not a marginal or peripheral but a literary mass phenomenon. Fiction and non-fiction are equally
popular, long prose (in particular the novel) being the favorite form. Most texts address adult
audiences but literature for children and adolescents is also represented.
Russian-German Fiction in the Context of German-Language Literatures

For all its success, the emergence of Russian translingual literature in German-speaking countries
was by no means a singular occurrence; on the contrary, it needs to be seen as part of a much larger
development. Jews and ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union were not the only ones to emigrate
to Austria, Germany, and to a lesser extent to Switzerland in the 1990s. Following the collapse of
the communist regimes in Eastern European states in 1989/1990 and the breakup of Yugoslavia in
1992, thousands of labor migrants and refugees relocated to the three German-speaking countries.
Along with immigrant writers from the Soviet Union, in the 1990s their colleagues from Bulgaria,
the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and former Yugoslavia began writing in German
too; they too were now creating a new and decidedly transcultural German-language literature. Such
was the magnitude of this phenomenon that Brigid Haines saw fit to speak of an “eastern turn” in
contemporary German-language literature (Haines 138).
As different as their individual poetic features are, texts by writers from the Soviet Union and
other Eastern European states share many commonalities. One of them is their marketability, which
is also regarded as the key to their tremendous success. As Brigid Haines states:
If the writers assume willingly the role ascribed to them by publishers, the media and the
reading public, namely that of cultural ambassador for the country or region they have left
behind, it is often at least in part because this makes them marketable. The positive recep-
tion of these works is aided by the fact that, drawing on cultural traditions of the authors’
homelands or connecting with global movements such as magic realism, they tend to be
written in accessible prose with a strong element of storytelling.
(Haines 139)
This observation is undeniably true for Russian- German literature, but, as Eva Hausbacher
observes, its success didn’t stem only from the publishers’ well calculated marketing strategies or from
the writers’ attempts to fulfill the readers’ expectations (Hausbacher, Transnationale Schreibweisen 187).
As Wanner convincingly demonstrated, such tendencies were indeed present in the 2000s (Wanner,
Out of Russia 50–82); what makes Russian-German literature marketable today (and explains its pre-
dominantly positive reception with literary critics), is its critical engagement with pressing political,
cultural, and social issues, often in combination with stylistic finesse and linguistic innovation. Before
proceeding to the analysis of linguistic features, a discussion of four topics central to Russian-German
literature shall serve to illustrate its major concerns: the history of the two respective ethnic groups
in Russia/Soviet Union, the individual immigration experience, the complex hybrid identity that
emerges in the immigration process, and, finally, the interest in issues unrelated to one’s own fate or
that of one’s own ethnic group.
Stories of the Past—Historical Narratives

In a quite outspoken manner, many writers look to inform and enlighten Western audiences about
the Russian/Soviet past since “the German-speaking readership cannot be relied upon to have
the same store of cultural knowledge as the diverse potential readerships in their home countries”
(Haines 138). This information was particularly welcome in the 2000s, as the interest of the Western
societies in Russia was on the rise, now that the Iron Curtain was down and Eastern Europe became
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accessible. But, as the success of Katja Petrowskaja’s bestselling debut Vielleicht Esther (2014, Maybe
Esther, trans. by Shelley Frisch, 2018), an inquiry into her Jewish family’s past, had demonstrated, the
interest of German-speaking readers in Jewish history is still high. Like Petrowskaja’s, most texts that
engage with the past are not historical novels in the strict sense of the word. Typically, they combine
immigration stories with a historical narrative: The history of one’s family or ethnic group is related
by a recent immigrant, a first-hand witness to the events or a descendant who conveys, in Marianne
Hirsch’s sense of post-memory (Hirsch 2012), the experiences and memories of her parents and
grandparents.
Eleonora Hummel’s novels Die Fische von Berlin (2005, The Fish of Berlin) and Die Venus im
Fenster (2009, Venus in the Window) are a case in point. Hummel, the most prominent ethnic
German writer from Russia, combines the immigration story of a young woman to East Germany
with an account of the troubled history of her family of ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. In
a remarkably balanced way, Hummel tells of the suffering of ethnic Germans without omitting or
suppressing the fact that during World War II some of them indeed supported Hitler, welcomed the
Nazis, and hoped for their victory.9 But her texts are free of simple binary oppositions of victims
versus perpetrators; while in no way exculpating the Nazi collaborators, they themselves are shown
as victims of Soviet persecution.
In Katja Petrowskaja’s aforementioned book as in Vladimir Vertlib’s Das besondere Gedächtnis der
Rosa Masur (2001, The Special Memory of Rosa Masur) and Jan Himmelfarb’s Sterndeutung (2015,
The Explication of Stars), the fates of ordinary Jewish people, of individuals and families, are depicted
as exemplary for Jewish history in the Soviet century. This history, as it emerges from the texts, is
largely defined by oppression and suffering caused by the Stalinist terror regime and Nazi atrocities
committed during the Holocaust. As one of the most tragic consequences of Soviet anti-Semitism
that enforced cultural assimilation and forbade the commemoration of specifically Jewish victims
after World War II, Petrowskaja names the loss of Jewish cultural memory and of one’s own familial
history. The title of her book thus highlights the descendants’ pain caused by not knowing—she isn’t
even sure of her great-grandmother’s name.
But there is also a different side to these narratives. Next to the losses, they tell of Jewish resili-
ence, of the will to survive and to live, despite all odds, an emancipated, self-determined life as
well as the achievements and successes of Jewish scientists, doctors, and artists. Furthermore, when
talking about Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union, writers like Vertlib, Himmelfarb, and Dmitrij
Kapitelman often focus on events little known to Western audiences, on aspects that complicate
and challenge the German memorial culture and the Holocaust discourse. Kapitelman’s depictions
of Jewish war veterans in his thinly disguised autobiographical novel Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren
Vaters (2016, The Smile of My Invisible Father), of former Red Army soldiers who take enormous
pride in their fight against Nazis doesn’t sit easy with the prevalent German view of Jews as victims;
Vertlib’s focus on the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944) that cost over a million Jewish and non-
Jewish lives and Himmelfarb’s vivid descriptions of the tremendous hardships of Jewish evacuees
in Central Asian republics remind us that the Jewish suffering wasn’t limited to ghettos and con-
centration camps. The detailed depictions of these experiences (that were little known to German-
speaking readers), were instrumental in bringing about a profound change of German memorial
culture—a turn away form a “container-memory culture” limited to the past of an (allegedly)
homogeneous nation (Erll 7–8), towards a genuinely transcultural memory of an ethnically diverse
and heterogeneous society.
Writing the New Life—Immigration Narratives

The texts in question also offered insights into the immigration experience and enlightened audiences
about the hardships in the everyday life of the newly arrived, about the multiple challenges they
had to face, the encounters with xenophobe attitudes, and discrimination in Austria and Germany.
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However, these immigration narratives cannot be reduced to suffering and victimization since the
vast majority tell of successful social and professional upward mobility. Novels by Kapitelman, Anna
Galkina, Kat Kaufmann, Dimitrij Wall, and many others depict the immigrants’ difficult beginnings, a
life defined by a constant struggle with disorientation in a new society, of helplessness and poverty in
overcrowded refugee camps, in the decrepit suburbs of Berlin or Leipzig, or in the “Russian ghettos”
of little provincial towns in western Germany. But their protagonist’s fates all follow a trajectory
from an “immigrant underdog” to what each of them thinks of as success. Significantly, while some
younger immigrants are shown to strive for financially attractive careers,10 for others (professional)
self-realization is far more important than economic prosperity. Kat Kaufmann’s, Marina Frenk’s, and
Lena Gorelik’s protagonists thus opt for careers as musicians, artists, or writers, knowing full well that
these are often not as well-paid and offer less stability.11 In societies ruled by a market economy, this
rejection of a “dishwasher to millionaire” life plan, of success that is measured exclusively by pros-
perity and prestige, questions the most basic principles of the said societies; these texts can therefore
be understood in terms of a specific immigrant critique of Western capitalism.
“Russians, Asians, and Barbarians”—Imaginations of Exotic

Immigrant Identity
The third important feature is the inherent exoticism of the texts in question, in regard to the
exotic (as in unfamiliar and exciting) East European landscapes but especially in regard to the
imagined immigrant identity. As Wanner convincingly argued, by staging their public personae
as “Russian” and creating “Russian” immigrant characters, in the 2000s Wladimir Kaminer, Lena
Gorelik, and Alina Bronsky produced “Russianness for German consumption,” and offered their
readers familiar and non-disturbing images of foreignness. This “Russianness” was a mélange of
German stereotypes concerning “typically Russian” drinking and eating habits and the equally
“typical” love for literature and culture (Wanner, Out of Russia 50–82).12 This type of exoti-
cism, a combination of popular clichés with consequent avoidance of complex, possibly irritating
issues13 and an accessible, entertaining narrative style made the three writers marketable and
highly successful in German-speaking countries.
A different approach to the same issue was proposed by Dirk Uffelmann who identified two dis-
tinct strategies of translingual writers’ self-fashioning as “exotic Others.” The first, “conciliatoriness”
(Konzilianz), aims to reduce possible irritations with the readers in their encounters with the Other
(Uffelmann 608). Thus, he describes Kaminer as a cuddly foreigner (Kuschelausländer),14 i.e. a writer
who chooses to affirm German clichés about foreigners in order to gain acceptance of the readership
rather than criticize and deconstruct them. The second strategy, “Asianism/alienation” (Asianismus/
Befremdung), is diametrically opposed to the first in so far as it is meant to deliberately irritate readers
(Uffelmann 613). Here and elsewhere, Uffelmann productively adapts the terms and positions of
postcolonial theory to the context of Russian-German literature. Strategies of “self-othering” and
“self-Orientalization” turn out to be particularly helpful in the understanding of self-representations
of writers like Maxim Biller, a German writer born in Prague to a Russian-Jewish family. In his essays
and novels Biller depicted himself (and other migrants) as the exotic Other of the “civilized” Western
society, as “Asians” or “wild barbarians” from the “East.” By seemingly affirming these negative
stereotypes, this provocative strategy actually subverts them insofar as it forces the readers to face and
to question any similar stereotypes of their own.
Strikingly, a clear gender difference can be observed in regard to the depictions of immigrant
identities. While some recent texts, like e.g. Dimitrij Wall’s novel Gott will uns tot sehen (2015, God
wants to see us dead) or Mitja Vachedin’s Engel sprechen Russisch (2017, Angels speak Russian), still
draw upon the “Asianism” model, neither this, nor the other strategy were popular with women
writers. By the end of the 2000s, a different tendency in the fashioning of immigrant identity became
evident, a change of paradigms that was brought about by women writers.
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Angry Young Women—Writing the Female Immigrant Experience

Despite the continuous popularity of Biller, Kaminer, and Vertlib, in recent years Russian-German
literature has become a domain largely dominated by female authors. Lena Gorelik and Alina Bronsky
were soon joined by Olga Grjasnowa, Olga Martynova, Katja Petrowskaja, Sascha Marianna Salzmann,
and many others. As heterogeneous as their fictional texts are, what they have in common is the
foregrounding of specifically female subjectivities, the discussion of the immigration experience from
a decidedly female point of view, and the fashioning of the female immigrant identity that differs in
most fundamental ways from those discussed above.
Dismissing both the “cuddly foreigner” and the “wild barbarian” models as unsuitable for their
purposes, for themselves and for their immigrant characters they devised a new type of identity—that
of a self-emancipated and fierce woman unwilling to accept discrimination or tolerate abuse, always
ready to raise uncomfortable questions, voice criticism, and confront injustice.
In their non-fiction, many of these writers act as critical observers of German society, especially in
regard to the broader social discourse on immigration and integration. In 2012, Gorelik published a
programmatic essay15 in which she criticized the debates on the required integration of “foreigners”
into a “German leading culture” (Deutsche Leitkultur) in no uncertain terms and demanded the
unconditional acceptance of immigrants and their different cultures as integral and indispensable
parts of a modern, pluralistic German society.16 More recently, harsh criticism of ubiquitous racism
and xenophobia were expressed by Grjasnowa and Salzmann in a collection of essays by immi-
grant writers with a no less explicit title Eure Heimat ist unser Alptraum (2019,Your Homeland is our
Nightmare).
In their fictional works, these and other writers have introduced assertive and strong-willed female
immigrant characters whose most striking feature is resilience, especially in the face of the extremely
traumatic violence and/or sexual abuse she typically experiences at a young age. Sasha, the heroine
of Bronsky’s debut Scherbenpark (2008, Park of Broken Glass, transl. by Tim Mohr, 2010), the novel
in which this character first appeared, witnesses her mother’s murder at the hands of her stepfather;
Masha in Grjasnowa’s novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2012, All Russians Love Birch Trees,
transl. by Eva Bacon, 2014) witnesses bloodshed in her native city of Baku during anti-Armenian
riots in 1990, in Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s novel Außer sich (2017, Beside Oneself), Alissa (and her
twin brother Anton) suffer at the hands of their violent father who had himself experienced sexual
abuse in childhood.17 The process of dealing with these traumas is depicted as long and painful, but
ultimately all young women are shown to overcome them. Moreover, later in life they are able to
successfully confront hostility and discrimination by their (often male) peers and superiors, in schools,
universities, in private and professional settings.
What also becomes visible in these texts is a shift from problematizations of the immigrants’
ethnic or linguistic identity towards a stronger interest in their gender identities, and, in broader
terms, in concrete and tangible bodily expressions of identity.18 A case in point is Gorelik’s novel
Die Listensammlerin, where the immigration experience and ethnical identity are far less relevant
than the physical changes women immigrants’ bodies undergo in different stages of their lives.
Here, it is the change of a body’s shape, of its contours due to childbirth, illness, or advanced age,
depicted as the utmost irritating and painful experiences, that force Sofia, the main character, to
reflect upon her identity. Similarly, in Jägerin und Sammlerin (2020, Hunter and Gatherer), Lana
Lux focuses on a troubled mother-daughter relationship, whereby their immigration story steps
behind that of the daughter’s eating disorder. Salzmann’s aforementioned novel focuses on Alissa’s
search for her gender identity, which is ultimately shown to be fluid; her immigration experience
as well as her Jewishness, on the other hand, are no longer prioritized and appear to be taken for
granted.
With these recent foci, Gorelik, Salzmann, and the other writers step outside strictly local contexts
and position themselves as part of global political and social discourses. Furthermore, they actively
194
participate in global literary trends. Hereby, a comparative approach appears particularly promising: a
juxtaposition of the depictions of female immigrant experience by Russian-German writers and of
those by writers from other cultural contexts such as e.g. Zadie Smith (UK), Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie (Nigeria/USA), or Marie NDiaye (France) would help better understand the features they
have in common on the one hand and map out the respective specificities on the other.
Discovering the World—Beyond the Immigration Narrative

The interest these writers take in the world beyond their countries of residence is perceptible in the
different geographical locations of the plots as well as in their protagonists’ mobility. After her step-
father’ suicide, Bronsky’s Sasha leaves to Prague to rethink her future, Grjasnowa’s Masha temporarily
moves to Israel for private and professional reasons, most of Salzmann’s plot takes place in Istanbul,
where Alissa goes in search of her brother. Writers like Lana Lux and Wlada Kolosowa choose to
“return” to Ukraine and Russia: in her debut Kukolka, Lux tells the tragic story of an orphaned girl
who is forced into prostitution in Ukraine of the 1990s, Kolosowa’s Fliegende Hunde (2018, Flying
Dogs) tells a complicated love story between two teenage girls in the suburbs of today’s St. Petersburg,
and Bronsky’s third novel, Baba Dunjas letzte Liebe (2015, Baba Dunja’s Last Love, transl. by Tim Mohr,
2019), focuses on the fates of Ukrainians who return to their village close to Chernobyl years after
the catastrophe. In Vielleicht Marseille (2015, Maybe Marseille), Katerina Poladjan radically leaves all
issues related to immigration and Russia behind to tell a complex love story of a French couple in
the eponymous city.
Whereas in the 2000s Russian-German writers displayed little interest in their non-Russian
environment (Finkelstein, A Common Place 370), today, Gorelik, Grjasnowa, and Kaminer are highly
sensitive to the fates of the people around them.They too move away from the Russian and Russian-
Jewish context and, in a very emphatic way, venture into the worlds of other immigrants and refugees.
In Null bis Unendlich (2015, From Zero to Infinity), Gorelik explores the fates of Yugoslav refugees
in Germany since the 1990s. Several writers responded to the war in Syria and the tragic fates of
millions of refugees, many of whom came to Germany after 2015; their reactions range from fictional
reconstructions of the events leading to the outbreak of the war, of the perilous flight, and the many
hardships Syrian refugees faced upon arrival in Germany in Grjasnowa’s novel Gott ist nicht schüchtern
(2017, City of Jasmine, transl. by Katy Derbyshire, 2019) to Kaminer’s short essays written in his typical
humorous and ironical style, in which he mainly highlights the shortcomings and the absurdities of
German bureaucracy (Ausgerechnet Deutschland. Geschichten unserer neuen Nachbarn, 2018, Germany of
all Places. Stories of Our New Neighbors).
The Languages of Russian-German Literature

Upon arrival in the German-speaking countries, with very few exceptions immigrants from the
Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia were strictly monolingual speakers of Russian with hardly
any knowledge of German. After decades of assimilation pressure, exercised by Soviet authorities,
younger generations of ethnic Germans no longer spoke the language of their ancestors and Yiddish
was no longer spoken among Russian Jews. In both groups, only older people retained some know-
ledge of the respective idiom, whereas the young grew up with little more than a faint memory of
their families’ bi-or multilingual past. In fictional works that are often based on the autobiographical
experience of the authors, the acquisition of German is mostly depicted as a long and challenging
process, but after a while especially the younger protagonists are shown to speak it perfectly (e.g. Anna
Galkina Das neue Leben, 2017, The New Life).
Albeit most Russian-German authors write exclusively in German (in Steven Kellman’s terms they
are “monolingual translinguals,” Kellman 12) and specifically address German-speaking audiences,
not all their texts are strictly monolingual; in fact, many operate in more than one language. One
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of the first authors to pursue this strategy was Olga Martynova, who left Leningrad in 1991 already
a renowned poet. In her novels Sogar Papageien überleben uns (2010, Even Parrots Outlive Us) and
Mörikes Schlüsselbein (2013, Mörike’s Clavicle) she inserts Russian words and expressions on several
occasions (Hitzke 97–117). However, possible irritations of the readers are reduced by immediate
translations. More recently, Salzmann and Lux introduce even more foreign-language material into
their novels; here, Russian words in the Latin alphabet are also followed by translation. Marina Frenk
chooses a more radical, irritating approach and leaves some words without translation or explanation.
For the first time in the history of Russian-German literature, entire sentences are printed here in
Cyrillic letters (these are followed by translations).
Furthermore, for some authors memories of a multilingual past also play a significant role. Imperial
Russia and the Soviet Union were multinational and multicultural states that consisted of dozens of
different nations, ethnicities, and languages. Long before immigration, Jews and ethnic Germans have
thus lived in multiethnic and multilingual environments, in contact with many different ethnic groups
and cultures and have themselves spoken two or more languages. Especially elderly characters like
the 93-year-old Rosa Masur in Vladimir Vertlib’s aforementioned novel Das besondere Gedächtnis der
Rosa Masur or the 96-year-old Luka Lewadski in Marianna Gaponenko’s 2012 novel Wer ist Martha?
(Who is Martha?) bear witness to Russia’s multilingual past. As well as her native Yiddish, Rosa Masur
speaks Russian, Belorussian, and Polish. Luka Lewadski speaks Russian and Polish. Furthermore, both
are fluent in German, which makes their adaptation to the respective German-language environment
a lot easier than it is for the aforementioned immigrants, non-speakers of German. Therefore, the
acquisition of German by Rosa’s son and grandson restores the traditionally multilingual Jewish way
of life that was forcibly interrupted by the totalitarian Soviet regime (Finkelstein, Russisch-translinguale
Gegenwartsliteratur 202–207).
Writing in Two Languages, Addressing Different Audiences

For some immigrant writers switching into German didn’t necessarily mean abandoning Russian.
Olga Martynova, Dmitrij Vachedin, and Dariia Wilke (who publishes in Russian under the pen name
Verner) write in both languages. They are, according to Steven Kellman’s taxonomy, “ambilingual
writers” (Kellman 12), who look for recognition not in Paris, as Pascale Casanova argued (Casanova
82–125), but in two (or three) literary centers–Berlin and/or Vienna and Moscow. Addressing two
very different audiences, such as the German-and the Russian ones, requires the employment of
different strategies on multiple levels. Martynova, who writes prose and poetry, differentiates themat-
ically between genres and languages: Her novels, addressed to a German-speaking audience, frequently
deal with immigration experience. Her Russian poetry covers a broad range of topics, but immigra-
tion is not one them.19 In what can be considered an exceptional case, she is almost equally successful
in both countries.20 Wilke began writing only after moving to Vienna in 2000; between 2011 and
2016 she published several children’s books in Russian and the novel Mezhsezon’e (In-Between
Season) in 2012, for which she was awarded the Russkaiia Premiia. Wilke differentiates thematically
between her Russian and German oeuvre too, but in a way very different from Martynova: Whereas
in her Russian novel she explicitly addressed the hardships of immigration, for her German debut,
Hyazinthenstimme (2019, Hyacinth Voice), she carefully avoided any such issues. Her choice of a com-
pletely different and unusual topic (modern day castrati singers) speaks of an attempt to avoid writing
“for German consumption” and to present herself to the German-speaking audience as a “Russian
writer.” Vachedin’s approach is different yet: Both in his Russian novel Snezhnye nemcy (2010, Snow
Germans, transl. by Arch Tait, 2013) and in the aforementioned German novel Engel sprechen Russisch,
he addresses the immigration experience of Russian-born protagonists in Germany. In Russia, his
prose received considerable recognition; in 2007 he was awarded the Debjut award and the Russkaiia
Premiia in 2012.
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Becoming World Literature

Arguably, the presence in both languages and on both literary scenes helps authors to gain recogni-
tion with these audiences—especially if one considers that German-language fiction by immigrant
authors is rarely translated into Russian. Of the vast body of German texts only very few found
their way into the Russian book market: among them Kaminer’s Russendisko (Russendisko. Rasskazy,
2003) and Vertlib’s Zwischenstationen (Ostanovki v puti, 2009). While the former was met with very
little enthusiasm by Russian critics and readers, the latter received hardly any attention at all. Genres
other than fiction, like children literature or non-fiction, are more likely to be translated. Bronsky
is known to the Russian public only as an author of children books. Her novels for adolescents
Spiegelkind (2012, Mirror Child) and Und du kommst auch drin vor (2017, You’re Also in It) were
published in Russia in 2013 and 2019. Kaminer’s second and to date last book in Russian transla-
tion is his parenting guidebook Coole Eltern leben länger. Geschichten vom Erwachsenwerden (2014, Cool
Parents Live Longer. Stories about Growing Up, Russian edition from 2017), which was published by
a Moscow based publisher as “modern psychology.” Tellingly, none of these books by Bronsky and
Kaminer engage with issues of immigration—the Russian book market and the reading public do
not seem particularly appreciative of immigration narratives by former compatriots.
The reception of Russian-German fiction in the Anglophone world, on the other hand, has
increased significantly in recent years. Initially, the restrained reviews Kaminer’s Russendisco received
in America made future translations of his other books and those of other Russian-German writers
somewhat improbable. However, Kaminer was later translated into many European languages: Italian,
French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Bronsky’s and Grjasnowa’s novels were also met
with interest in Europe. The former was translated into French, the latter into Czech and Swedish.
As mentioned throughout this chapter, novels by Bronsky, Grjasnowa, and Petrowskaja were also
translated into English and received, especially in Petrowskajs’s case, considerable appreciation.21 In a
world defined more than ever by mass immigration, by wars and repression that result in the displace-
ment of millions of people, Russian-German literature that frequently speaks similar experiences is
now successful not only in the German-speaking countries but also finds its readers in other parts of
the world.
Notes
1 In part, this is the case because texts written in the respective second language were lost, in part because some
writers are still recognized exclusively as Russian and not as translingual, bi-, or multilingual ones. Adrian
Wanner’s recent monograph The Bilingual Muse. Self-Translation Among Russian Poets (2020) is an exception
to the rule. Among with the works of Alexandra Berlina and Eugenia Kelbert, it signals a growing scholarly
interest to the subject.
2 Kiukhel’beker was a descendant of Baltic German nobility from Livonia, Kul’man’s and Pavlova’s parents were
of Alsatian and German ancestry respectively.
3 For the best and most extensive discussion of Kul’man’s multilingual oeuvre see Wanner, The Bilingual
Muse 19–43.
4 Such as “izbushka,” the wooden hut (in Starik, The Old Man) or “usad’ba,” the country estate (in Pozhar,
The Fire).
5 Vladimir Vertlib and Olga Martynova were both awarded the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 2001 and 2011
respectively; this particular award honors writers whose first language isn’t German but who have switched to
German for their writing.
6 The commercial success of Kaminer’s first two books made it very clear that literature written by Soviet/
Russian immigrant writers could provide publishers with substantial profits.
7 Throughout this text, the writers will be referred to by this term and the body of texts will be referred to
as “Russian-German literature”; the hyphen is intended to emphasize the hybrid and transcultural nature of
the texts.
8 In the 1970s, Jews from the Soviet Union were fleeing state-sponsored anti-Semitic discrimination and
oppression. Most of them left for the United States and Israel and only a few opted for Austria and Germany.
Most Jewish immigrants of the 1990s left because of the harsh economic conditions in their home countries
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Miriam Finkelstein
but also because of serious concerns about imminent pogroms as radical right-wing organizations were on
the rise. After 1990, when Germany recognized its historical guilt towards the Jews and, as a belated act of
compensation, granted Soviet Jews refugee status (Kontingentflüchtlingsstatus) and roughly 220.000 Jews
relocated to Germany (Laufer 2003). The single largest group of immigrants to Germany was, however, the
“Spätaussiedler,” ethnic Germans from Russia. According to official sources, a little over 2 million individuals
settled in Germany between 1990 and 2012 (Spätaussiedler in Deutschland 28). Few Russian-speakers came
to Germany and Austria since the late 1990s for family or professional reasons. While this chapter focuses
on writers that belong to these two groups, it should also be noted that some Russian-born authors were
writing in German in both German states long before the so-called ‘third and fourth immigration waves’ of
the 1970s and 1990s. Irina Liebmann and Eugen Ruge were born in the Soviet Union to German-Russian
parents (in 1943 and 1954 respectively) and returned to East Berlin a few years later; Natascha Wodin (née
Nataliia Vdovina) was born to Soviet forced laborers in a displaced persons camp near Nuremberg in 1945.
Although their extensive and much acclaimed oeuvre frequently engages with Russian/Soviet history and
Russian-German political and cultural ties and even contains traces of the Russian language, it will not be
addressed here since these writers are effectively monolingual speakers of German.
9 In 1930s and 1940s, during of Stalin’s terror regime and World War II, thousands of Russian Germans (who
were suspected of supporting Hitler on the grounds of their ethnicity) were deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan,
and Central Asia.Thousands more send to the Gulag camps. Only in the 1980s and 1990s significant numbers
received permission to settle in the home country of their ancestors.
10 Such as the daughter of Artur Levin, the protagonist in Himmelfarb’s novel, who studies at a prestigious uni-
versity to become an economist, or Rosa Masur’s grandson who becomes a successful software engineer in
Vertlib’s book.
11 In their novels Superposition (2015), ewig her und gar nicht wahr (2020, A Long Time Ago and Absolutely
Untrue) and Die Listensammlerin (2013, The Collector of Lists) respectively.
12 Wanner emphasizes here the protagonists’ “bookishness” who likes reading Russian classics (Mandelshtam,
Pushkin, or Tolstoy).
13 One issue that was apparently considered too irritating for German audiences was Jewishness. Kaminer
and Gorelik hardly ever address their own Jewishness (although both came to Germany as a Jewish quota
refugees) and refrain from using Jewish immigrant characters (Wanner 55).
14 A term he borrows from KANAK ATTAK, a loose group of German artists and public figures who “share a
commitment to eradicate racism from German society.” www.kanak-attak.de/ka/down/pdf/manifest_e.pdf
(17.09.2020)
15 With the telling title Sie können aber gut Deutsch! Warum ich nicht mehr dankbar sein will, dass ich hier leben darf
und Toleranz nicht weiterhilft (“Your German is so good!” Why I no longer want to be grateful for being able
to live here and why tolerance doesn’t help).
16 As Wanner rightly remarks, this critical tendency was already visible in Gorelik’s earliest novels (Wanner
72) but it was not until this essay that it was fully developed and replaced her earlier, more conciliatory
positions.
17 Children are common protagonists in the works of these and other writers: Stories of child abuse and
suffering are central to Bronsky’s second book Die schärfsten Gerichte der tatarischen Küche (2010, The
Hottest Dishes in the Tatar Cuisine, transl. by Tim Mohr, 2011) or Lana Lux’ debut novel Kukolka (2017,
The Doll).
18 For a discussion of hybrid ethnic and cultural identities of women immigrants see Isterheld 2017 and
Kazmierczak 2016.
19 Her poetry is frequently metapoetic. Tt often reflects upon the possibilities and the limits of languages and
verbal communication. For a detailed discussion see Hausbacher 2016.
20 In Russia, her poems are published by the renowned publisher “Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie” and have
been recommended for prestigious prizes like “Russkaiia Premiia” (2009). In Germany and Austria, she was
awarded numerous prizes and was the first Russian translingual writer to receive the Ingeborg-Bachmann
Prize (2012).
21 As already indicated, Vachedin’s novel was made available to English readers in 2013; Shutovskoii kolpak,
Wilke’s novel for adolescents about a young homosexual boy in today’s Russia (2012) was translated and
published in 2015 as Playing a Part (transl. by Marian Schwartz).
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Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. by M. Debevoise. Harvard University Press, 2004.
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Dawson, R. P. “Catherine the Great: Playwright of the Anti- Occult.” Thalia’s Daughters: German Women
Dramatists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Francke, 1996, pp. 17–34.
Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax, vol. 17, no .4, 2011, pp. 4–18.
Finkelstein, Miriam. “A Common Place, a Contested Space: Reciprocal Representations of Russian and
Eastern European Migrants in their Berlin Narratives.” Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, vol. 70, no. 2, 2015,
pp. 365–399.
Finkelstein, Miriam. “Russisch- translinguale Gegenwartsliteratur als Weltliteratur.” Slavische Literaturen als
Weltliteratur. Hybride Konstellationen, Innsbruck University Press, 2018, pp. 189–214.
Haines, Brigid. “Introduction: The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature.”
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Hausbacher, Eva.“Transnationale Schreibweisen in der Мigrationsliteratur.” Handbuch Literatur und Transnationalität,
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Isterheld, Nora. “In der Zugluft Europas”. Zur deutschsprachigen Literatur russischstämmiger AutorInnen. University of
Bamberg Press, 2017.
Kazmierczak, Madlen. Fremde Frauen. Zur Figur der Migrantin aus (post)sozialistischen Ländern in der deutschsprachigen
Gegenwartsliteratur. Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2016.
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Moracci, Giovanna. “Performing History. Catherine II’s Historical Dramas.” Eighteenth-Century Russia: Society,
Culture, Economy. LIT, 2007, pp. 121–130.
Pavlova, Karolina. Das deutsche Werk Karolina Karlovna Pavlovas. Textsammlung zur ersten deutschen Gesamtausgabe.
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Uffelmann, Dirk.“Paradoxe der jüngsten nichtslavischen Literatur slavischer Migranten.” Die Ost-West-Problematik
in den europäischen Kulturen und Literaturen. Ausgewählte Aspekte, Neisse Verlag, 2009, pp. 601–630.
Wanner, Adrian. Out of Russia. Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora. Northwestern University Press, 2011.
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Worbs, Susanne et al. (Spät-)Aussiedler in Deutschland. Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, 2013.
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16
RUSSIAN-ENGLISH LITERARY
TRANSLINGUALISM
Switching from Cyrillic to Roman across
the Atlantic
Adrian Wanner
The phenomenon of Anglophone literature written by native speakers of Russian owes its existence
to the Bolshevik Revolution. Of course, even prior to 1917 many members of Tsarist Russia’s poly-
glot upper class, including the novelists Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy, were fluent in English (along
with French and German).Vladimir Nabokov, the scion of an Anglophile Russian aristocratic family,
spoke the language since his early childhood. However, the use of English as a tool of creative writing
arose as a consequence of forced emigration. The many émigrés who left the country after the
Revolution and the Civil War were followed by three more major waves of outmigration: the flow of
refugees in the wake of World War II known as the “Second Wave,” the mostly Jewish and dissident
“Third Wave” of the 1970s, and, finally, a massive “Fourth Wave” triggered by the disintegration of the
Soviet Union and the political and economic turmoil of the 1990s.
To be sure, not all Russian émigré writers ended up embracing the language of their host country.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived from 1976 to 1994 on a secluded estate in Cavendish, Vermont,
never even bothered to learn English. Sergei Dovlatov, who emigrated to New York in 1979, also
remained a Russophone writer, even though, unlike Solzhenitsyn, he did address the topic of emi-
gration in his books.The prominent dissident author Vasily Aksyonov, who moved to the U.S. in 1980
at age 48, failed in his effort to become a translingual writer in spite of having a good command of
English. In 1986–1988, Aksyonov wrote a novel in English, The Yolk of the Egg, but was unable to find
a publisher. To this day, the book is available only in Aksyonov’s Russian self-translation (see Orlova
94–95).
Among the Russian-born authors who switched to English, three stand out as “superstars,”
even though their names are rarely uttered in the same breath: Ayn Rand (1905–1982), Vladimir
Nabokov (1899–1977), and Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996). All three were born and raised in the
same city, the former Imperial capital St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad. In their spoken English,
they retained a Russian accent—faint in the case of Nabokov, heavy in the case of Rand and
Brodsky—and they shared a common contempt for Soviet communism and a sense of rugged
individualism. Further similarities include a penchant for strong opinions, a preference for cerebral
“coolness” over soft sentimentalism, and an eagerness to engage in polemics against those who dis-
agreed with their views. In almost all other respects, though, Rand, Nabokov, and Brodsky could
not be more different from one another. As we will see, they also represent different strands in
Russian-English translingualism.
200 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-16

Russian-English Literary Translingualism
If we measure success in terms of volumes sold and political influence, Ayn Rand, née Alissa
Rosenbaum, is the most successful Russian-born Anglophone author, and she rivals only Kahlil
Gibran as the most influential translingual writer of all time (although she is rarely discussed as such).
With tens of millions of copies sold, Rand’s books continue to be bought in the U.S. by the hundreds
of thousands every year. The long list of her fans and followers includes the economist and former
head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, the 2012 Vice-Presidential candidate and Speaker of
the House Paul Ryan, the former CEO of ExxonMobil and Donald Trump’s short-lived Secretary
of State Rex Tillerson, and the Texas Republican Senator and presidential candidate Ted Cruz. The
intensity of Rand’s following has the hallmarks of a religious cult. Indeed, in a 1991 survey sponsored
by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club, asking readers to identify the book
that had most influenced their lives, Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged came in second after the Bible (Bell-
Villada 6).
Rand graduated from Petrograd University with a degree in history and did a brief stint in film
school before arriving in the U.S. in 1926. Despite her minimal knowledge of English, she managed
to become a script writer in Hollywood. Later she achieved fame as a novelist and political theorist
advocating “ethical egoism.” While much has been written about Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy
by both her followers and detractors, her transition from Russian to English has received no schol-
arly attention. Rand herself hardly gave any thought to this topic. Her attitude towards language
was essentially instrumental. In the foreword to the revised 1958 edition of her first novel We the
Living (originally published in 1936), she writes that “the chief inadequacy of my literary means was
grammatical—a particular kind of uncertainty in the use of the English language, which reflected
the transitional state of a mind thinking no longer in Russian, but not yet fully in English” (xiii).
Acquiring an “ambilingual” mind able to think simultaneously in both Russian and English was not
among Rand’s aspirations. In spite of Rand’s claim to have purged her book from embarrassing
Russianisms, a careful reading reveals plenty of Russian calques, ranging from missing articles and
pronouns to expressions like “sickle and hammer” (serp i molot) rather than “hammer and sickle,” or
the ungrammatical “reduction of staffs” (sokrashchenie kadrov).
Among Rand’s four novels, We the Living is the only one with a Russian setting. Rand’s dis-
ciple Leonard Peikoff explains in his afterword that Rand “hated” Russia and wrote the book “to
get Russia out of her system” (492). Even though Rand embraced her American identity with a
neophyte’s zeal and strove to downplay her Russian roots (as well as her Jewish roots), more recent
scholarship has unearthed a significant influence of Russian culture on her writings. As D. Barton
Johnson has shown, the “sensationally overwrought plots, crude didacticism, and clumsy prose” of
Rand’s novels show clear similarities with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s influential potboiler What is to be
Done? (56; see also Bell-Villada 132–43 and Weiner). Johnson concludes that “Rand wrote Russian
novels in English transforming the traditional Russian didactic novel of ideas into something that we
might loosely label ‘Capitalist Realism’ ” (64).
Aside from stylistic and generic similarities, common elements between Rand’s Capitalist Realism
and Stalinist Socialist Realism include a militant atheism, the celebration of industrialization and
technology, and a fascination with muscular masculine bodies. While Rand was clearly repelled by
the egalitarian ideals of communism, she seemed nevertheless impressed by Bolshevik ruthlessness
and masculinist swagger. Here is her description of G.P.U. (Soviet secret police) agent Andrei Taganov,
one of the main characters in We the Living and a love interest of the female protagonist: “Andrei
went to work in a factory. In the daytime, he stood at a machine and his eyes were cold as its steel,
his hands steady as its levers, his nerves tense as its belts” (100). The only difference with Soviet “pro-
letarian” fiction of the 1920s or the Socialist Realism of the 1930s is that Rand’s depiction makes
the machine-like, militarized body an object of erotic allure tinged with streaks of sadomasochism.
We learn that, after he joins the Red Army, “Andrei’s hand carried a bayonet as it had fashioned steel;
it pulled a trigger as it had pushed a lever. His body was young, supple, as a vine ripe in the sun, on
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the voluptuous couch of a trench’s mud. He smiled slowly and shot fast” (102). This, then, is the kind
of Anglophone Russian-inflected purple prose most eagerly consumed by a conservative American
mass readership.
By a curious quirk of fate,Vladimir Nabokov became a literary celebrity in America almost at the
same time as Rand. In the late 1950s, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) and Nabokov’s Lolita (1958) made
the two Russian-born novelists “strange bedfellows on the NewYork Times bestseller list” (Johnson 47).
As far as we know, Rand and Nabokov never met, although Nabokov’s younger sister was a school-
mate and close friend of young Alissa Rosenbaum back in St. Petersburg. Unlike Rand, Nabokov
had a distinguished record as a Russian émigré writer (under the pen name V. Sirin) when he arrived
in the U.S. in 1940 fourteen years after Rand. Nabokov’s writing in English preceded his relocation
to America: in the late 1930s, while still living in France, he self-translated two of his Russian novels
into English, and he also began working on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel written
directly in English. His subsequent Anglophone oeuvre made Nabokov one of the most distinguished
American novelists of the twentieth century and, together with Samuel Beckett, perhaps the most
famous writer worldwide working in more than one language.
Even though he lived outside Russia since 1919, up to the mid-1930s Nabokov saw himself
clearly as a Russophone novelist, albeit with cosmopolitan inclinations. His switch to English was
prompted by geopolitical and economic rather than artistic reasons: he realized that the increasing
Nazi menace would necessitate his departure from the European continent and that it would be
impossible to make a living in America with books written in Russian. To be sure, English was a
language Nabokov had known since his earliest childhood—in his own words, he had grown up
“a perfectly normal trilingual child” (1973, 43)—but this does not mean that the transition to
English was easy. Nabokov’s apprehension about writing outside the native tongue is captured in
his well-known lament, in the afterword to the American edition of Lolita, of having to abandon his
“untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English” (1991,
316–317). While the labeling of Nabokov’s English as second-rate is wildly inaccurate, the agony
was real. As Elizabeth Beaujour has noted, “Nabokov experienced his abandonment of Russian as
an apostasy, a personal tragedy, and described it though images of betrayal, amputation, and dismem-
berment” (1995, 39–40).
Even after his metamorphosis into an American novelist, Nabokov never really abandoned his alle-
giance to Russian language and literature (see Bozovic). Most of his Anglophone novels feature Russian
characters and themes. Moreover, he continued to write poetry in his native tongue, and he self-translated
Lolita and his memoirs into Russian. In his late-career work, such as the novel Ada (1969), Nabokov
resorted to a polyglot mode of writing mobilizing the linguistic resources of English, Russian, and French
to create a complex network of trilingual puns, allusions, and parodies. Nabokov’s provocative hyper-
literalist translation of Aleksandr Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin (published 1964), accompanied
by a hypertrophied commentary, exemplifies both his continued commitment to his native culture and
his skepticism about transposing poetic texts from one language to another. This same attitude turned
Nabokov’s bilingual anthology of self-translated poems and chess problems, Poems and Problems (1970),
into a demonstration of poetic untranslatability (see Wanner 2020, 112–134).
Joseph Brodsky, the third member of our trio of Russian-born translingual “superstars,” became
the most highly decorated Russian literary immigrant to America, with the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1987 and an appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1991 (even though, unlike
Nabokov and Rand, his writings did not make him rich). While Rand completely abandoned her
native tongue and Nabokov only used it selectively after his arrival in the U.S., Brodsky remained for
the most part a Russophone poet. He did, however, develop a successful sideline as an Anglophone
essayist. His collection Less Than One won the National Book Critics Award in 1986. More contro-
versially, Brodsky also began to write poetry in English and to self-translate his Russian texts, with the
share of his Anglophone work steadily increasing over the years. Forty-six of his published poems—
about 8 percent of his total output—are written directly in English. He also translated fifty-three of
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his Russian poems into English on his own in addition to collaborating with second-party translators
on many more texts.
Unlike Nabokov, Brodsky did not benefit from an aristocratic multilingual upbringing. He grew
up in Leningrad as a normal monolingual Soviet child. He taught himself English during his exile
in Norenskaia, the small village near the Arctic Circle where he had been banished on charges of
“social parasitism,” by studying and translating the poetry of John Donne and other poets of the
English metaphysical school as well as W.H. Auden, who later became a personal friend. In his 1983
essay “To Please a Shadow,” Brodsky claimed that the wish for “closer proximity” to Auden was what
inspired him to write in English (Brodsky 1986, 357). In later interviews, Brodsky contrasted his atti-
tude toward the English language with that of Nabokov by pointing out that it gave him “pleasure
to write in English.” He added that “an additional pleasure comes from a feeling of incongruity: inas-
much as I was not born to know this language, but the exact opposite, not to know it” (Brodskii 730
[English translation: A.W.]). Having two languages at his disposal became an existential and psycho-
logical necessity that Brodsky was unwilling to part with. In conversation with Solomon Volkov, he
described his bilingualism as
a remarkable situation psychically, because you’re sitting on top of a mountain and looking
down both slopes … and this is an absolutely special sensation. Were a miracle to occur and
I were to return to Russia permanently, I would be extremely nervous at not having the
option of using more than one language.
(Volkov 185–186)
While Brodsky’s English-language essays have reaped high praise, his poetic oeuvre in English
has met with a mixed reception. Brodsky’s decision to take the English translation of his poetry into
his own hands, or—perhaps even worse—to edit and “correct” the work of prominent Anglophone
poets who had agreed to translate his poems was bound to raise eyebrows. How could someone who
spoke English with a heavy foreign accent dare to lecture experienced native speakers about English
verse? To many critics, such behavior seemed, at best, presumptuous, and at worst, self-destructive
in terms of Brodsky’s reputation. However, many of the assumptions underlying the critique of
Brodsky’s Anglophone poetry are open to debate. The peculiarities of his pronunciation and inton-
ation could easily obscure the fact that Brodsky, while clearly not a native speaker of English, had an
intimate familiarity with English-language poetry that surpassed by far the knowledge of an educated
Anglophone. Moreover, one might wonder whether an unidiomatic use of the target language is
necessarily a bad thing in an age that values “foreignization.”
Brodsky’s stubborn insistence on preserving meter and rhyme, while a common feature of English-
to-Russian verse translation, went very much against the grain of established American practices and
set Brodsky on a collision course with the Anglophone translation establishment. But why should
Brodsky in English sound like an American free-verse poet? The perception of formal poetry as an
expression of conservatism, which led some American critics on the left to attack Brodsky on pol-
itical grounds in the 1970s, has given way to a more tolerant and pluralist attitude in recent years.
Ann Kjellberg, Brodsky’s literary executor and the editor of his collected poetry in English, argued in
2015 that “Brodsky’s effort to enliven and expand the formal repertoire in English, which met with
considerable resistance at the time, can surely now be judged a success.” While Brodsky’s stature as
an English-language poet is far from a settled issue, recent studies, such as Alexandra Berlina’s mono-
graph on Brodsky’s self-translations, have begun to reevaluate his Anglophone poetry in a more posi-
tive light (see also Kelbert 2016).
Rand, Nabokov, and Brodsky were not the only twentieth-century Russian-to-English translingual
writers, of course. Mention should be made of two more authors: Romain Gary, born Roman Kacew
(1914–1980), and Vasily Yanovsky (1906–1989). Both belonged to what we might call the “1.5 gen-
eration” of the First Russian Emigration. Born in Russia’s Jewish periphery, they both emigrated
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Adrian Wanner
via Poland to France as adolescents before ending up in the United States either temporarily or
permanently. Gary has the distinction of being perhaps the most linguistically versatile writer ori-
ginating from the former Russian Empire. Adam Gopnik describes him as a “sort of street-dog
Nabokov,” who, fluent in six languages, “passed punningly from one to the other in a dazzling dis-
play of instinctive interlineation.” Born in Vilnius, Gary grew up speaking Russian at home, Polish
at school, and Yiddish in the larger community before embarking on a literary career in two non-
native languages: French, then English, and then French again under the pseudonym Emile Ajar.
Gary learned English during World War II while stationed as a fighter pilot for the Free France air
force in England. Most of his Anglophone novels were written while he lived as a French diplomat
in New York and later Los Angeles. His American fame reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s,
buttressed in part by his celebrity status as a French war hero and husband of Hollywood actress Jean
Seberg. Even though Russian was only one of Gary’s multiple identities, it did form an important part
of his fictional self-presentation, as demonstrated, for example, by the numerous references to Russian
language and culture in the 1970 novel White Dog (see Kelbert 2015, 92–93).
Yanovsky, although living in France for many years, never switched to French in his literary work,
but after moving to New York in 1942 he eventually became a bilingual author working in both
Russian and English. Arriving in the U.S. with no active command of English, it took Yanovsky
twenty-five years of residence in America before he wrote a book directly in English, The Dark Fields
of Venus, based on journals he kept while working in venereal disease clinics. This book was followed
by several more in English, including the novel The Great Transfer (1974). Elizabeth Beaujour (1989,
149) describes Yanovsky’s switch to English as an “instrumental choice.” He acquired the language
through his work as a practicing physician, and, like Nabokov, he realized that there was an extremely
limited market for books written in Russian. As Beaujour puts it, “[b]‌ecause he felt that he had
something very important to say, he would use whatever artistic means he could—including a not
entirely comfortable language, if necessary—to say it” (151). Rather than highlighting his Russian
origins, Yanovsky preferred to embrace an ecumenical, cosmopolitan identity. More recently, Maria
Rubins has analyzed his bilingual oeuvre as a salient example of the “hybridity, plurality, and fusion
that underlie transnational discourse” (84).
By the time the twentieth century reached its end, the original generation of post-Revolutionary
Russian émigrés had passed away. Joseph Brodsky’s poem “Fin de Siècle,” written in Russian in 1989
and self-translated into English in 1992, begins with the line “The century will soon be over, but
sooner it will be me” (Brodsky 2000, 387). When Brodsky died in January of 1996, with the twen-
tieth century drawing to a close and the Soviet Union receding into history, it seemed indeed that
the end of an era had arrived. As it turned out, though, the new millennium was about to open a new
chapter in the history of Anglophone literature written by Russian-speaking immigrants by ushering
in an unprecedented and unexpected new wave of Russian-American fiction, a juggernaut that has
continued to grow unabated for the past twenty years.
The opening salvo of twenty-first century Russian-American literature was the 2002 novel The
Russian Debutante’s Handbook, written by a hitherto unknown author named Gary Shteyngart. Born
in Leningrad in 1972, Shteyngart had come to the U.S. as a child in 1979. His debut novel was hailed
by reviewers as the work of a “new Nabokov” and soon became a national and international best-
seller. The press photo on the book’s jacket showed the author looking forlorn in a woolen hat and
1970s coat with a fake fur collar holding a bear cub on a leash. The clownish outfit and setting sig-
naled Shteyngart’s readiness to both embrace and mock his Eastern European immigrant identity.The
same tropes inform much of his writing. Shteyngart’s self-ironic performance allows him to monetize
his background as a Russian Jew while at the same time deriding those who engage in multicul-
tural auto-exoticism. His second novel, Absurdistan (2006), even contains a direct self-caricature in
the form of a minor character named Jerry Shteynfarb, the author of a successful autobiographical
novel about his travails as a Russian-Jewish American. The narrator, himself a Russian Jew, dismisses
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Shteynfarb as “an upper-middle class phony who came to the States as a kid and is now playing the
professional immigrant game” (81).
Shteyngart’s novel was soon followed by a plethora of books written by other emergent
Russian-American immigrant writers. The still growing list of these authors includes such names
as Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Julia Alekseyeva, Michael Alenyikov, David Bezmozgis, Svetlana Boym,
Mark Budman, Emil Draitser, Anna Fishbeyn, Boris Fishman, Keith Gessen, Elena Gorokhova,
Olga Grushin, Michael Idov, Nadia Kalman, Irina Kovalyova, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Natasha
Lvovich, Kseniya Melnik, Irina Reyn, Maxim Shrayer, Anya Ulinich, Lara Vapnyar, Anya Von
Bremzen, and Zarina Zabrisky. In an article with the whimsical title “The Beet Generation,” the
journalist Emily Gould noted in 2008 that “Russian immigrant authors—especially writers who
write explicitly about Russia and Russianness—are So Hot Right Now.” In the years since Gould
made this observation, the trend has showed no sign of flagging, turning the initial “new wavelet
of Russian-Jewish fiction in English,” as Val Vinokur dubbed it in 2005, into a full-blown wave.
Given the status of English as the global lingua franca, residence in an Anglophone country is not
even necessary anymore for a Russian writer to switch to English. The “flash fiction” author, poet
and essayist Linor Goralik, who shares her time between Moscow and Tel Aviv, creates her work
both in Russian and English.
Where did all these writers come from all of a sudden? Some of them, like Shteyngart, had left the
Soviet Union as children in the company of their “Third Wave” emigrant parents. Others were part
of the vast Jewish exodus from the former Soviet Union and its successor states in the early 1990s.
An increasing number of these Jewish émigrés bypassed the traditional destination of Israel to settle
in North America and in Germany (see the contribution by Miriam Finkelstein on Russian-German
Translingualism in this volume). As the novelist Anya Ulinich explained in a 2007 interview with
Kevin Kinsella:
Starting in the late 1980s it became easier to leave, and people began to arrive in droves.
I suppose, statistically, more people mean more potential writers. … It took us a while to
grow up and learn English, and so here we are now.
Even though they are frequently lumped together and sometimes appear jointly at promotional
events, the Russian-American novelists are not a homogeneous group and they cannot easily be
reduced to a common style or “school.” They all share a Soviet place of birth, Russian as the native
tongue, and the experience of immigration to America in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood.
While those who arrived as children can easily pass as native speakers of American English, others
retain a more or less conspicuous Russian accent in their speech. Most of them write exclusively
in English, which makes them, in Steven Kellman’s terminology, “monolingual translinguals” rather
than “ambilinguals” (2000, 4). The only major exception is the novelist, journalist and screenwriter
Michael Idov, who, shuttling back and forth between the U.S. and Russia, writes in both English and
Russian and self-translates between the two languages (see Wanner 2019).
Aside from Olga Grushin, who came to the U.S. on a student visa, all of these writers are of
Jewish origin (as were Rand,Yanovsky, Gary, and Brodsky). With the notable exception of Nabokov,
Russian-American translingual literature is thus almost exclusively a phenomenon generated by
(secular) Jews. In the Soviet Union, Jewishness was officially noted in a person’s identity documents,
giving the thoroughly secularized, linguistically Russified and culturally Sovietized Jewish population
a separate legal status that could be instrumentalized for purposes of anti-Semitic discrimination. But
being classified as a Jew also had the advantage of facilitating emigration in the guise of “repatri-
ation” to the presumed homeland. Between 1971 and 1981, around 250,000 Jews took advantage of
this opportunity by leaving the Soviet Union, followed by an even more massive post-Soviet-Jewish
exodus of over 1.6 million people.
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Adrian Wanner
Paradoxically, these Soviet Jews finally became “Russians” after they left Russia. Their provenance
from the Soviet Union and their Russian native language automatically conferred on them a Russian
identity in the eyes of their new compatriots. Under the circumstances of post-Soviet emigration,
“Russian” could become a new stigmatizing term associated both with old Cold War stereotypes of
hostile communists and post-Soviet images of prostitutes and gangsters.Yet a Russian identity was not
only imposed from outside as a derogatory label; it could also be embraced as a positively valued part
of an individual’s self-definition. The identification with canonical Russian art, music, and literature
even turned into a sort of secular religion. As the Israeli sociologist Larissa Remennick put it in her
study of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Israel, North America, and Germany, “if they had any deities
at all, these were Pushkin and Chekhov, Pasternak and Bulgakov” (48–49).
The prestige of the Russian literary canon certainly helped as a marketing strategy in the promo-
tion of the newly emergent Russian-American novelists. Blurb writers and reviewers compared their
works to those of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, or Gogol, as well as to Nabokov as the quintessen-
tial Russian-turned-American. While it would be far-fetched to proclaim these authors as latter-day
Tolstoys or Nabokovs, given that they work in a quite different artistic and stylistic mode, they do
show a postmodern, parodic awareness of the Russian literary tradition. In the extreme case, the
entire plot of a story or novel can be borrowed from a classic Russian source. Such is the case with
Shteyngart’s story “Shylock on the Neva” (2002), a rewriting of Gogol’s tale “The Portrait,” or with
Irina Reyn’s novel What Happened to Anna K. (2008), a transplantation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
into the Bukharian-Jewish immigrant milieu of Queens, New York (see Wanner 2011a, 108–120 and
157–166).
If we are looking for a common denominator among these writers, the juggling of multiple
identities comes to mind most of all. As a minimum, they combine a Russian native language with
a Jewish ethnicity and U.S. (or, in the case of David Bezmozgis, Canadian) citizenship. Additional
geographies come into play: Bezmozgis, who was born in Riga and emigrated to Toronto at age six,
has begun to explore his Latvian roots in his latest book, Immigrant City (2019). Sana Krasikov, who
spent part of her childhood in Ukraine and Georgia, populates her short-story collection One More
Year (2008) with a diverse cast of post-Soviet immigrants from vastly divergent ethnic, religious, and
socioeconomic backgrounds whose only commonality is a sense of transnational homelessness. Some
writers address issues of race in the context of “immigrant whiteness” (see Sadowski-Smith). Anya
Ulinich’s novel Petropolis (2007) features a Siberian-born, partially African heroine who, like the hero
of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, is essentially a black person passing as a Jew.
Remarkably, women outnumber men by a factor of about 2:1 among the Russian immigrant
novelists, which turns some of their books into examples of feminist metafiction questioning patri-
archal norms (see Wanner 2011b). A perceived outsider status involving multiple identities can serve
as a precious resource for a creative writer, especially in an environment that validates multicultur-
alism, hyphenated identities or “hybridity” in whatever form. As Yelena Furman has noted,
[w]‌hereas earlier East European Jewish writers such as Mary Antin [or Ayn Rand, A.W.]
reveled in becoming ‘American’ and severing the connection to their ‘old-world’ identities,
contemporary Russian-American writers pointedly resist such assimilation, insisting instead
on maintaining both sides of the hyphen.
(20)
Furman links the hybridity of the Russian-American writers to Homi Bhabha post-colonial
notion of a “third space.” In a provocative essay published in 2015, Sasha Senderovich has argued that
this point needs further refinement inasmuch as, according to Bhabha, hybridity emerges out of an
unequal power relationship between colonizer and colonized. While the Soviet-Jewish immigrants
assume the position of the colonized, the role of the colonizer, according to Senderovich, is played by
American Jews who, after having “rescued” their brethren from the clutches of Soviet communism,
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are trying to civilize the Russian newcomers by molding them in their own image of a normative
Jewish-American identity. A good example of how this idea is depicted in Russian-American lit-
erature is Ellen Litman’s book The Last Chicken in America (2007), in which the Jewish Family and
Children’s Service urges the newly arrived immigrants to reaffirm their faith by frequenting a syna-
gogue and also to “behave like Americans by washing every day and dressing appropriately, in varied
colored clothing” (60). As Senderovich argues, the Russian-American writers engage in a sort of
post-colonial mimicry by parodying and subversively undermining the discourse of their American
“colonizers.”
If the Russian-American novelists are cultural hybrids, how “Russian,” then, is the language
deployed in their writings? At least on the surface, all of them write their books in standard
American English rather than in an English-Russian mix of languages. To be sure, in some
instances, especially with authors like Lara Vapnyar, who learned English as an adult, we can
find occasional solecisms overlooked by the copy-editors, such as the telltale omission of art-
icles (see Wanner 2011, 224, n. 20, for examples). But a certain presence of the Russian language
also becomes noticeable in the writings of authors with a native-like command of English. In
order to convey that a conversation takes place in Russian, the author can infuse a dialogue with
a sprinkling of transliterated Russian words. Usually, these expressions refer to items belonging
to a Russian cultural context that have no readily available English equivalent. However, some
authors, especially Anya Ulinich and Irina Reyn, insert Russian lexical elements almost randomly
in their texts. Without the benefit of an explanation, a reader with no knowledge of Russian is
left guessing the possible meaning of the word or utterance. Some of these untranslated Russian
lexical items can be obscenities. In his novel Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart makes frequent use of
the extremely profane word “khui” to refer to the protagonist’s male anatomy. While the English
equivalent would produce a rather coarse effect, the Russian term has for the American reader an
exotic rather than offensive quality.
Names offer a particularly fertile opportunity for creating translingual “insider jokes.” In
Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (190, 194, 305), we are told that a five-star resort is
planned on the shores of “Lake Boloto” (swamp), a movie star is named “Trata Poshlaya” (vulgar), and
the first Communist leader of the Eastern European country where the story takes place was one “Jan
Zhopka” (the diminutive of “zhopa,” meaning “ass”). A Jewish fundraiser in Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis
is hosted by the “Tarakan” family (which means cockroach in Russian) and attended by “Mr. and Mrs.
Sidney Shmel” (bumblebee), “Mr. and Mrs. Sarancha” (locust), “Mr. and Mrs. Svetlyak” (firefly), “Mr.
Pauk” (spider), “Mr. and Mrs. James Blocha” (flea), and “Mr. and Mrs. Komar” (mosquito) (159–160).
The entomological meaning of these names is never revealed to the book’s monolingual Anglophone
readers.
Several authors use a Russianized “broken English” in their rendering of direct speech. Shteyngart
in particular resorts to this technique, which highlights an immigrant insecurity with English
grammar, but also becomes a conscious device to fake East European “authenticity.” In Irina Reyn’s
What Happened to Anna K., a cab driver in New York tells his passengers—“in Russian,” according
to the narrator—: “Comrade passengers, I suggest you relax back there. … We got long ride” (20).
Obviously, this sentence cannot be a realistic quote, since the character presumably speaks in his
native Russian. The faulty English syntax with the missing article, similar to the word “comrade,”
merely serves as a clichéd index of the character’s Russianness. At the same time, it becomes clear that
he has become Americanized to some extent—it is highly unlikely that a cabdriver in Russia would
invite his passengers to “relax back there.” The text self-parodies Reyn’s own role as an assimilated
Russian immigrant who is entertaining the American reading public with an exoticized display of
“Russianness.”
A more subtle variant of English malapropisms committed by Russian native speakers occurs in
Sana Krasikov’s One MoreYear. Some of her immigrant characters are comfortable enough with English
to make no grammatical mistakes, but they still stumble at the level of idioms, using expressions like
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Adrian Wanner
“dirty wealthy” instead of “filthy rich,” or “the Christ-father” rather than the Godfather (“Christ-
father” being a transparent calque of the Russian phrase “krestnyi otets”) (54, 93). Perhaps the most
intriguing version of this kind of Russianized English occurs with loan translations of Russian idioms.
The result is a “strange”-sounding discourse which, while not technically wrong, gives the English
language a vaguely foreign feel. Ellen Litman’s The Last Chicken in America is particularly abun-
dant with examples of this sort. Her characters use expressions like “God’s Dandelion” (41), “How
many winters, how many springs!” (52), “somewhere in the devil’s antlers” (53), “firs-and-sticks!”
(91), or “school like school” (110). A reader who knows Russian can easily discern the underlying
idioms: “bozhii oduvanchik” (a frail old woman), “skol’ko zim, skol’ko let” (long time no see), “u
cherta na kulichkakh” (out in the sticks), “elki-palki” (holy moly), “shkola kak shkola” (a school like
any other). It looks as if the English text were a clumsy, literal translation of a Russian original, or per-
haps the conscious choice of a translator who rejects a “smooth,” assimilationist rendering in favor of
a “foreignizing” approach. This translational effect is illusionary, of course, since the text was written
directly in English. The hybrid discourse, mimicking an English surface rendering of a Russian deep
structure, serves as an apt representation of the heroine’s own bicultural background and unresolved
tension between her Russian and American identities.
In addition to having produced a successful crop of new fiction writers, the latest wave of Russian-
Jewish immigrants to the U.S. also contributed to the emergence of a new kind of Russian-American
poetry. While some of the immigrant poets from the former Soviet Union continue to write exclu-
sively in Russian, others have switched wholly or partially to English. Just like the prose writers, these
poets are not a homogeneous group. Matvei Yankelevich, himself a Russian-American poet, wrote
in his 2006 survey of contemporary Anglophone Russian immigrant poetry in Octopus magazine
that “[w]‌hat would appear to be a small coterie is really a prism reflecting most theoretical debates
between poetic schools that exist in the American as well as the Russian context.”
Some Russian-American poets, such as Philip Nikolayev, Genya Turovskaya, or Eugene Ostashevsky,
write in an experimental style resembling the “Language” trends in contemporary American poetics.
Echoing Shteyngart’s performative auto-exoticism, Nikolayev’s poem “My Aeroflot,” published in
the collection Monkey Time (2004, 19), is written in the broken English of a Slavic speaker. Nikolayev
himself refuses to be tagged as a member of any kind of Russian diasporic community. In fact, he
has a command of multiple languages, including French, Romanian (having grown up in Soviet
Moldavia), and Sanskrit. Ostashevsky, another highly erudite poet, displays his multilingualism in a
dazzling postmodern parody reminiscent of the absurdist writings of the Russian OBERIU poets
(whom he has translated into English). Having arrived in New York as a child, Ostashevsky claims that
he finds himself “with no native tongue, /only two prosthetics to flap along” (2005, 9). Even though
his poetry is written in English, the Russian language forms an important substratum. In the volume
Iterature (2005), Russian is a shadowy presence in the form of puns and neologisms, while in The Life
and Opinion of DJ Spinoza (2008) it coexists openly with several other languages. Ostashevsky’s latest
book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (2017), contains a Russian “cryptosubtext,” which
becomes accessible by adding up individual letters set up in a larger type font. As Miriam Finkelstein
(564) has argued, Ostashevsky’s multilingual poetics challenge and undermine the myth of the mono-
lingual Anglophone American “melting pot.”
Not every Russian-American poet is a postmodernist, to be sure. Ilya Kaminsky, who was born in
Odessa in 1977 and has lived in the United States since 1993, writes in an unapologetically “poetic”
rather than an experimental or conceptual style. His book Dancing in Odessa (2004) received the
Tupelo Press Dorset prize and earned him a multitude of adulatory blurbs from prominent members
of the American poetic establishment. Critics praised Kaminsky for providing contemporary American
poetry with a sorely needed infusion of Russian emotional power and “sincerity.” Suffused with
intertextual references to the work of multiple twentieth-century Russian poets, Kaminsky’s volume
mobilizes the literary myth of his native city as a locus both of intense suffering and of ecstatic joie de
vivre. An important factor contributing to Kaminsky’s popularity is the mesmeric quality of his live
208
readings. His incantatory recitation is somewhat reminiscent of Brodsky, but it goes to much greater
extremes of pitch and intensity. The unusual nature of his delivery is also connected to Kaminsky’s
deafness, another factor contributing to his mystique. Even though Kaminsky has appropriated the
techniques of contemporary American poetic discourse such as free verse, the role he has embraced
harks back to the Russian myth of the poet as a provider of spiritual sustenance which, as Kaminsky’s
enthusiastic reception demonstrates, seems to fulfill a genuine demand in the current American lit-
erary market.
Rather than switching completely to English, a few Russian-American poets—including Andrey
Gritsman, Katya Kapovich, Alexei Tsvetkov, Irina Mashinsky, and Anna Halberstadt— use both
languages, while occasionally self-translating their poems (see Wanner 2020, 154–170).The most active
self-translator among them is Gritsman. His bilingual volume Vid s mosta/View from the Bridge (1998)
contains the Russian and English version of his poems on facing pages. As Gritsman explains in his
introduction, these are not “direct translations,” but “parallel poems” written in two languages on
the same subject and in the same “emotional waves.” The traditional relation between original and
translation gives way to a constellation where both texts coexist with equal authority and add new
dimensions to each other.While Gritsman’s bilingual edition invites a comparison between source and
target text and the gaps between them, Katya Kapovich camouflages her four self-translated poems
in the volume Gogol in Rome (2004) as English originals. In spite of the different staging of self-
translation, Gritsman and Kapovich both use the recasting of their Russian work in English as a means
of exploring the mutation of the self through time, migration, and changing linguistic and cultural
environments. In a 2010 interview, Kapovich explained that, while she still considers Russian to be her
primary poetic medium,“everything is more placid when I write in English. I guess it’s natural because
English is the language of my adulthood” (Vincenz). Even though Kapovich has found critical acclaim
with her Anglophone poetry, a sense of unassimilated foreignness remains, captured in a self-ironic line
from the poem “Generation K”: “We mumble in English with a heavy accent, /dropping the art-
icles like cigarette ashes” (2004, 96). The Russianized English of the immigrant becomes here, like the
slightly opprobrious practice of smoking, a defiantly displayed badge of cultural “cool.”
In summary, while Russian-English translingual literature in the twentieth century was created
by just a handful of individuals—some of whom became extremely prominent, to be sure—it has
now turned into a mass phenomenon fueled by the unprecedented dispersion of millions of Russian
speakers over the entire globe. The emergence of a new generation of “diasporic” Russians has
provided a more receptive milieu for multilingual creativity. Most of the Russian-born American
writers and poets are still younger than fifty, which means that Russian-English translingual fiction
and poetry are likely to remain alive and well for many years to come.
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17
TRANSLINGUALISM IN POLISH
LITERARY CONTEXT
Introduction: Poland and the Languages of European Intellectual Empires

Poland is widely believed to be a monolithic country with one language of literary creation, a view
reinforced by the Communist government after the Second World War and the nationalistic pol-
itics of memory. This chapter demonstrates that this view is a myth. Over the centuries, the writers
credited with the development of Polish literature and artistic language engaged with the dominant
languages of Europe as well as neighboring Slavic tongues, through creating in or (self)translating
from Latin, French, Russian, German, and English among others. It is thus safe to say that Poland has
always had writers who used Polish along with one other language or more in their work (Skwara,
“Polish Literature and Its Languages” 273).
Writing in the languages of the “European intellectual empires” is only one of the currents of
translingual literature1 encountered in the Polish context (Kellman The Translingual Imagination).
In the country’s territory, the choice of language was often determined by the political situation.
While Latin was the most influential language for centuries, Polish – existing alongside Lithuanian,
Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and German, among others – became the dominant tongue of the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1791) due to its official status (Miłosz, The History 108). After the
Partitions (1772, 1793, 1795) Russian and German (Prussia and the Habsburg Empire annexed part
of Poland) became the official languages of these areas and with the Jewish diaspora also settled there,
Yiddish and Hebrew were added to the linguistic map of this multi-ethnic and multicultural territory.
The legacy of these historical developments and intensified contact with multiple languages enabled
the writers to engage with and express themselves in their chosen language(s).This phenomenon can
be observed in literary production until the outbreak of World War II, with writers such as Tadeusz
Rittner, Bolesław Leśmian, Maurycy Szymel and Debora Vogel engaging in language switching, bilin-
gualism, and self-translation in the said languages. While it is not possible to establish clear motives
behind every writer’s language choice, this chapter provides an overview of selected patterns that can
be distinguished within the historical and literary periods, and within clusters of writers conditioned
by similar circumstances.
The historical and political context also appears to be a major factor impacting “translingual
phenomena,” that is trends and controversies, on which this chapter aims to shed light. The loss of
statehood due to the Partitions (1795–1918), poverty, and continuing political oppression throughout
the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II, contributed to migration and the
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-17 211

emergence of the most distinctive pattern of Polish translingualism: writing in exile. This broad
category is represented by such diverse writers as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who became
known as Joseph Conrad, Adam Mickiewicz, Eva Hoffman, and other émigré writers we discuss
below. Conrad, and a few other writers, were confronted with accusations of literary treason, that
is bestowing their talent upon another country. The idea of literary betrayal exposes the essentialist
understanding of literature as “national,” i.e. bound to the Polish language and is discussed in rela-
tion to such authors as Stephan and Franciszka Themersons, and Maria Kuncewiczowa writing
in English, who offer an alternative perspective on “Polish/national” literature created in other
languages.
The analysis of the writing by émigré writers, but also Polish-Jewish writers settled in Poland,
demonstrates that many grappled with dilemmas regarding their choice of language as a creative
medium—since it was also a strong marker of national identity—while others used the life between
languages as a form of their artistic expressions. Writers such as Roman Brandstaetter and Julian
Stryjkowski wrote in Polish, which was not their mother tongue, in which they attempted to synthe-
size their Jewish identities. Their struggles illuminate the problematic notion of the “mother tongue”
itself within multilingual Jewish families before the war. “Language boomerang,” coined by Polish-
Hebrew writer Irit Amiel, offers a different take on a translingual writer’s quest to find a proper idiom
while acknowledging the powerful influence of the primary tongue.
Finally, the chapter traces the changing ideology and meaning attached to English as a foreign
tongue, evident in most recent works in English published by Polish authors. While during the com-
munist period in Poland, the language signified freedom and access to the “intellectual empire” away
from home, in the aftermath of Poland’s accession to the EU, it also became a marker of belonging
to a transnational community bound by shared experiences of (im)migration, ethnic backgrounds, or
sexual orientation rather than by a language and ethnicity.
The Multilingual Polish State and Latin

The period of Polish Renaissance saw the emergence of the Polish literary language, developed
largely due to its co-existence with Latin. It was the efforts of elites educated in the lingua franca
of Renaissance Europe who transferred their literary talent to enrich the vernacular. While some
writers studied and wrote in Latin at first, and through bilingual practice moved to Polish, one
distinguished Polish writer mastered his Latin to such perfection that his work is still at the core of
the Latin classical canon. It was Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, (Matthias Casimirus Sarbievius, 1595–
1640), known as “the peer of Horace” (Horationis par), whose first collection of poetry, Lyricorum
libri tres (Three Books of Lyrics), already brought him European fame. While he inspired many writers
in Poland, he is also considered to be at the top of the list when the impact on Baroque poetry in
English by Henry Vaughan, Sir Edward Sherburne, Abraham Cowley, and Johan Huges is concerned
(Kraszewski 15). At the other end of this linguistic spectrum was his predecessor Jan Kochanowski
(Joannes Cochanovius, 1530–1584), fluent in Latin at the age of fourteen, who is celebrated as the
creator of the Polish literary language.
Kochanowski wrote in both languages throughout his lifetime and it was the plurilingualism of his
thoroughly humanistic education that enabled him to develop literary Polish to timeless perfection.
He authored early canonical texts of Polish poetry such as Songs (Pieśni, 1586) and Laments (Treny,
1580)—masterpieces of Polish literature whose poetic sophistication has inspired poets and translators
ever since, including Seamus Heaney’s rendition of the Laments cycle (1995). Among other bilingual
authors, whose talent also enriched Polish, were Mikołaj-Sęp Szarzyński (1550–1581)—pioneer of
the Baroque style poetry—and Józef Baka (1707–1780), Jesuit and missionary, who wrote prose in
Latin and religious Baroque poetry in Polish. Szymon Szymonowic, (Simon Simonides, 1558–1629),
contributed to the 1619 collection Poematia aurea and gained recognition in both linguistic spheres.
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The Polish Literary Context
Wilczek’s combined list of noted Latin writers from the early Renaissance until the eighteenth cen-
tury includes 126 names and even though not all of them came from an ethnic Polish background, it
still shows an impressive scope of the Latin Universe (Wilczek 116–123).
In his survey of European translingualisms before the twentieth century, Steven Kellman noted
that literatures in local vernaculars owe much to the dominant languages of Europe, which acted
as cultural, translingual mediators, stimulating local literary production (Kellman The Translingual
Imagination). Latin, which for centuries had been the adoptive language of the European intellectual
empire, impacted on the development of literary Polish in the Renaissance and Baroque. Gradually
Polish superseded Latin as a source of poetic inspiration for writers of other Slavic languages. Due
to its artistic growth, Polish fostered literary efforts by writers developing Lithuanian, Byelarussian,
and Ukrainian (Miłosz, The History 108–110). Since both languages shared equal power in terms of
administration and usage in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1791), it was an influen-
tial Polish conquest (Skwara, “Polish Literature” 276). While the dominant language in a large part
of Poland-Lithuania was Polish, over the course of the eighteenth century, French had gradually
replaced Latin as the tongue of, in Kellman’s terms, an intellectual and a cultural empire, shaping not
only literature, literary style, and the imagination of Polish creators but also becoming an everyday
language for communication in aristocratic circles. For centuries Latin guaranteed membership
of the European literary universe and continued to impact the style of writing in local languages.
Jan Chryzostom Pasek’s (c.1636–1701) autobiographical Pamiętniki (1836; Memoirs of the Polish
Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek), written at the end of the seventeenth century, which
chronicled the Swedish invasion of Poland in 1655 vividly depicting the everyday life of Poland’s
nobility, were heavily encrusted with Latin phrases, which entered everyday language, a legacy of its
influence across Europe.
French as a Lingua Franca and the Role of Translations

In eighteenth-century multicultural and multilingual Poland-Lithuania, French was a lingua
franca among Poland’s aristocracy and intellectuals. As well as being a language of Enlightenment,
French provided a medium to introduce world literature to Polish readers with translations from
French outnumbering those from other languages (Dybiec-Gajer n.p.). Such an increased number
of translations provoked the emergence of “modern Polish translation,” and has been perceived
as a major factor in stimulating the development of literary production in Polish at the time
(Perek 24).
The epitome of the ideas of French Enlightenment in Polish culture is the French-language
author, Jan Potocki, best known for his monumental work, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (Manuscript
Found in Saragossa), a fantasy novel written in six chapters or “Decamerons,” considered one of
the most canonical works of Polish literature. The history of this text provides insights into the
issues of translation, understanding of linguistic identity, but also, the functioning of translingual
literary texts in the multicultural and multilingual European states during the heightened period
of European imperialism. The latter finds its expression in Potocki’s fascination with the Orient.
The thematic structure of Manuscript Found in Saragossa had been heavily influenced by the Middle
Eastern tales, One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights; Saragossa represents
tensions between the European Christian, and the Arabic Muslim and Jewish cultures (Alaki 185–
187).2 Characteristically for his aristocratic milieu, Potocki travelled to the Middle East, a well-
established European tradition at the time, publishing travel journals and incorporating the oriental
aesthetics into his writing.
The issues surrounding the Polish translations of Potocki’s oeuvre provide a window into the
eighteenth-century understanding of national literature and national identity as not fixated on the
language. A translator’s note to Potocki’s travel journal, Voyage en Turquie et en Égypte (The Voyage to
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Turkey and Egypt, 1789) states the following: “By translating [the travelogue] into our native tongue
I wished to return to our literature the property which belongs to it, because the original was
composed by a Pole” (Niemcewicz qtd. in Dybiec-Gajer n.p.). Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, the trans-
lator of The Voyage, was a fellow writer and Potocki’ representative in Sejm, the Polish Parliament,
speaking on behalf of Potocki, whose level of Polish was not sufficient for political debates. Yet,
Niemcewicz did not hesitate to situate Potocki’s works as Polish, underscoring the fact that the
work he translated had been written by a Pole. He thus viewed translation as a way of reintroducing
(“returning”) the work written in another language to the domain of Polish literature. Clearly what
rendered Potocki a Polish writer was geography, i.e. a country that was the place of his birth, where
he was a politically engaged public figure and where he established his printing house.
To understand this approach, it is important to consider the relationship between the language
and the socio-cultural milieu since, as Rosset and Traire pointed out, Potocki did not belong to a
nation but a certain social order (Jan Potocki). Potocki was born into an aristocratic family, living
a “privileged lifestyle as a part of the cultured European elite,” where French was the norm, as
well as sending children to France, England, and Switzerland to study (Dybiec-Gajer n.p.). Since
Potocki was a product of a specific social class, with its own language, system of education, and
habits, this shows that the meaning of “national” was clearly connected with the European cul-
tural centers, with French holding a privileged position, yet secondary to the author’s connection
to the place of his birth and political activity. This approach became almost completely reversed
in the nineteenth century, after the Partitions of Poland, where, due to the loss of statehood, the
Polish language became the major denominator of national identity and literature. The discus-
sion on the two approaches to the notion of national literature presented will resurface with the
revival of Yiddish in Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century, with Yiddish writers clearly
evoking Poland-Lithuanian’s idea of the nation as a “unique cultural blend and people with a
shared history and tradition” and not a political entity, with literature written in the language
representing the writers’ specific culture or milieu (Stępień 17). This approach legitimized Yiddish
literature as belonging in Poland.
The nation’s ties with the Polish language were strengthened further because of its banning
and suppression, particularly in the Russian and Prussian territories. National bards, such as Adam
Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the major representative of Polish Romanticism, created and published
canonical works of literature in the prohibited Polish language while living in Paris—the artistic
center for Poland’s Great Emigration (between 1830 and c.1870). However, for Mickiewicz, French
was the language of his academic lectures on Slavic literatures delivered at the Collège de France.
These scripted oral performances were noted down by his students and then edited by the author for
publication in La Tribune des Peuples. The most widely known and translated into several languages
was his 1843 Slavic drama lecture, translated into English by Gerould (“From Adam Mickiewicz’s
Lectures”) and analyzed with the aid of a performance studies framework and archival sources by
Filipowicz (“Performing Bodies”). Mickiewicz’s French translation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philo-
sophical ideas, largely unknown in Europe at that time, was yet another example of his transcultural
competence, cosmopolitan erudition, and plurilingualism.3
Writers’ Obligations to Nation and Literary “Treason”

Suppression and censorship of Polish as well as increased mobility and emigration from the partitioned
stateless Poland put new obligations on writers to preserve literature in the now-threatened national
language. This impacted the reception of the works written by Polish authors in languages other
than Polish. It is thus hardly surprising that Joseph Conrad’s (1857–1924) choice of English as a
creative medium was met with criticism from his fellow Polish writers. Eliza Orzeszkowa, who was
a literary celebrity in Poland at that time, voiced her outrage in a letter from 1899 gaining support
from other citizens (Najder, Joseph Conrad 292–5; 311–312). In her opinion the betrayal consisted of
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bestowing Conrad’s talent upon another country (Miłosz, Emperor 183). Conrad himself grew up in
a highly patriotic household in which love for the country was as important as love for languages
(Greek, Latin, French, and German). The treason controversy, however, forced Conrad to defend his
choice in private letters and public statements, where he expressed his strong attachment to Poland
and its cultural heritage (Najder, Conrad in Perspective 12, 15). Since Russian was the language of
his parents’ oppressors, Conrad was never inclined to learn it and his father also discouraged him
from doing so (Najder, Joseph Conrad). Yet, as the research on multilingualism demonstrates, it was
Conrad’s linguistic background that made his acquisition of English, mostly through reading litera-
ture at sea, much easier.
While the argument of literary betrayal has lost its power in today’s global world, the question
to what extent Conrad’s literary talent was fueled by his linguistic transfer still constitutes an inves-
tigative ground as evidenced by linguistic, cultural, and literary research. Many Polish and Polish
American academics, who traced Conrad’s affinities with Polish literature and language, brought to
light much evidence of linguistic, intercultural, and intertextual connections. The classic resource in
this category is “Conrad’s Polish Literary Background” (1966) by Andrzej Busza, along with works
by Gustav Morf, Adam Gillon, Zdzisław Najder, and the recent study “Sailing Towards Poland” with
Joseph Conrad (2017) by Jean M. Szczypien. Some of these studies accentuated the shadow of Polish
in Conrad’s literary style on the level of syntax, phraseology, and idiomatic expressions which could
be traced back to his native tongue, but much effort went to tease out a dense network of allusions
and intertextual connotations that can be found in Conrad’s fiction. Commenting on Conrad’s inter-
textuality, Najder noted,
he had a phenomenal memory for texts and remembered details, but it was not a memory
strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous entities; it was,
rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw.
(Joseph Conrad 454)
Keeping in mind Conrad’s admiration for Polish Romantic drama and the country’s rich history
of double speech, Laurence Davies (the editor of Conrad’s letters) also proposed to bridge these
characteristics with Conrad’s narratives (“Time, Place, Scale”).
There is no doubt that as rich as Conrad’s scholarship is, new approaches can reveal much about
his translingual imagination if an effective methodology can be proposed through interdiscip-
linary efforts.4 The question is no longer how Conrad’s intersection of languages contributed to the
development of his artistry but rather what can be understood from the mysterious entanglement
of languages and cultures that shaped his oeuvre. For example, as some scholars suggest, Conrad
struggled with the idea of “competing” with the Anglophone writers and lacking a common cultural
background with the English readers.This most likely inspired the settings of his novels: outside of the
English-speaking world, in colonial places not ruled by the British. At the same time, he was drawn by
the “struggle aimed at preserving national independence,” that is the subject, which shaped his entire
childhood and youth in the occupied Polish territories (Najder, Joseph Conrad 120).
The accusations of treason, which re-emerged during the communist period in Poland, exposed
a specific understanding of the role of a writer in relation to his or her country and the language
even during the time of a strict communist regime. Similarly to Conrad, an émigré writer, Czesław
Miłosz, was attacked for the alleged betrayal by the Polish poet K.I. Gałczyński who in his “Poem
for a Traitor” (1951) stated that Miłosz “exchanged Poland for a suitcase.” Miłosz’s essay “Prywatne
obowiązki wobec polskiej literatury” [Private Obligations to Polish Literature, 1985] can be seen as
a response to these accusations as it discusses his dilemma as a “Polish expatriate continuing to write
in his native language in an English-speaking world” and the implications of his decision (Besemeres,
“Rewriting One’s Self ” 416). The writer’s response to this dilemma was to undertake the practice
of self-translation of his poetry from Polish into English. He saw it as a kind of service to Polish
215
literature in that he could share it with the international audience and, by adding his perspective as
someone living outside his own culture, expand the horizons of Polish literature. Evoking Conrad
in his writing, with whose predicament he often identified, Miłosz challenged the understanding
of what it means for a writer to “serve” a Polish national literature, in his view, too concerned with
“being Polish.” His contestation culminated in a statement: “I wasn’t born in Poland, I didn’t grow
up in Poland, I don’t live in Poland, but I write in Polish” (Miłosz, “Prywatne obowiązki” 80, authors’
translation).
A different take on the obligations to national literature and its relationship with the national
language is represented by Maria Kuncewiczowa’s (1895–1989) vision of cosmopolitan artistic
belonging. In 1949, as a displaced political refugee in London, Kuncewiczowa put forward a call
for a utopian model of “world citizenship,” the idea at first conceived in legal and psychological
terms (Kampert, “Self-Translation: Between …” 120–122). She combined it later with her linguistic
and literary views, defining literature as the “free-for-all country” of fiction and as a world without
borders. Her conception of “world citizenship” (obywatelstwo światowe) combined with her practice
of writing in English and self-translation “extends a unidimensional way of conceiving national lit-
erature” (Kampert, Self-Translation in 20th Century 160). Kuncewiczowa’s works in English include
one unpublished play (Thank you for the Rose, 1950–60) and a novel The Olive Grove (1950s, published
1961), while she self-translated another novel, Tristan 43 (1967), into English. (Zaborowska 209).
An advocate of foreign languages, Kuncewiczowa believed that a new perspective on one’s native
country through a “foster tongue” enriches rather than weakens the attachment to one’s cultural
heritage but her views had no chance for support in the climate of the forced monolithic notion
of Polishness promoted by the post-war authorities in Poland. As the recent study indicates, writers
who migrate to the UK and Ireland either replace Polish with English and/or represent a shift in
their perspective on Poland. Joanna Kosmalska defined this shift as the “transnational turn in Polish
literature” (165–186). Hence, when revisited today, Kuncewiczowa’s ideas seem to offer a long-
term prediction that could only be embraced at the time of open borders and Poland’s post-2004
accession to the EU.
It is worth noting that the accusations of literary treason have never been raised to the same
extent about Polish-Jewish émigré writers, such as Eva Hoffman writing in English or Irit Amiel,
a Polish-Hebrew writer in Israel. Arguably, this reflects the post-war silence surrounding the mas-
sacre of nearly the entire Jewish population along with its culture from Poland and the national
guilt relating to the fate of Polish Jews, also in the aftermath of World War II. An exception was
Jerzy Kosiński’s publication of The Painted Bird (1965), which engendered many attacks in the
writer’s homeland years before its Polish translation became available; yet, the hostility related
to, what was viewed as, Kosiński’s biased portrayal of Nazi-occupied Poland centering on anti-
semitism of the local population (Sloan 235–239). Another controversy challenged the writer’s
English authorship of the novel. The investigative journalists suggested Kosiński did not conceive
it in English but in Polish and had it translated by someone else (Stokes and Fremont-Smith). In
Kellman’s reading, this accusation only confirms how daunting the task of writing in a foreign
tongue acquired after childhood can be (The Translingual Imagination 66). None of the writer’s
other eight novels in English raised similar objections about his authorship but his biographer
presents Kosiński’s creative process while working on the novel Steps (1968) as verging on collab-
orative efforts at various stages of its composition (Sloan 252–254).
The title of Dagmara Drewniak’s article “They would say she was betraying Poland already!” sums
up a classical dilemma of diasporic writers of Polish origin, who were often accused of treason once
they adapted another language for their art of writing. The translingual writers of the latest gener-
ation discussed by Drewniak mock this approach. The works by Canadian writers of Polish origin,
including Jowita Bydlowska (Drunk Mom, 2013 and Guy, 2016), Ania Szado (Studio Saint-Ex, 2013),
Aga Maksimowska (Giant, 2012), and Kasia Jarończyk (Lemons, 2017), insist on their right to claim
216
hybrid or multiple linguistic identities as liberating and enriching rather than unpatriotic (Drewniak
149). As their perspective is hard earned, their writing deserves much attention.
Schooling, Language Switching, and “Lisping in Tongues” at the

Birth of the Modern Polish State
When Polish territory was divided among the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the
Habsburg Empire under the Partitions (1772, 1790, and 1795), Russian and German, the administra-
tive languages, came to represent political power and dominance of the colonizers’ tongues.5 Yet, they
were also official languages of education, which enabled access to education outside Poland where
their status did not carry the same ideological burden as it did back home. While studying in Vienna,
Berlin, or Moscow, young writers could express themselves freely in German and Russian and omit
the censorship restrictions imposed on publications in the Polish language in the partitioned ter-
ritories. This linguistic context produced a new wave of bilingual authors, such as Tadeusz Rittner
(1873–1921), a playwright, prose writer, and literary critic, who studied and worked in Vienna but,
after the First World War, opted for Polish citizenship. His plays in German premiered first in Germany
and Austria and were followed by their staged Polish versions, which Rittner self-translated (Raszewski
289).6 While Rittner’s plays were written predominantly in realistic convention inspired by Ibsen’s style
and became more symbolic with some use of irony and satire, another German-Polish writer of the
same generation, Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868–1927)—whose daughter Stanisława Przybyszewska
(1901–1935) had also become a translingual author in German and French—was a proponent of
Nietzschean philosophy and satanism. Born in Poland but schooled in Berlin, he launched his career
as a German writer, publishing poetry, essays (Zur Psychologie des Individuums: I. Chopin und Nietzsche.
II. Olla Hansson 1892), and novels: Totenmesse, 1893 (which he rendered in Polish as Requiem Aeternam);
Vigilien, 1994, De Profundis, and a trilogy Homo Sapiens, 1895–1896. Przybyszewski began to write in
Polish only when he moved to Kraków (then Austro-Hungarian Galicia) in 1898 and undertook self-
translation from German. He left behind works in both languages and according to the study of his
bilingualism, “his original German texts are driven by the spirit of creativity, while the Polish versions
are more like re-creations” (Łuczyński qtd in Skwara, “Polish Literature and Its Languages” 282).
Arguably, Polish-Jewish writers constitute one of the most diverse groups of translingual authors.
As a result of the discussed historical processes, in the first half of the twentieth century the Polish-
Jewish literature created on Polish soil could best be described as trilingual (Molisak and Ronen). As
well as the Jewish languages acquired at home, Hebrew, a religious language and Yiddish, a spoken
language of the Ashkenazi diaspora, the writers reached for Polish and other dominant languages of
the partitioned Poland-Lithuania. However, a continuous switching between languages and experi-
mentation were common and intensified in the interwar period. Bolesław Leśmian (1877–1937, born
Lesman), from a Polonized Jewish family, used Russian as a creative medium in his early works. Fluent
in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian, Leśmian spent his school years in Kiev receiving education through
Russian. His early poetry collection Piesni Vasylisy Priemudroy (1906–1907, Songs of Vassilisa the Wise)
utilized his bilingualism for artistic purposes and initiated a style of writing he transferred to his Polish
verse. According to Gliński, “his style relies heavily on the vertiginous word-formation potential of
Polish, mainly the prefix+verb formula” shared by other Slavic languages (“The Untranslatable”).
The highly symbolic, imaginative style turned his poems into a linguistic playing field full of cre-
ative interferences and neologisms referred to as “leśmianisms,” which ultimately render his poetry
untranslatable (Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz; Paloff). Among other significant writers, who wrote in
Russian and Polish, often self-translating their works both ways, was Bruno Jasieński (1901–1938,
born Wiktor Bruno Zysman), who gave up writing in Polish later in his life and completed the novel
Chelovek meniaet kozhu (1934) as a work crowning his ideological commitment to communist ideals.
Although he preserved fluency in both, it was Russian, not Polish, that became his privileged mother
tongue in the end (Balcerzan). It seems that his wishful objective of eradicating the linguistic border
217
to achieve a language of pure communist/Marxist thought dominated his final artistic desire. A pro-
lific novelist, Wacław Sieroszewski (1858–1945), also moved between the two tongues, eventually
privileging Polish to Russian than the other way around.
The period of the First World War had a tremendous impact on Jewish diaspora and “the trad-
itional Ashkenazi bilingualism of Hebrew and Yiddish” (Shmeruk 290). The introduction of compul-
sory public schooling with Polish as the language of instruction, following the establishment of the
Polish independent state in 1918, increased the amount of Jewish writing in Polish (Fishman 89).
For a group of writers from Yiddish-and Hebrew-speaking homes, Polish became the major lan-
guage of artistic expression, even though their works focused predominantly on Jewish themes. One
notable example, Julian Stryjowski (1905–1996, born Pesacḥ Stark), created his works exclusively in
Polish, exploring the hugely transformative impact of public schools on Jewish identity, a literary sub-
ject in his autobiographical stories, such as the highly regarded Azril’s Dream (1975) (Prokop-Janiec
“Pogranicze polsko-żydowskie” 66–67). According to Chone Shmeruk, Jewish writers in Polish that
identified as Jewish and focused on Jewish themes had no desire to reach a general Polish audience,
which was apparent in the type of press, often of Zionist profile, in which they decided to pub-
lish their works (299). Indeed, Stryjkowski’s translations from Hebrew, French, and Russian were
published in the Zionist Polish-language daily “Chwila” (“Moment”) that appeared in Lwów and
addressed a Jewish audience. Next to Stryjowski, Chwila published prose by Zygmunt Nowakowski
(born Zygmunt Tempka), and two poets Stefan Pomer (1905–1941) and Karol Dresdner (1908–
1943), both translators from Yiddish into Polish (Piekarski 30).
The artistic output of a Zionist poet writing in Polish, Roman Brandstaetter (1906–1987),
illustrates the “dramatic experiences and radical ideological choices facing twentieth-century Jewish
intelligentsia” (Prokop-Janiec “Brandstaetter”). Brandstaetter engaged in a lively debate about Jews
writing in Polish in his essay, “Sprawa poezji polsko-żydowskiej” (The problem of Polish-Jewish
poetry, 1933), where he argued that the Jewish poets writing in Polish produced a new quality of
artistic expression, which he summed up as breathing “the Jewish national spirit into the Polish lan-
guage of poetry” (Zuberbier, “Brandstaetter”).Yet, constructing Jewish identity in a non-Jewish lan-
guage was a contradiction expressed in, what Władysław Panas described, a “system of oppositions” in
poems by Brandstaetter (“a Polish poet, in Hebrew mute”): e.g. spatial (Poland/here and Palestine/
there), linguistic (Polish and Hebrew tongue), and anthropological (“Semitic features” vs. “bright
face”) (23). Similar efforts of synthesizing Polish and Jewish identities can be found in the works of a
bilingual poet, Maurycy Szymel (1903–1942, born Mosze Schimel). Szymel publishing in Polish and
Yiddish, nevertheless, experienced limitations in each, a feeling summed up most poignantly in one
of his poems: “I confide in you Elijah/lisping in the tongue of my fathers … That I will never in my
poems/name the name of my mother. /Because the sadness will not be contained/in the easy-going
nature of Slavonic words” (Szymel qtd. in Panas 24). Szymel’s confession illustrates how the choice
of language constituted an identity crisis for many Jewish writers, who wrote in one language while
they “dreamed” of another.
A separate group consists of writers brought up in Polish-speaking families, who made a radical
choice to write in Yiddish, and to a lesser degree in Hebrew as its role diminished after the war.7
Many contemporaries of Isaac Bashevis Singer, such as Zusman Segalovitch, Maurycy Szymel, and
Debora Vogel, are examples of writers “coming into Yiddish” in their post-partitioned Polish home-
land; yet, this group is not homogenous either, with different motivations appearing to be a factor in
language choice. Szymel published three collections of poems in Polish before switching to Yiddish
with his collection Mir iz umetik (Yid. ‫[ קיטעמוא זיא רימ‬I’m Sad], 1936). Debora Vogel, a Galician
Jewish poet and a friend of Bruno Schulz, had also abandoned Polish in the 1930s. She was raised
as a Polish speaker and began learning Yiddish as an adult. In 1930, together with a group of friends,
Vogel created Tsushtayer, a magazine dedicated to promoting Yiddish art and writing. Explaining
Vogel’s decision to return to the sphere of a native Jewish language, Katarzyna Szymaniak pointed
out how this guaranteed a thematic and aesthetic freedom, a chance to realize artistic themes that
218
were far removed from typical Polish-Jewish themes while also being able to declare her Jewish
identity (Szymaniak). This was Vogel’s answer to the dilemmas and crises faced by many Jewish mod-
ernist writers. More broadly, Jewish writers’ increased commitment to Yiddish was influenced by the
ideology of diasporic nationalism, defined as a turn to Ashkenazi tradition and language (referred to
by Bashevis Singer as “Folk-lore”) but also a growing sense of disappointment with the new Polish
state due to intensified discrimination of Jews and exclusivist policies (Stępień 13–21).
“Language Boomerang”: Linguistic Identities in the Shadow

of the Holocaust
The Holocaust ended the golden era of Polish-Jewish multilingual writing, with a new generation of
Jewish survivors dispersed across various centers of Jewish life in the world, having to construct their
identities anew in foreign tongues. Polish Jews continued to write in America (Kosiński being one of
them), Argentina, Great Britain, and Israel with the shadow of the Holocaust apparent in the themes
of loss, trauma, nomadic life, or the state of linguistic in-betweenness. Two Polish-Jewish writers, Eva
Hoffman (born 1944 as Ewa Wydra) and Irit Amiel (born 1931 as Irena Librowicz), offer interesting
and varied perspectives on the languages and identities constructed in their new homelands, Canada
and U.S.A. in the case of Hoffman and Israel in the case of Amiel.
Second language acquisition is at the center of Eva Hoffman’s classic translingual memoir Lost in
Translation. A Life in a New Language (1989) which turned out to be a pivotal work for the study of
translingualism for years to come.8 Unlike her predecessor, Mary Antin (a Russian-speaking Jew), whose
autobiography The Promised Land (1912) depicts her migration to America as a story of joy and success,
Hoffman focuses instead on her own traumatic uprootedness from Kraków and from Polish once she
reaches Canada in 1959 as a girl of thirteen with no previous knowledge of English.9 Hoffman details her
linguistic, emotional, and cognitive struggle as a person “exiled” from a childhood “paradise,” evoking the
biblical connotations of creating “the new world,” which is how she names her final chapter. Her memoir
chronicles the process of constructing her new “self,” not only as a translingual and nomadic subject, but
also in terms of gendered and cultural values, which she needs to negotiate to secure her belonging in the
multicultural world dominated by English. Ewa/Eva reinvents herself linguistically and culturally first as
a teenage girl in Canada and later as a New York intellectual woman.
In 2003, Hoffman published an essay “P.S.,” which is an intellectual exploration of the process of
her rejection of Polish and becoming almost a monolingual English speaker in her debut work.“When
is it safe to return to something you have loved and lost?” she asked, and her answer makes it clear that
her return to the suppressed native Polish could only take place once she developed an equally strong
bond with English—the main medium of her artistic expression which became safely anchored in
her mind and psyche (Hoffman, “P.S.” 49). Significantly, Hoffman admits to writing Lost in Translation
from the perspective of her own subjectivity and points out how the studies in bilingualism and self-
translation published after her memoir, rendered her a vocabulary to critically examine her attitudes
in the process of “linguistic transmogrification,” i.e. life between languages and cultures (“P.S.” 51).10
Unlike Conrad, for whom writing in English was mainly a creative tool, Hoffman also made writing
in the acquired language a subject of study and self-examination, uncovering the different kinds of
relationships formed with the new language: a sense of liberation, the feeling of transgression or
rejection.
While Hoffman’s suppressing the language of her Kraków paradise was more painful than willful
at first, for the Polish-Israeli writer, Irit Amiel, who fled the country in 1947, it was more of a lib-
eration, an opportunity to create a new persona in Hebrew which for a time shielded her from the
traumatic events in Poland. Thus, Amiel’s return to Polish, after thirty years of living in Hebrew (and
other languages), adds another dimension to her writing in Polish. In her autobiography Życie. Tytuł
tymczasowy/Life. A Temporary Title (2016/2017), Amiel calls this return “language boomerang” and
credits her Hebrew for the directness and conciseness her written Polish has achieved in four volumes
219
of poetry and two collections of short stories (Osmaleni/Scorched, 1999, Podwójny krajobraz/A Double
Landscape, 2009) which she also self-translated into Hebrew (Life 112–117). Amiel’s constant bilin-
gualism in her writing and self-translating shows how mysterious and unpredictable the pattern of
languages’ co-existence in a psyche can be and the role that life circumstances and serendipity play
for translingual subjects. Unlike Amiel, Hoffman does not write in Polish, even though she returned
to speaking the language (“P.S.,” 53). Also, representing the second generation of Holocaust survivors,
Hoffman has different experiences to share and the shadow of Shoah and all its related themes are
ever present in her works, especially in Shtetl (1997), After Such Knowledge (2004), and The Secret (2002,
novel).
English as a Marker of Artistic Freedom and Cosmopolitan Belonging

Unlike Russian and German, associated with the tongues of the invaders due to the Partitions,
and consequently resented, English and French have been associated with the liberated “West” and
perceived as the means of free exploration of artistic richness or the way of belonging to transnational
intellectual community. Even though the predominant number of exile writers wrote in Polish, quite
a few (besides Conrad, Kosiński, and Hoffman) undertook the challenge of expressing themselves in
this stepmother tongue very successfully.
One of the key figures in this cluster is Stefan Themerson (1920–1988), a multilingual artist,
novelist, essay writer, opera composer, and filmmaker whose work was often co-designed with his
wife Franciszka Weinles (1907–1988). For Themerson, the concept of pure and thus sublime art
automatically excluded all kinds of politics regardless of geographical location or the languages he
happened to be using for artistic creations. Themerson wrote in a language of the host country,
hence a longer poem Croquis dans les Ténèbres (1944, Sketches in Darkness) marked his stay in France
and his prolific prose in English—his settlement in London where he found himself in 1942 due
to the war (Kraskowska 7–13). He self-translated some of his earlier pieces conceived in Polish,
such as Bayamus, Professor Mmaa, and Cardinal Pölätüo and in the late 1960s switched to English.
His novels like Tom Harris (1967), The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), and Hobsons’s Island (1988)
drew on various genres while owing a debt of gratitude to the modern thriller. Praised by British
reviewers for having “a kind of mind that is all too rare,” and his writing for being “clear and
cogent in logic and psychology,” (Wisdom 84) he saw language as being both trap and tool for
creativity. His concept of Semantic Poetry, originally conceived in Polish, but fully developed in
English, attested to this conviction as reported by Wadley, “I [ST] wanted to disinfect words, scrub
them right to the very bone of their dictionary definitions … It was meant to be funny. Both
serious & funny. It became the subject of my novel Bayamus.” (Wadley xvi). Themerson created
his artistic universum,11 which he wished to protect and expand through his publishing activ-
ities and connections with other artists while staying on the peripheries of any cultural set-up
he happened to be in. As Themersons’ lives show, the translingual practice undertaken by Polish
writers was not always motivated by exile which implied “un unwilled expulsion from the nation,”
as Mardorossian put it, but often resulted from relatively voluntary departure and only due to
unexpected circumstances turned into a stay with no possible or eventually undesired return (17).12
Other writers whose personal circumstances varied much but for whom English was also a marker
of artistic freedom include Ewa Kuryluk, (born in Kraków in 1946 to a Polish-Jewish family) and
Ewa/Eva Stachniak (born 1952 in Wrocław). Both left Poland in the early 1980s having studied
English previously. Stachniak settled in Canada and wrote her debut novel Necessary Lies (2003) in
English, exploring Polish-German relations from a transcultural perspective to revisit the traumatic
war memory while focusing on the Breslau/Wrocław theme. But it was her subsequent historical
novel writing which critics compared to Hilary Mantel in terms of scope and powerful psychological
portraits of characters depicted, especially in The Winter Palace/Empress of the Night (2011), Garden of
Venus/Dancing with Kings (2012), and The Chosen Maiden (2016) (Carol Bishop, Stachniak’s website).
220
Both Stachniak and Kuryluk share interests in engendering history and giving voices to women
which seemed to be enhanced by their use of English and the distant perspective they gained after
they had left Poland. Kuryluk’s novel Century 21 (1992) illustrates such focus but at the same time she
continues her explorations in mutual interference between word-based and image-based art and as
she stated herself: “I draw what I cannot write, and write what I cannot draw” (qtd in Makowiecka
117). Interestingly, the practice of drawing and writing has recently been combined by Monika
Szydłowska, the youngest generation representing free mobility in post-2004 Europe. Her art book
Do you Miss Your Country? (2015) utilizes bilingualism, code-switching, translanguaging (as defined by
Li Wei) giving equal treatment to both languages and thus securing equal access to readers of either of
the two languages.13 While the focus ostensibly falls on daily scenes encountered by Polish migrants,
the book at the same time places linguistic concerns at its very center and foregrounds them with
pastel drawings which open space to different interpretations.14
Poland’s accession to the EU, and the intensified migration to the UK and Ireland resulted in new
works being written in English, next to a growing number of translations of Polish literature into
English. Works produced in the post-EU accession, such as Madame Mephisto (2012) by A.M. Bakalar
(born Joanna Zgadzaj in 1975), focus on the experience of immigrants and life between cultures
(and languages) in an increasingly globalized world. The New Dubliners (2014) is a collection of short
stories by Daniel Zuchowski about “the new Irish” and their lives in Ireland’s capital. However,
increasingly Polish-speaking authors writing in English move away from the subject of migration,
covering topics related to social justice and minority rights, which have come under threat, such
as in Bakalar’s second novel, Children of Our Age (2017), exploring modern-day slavery and human
trafficking by Poles in the UK.15
English as a global, cosmopolitan language has also been taken up by the writers who do not live
in the English-speaking countries, such as Paris-based Tomasz Jedrowski, whose novel Swimming in
the Dark (2020), a coming-of-age story set in a communist Poland, has been praised for its artistic
merits. Commenting on why he chose English, Jedrowski stressed English as a language that was not
imposed on him:
It’s not something that I happened to be born into. It’s just something I enjoyed from the
very start, and I don’t feel like it’s my parents speaking through me when I’m writing in
English, because we never spoke in English.
(Juzwiak 2020)
Writing in English can provide a sense of liberation as opposed to the native tongue that may
carry burdensome childhood memories (possibly traumas), traditions, and cultural conventions. For
those outcast by society, such as the LGBT community, Polish has become a language of exclusion
and oppression with English enabling them to join a transnational community of people with shared
experiences rather than united by language and nationality.
Although “few migrants are writers,” immigration, including “matrimonial” immigration, is
often the most obvious motive for taking up writing in another language (Kellman and Lvovich
“Introduction,” 3). Yet, in the case of the Canadian writer, Soren Gauger, it was the encounter with
Polish literature, including translingual authors such as Jan Potocki and Bruno Jasieński (he translated
Jasieński’s I Burn Paris) discussed in this chapter, which provided the impetus to learn Polish as an
adult and consequently began creating literature in Polish.16 Gauger saw the marginality of Polish
as an opportunity for an intimate relationship with the language and to boost, what he honestly
describes, as his own sense of having “unique” interests (Marecki 188). While Gauger translates and
promotes literature “from the margins” abroad, his own work in Polish, mainly the novel Nie to /nie
tamto (2014), is an exploration of the “Polish inferiority complex,” the acute awareness of the percep-
tion of one’s own culture as inferior often expressed by “othering” of that culture. Gauger recreates
this through his creative and unusual usage of Polish, for example replacing “i” with “y”, a playful
221
use of aspect and incorrect declension, which defamiliarizes the language while creating a sense of
strangeness and abnormality.
The phenomenon of writing literature in a second language, recently described also as exophonic
writing,17 has been increasing across Europe due to migration. Among exophonic authors many are
translators, as is the case of Gauger and other bilingual and multilingual authors discussed above, who
practiced literary translation and self-translation. Although English has been a dominant language of
twenty-first-century transnational literature, Aleksandra Lun represents a native speaker of Polish and
accomplished Spanish translator, who has also become a Spanish-language writer. Lun’s novel Los
palimpsestos (The Palimpsest, 2015) is itself an examination of linguistic hybridity through the story
of Czesław Przęśnicki, a Polish writer who migrates to Antarctica, learns the local language and later
writes a novel in it. Lun also presents a unique take on the languages (e.g. using the parallels between
“multiverses,” a concept from string theory and languages) (Noubel). Commenting on what it means
to “master” or “own” a language in an interview with Filip Noubel, Lun seems to be embracing a
postnational approach to writing:
In Europe or the US we seem to be obsessed with “speaking” a language, the ultimate own-
ership as opposed to thinking, dreaming, or writing in it. Beyond this narrative, which is an
effect of the Western world’s dictatorship of extroversion, a language is simply a world that
you choose to live in. If you live in that world, you own its language.
Conclusion
In this chapter we presented an overview of some authors and their literary texts, which helped us to
shed light on issues of literary translingualism in the Polish context. In the multilingual set-up, such as
that of Poland-Lithuania before and after the Partitions, the notion of a mother tongue or native lan-
guage in itself becomes contested and problematic. While it was a standard practice in the eighteenth
century to consider a work in French by a Pole as “Polish literature” by a mere act of translation, Conrad’s
writing in English was viewed as an act of literary treason a century later. This demonstrates the com-
plex relationship between language and the notion of what is “national literature”—which developed
in the Polish territories due to historical events—a relationship discussed by many translingual authors
introduced here. Significantly, the essentializing approach to Polish ethnicity and literature as a mono-
lingual phenomenon obscured and excluded the impact of writers’ multilingualism, language switching,
or practice of self-translation within teaching and scholarship on Polish authors in general. Although
such an attitude was meant to preserve the endangered nationhood during the time of Poland’s state-
lessness, it misrepresented local diversity and led to harmful exclusions for years to come. We have
shown that positioning and existing hierarchy between the languages and cultures as well as migration
and mobility across continents shaped significantly the profile of Polish translingualisms which due to
being under-researched and obscured remains a challenge to wrestle with. Since every focus excludes,
we were forced to simplify and leave out many significant names and developments in order to present
most distinctive trends and languages. However, if this chapter inspires more in-depth explorations in
genres and languages missing above, its initial aim will be fulfilled.
Notes
1 In our usage of the term “literary translingualism,” we draw from Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich’s
definition as “literature written in a language not native to the author, in two languages, or in a mix of
languages” (“Selective Bibliography …”, 2015, 152).
2 Alaki elaborates: “Orientalist societies that Potocki frequented were celebrating Beckford’s Gothic work that
analogically rewrites the structure of the Arabian Nights and which provided Potocki with both Gothic and
Arabesque mises en abîme influences” (183).
222
3 Other Polish writers in exile such as Andrzej Busza (1938–2018), Bogdan Czaykowski (1932–2007), Anna
Frajlich (born 1942), Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004), Marian Pankowski (1919–2011), Jadwiga Maurer (1932–
2012), Stanisław Barańczak (1946–2014) created literature mostly in their native tongue, but used the lan-
guage of the country, to which they emigrated in their academic and research pursuits, and to promote Polish
literature abroad. The only exception was Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (1916–2007), a writer and an academic based at
University College London, who authored eight novels in English, his acquired tongue.
4 For example, Claude Maisonnat has analyzed the traces of French in Conrad’s English prose, pointing
out examples of linguistic cross breeding and textual heterosis (“The Venomous Sibillation of Subdued
Words”).
5 The German-speaking Polish territories under Prussian and Austrian administrations differed in their lan-
guage policy. While the Prussian policy of Germanization (the Kulturkampf) was very rigid, the Austro-
Hungarian emperor, who administered the region of Galicia, allowed more linguistic flexibility and writers
managed to secure legitimate space and literary dignity (Trzeciakowski, 180–210).
6 Out of his eleven plays only two were originally created in Polish (Raszewski, “Rittner Tadeusz” 289)
7 Chone Shmeruk explained that emigration of Hebrew writers to Palestine and establishing centers of
Hebrew literature there were the two major factors that led to the impoverishment of Hebrew literature in
Poland between the two world wars (Shmeruk 297).
8 Field shaping scholars such as Pavlenko (2001, 2004), Besemeres (1998, 2004) and Kellman (2000, 2020) have
demonstrated the richness of Hoffman’s novel for literary, linguistic, and sociolinguistic studies while others
pointed out its value for ethnographic, anthropological and migration studies.
9 For an insightful comparison of the two approaches, see Kellman’s analysis in Chapter 6 of The Translingual
Imagination (2000).
10 Hoffman’s “language memoir” has been used extensively by L2 researchers despite the reluctance to use
“subjective” accounts in SLA research. The breakthrough was by leading scholars of multilingualism Aneta
Pavlenko and Claire Kramsch (2005), who used Hoffman’s texts to articulate L2 identity theories.
11 In his unpublished letter to the Committee for Writers in Exile (London, 1951), he wrote: “Writers are
never, writers are nowhere in exile, for they carry within themselves their own kingdom, or republic, or
city of refuge, or whatever it is that they carry within themselves. And at the same time, every writer, ever,
everywhere, is in exile, because he is squeezed out of the kingdom, or republic, or city, or whatever it is that
squeezes itself dry” (qtd by Wadley x).
12 A French-language poet of Lithuanian origin, Oscar Milosz (1877–1939), who was a speaker of ten
languages and Jan Brzękowski (1903–1983), a Polish poet who wrote poetry in French and between 1929–
1930 edited a Paris-based bilingual art magazine L’Art Contemporain—Sztuka Współczesna, also belonged in
this category.
13 For examples of similar devices regarding language-switching in the post-2004 theater see Grossman.
14 For an insightful elaboration on Szydłowska’s technique see Emily Finer’s article ”I don’t mix much.”
15 For an exhaustive study of Polish migrant writers to the UK and Ireland see Joanna Kosmalska “Liberated
from Their Language.”
16 Gauger published his first two collections of short stories in English: Hymns to Millionaires (2004), Quatre
Regards sur l’Enfant Jesus (2004).
17 The concept of exophonic writing had emerged in the context of German migrant writing to describe
literary production in German by non-native speakers but now it has a broader use and is often treated
as synonymous to translingual writing. In 2008, Wright pointed out that in relation to German as L2 the
term: “allows an important distinction to be drawn between the differing contexts of production of writing
by non-native-speakers and native-speakers of hybrid identity, calling attention to the politics of style in non-
native-speaker writing” (26).
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18
IN THE BALKANS
The Post-Yugoslav Case
Una Tanović and Ulvija Tanović
If identity is shaped by language, then monolingualism is a deficiency disorder. It limits our

versions of self, society, and universe.
–Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination
The concept of a pure language can exist only in a monolingual mind, where the complexities
of the world can be reduced to the simplicity of a dot. In a multilingual mind, on the other
hand, there is constant chatter among various possibilities, because inside it, language is nothing
if not endless negotiation.
–Aleksandar Hemon, “Pathologically Bilingual”
Introduction
“When I speak Bosnian I smoke, and when I speak English—I don’t” (65). These are the sentiments
expressed by the Bosnian-American writer Semezdin Mehmedinović in his prose poem “Teeth Marks
on the Apple” (2006). Mehmedinović was already an established author in the former Yugoslavia
when, in 1996, he came as a political refugee to the United States, where he continued to write in
his native language and publish in translation.1 For Mehmedinović, however, translation is not just a
literary endeavor. It is a daily reality. The same is true for the millions of other immigrants who leave
their homelands because, as John Berger puts it, “there is nothing there, except their everything,” and
this everything includes their native tongue.To migrate is, metaphorically speaking, to translate (from
the Latin translatio, meaning “to carry across”), but the link between spatial and linguistic mobility is
not only metaphorical. Translation scholar Loredana Polezzi reminds us that the link drawn between
travel and translation is also “an applied one” (173) as traveling more often than not requires the prac-
tice of translation. Unsurprisingly then, another translation scholar, Michael Cronin, focuses in on the
condition of the migrant as “the condition of the translated being” because translation in the physical
sense of spatial displacement entails inserting oneself into a new cultural context and necessitates lin-
guistic and cultural translation—a shift, or rather a continuous shifting from “one way of speaking,
writing about and interpreting the world to another” (45). As Mehmedinović’s translator, Aleksandar
Hemon, another writer from the former Yugoslavia who arrived in the United States in the 1990s
as a tourist but stayed on as a political refugee and thus knows a thing or two about displacement,
points out in his translator’s note to “Teeth Marks on the Apple”: “the selfhood rooted in the mother
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-18 227

Una Tanović & Ulvija Tanović
tongue appears to be something different in English” (67). Bodies do not simply cross borders; they
carry meaning across borders in the form of words, languages, stories, and cultures. Or as the Cuban-
American writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat puts it: migrants sometimes travel without much luggage, but
they always arrive with a lot of baggage (7).
This already fraught situation of living in translation is still more fraught for “translingual”
authors— a term coined by Steven G. Kellman in his groundbreaking study The Translingual
Imagination (2000) to designate “authors who write in more than one language or at least in a lan-
guage other than their primary one” (9). Translingual authors not only live in translation but also
inevitably create in translation.2 Of course, as Kellman points out in Nimble Tongues (2020), his
second book-length study on the phenomenon of translingualism, not all migrants (who live in
translation) are writers, and not all translinguals (who create in translation) are migrants. He goes on
to note that, in fact, the motives for literary translingualism are as various as its practitioners: “There
are almost as many reasons to switch languages as there are writers who adopt another tongue” so
that “[e]‌very translingual is happy or unhappy in his or her own way.”While Tolstoy famously paired
familial unhappiness with variety and familial happiness with dull uniformity, Kellman allows for
the coexistence of felicity and linguistic heterogeneity but acknowledges elsewhere that (at least
from the outside) “[t]here seems something not only painful but unnatural, almost matricidal, about
an author who abandons the Muttersprache” (Translingual Imagination 19).3 Even some translingual
writers have questioned whether the effort of switching languages is ultimately worth it: writing
about the renowned translingual Vladimir Nabokov, another translingual author, Svetlana Boym,
asks, “How does one communicate the pain of loss in a foreign language? Why bother?” (251).4
This chapter takes up Boym’s questions in order to examine the phenomenon of literary
translingualism in the context of the area of Eastern Europe known as the Balkans. In particular, we
focus in on post-Yugoslav literature as a case study of translingual literary practices, with an excursus on
translingualism in Albania and Bulgaria.We will rehearse how the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia
in the 1990s led to the fragmentation of the common tongue and we will examine the effects this
had on authors who had been writing in that tongue. This chapter discusses at length the work of
three representative translingual writers from the former Yugoslavia—Predrag Matvejević, Aleksandar
Hemon, Tomislav Longinović—and mentions several others in order to show that, in some cases at
least, the answer to both of Boym’s questions is made simple: post-Yugoslav translingual writers are
left with no other choice when the foreign tongue is the only one available. The conclusions drawn
from the post-Yugoslav case also show how reconceptualizing translation can play a pivotal role in
understanding translingual literature.
When Mehmedinović states that he is a smoker in Bosnian and a non-smoker in English, he is in
fact recounting the words of his friend, “an American from Alexandria who now lived in Sarajevo”
(65). In “Teeth Marks on the Apple,” Mehmedinović tells us that this is his stock response at poetry
readings in the United States whenever he is asked—as he is invariably always asked by a monolin-
gual member of the audience—to share his thoughts on the impossibility of translating poetry. His
response is not just a clever ruse to step out and light up, although it is also that. Here Mehmedinović
cuts the Gordian knot of the “mother tongue,” identified by Yasemin Yildiz as “the affective knot
at the center of the monolingual paradigm” (10) that “produces a fantasy about the natural, bodily
origin of one’s first language and its inalienable familiarity” while at the same time discounting “any
possible new affiliation” (127–128). By implying that both his languages are embodied in the action
of smoking or not smoking, he opens up a space for new linguistic affiliations—a translingual space
where translation is not only possible but inevitable.
Where and Why are the Balkans?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Estonian-born social philosopher Hermann von Keyserling,
who wrote in both German and French, noted, “Si les Balcans n’existaient pas, il faudrait les inventer”
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Literary Translingualism in the Balkans
[If the Balkans did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them] (qtd. in Todorova 116). Although the
Balkans do exist, however, they have routinely been (re)invented. Maria Todorova, whose Imagining the
Balkans (1997) has been instrumental in delineating contemporary Balkan studies, notes that at the same
time as “the Balkans” was beginning to be widely used as a geographic signifier in the mid-nineteenth
century,“it was already becoming saturated with a social and cultural meaning that expanded its signified
far beyond its immediate and concrete meaning” so that “the Balkans” has to be approached as “an exer-
cise in polysemy” (21–22). Vesna Goldsworthy, another notable Balkans scholar (and also a translingual
author),5 treats “the Balkans” as a floating signifier that does not refer to any specific geographical entity
but rather to a historical construct—“a series of overlapping imagined spaces in which whole countries
are defined as ‘Balkan’ in some accounts, but excluded from others” (3).6
Commenting on Goldsworthy’s discussion of these shifting Balkan frontiers, the Slovenian-born
philosopher Slavoj Žižek sums up the situation:
[T]‌he first of many paradoxes concerning Balkan: its geographic delimitation was never
precise. It is as if one can never receive a definitive answer to the question, “Where does it
begin?” For Serbs, it begins down there in Kosovo or Bosnia, and they defend the Christian
civilization against this Europe’s Other. For Croats, it begins with the Orthodox, despotic,
Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia defends the values of democratic Western civil-
ization. For Slovenes, it begins with Croatia, and we Slovenes are the last outpost of the
peaceful Mitteleuropa. For Italians and Austrians, it begins with Slovenia, where the reign of
the Slavic hordes starts. For Germans, Austria itself, on account of its historic connections, is
already tainted by the Balkanic corruption and inefficiency. For some arrogant Frenchmen,
Germany is associated with the Balkanian Eastern savagery—up to the extreme case of
some conservative anti-European-Union Englishmen for whom, in an implicit way, it is
ultimately the whole of continental Europe itself that functions as a kind of Balkan Turkish
global empire with Brussels as the new Constantinople, the capricious despotic center
threatening English freedom and sovereignty. So Balkan is always the Other: it lies some-
where else, always a little bit more to the southeast, with the paradox that, when we reach
the very bottom of the Balkan peninsula, we again magically escape Balkan. Greece is no
longer Balkan proper, but the cradle of our Western civilization.
Although he regularly writes and publishes in English, Žižek insists here on using the term “Balkan”—
always singular in the South Slavic languages of the Balkans—instead of its translation into English
which would yield what the literary scholar and translingual author Tomislav Longinović has termed
“an uncanny plural, The Balkans.”7 For Longinović, this plural is no mere linguistic fluke, but rather,
much like the verb “to balkanize,” “symptomatic of Europe’s and its transatlantic extensions’ inability
to symbolize its own imaginary south-eastern region as a sovereign territory in a singular substantive
form” (“Balkan in Translation”).
For the purposes of this chapter, however, a singular substantive form is necessary and therefore we
limit our discussion to the most recent iteration of the Balkans. We have decided to focus primarily
on the territory of the former Yugoslavia and our reason for delineating the region in this way is that
the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001) have rendered it into what Marijeta Božović has termed a “particular
and politicized mini-Babel” (11). Since the curse of Babel is ultimately at the root of the translingual
impulse, this region is a particularly instructive case for the study of translingualism.
An Excursus on Translingual Literature from Albania and Bulgaria

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which also acknowledges the amorphousness of the term
“Balkans” and concedes that “the geographical area designated by this term is not fixed,” the “Balkans”
is “currently primarily associated with the region north of Greece and particularly with Albania and
229
those countries which made up Yugoslavia.” Although brought together by definition, the former
Yugoslavia and Albania are worlds apart, primarily because for much of its existence as an independent
nation, Albania was a world apart. After coming to power in 1944, Enver Hoxha’s Communist regime
maintained the borders established in 1913 to avoid any disputes with neighboring Yugoslavia, but
also hermetically sealed off the country for almost half a century, cutting off relations with Yugoslavia
in 1948, the Soviet Union in 1961, and China in 1976. By the early 1980s, there were only a dozen
or so foreigners living in the country, no foreign-language books were being imported and very few
were being translated from the Albanian (Bellos). Compounding Albania’s isolation is the fact that
the Albanian language, as the only surviving member of its branch of the Indo-European family, does
not have any close relatives. The result of this severe limiting of cultural and linguistic contacts is that
Albanian literature remains to this day one of the least known European national literatures outside
its own borders (Elsie).
The only Albanian writer with a truly global reputation is the translingual Ismail Kadare,
recipient of the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and the Neustadt International
Prize in 2020. Kadare’s first novel Gjenerali i ushtërisë së vdekur [The General of the Dead Army]
(1963) was also the first major work of modern Albanian literature to gain an international read-
ership because it was translated into the French in 1970, paving the way for Kadare to request
political asylum in France in the early 1990s. By the time Kadare turned to translingualism,
publishing his novel La Pyramide (1992) in French, another Albanian translingual tradition was on
the rise with an increasing number of texts being published in Italian by Albanian migrant writers,
including works by the poet Gëzim Hajdari and the novelists Elvira Dones, Anilda Ibrahimi, Ron
Kubati, and Ornela Vorpsi (Pinzi 24–25).
As is often the case with migrant writers, these Albanian-Italian writers live and work at an inter-
section of languages. On the subject of his translingualism, Hajdari states in an interview that his
poetry “inhabits the space of constant linguistic migration between Italian and Albanian,” so that
“language becomes a homeland, a double language in my case.” For Hajdari, homeland is regained
in translation. The same is true for some contemporary translingual writers from Bulgaria, home to
the Balkan mountain range, the concrete landform which gives this often-imaginary border region
between the East and the West its name. On the final page of his debut short story collection, East of
the West: A Country in Stories (2011), Miroslav Penkov, who was born in Bulgaria in 1982 and moved
to the United States in 2001, writes, “And forgive me, beautiful Bulgarian language, for telling stories
in a foreign tongue, a tongue that is now sweet and close to me.” As an act of atonement perhaps,
Penkov translated the book himself and it was published as На изток от запада in Bulgaria, where it
promptly became a bestseller. Conversely, Kapka Kassabova, who writes primarily in English although
in addition to her native Bulgarian also speaks German and French, does not translate her own works
into Bulgarian but has translated Bulgarian literature into English.
This kind of fluid movement back and forth across borders and languages was not possible for an
older generation of translingual Bulgarian writers—such as Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, and Ilija
Trojanow—who left the then-totalitarian state before 1989 when there was little prospect of return.
“Je n’ai pas perdu ma langue maternelle” [I have not lost my mother tongue], Kristeva writes in
her essay “Bulgarie, ma souffrance” [Bulgaria, my Suffering] (1994) only to immediately claim, “Et
pourtant, le bulgare est déjà pour moi une langue presque morte. C’est dire qu’une partie de moi
s’est lentement éteinte au fur et à mesure que j’apprenais le français” [And yet Bulgarian is already
an almost dead language for me. That is to say, a part of me was slowly extinguished as I learned
French] (165).
Indeed, it would seem that switching between languages was also not an option for Bulgaria’s most
celebrated translingual author—Elias Canetti. Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, in 1905, Canetti’s first language
was Ladino, but he was also exposed to Hebrew, Bulgarian, English, French, and German, as the
family moved between Ruse, Manchester, Lausanne,Vienna, Zürich, and Frankfurt. Although he was
fluent in several languages and ultimately settled in London, Canetti wrote exclusively in German.
230
When he died in 1994, his obituary in the Times opened with the somewhat incongruous boast
that, “Elias Canetti was the first British citizen to win the Nobel Prize for Literature after Winston
Churchill in 1953” (19).The curious fact that Canetti received the Prize as a British citizen for litera-
ture written in German is explained in the award ceremony speech by the Nobel committee: “The
exiled and cosmopolitan author Canetti has one native land, and that is the German language.” And
Canetti himself states in an interview, “Meine Vorfahren haben 1492 Spanien verlassen müssen und
ihr Spanisch in die Türkei mit genommen … Mit dreiunddreißig mußte ich Wien verlassen und
nahm Deutsch so mit, wie sie damals ihr Spanisch” [When my ancestors had to leave Spain in 1492,
they took their Spanish with them to Turkey … When I had to leave Vienna at thirty-three, I took my
German with me, just as they had taken their Spanish] (103). Canetti did not take his native Ladino
with him. In fact, as Ilan Stavans laments, “[a]‌history of Ladino literature is still unavailable” because
the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492 “resulted in a broken vessel whose multiple
particles are disseminated the world over” (qtd. in Sokol 109). Almost exactly 500 years later, another
literature, that of what would become known as the former Yugoslavia, risked a similar fate.
The Language Formerly Known as Serbo-Croatian

In order to consider literary translingualism in the former Yugoslavia, we must first provide a brief
overview of the fate of the language formerly known internationally as Serbo-Croatian. The term
“Serbo-Croatian” is a compound term, coined in the early nineteenth century when the linguistic
nationalism of German Romantics such as Johann Gottfried Herder was enthusiastically taken up
in the Balkans (Greenberg 9). In 1850, building on the Herderian conjunction of Volk and lan-
guage, writers from present-day Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia—who were divided among the Austro-
Hungarian and Ottoman Empires with their different official languages, and who used various literary
languages but shared similar South Slavic vernaculars—signed the Vienna Literary Agreement in an
effort to standardize and elevate Serbo-Croatian into a literary language:
Dolje potpisani znajući da jedan narod treba jednu književnost da ima, i po tom sa žalosti
gledajući, kako nam je književnost raskomadana … sastajali smo se ovijeh dana, da se
razgovorimo, kako bismo se što se za sad što više može u književnosti složili i ujedinili.
[We the undersigned well aware that one people must have one literature, and seeing with
sadness how our literature is splintered … have met to discuss how it might be possible to
understand each other and to unite in our literature.]
(qtd. in Greenberg 170)
From this initial Romantic conjoining of language and nation, Serbo-Croatian followed the uniting
of its speakers into the various iterations of Yugoslavia after the First World War, when it became an
official language, and then followed them again through the 1990s, when they went their separate
ways and deprived it of its official status.
The effect this disintegration of language had on authors from the region is well-exemplified by
the case of perhaps the most celebrated author from a South Slavic language—Ivo Andrić. Judging
by the curriculum at the University of Sarajevo, Andrić, Yugoslavia’s only Nobel laureate, was a
translingual writer: his prose is studied as Serbian literature and his poetry is studied as Croatian lit-
erature. One could also deduce that Andrić was translingual from the fact that some of his novels
have been translated from the Serbian into Croatian by publishers who have also issued his “original”
writings in Croatian (Hawkesworth 216).8 Andrić was in fact multilingual. In his youth he translated
Strindberg,Whitman, and the Slovene poets Fran Levstik, Josip Murn, and Oton Župančić (Vucinich
3), while the thesis for which he earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Graz in
Austria—“Die Entwicklung des geistigen Lebens in Bosnien unter der Einwirkung der türkischen
231
Herrschaft” [The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule]
(1924)—was written in German. And when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961,
he addressed the gathered dignitaries at the Stockholm Concert Hall in French: “Ma patrie est en
effet un ‘petit pays entre les mondes’, comme l’a pertinemment qualifiée un de nos écrivains” [My
country is indeed a “small country between the worlds,” as it has been aptly characterized by one of
our writers].9 Although multilingual, Andrić composed all his literary works in the official language
of this small country between the worlds, his native language, making him in Kellman’s terminology
an “isolingual author.”
During and after the Yugoslav Wars, however, nationalists eager to construct separate national
literatures out of what used to be a unified literary space seized on the fact that Andrić wrote in two
variants of the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian: born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he
grew up speaking the ijekavski dialect of Serbo-Croatian and his early poetry was written in ijekavski,
but when he moved to Belgrade in the 1920s, he switched to the ekavski dialect dominant in Serbia
for his prose (Longinović “East Within the West” 136). Therefore, the answer as to why Andrić is
sometimes treated as a translingual author in the Balkans has more to do with the dissolution of
Yugoslavia and its common tongue than with the author’s biography or literary output. Writing in
1995, at the height of the Yugoslav Wars, Longinović uses the example of efforts to destroy Andrić’s
legacy to illustrate how the self-appointed guardians of newly cleaved national cultures were “quick
to silence those who remind them of their common Slavic origin” (“East Within the West” 137).
As opposed to Andrić, whom he thought “fortunate” (qtd. in Suvin 20) for not having to witness
the bloodbath attenuating the dissolution of their shared language, Predrag Matvejević, like other
living Yugoslav authors at the time who refused to side with one of the newly created ethno-national
identities, had to keep writing while both his language and his country were falling apart. Beginning
with Matvejević, we will examine in more detail a selection of such authors who refused or were
not allowed to embrace an ethno-national identity and an exclusive link between a (new) language
and that ethno-national identity in order to shed light on how translingual literature can come about
not only because of deliberate linguistic choice but by authors becoming “native speakers of a dead
language” (Bugarski 167) against their will.
Predrag Matvejević
The writer and literary scholar Predrag Matvejević was the son of a Russian-speaking Ukrainian
father who left Odessa with the retreating White Army during the Russian Civil War in 1921 to settle
in Yugoslavia, where he married Matvejević’s mother, a Bosnian Croat. Matvejević’s own fate echoes
that of his father: in 1991, he was forced to leave his country by the Yugoslav civil wars, settling first in
France and later in Italy. Matvejević was already multilingual when he left Yugoslavia, having inherited
Russian and studied French, but living, as the English-language title of his 1994 epistolary novel puts
it, Between Exile and Asylum is what made him translingual.While Yugoslavia was tearing itself up into
an ex-Yugoslavia, Matvejević turned to French in his autobiographical work Le monde ex. Confessions
[The Ex-World. Confessions] (1996) to address his own experience of becoming an “ex”: “Ces
confessions sont liées, on le devine, à mes origines: d’un côté la vieille Russie d’où provient mon père,
de l’autre l’ex-Yougoslavie où je suis né en une Bosnie-Herzégovine défunte, dans la ville de Mostar
détruite” [These confessions of mine are bound up with my origins: from one side, the old Russia
from which my father comes, from the other the disaggregated ex-Yugoslavia where I was born, in
an almost extinct ex-Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the ex-town of Mostar, half-destroyed] (qtd. in Botta 7).
Le monde ex interrogates the tension between individual and collective memory, or rather mem-
ories, in order to settle on a state of “ ‘ex-instance,’ at once retroactive and superimposed, a state that
is both individual and collective” (Botta 7). In terms of the collective meaning of “ex,” Matvejević
explains that “L’après-Guerre froide aura vu une partie du monde, à l’Est, vivre une existence en
quelque sorte posthume” [The post-Cold War will have witnessed a part of the world, in the East,
232
living a somewhat posthumous existence], so that “Le mond ex est rempli d’héritiers sans heritage”
[The world “ex” is full of heirs without inheritance] (qtd. in Botta 7). Matvejević establishes a com-
monality here between ex-Yugoslavs and ex-Soviets. Like Boym who once described herself as “an
expat from an ex-country,”10 and like Matvejević’s father who “felt himself a citizen of the world,
whom the world had deprived of a homeland” (Matvejević 3), the country of their birth had come to
exist only in memory. But in addition to losing a sense of origin provided by a homeland, Matvejević
also witnessed his native language being ripped apart. Rendered an exile from an ex-language, denied
access to his mother tongue, he turned instead to his father’s French:
Mon père avait parfaitement appris au cours de son enfance la langue française, dans son ex-
patrie. Il me l’a transmise dès mon plus bas âge, en même temps que le russe. Nous sommes
probablement rares à connaitre cette «autre langue» d’une Russie d’antan.
[My father had learned, during his childhood, the French language of his ex-homeland.
… He taught it to me, together with Russian. It is likely that there are only few of us who
know this ‘other language,’ which was the French used long ago in Russia.]
(qtd. in Botta 7)
“Je me vois par moments comme un dinosaure.” [Sometimes I see myself as a dinosaur], Matvejević
concludes in an effort to explain why this extinct French is a particularly fitting medium in which to
write about his ex-istence as a diasporic subject from a country that no longer exists.
Not satisfied with leaving an ex-cised part of himself behind forever, he also turns to self-translation
and includes in Le monde ex translations from previous works that had been written and published in
Serbo-Croatian: for example, a ten-page discussion on socialist self-management from Prema novom
kulturnom stvaralaštvu [Towards New Cultural Creation] (1977) that he translated into French and
annotated (Suvin 14) in order to reiterate that though the world it described had been irretrievably
lost, his thoughts and convictions were still informed by its afterlife and he could not make himself
fully understood without bringing them along into this new language. If, according to Benjamin,
translation provides the original with an afterlife, it is perhaps no wonder that in his “posthumous
existence” this Francophone Russian ex-Yugoslav citizen of Croatia living in exile from Bosnia
resorted to self-translation.
Aleksandar Hemon
Self-translation has also played a role in the work of the most widely-known translingual author from
the former Yugoslavia—Aleksandar Hemon. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a finalist
for the National Book Award, Hemon arrived in the US as a tourist in 1992, just before the war in
Bosnia and Herzegovina broke out, and stayed on as a refugee. But, official status notwithstanding,
Hemon does not think of himself as a refugee. Or, at least, he does not think of himself as a refugee
when he thinks in the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian:
Moram, međutim, naglasiti da se ja nikad nisam osjećao kao izbjeglica. ... Meni se potrefilo
da budem u Americi kad je rat počeo, ali sve nakon toga je bila stvar mog izbora, zbog čega
mi se bilo mnogo lakše prilagoditi, jer nisam preživljavao ratnu traumu, budući da nikad
nisam bio u ratu.
[I have to emphasize that I never felt like a refugee. … I happened to be in America when
the war started but everything after that was a matter of choice, which is why I could adapt
more easily—I didn’t experience any war trauma given that I never experienced the war].
(qtd. in Imamović)
233
The trauma he did experience was that of being stranded between two languages, neither of which
he could fully claim as his own:
I realized I wouldn’t be able to write in Bosnian in the foreseeable future as the war was
changing the language in ways I could not comprehend; and that I wouldn’t be able to write
in English until I understood it in a way a native writer would.
(“Pathologically Bilingual”)
The popular version of his biography as canonized in the English-language press, however,
tells a much more dramatic story. After glossing over Hemon’s work as a writer in the lan-
guage formerly known as Serbo-Croatian, Lorin Stein, writing in the New York Review of Books,
reminds the reader that Hemon “spoke only rudimentary English” when he arrived in the US
and “read American novels with the help of a dictionary,” only to pupate in three years as an
English-language writer. Later in the article, Stein includes the requisite reference to “Hemon’s
Nabokovian swagger,” stating that:
Some of the lessons [Hemon] learned from Nabokov are plain … to alliterate; to make a
big deal out of choosing the flashy mot juste; in general, to dramatize his own relationship
to the language—even to tease his readers, as a tightrope walker pretends to lose his footing,
with a consciously unidiomatic turn of phrase.
Tightrope walker or a dog walking on its hind legs? Either way, the spectacle is impressive. However,
what is conspicuously absent from this neat account is that Hemon’s first English-language collection
of short stories, published in 2000 as The Question of Bruno, is the result of not only an “extraordinary
self-education” (Stein) but also an extraordinary feat of self-translation—six of the eight stories in the
collection were also written and appeared in the language now known as Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
(BCS) as Život i djelo Alphonsea Kaudersa, published in 1997.
As opposed to Hemon, who continues to write and publish in both his L1 and his L2, a pre-
vious generation of Yugoslav translinguals who left Yugoslavia during the Cold War, such as the
Serbian-American poet Charles Simic and the Croatian-Canadian novelist and short story writer
Josip Novakovich, switched completely to their adopted tongues. The same is true for a younger
generation of post-Yugoslav writers, who acquired their second language at a young age:Téa Obreht,
the Serbian-American novelist who won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel The
Tiger’s Wife (2011), switched to English after moving to the United States at the age of twelve, having
already spent several years living in Cyprus and Egypt; Saša Stanišić came to Germany at the age of
fourteen as a refugee and fourteen years later he became a successful German-language writer with
his debut novel, Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert [How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone]
(2006); Alen Mešković was also fourteen when he became a refugee in Croatia, which he describes
in his semi-autobiographical novel Ukulele-jam (2011), written in Danish, the language he adopted
after seeking asylum in Denmark when he was seventeen, an experience he describes in his second
novel, Enmandstelt (2016).
Given the recent popularity on the US literary market of translingual writing by native informants
who may or may not be fluent speakers of their native language, the tendency to explain Hemon’s
acute sense of language with reference to his foreign origins without engaging with any of his ori-
ginal foreign work is perhaps understandable, and it is certainly representative of how translingual
writing is generally received in the United States.The poet Reginald Gibbons, who was also Hemon’s
first American editor at TriQuarterly, sums up the tone well: “[H]‌ere was a guy out of nowhere, ambi-
tious and operating in the tradition of unbelievable European writers who write in English the way
Americans never do” (qtd. in Borelli). The feat of translingual writers like Hemon, however, is not
that they “make it” in their adoptive language, or even what they make of their adoptive language, but
234
how they manage to make it across from one language into another. Their success is too often used
to obliterate this often-precarious journey from the awareness of the reader.
Hemon’s short story “A Coin,” from The Question of Bruno,11 uses the metaphor of running across
an intersection covered by a sniper to provide insight into this translingual predicament. “A Coin”
presents fragments of letters exchanged between a young man, an unnamed Bosnian refugee in
Chicago and stand-in for the author, and a young woman, Aida, in a besieged Sarajevo. It begins in
what is presumably her voice, as she describes running across an intersection in a sniper zone:“Suppose
there is a Point A and a Point B and that, if you want to get from Point A to Point B, you have to
pass through an open space clearly visible to a skillful sniper” (117). The story ends with the same
scene—“But once you get to Point B everything is quickly gone, as if it never happened. You pick
yourself up and walk back into your besieged life, happy to be.You move a wet curl from your fore-
head, inhale deeply, and put your hand in the pocket, where you may or may not find a worthless
coin; a coin” (133)—but by now the reader knows that this is all a feat of ventriloquism. Halfway
through the story, it is revealed that Aida’s letters have stopped arriving and that the refugee has had
to make up her letters, had to write her letters for her in a language that is not her or his own. Both
the refugee within the story and the refugee writing the story, Aleksandar Hemon, have had to tra-
verse the open space between Point A and Point B (L1 and L2), dropping words, phrases, idioms, and
picking up others, hoping that what makes it across still carries meaning.Treating translingual writing
as only a spectacular performance in an L2 and disregarding the journey from L1 runs the risk of
misunderstanding the nature of the space in between—the space that makes translingual writing
possible.
Tomislav Longinović
Tomislav Longinović has understood and theorized the nature of this space. “In alchemy, as in transla-
tion across cultures, the knowledge gained in the passage over the domestic/foreign divide is imagined
as a secret formula which enables the movement from one state to another, with an increase in the
value of the original” (5). Thus begins his “Fearful Asymmetries: A Manifesto of Cultural Translation”
(2002).The new entity produced by this transformation, Longinović goes on to explain, is an opening
up of “a space of the national in-between, the gold of hybrid and mobile identities amid the current
catastrophes of war and terror” (5).
Born and raised in Belgrade, Longinović had effectively emigrated to the United States in 1982
but was nevertheless, as he states in an interview, “strongly affected by the collapse of Yugoslavia”; it
“profoundly shook [him] in [his] sense of being and belonging” (qtd. in Buden), something that was
also reflected in his writing. As a student at the University of Iowa International Writing Program
in the 1980s, Longinović initially began composing a novel in Serbo-Croatian about his generation
of Yugoslav youth—then twenty-somethings from Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo, and Zagreb who,
according to Longinović, “did not support the unified cultural space of Yugoslavia as some nebulous
project” (qtd. in Buden) but instead spontaneously lived it through intense cultural exchanges. The
disintegration of Yugoslavia and the accompanying fragmentation of the language formerly known
as Serbo-Croatian had a profound effect on Longinović: he decided to remain in the US; the novel
came to be about the last generation of Yugoslav youth, and the author was left without a lan-
guage in which to tell their story. And so the novel, begun as Minut ćutanja in 1980 in Longinović’s
native Serbo-Croatian, was initially published in English as Moment of Silence in 1990, only to be
translated (back) into Serbian in 1997. When the novel was finally published in Serbian in 1997, it
was presented as a translation into Serbian of the English translation of the Serbo-Croatian transla-
tion of the English translation ... In Longinović’s telling, in order to produce the novel in the “new”
Serbian language, he had to resort to a form of Rückübersetzung—“a case of translating back-and-
forth in which a sense of what is the original and what is the translation gets radically confused”
(qtd. in Buden).
235
Longinović has characterized his process of recursive translation as “the work of mourning” (qtd.
in Buden). This brings to mind an episode from the life of the Dutch Renaissance poet Pieter
Corneliszoon Hooft recounted by Antoine Berman: after the death of his beloved wife, Hooft
composed an epitaph for her—drafting it first in Dutch, then Latin, then Italian, before eventually
translating it back into the Dutch. Berman concludes: “[It is] as if he needed to pass through a whole
series of languages and self-translations in order to arrive at the right expression of his grief in his
mother tongue” (2).
During the fateful 1990s, while occupied with this process of recursive translation, Longinović
found himself, in his own words, stuck between “the global media’s … enforced … vision of ‘tribal
warfare’ and local media involved [in] demonizing their newly found ethnic others” trying to “find
the idiom through which the ‘third voice’ could be heard” (qtd. in Buden). And he found it, as he says,
“in translation only” (qtd. in Buden). It is then, perhaps, quite fitting that Longinović should eventu-
ally formulate “A Manifesto of Cultural Translation.” His manifesto addresses not just how the “semi-
otic experience of translation as a ‘practice of everyday life’ ” (6) that influences the works translingual
authors should inform cultural studies, but also how such works should be translated:
If class, race, and gender are to remain the indisputable trinity of cultural studies, they need
to turn to the invaluable, yet underrated, semiotic experience of translation as a ‘practice
of everyday life’ for those identities that find themselves in the ranks of exiles, immigrants,
and refugees.
(6–7)
Longinović goes on to state that:
These identities-in-translation experience displacement as a result of ethnic conflict, eco-

nomic devastation, and other forms of violence which contribute to the creation of a glo-
balization of an unwanted kind. The demand for recognition coming from this growing
segment of hybrid cultural populations displaced across the globe is the symptom of emer-
gent identities that survive on the periphery of different national projects. These identities
require a particular form of translation—one that does not reach for easy equivalents in
order to quickly domesticate the alien, but seeks to live with the defamiliarizing effects of
the alterity of identities beyond one’s own.
(8)
Hemon would likely agree. When asked in an interview about “the relationship between the experi-
ence of emigration and the act of writing,” Hemon commented that the writer and the immigrant
have a similar point of view because “the writer is already, as such, an immigrant … a traveler, as it
were, who ignores every kind of border.” He goes on to explain that “in a world marked by migration
of labor and the perpetual redrawing of geographic borders,” it is “the immigrants, the émigrés, and
refugees [whose] stories need to be told and retold, more than the obsolete myths that represent the
bulk of national literatures” (qtd. in Cowart 191).
Conclusions
In 2013, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Conflicted Phonemes (2012) became notable as the only artwork
ever submitted into evidence at a deportation hearing before the UK Asylum and Immigration
Tribunal.12 Conflicted Phonemes is a series of colorful infographics and digitized voice-maps that
problematize the use of language analysis in asylum cases. Abu Hamdan, a Lebanese-British artist,
created the work in cooperation with twelve Somali men who were denied asylum by the Dutch
236
government after being subjected to a so-called “accent test.” This test, Abu Hamdan explains, has
been employed since 2001 by immigration authorities to establish the national origin of asylum
seekers through a process known as Language Analysis in the Determination of Origin (LADO).13
The LADO protocol is simple: When an asylum seeker does not have the necessary documentation
to prove his or her nationality or when an immigration officer suspects that the asylum seeker has
falsified their national identity documents, the applicant undergoes an interview for the explicit
purpose of language analysis. The immigration officer who carries out the interview discounts the
content of the applicant’s testimony and focuses instead on his or her accent and word choice in
order to issue a judgment about the interviewee’s national origin (Eades 412). The task is made all
the more ludicrous by the fact that there is usually a lack of crucial information about the applicant’s
family history, regional community, migration route, and exposure to other languages (Apter 106).
Despite this, the judgment can be used as a basis for granting or denying asylum. In practice, as Abu
Hamdan illustrates, the (mis)pronunciation of a single word or even a single phoneme can result in
the rejection of an asylum petition: when a Palestinian asylum seeker in the UK pronounces the
Arabic word for “tomato” as benadoora and not bendoora, his application is denied (Mauk 167). You
say tomato, I say deportation.
At a time of widespread celebration of global mobility, Conflicted Phonemes cautions against
ignoring asymmetries of power in situations of cultural contact. Like Abu Hamdan’s critique of
LADO, the examples of post-Yugoslav translingual writing discussed in the present chapter expose
a monolingual bias inherent in positing that individuals have a single mother tongue that links them
to a single, clearly demarcated national territory. Matvejević, Hemon, and Longinović, after all,
started with the same mother tongue but ended up in three different national literatures—Croatian,
Bosnian, and Serbian respectively. Furthermore, drawing on this critique of LADO, we note that
a similar monolingual bias sometimes structures the academic study of translation and informs the
reception of translingual literature. As Yildiz demonstrates, the notion of a mother tongue, which
makes possible the conjunction of language and nation, is a relatively recent invention that emerged
in Western Europe in the late-eighteenth century. It is hardly an accident that the same thinkers who
promoted the notion of the mother tongue (including Jonathan Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von
Humboldt, and Friedrich Schleiermacher) also provided the foundation for traditional approaches
to translation that conceptualize it as a movement of texts across linguistic, cultural and often national
borders. In Eastern Europe, at the end of the twentieth century, however, translation was utilized—as
for example in the transposition of Andrić’s work from the Serbian into Croatian discussed above—
to burn down cultural bridges. Stranded, in the wake of this destruction, post-Yugoslav translingual
writers, including Matvejević, Hemon, and Longinović, traversed languages and espoused transla-
tion as a mode of being in the world as opposed to moving between fixed points of departure (L1)
and arrival (L2), never wanting to settle. It is in this in-between space where language is lost that
translation is found because, as Hemon puts it, “a mind cannot be empty of language; the space
we’re talking about is not in-between nor vacant. Rather it is doubly and thickly populated, with
at least twice as much as there can be in a monolingual mind” (“Pathologically Bilingual”). When
phonemes are yanked into the sphere of the legally audible, Abu Hamdan’s asylum speakers are
denied the right to remain silent. The writers discussed in this chapter show that silence is not what
is left when language is taken away.
Notes
1 In addition to poems and prose pieces published in Poetry, TriQuarterly, BOMB, and The Massachusetts Review,
Mehmedinović has published a collection of poems and vignettes Sarajevo Blues (trans. Ammiel Alcalay, City
Lights, 1998) and a collection of poems Nine Alexandrias (trans. Ammiel Alcalay, City Lights, 2003) in English
translation. An autobiographical novel about his experiences as a refugee in the United States, My Heart (trans.
Celia Hawkesworth, Penguin Random House, 2021), is forthcoming.
237
2 It is no accident that “translingualism” and “translation” share a prefix. “As ongoing research in both the
fields of translation studies and translingual literary studies makes clear, the phenomena of translingualism and
translation are closely interrelated in significant and mutually illuminating ways” (114), Julie Hansen notes
in her introduction to a special issue of Translation Studies dedicated to translingualism and transculturality
in the Russian context, while Karen Van Dyck opens a talk on “Migration, Translingualism, Translation” by
stating that translingual spaces are inevitably also translational, meaning “about and informed by the act of
translation.”
3 For a brief but illuminating history of the term Muttersprache or “mother tongue” and its entanglements with
monolingualism since the late eighteenth century in Western Europe, see Yildiz (pp. 10–14).
4 Although better known as a literary scholar who theorized nostalgia and addressed the translingual writing
of the Russian authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, Svetlana Boym was also a translingual writer
in her own right as the author of Ninotchka (SUNY Press, 2003), a novel written in English, Boym’s third
language after Russian and Spanish.
5 A native of Belgrade, Goldsworthy moved to London in the 1980s. In addition to literary translations from
the Serbian, she has published poetry in both English and Serbian, an English-language memoir Chernobyl
Strawberries (Atlantic Books, 2005) and two novels in English: Gorsky (The Overlook Press, 2015) and Monsieur
Ka (Chatto and Windus, 2018). English is her third language.
6 At one time or another, Goldsworthy notes, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Dobrudja,
European Turkey, Greece, Hungary, Illyria, Kosovo, Montenegro, (North) Macedonia, Novibazar, Romania,
Serbia, Slavonia, Slovenia, and/or Vojvodina came to be defined as part of the Balkans (4–9). The criteria for
a southeast European nation to qualify as “Balkan” seems to be that it must be perceived as simultaneously
part and apart from Europe, because the Balkans are defined as both geographically and culturally part of
Europe and yet, as Life magazine put it in 1964 without a hint of irony, “another Europe, disordered, far from
prosperous, irrational in their violence … Europe’s dark and bloody ground” (Stillman 10).
7 The same is true in other European languages: for example, Balcania in Italian, Los Balcanes in Spanish, les
Balkans in French.
8 Given the complexity of recent language politics in the Balkans, it is necessary to explain why this and similar
cases qualify as translation. Drawing on Gideon Toury’s definition that a translation is “any target language
text which is presented or regarded as such within the target system itself, on whatever grounds” (qtd. in
Tymoczko 1086), we can establish that transpositions from Serbian into Croatian are translations because they
are presented as such within the target system(s).
9 Andrić was referencing Oto Bihalji-Merin, author of Mala zemlja između svetova [A Small Country between
the Worlds] (1954) and a translingual writer who wrote in Serbo-Croatian and German under the pseudonyms
Peter Thoene, Peter Marin, Otto Biha, and Peter Maros.
10 Hicks, Jim. “… jamais une seule langue.” Writing the Stepmother Tongue: A Symposium on Translingual Literature, 9
Oct. 2015, Amherst, MA. Lecture.
11 “A Coin” was initially published in English in the Winter 1997 issue of the Chicago Review and came out
almost simultaneously in BCS as “Montaža atrakcija” in Život i djelo Alphonsea Kaudersa (1997).
12 See artist’s website: www.lawrenceabuhamdan.com
13 See Freedom of Speech Itself (2012), Abu Hamdan’s audio essay and companion piece to Conflicted Phonemes.
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VI
Literary Translingualism in Africa

19
IN A MULTILINGUAL SOCIETY
South Africa’s Publishing Landscape
Jana Klingenberg
Introduction
This chapter will be a case study investigating the circumstances that have led to the unique situ-
ation regarding languages in South African literature. It will further explore the effect on reader and
writer in South Africa. Close to three decades have passed since South Africa became a democracy.
With democracy came the freedom of expression in a multilingual society, however, instead of local
African language literature growing (in the adult trade market specifically), it has remained small.
Literary translingualism—African language speakers writing in English—is common practice and this
is reflected in the output of the local publishing industry.
The publishing industry in South Africa has grown from some distinctive circumstances, and des-
pite a multitude of challenges, it is one of the stronger publishing industries on the African continent.
According to Zell, South Africa consistently produces some of the newest titles in Africa, has some of
the most reliable publishing statistics and is overall a strong industry (4; 5; 6; 8).
South Africa’s publishing history has lasting influences on the industry today.“Historically, printing
and publishing in South Africa were controlled by external forces such as the colonial administration,
and missionaries. Dutch colonialism was responsible for the development of Afrikaans, while British
imperialism brought English into the country” (Möller 3). While the country has eleven official
languages, English and Afrikaans are still the dominant published languages. The language diversity
is thus not reflected in the corpus of novels published in the course of the past 100 years (the time-
span of South African literature) and African languages are poorly represented. Among other things,
this is because a reading culture cannot be taken for granted in a culturally diverse society with a
strong oral tradition. There are high levels of poverty and South African authors do not necessarily
write in their mother tongue. South African literature is seen as being dominated by white authors
writing in Afrikaans or English (Morgan 180–181). Many non-native Anglophones write in English.
Sometimes this translingualism is a choice—a political one, because writers feel more comfortable
writing in another language, or because they want to reach a bigger market—and sometimes not,
because writing in their mother tongue will promise limited sales for their book. However according
to Kellman, “Politics more than aesthetics accounts for the fact that postcolonial authors continue
to cultivate translingualism” (The Translingual Imagination 37). Language is often politicized, and the
published languages in South Africa are no different.The author who writes well in their second lan-
guage is rare (Kellman, The Translingual Imagination 12), but it is not a rare occurrence in South Africa,
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-19 243

Jana Klingenberg
and indeed there are a number of acclaimed South African authors not writing in their mother
tongues.
A History of South African Literary Production

In present-day South Africa, the language most frequently published is English. More often than
any other, it is also the language of imported literature. The second most published language is
Afrikaans (a language that developed in South Africa) and the official African languages (Sepedi,
Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, isiNdebele, isiXhosa and isiZulu) are hardly available
at all in the trade market.
In order to understand the situation around languages in South Africa, one has to consider the
history. The first European settlement in South Africa was established by the Dutch East India
Company (DEIC) in Table Bay in 1652, and the Cape remained in the hands of the DEIC until
1795, when the British occupied it and kept it till 1803 (Smith, 1971: 11). “Publishing in South
Africa, from its inception in the 17th century, first under Dutch colonialism and then under
British imperialism, was premised on the strict, if not total, control of the production and dis-
semination of literature in all its forms” (Oliphant in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing
in South Africa 110). This has greatly influenced what was published. Missionaries came to the
country to teach locals to read and write, and also to teach them about the Christian religion
(in effect negating African culture) but at the same time they put African languages on paper for
the first time. The mission presses published a number of important texts in African languages
including translations of religious texts (including the Bible) from and into the different languages
(Mpe & Seeber in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing in South Africa 15) and translations
of more general literature like Lovedale Press’s translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress by
Tiyo Soga into isiXhosa (Möller 3). There were also original works in different languages like
the first isiZulu novel published by the American Zulu Press called Ujeqe, Insila KaShaka (Jeq, the
Bodyservant of Shaka) written by John L Dube (Maake in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing
in South Africa 130). Significantly, Lovedale Press published Mhudi by Sol Plaatje as the first English
novel by a black South African (Oliphant in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing in South
Africa 114). This is an early case of translingualism (specifically to English). In 1822, the British
proclaimed English as the official language of the country (Marjorie) even though many South
Africans did not speak English.
Afrikaans literature developed from 17th century Dutch and came into existence partly as a result
of loss of power after British take-over of the Cape in 1805. The initial energies of Afrikaans writers
went into producing a counter-movement centered on Afrikaner nationalism as a rival to British
colonialism (Oliphant in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing in South Africa 112–13). By the
middle of the 19th century, Afrikaans had become a lingua franca in the Cape Colony while English
and Dutch remained the languages of the social elite (Webb 74). However Afrikaans continued to
grow and its use in public domains was promoted until it became a national official language in 1925
along with Dutch and English (Webb 74). There was much lobbying for the Afrikaans language
by the Afrikaner1 volk—fiercely proud and needing to be independent from especially the English,
having suffered great losses in the Anglo-Boer War at the end of the nineteenth century. Also known
as the South African War, it was fought from 1899 to 1902, between Great Britain and the two Boer
(Afrikaner) republics—the South African Republic (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Although
there are different opinions on the cause of the war, many believe the war was for control of the rich
Witwatersrand gold-mining complex, which was the largest gold-mining complex in the world at
that time. Boehmer explains that
to the same degree as their humiliation at British hands honed and sharpened the Boers’
nationalist spirit, the war experience also contributed to transforming their language, a
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hybridised version of Dutch … into a supple new medium of nationalist self-expression, as

Afrikaans poetry of the war’s aftermath testifies.
(Attwell and Attridge 257)
In Rethinking South African literary history Ampie Coetzee writes that the “relationship of language
to nationalism [is] particularly important in the case of Afrikaans, where language was a determining
factor in the creation of a ‘volk’ (people), and where the empowerment of language encouraged the
creation of literature” (Smit et al. 14). One of the most influential historical periods in South Africa’s
history is when the apartheid system was implemented—its impact on South African languages
and publishing is still evident. When the National Party started to govern the country from 1948,
Afrikaans became a way for it to exert power—the use of Afrikaans was prescribed by law for public
domains and was not only a matter of status but also of the economic protection of some speakers of
Afrikaans (de Kadt 186). “Afrikaans was strongly promoted in public domains, eventually achieving
functional equivalence with English” (Webb 74; de Kadt 190).
The Bantu Education Act was passed in 1953 and had far-reaching implications for the development
of African languages (Maake in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing in South Africa 129). It was
“revealed as having created a space for the proliferation of African language publishing while simultan-
eously drastically reducing the scope of its theme and messages” (Mpe & Seeber in Evans and Seeber, The
Politics of Publishing in South Africa 19).This is because on the one hand, the Act’s purpose was to ensure the
lowering of educational standards because no more English or Afrikaans was learned by black learners,
so “a fast growing market was created, almost overnight, for vernacular literary productions.” The Act’s
vernacularization of the medium of instruction in African schools created a demand for books, and ori-
ginal fiction writing was outpaced by this demand (Maake in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing in
South Africa 139), meaning that while African language books were in fact being published, it was mostly
for a school market (Möller 7). Additionally, authorities attempted to control the media’s access to and
collection of information. Censorship laws meant many books were banned, and many authors were
exiled. The Wet op Publikasies en Vermaaklikhede [Law on Publications and Entertainment] (1963) gave
state control of publications’ production and distribution if found to be “undesirable”; if transgressed, this
law was punishable by strict fines and even time in prison (Galloway and Venter in Van Coller 403).These
laws strongly affected most publishers’ decision-making about what to publish. In 1974 the censors (and
more specifically the Publications Act of 1974) banned renowned André P. Brink’s fourth novel, Kennis
van die Aand (1973), and his own English translation, Looking on Darkness (1974) (McDonald 74). Kennis
was the first banned Afrikaans title. Brink’s Kennis was not issued by a mainstream Afrikaans publisher; it
was rejected by the big publisher Human & Rousseau. Similarly the controversial Breyten Breytenbach’s
Skryt was published by Dutch publisher Meulenhoff because he did not want local publisher Human &
Rousseau (H & R) to publish it (McDonald in Attwell and Attridge 810).There were disputes (between
publishers and writers) over how best to confront the scourge of censorship, wrangles about the col-
laborationist stance of the major conglomerates, and questions about H & R’s independence within
Nasionale Pers (a publisher considered to be aligned with the government’s apartheid views). These
would continue to divide the Afrikaans literary world for the rest of the apartheid era (McDonald in
Attwell and Attridge 810).
Authors—including non-first language English speakers (African language and Afrikaans authors)
wrote in English in order to reach more people—there are many different African languages spoken
in the country but English became an important lingua franca and unifier under apartheid. The
move toward English was a deliberate choice as an assertion of communal identity (Kellman, The
Translingual Imagination 40) when many African authors especially raised their voices through English
texts. A publication through which many black South Africans found a voice (in English) was the
Drum magazine. Historically Drum is the first transnational popular publication in English to be
published and widely circulated in Anglophone Africa in both colonial and postcolonial eras. For
(black) South Africans Drum provided a literary space through which the injustices of apartheid
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could be communicated. Life in many of the South African townships, conditions for the Africans
in the countryside as seen through the eyes of blacks—journalists and ordinary readers—all found
expression in varying degrees and with different emphases in Drum (Odhiambo). The height of this
magazine’s success and influence was in the 1950s and was unifying for many South Africans speaking
different languages and coming from different cultures or tribes.
During (or as a result of) the isolation years during apartheid quite a strong indigenous publishing
sector developed (Land 107). In 1962 member states had to break diplomatic, trade, and transport
relations and to apply economic sanctions in an attempt to convince South Africa to abandon
apartheid (“South Africa’s Foreign Relations during Apartheid, 1948”). The increasing isolation
forced South Africa to rely on itself to produce books (because books could not be imported). “On
the threshold of the 1990s, Afrikaans fiction publishing constituted the most flourishing local lit-
erary publishing tradition” (Galloway and Venter 55) because the nationalist government enforced
and supported Afrikaans almost exclusively. The growth of fiction publishing in African languages
was directed towards providing literature for the school market under the apartheid system of
“Bantu Education,” and in English was manipulated, on the one hand, by the repression of authors
through bans, arrests, and exile and, on the other, the option to publish internationally (Galloway
and Venter 55).
The first democratic elections in South Africa occurred in 1994 (marking the end of apartheid),
with the new Constitution that followed in 1996 naming eleven official languages. Apartheid and
protest encouraged the writing and publication of books, and oppositional publishers like Ravan
Press, Lovedale Press, David Philip, and Skotaville published beyond the mainstream publishers like
Nasionale Pers, a dominant publisher during apartheid and often associated with the nationalist gov-
ernment (Wafawarowa 46).
Post-apartheid there was a small buying market for published material, partly due to limited dis-
posable income and inaccessibility to some publications by parts of the population; a government
focused on the provision of basic needs; highly competitive foreign publishers affecting the local
industry; limited incentives for local writers and an unfavorable domestic economic climate (Cultural
Strategy 8). These issues have contributed to a small publishing industry, often limiting the publica-
tion of more unconventional titles in favor of more guaranteed big sellers. The industry is affected
by its macro environment (like an economic recession) and growth and decline changes every year.
The industry is also heavily dependent on the educational sector, which in turn is dependent on
government policies, which has affected the industry hugely in the past. In addition, the situation
with books in African languages has not changed much since apartheid. In 1989, 78 percent of all
books published in South Africa were written in either English or Afrikaans. Today, African language
books are still mostly produced for use at schools. According to the Constitution of South Africa
1996, everyone has the right to receive education in the official language or languages of their choice
(South Africa 1996, 29 [2]‌). Schoolbook publishers are thus required to publish books for schools in
all eleven official languages. Consequently, this is where most African language publishing takes place.
In contrast, the support Afrikaans received from the apartheid government and the isolation
imposed on South Africa encouraged the growth of Afrikaans titles. Today, South Africa still has a
strong Afrikaans reader and buyer market, even though it is still smaller than the English market. By
language, most total income from local print sales was made from English (R 2 182 779 thousand)
titles, then Afrikaans titles (R 298 229 thousand) and isiZulu titles (R 121 675 thousand) (University
of Pretoria 7). The divide among English, Afrikaans, and isiZulu can be clearly seen with these fig-
ures. The African language in which the most books are sold is isiZulu—one of only four African
languages that report any sales in this sector (University of Pretoria 23).
The statistics clearly show a healthy production of Afrikaans and English literature in comparison
to a very meagre output in the other official languages (Van der Waal 53–54). In addition “the
[trade] sector is characterized by large multinational publishers with local offices as well as a var-
iety of local imprints” and “the [publishing] industry is heavily dominated by a small group of very
246
large publishers, who together represent more than 80% of production and revenue” (University of
Pretoria 4). This affects independence and the kinds of trade titles published to a large extent, and
contributes to the small number (if any) of African language titles published. The statistics provided
by Statistics South Africa’s General Household Survey of 2018 show that in South Africa just over
one quarter (25.3%) of individuals spoke isiZulu at home, while 14.8 percent of individuals spoke
isiXhosa, and 12.2 percent spoke Afrikaans. English was spoken by 8.1 percent of individuals at home,
making it the sixth most common home language in South Africa. English is, however, the second
most commonly spoken language outside the household (16.6%) after isiZulu (25,1%), and preceding
isiXhosa (12,8%). In addition, the use of most languages outside the household declined, with the
notable exceptions of isiZulu and Setswana (Statistics South Africa). Considering the statistics on
spoken languages vs. published languages in the trade sector, it is clear that spoken languages are not
published in the same proportions.
Many local authors feel they need to write in English in order to reach international status—it is
often seen as the ultimate goal—and this contributes to the large number of English titles published.
In The anglophone literary-linguistic continuum: English and indigenous languages in African literary discourse
Andindilile explains:
Though of late transnational discourse appears to have upstaged national discourse
under globalisation, nation-specific discourses in Africa and elsewhere can benefit our
understanding of the problematical position within the national discourse of literatures
written by Africans in former colonial languages.
(4)
For Afrikaans authors, writing in their mother tongue has the advantage that they may instead have
a loyal and even guaranteed market, whereas an English book will have to compete with imports
from other English-speaking countries. Not only is the Afrikaans market the second biggest in South
Africa, 92 percent of this market prefer to read in their own language (Ads24). In her article Publishing
and the African Renaissance, Machet (76) explains that
although Afrikaans no longer occupies a privileged position where it is supported by the

government at the expense of other languages, Afrikaans literature has continued to be
published, reviewed and bought. This indicates that once a literature and reading public for
a language has become established it will sustain itself even without government support.
African languages, however, are struggling to make any sales in the leisure reading market. Thus,
many African authors are immediately writing in English and bypassing their mother tongues. Often
Afrikaans authors will publish in their mother tongue first, and when the book has proven to be
successful negotiate a translation contract with another publisher (or the same publisher). Frequently
they will translate the titles themselves, although it is not always the case and a translator may be
needed. African language writers, however, have a bigger battle on their hands, and many African lan-
guage books are simply aimed at the school market where it can be prescribed right from the begin-
ning.There is a debate around African language publishing in the trade sector. Some blame publishers
for not producing these books, saying that readers will buy them if there are books available, and
publishers argue that there is simply not enough demand.
South Africa needs to find a new way of differentiating itself in a global market. Apartheid had a
huge impact on what authors were writing about. Resistance literature, then literature on reconcili-
ation overshadowed other topics in past years. As time went by, it was difficult for some authors to
find something to say, while many still felt a responsibility to explore apartheid themes. More recently,
authors have felt freedom to write about other topics and explore fiction, but without apartheid as
theme South African authors have to explore other ways of engaging an international audience.
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The situation in South Africa regarding language is a reminder of the implications of politics on
the languages in the country. “Language is a social phenomenon, a function and an instrument of
institutional power, and translinguals also often remind us of the political implications of discourse”
(Kellman, The Translingual Imagination 36). In a country with so many languages, it is difficult to asso-
ciate a specific language with South Africa that successfully represents the culture and the country in
its entirety. The current situation concerning spoken languages and published languages account for
the direction South African literary translingualism has taken.
Multilingualism and Literature in South Africa

The amount of official languages recognized in South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution is
one of the highest of any country in the world. Today English has become the most supported
language: “indigenous African languages are usually neglected and mostly lack the institutional
and political support that English enjoys. The African linguistic situation allows the English lan-
guage to enjoy an unprecedented prestigious status in relation to other languages (Andindilile
3). Furthermore “the hierarchy of language … exposes the problems of language placement in
many African countries” (Andindilile 11). As a result, South Africa and Africa in general have a
large number of translingual authors. Unfortunately, cultural elements are not always translatable,
and parts of African cultures are lost. What can be expressed in one language cannot always be
expressed in the same way in another. However, a new kind of literature and communication can
develop as translingual texts are written. Access to African languages and cultures can be provided
through English, serving as a “cross-cultural and linguistic bridge” (Andindilile 16) for those out-
side Africa.
On the positive side, English has not only helped to raise the profile of literatures from Africa
within Africa and abroad but also provided what can be regarded as continuity in Anglophone
African discourse. African literatures have continued to flourish not only in English but also in
other former colonial languages (Andindilile 1). “A ‘literary continuum’ refers to continuity in a lit-
erary tradition” (Andindilile 2) and “an Anglophone African literary-linguistic continuum appears
to exist based on the sustained use of the English language in African literatures to represent diverse
ethnicities, languages, cultures, beliefs and experiences” (Andindilile 1). English has established itself
as the undisputed lingua franca, used by millions of speakers as a second or third language, in post-
apartheid South Africa. It is the dominant language of business, public life, and education (Posel and
Zeller 289). There is thus a wide range of levels of competence in the language, from native English
speakers on the one hand to those who use the most elementary English as a communication tool on
the other (Khokhlova 985). Furthermore,
the continued use of standard English as the base (acrolect) from which variants of
Anglophone African literary expressions (basilects) spring suggests that this trend will per-
sist, mainly because of the language’s role in facilitating communication in multilingual,
multi-ethnic and multicultural African societies as either a national or official language,
especially amongst the educated African elites.
(Andindilile 3)
Afrikaans could be considered an African language as it is only spoken in Africa—although it is often

more associated with the European languages from which it originated. Regarding cultural identity,
Ampie Coetzee writes that the “relationship of language to nationalism [is] particularly important in
the case of Afrikaans, where language was a determining factor in the creation of a ‘volk’ (people), and
where the empowerment of language encouraged the creation of literature” (Smit et al. 14). Initially
Afrikaans writers produced a counter-movement centered on Afrikaner nationalism as a rival to
248
British colonialism (Oliphant in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing in South Africa 112–113).
This was because Afrikaans was ridiculed and regarded as fit only for communication with servants.
From this low status it campaigned for and secured a place for itself when the Union of South Africa
was formed in 1910 (Oliphant in Evans and Seeber, The Politics of Publishing in South Africa 114–
115). As a result, not many Afrikaans authors were choosing translingualism (like writing in English)
because there was a strong drive to further the Afrikaans language.
The apartheid government strongly supported Afrikaans and helped the language and its litera-
ture to grow, while at the same time relegating African languages (considered of lower status) to the
schools market. According to Oliphant, during apartheid the volumes of Afrikaans works published
at the height of apartheid outstripped all other languages and literatures by far (Evans and Seeber, The
Politics of Publishing in South Africa 110).
After the 1994 elections, the new South African democracy ended the exclusive support of the
Afrikaans language. Feelings around languages needed to be re-evaluated. Afrikaans was the language
of the oppressor, though not all Afrikaners participated in the apartheid system, and many Afrikaners
questioned their identity and association with the language. Today, Afrikaans is for some a symbol of
pride and nationalism while for others a reminder of apartheid and segregation. African languages
needed to be grown, but there was (and often still is) a movement towards English as being the
superior language, with African language speakers regularly choosing English above their own lan-
guage when raising children and sending them to school, for example.
Afrikaans is also the mother tongue of the majority of a group that was classified as “Cape
Colored” during the apartheid era in South Africa. The majority of this group reside in the Western
Cape Province of South Africa, where the biggest part of the population speaks Afrikaans as mother
tongue, followed by mother tongue Xhosa speakers and a smaller group of mother tongue English
speakers. The socio-political history of South Africa has led to the “Coloreds” developing as a group
with a particular identity which sets them apart from white Afrikaners (the Afrikaner volk) who
share their language, though the majority identify closely with the variety of Afrikaans which they
use every day (Dyers 52). Speakers of “Cape Colored Afrikaans” acknowledge its low status in
relation to standard Afrikaans, but it enjoys a certain status as well as strong vitality in the poor,
working-class townships of the Cape Flats. This is a large area on the periphery of Cape Town, to
which the “Colored” population of Cape Town was forcibly moved at the height of the apartheid
regime (Dyers 53). Despite the close identification of many members of this community with
Afrikaans, there are also signs of a shift towards English. The children in these families are educated
in English, and despite strong exposure to Afrikaans in the family and community environment,
tend to use only English in conversation with others (Thutloa and Huddlestone 62; Dyers 51).
However, it appears that Afrikaans remains a strong marker of identity in some semi-urban Western
Cape “Colored” communities, despite English largely being regarded as the language of upward
socioeconomic mobility (Thutloa and Huddlestone 57).
Still today, many Afrikaans authors choose to write in their mother tongue first, although there
are some Afrikaans authors that write in English first (rather than translating their title to English),
especially in the non-fiction market (Myburgh). The main reason is that authors believe their book
will reach a wider audience and have a bigger impact (for example, particularly in the case of political
exposés) (Myburgh). Some Afrikaans speaking authors who have managed to reach the local best-
selling lists with their non-fiction titles include Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s Gangster State (2019), Pieter
du Toit’s The Stellenbosch Mafia (2019), Blessed by BOSASA: Inside Gavin Watson’s State Capture Cult
(2019) by Adriaan Basson and James-Brent Styan’s Steinhoff: Inside SA’s Biggest Corporate Crash (2018).
There is also a growing trend among Afrikaans writers to seek new readers and larger markets by
rendering previously published work into English. Indeed, some have even abandoned their mother
tongue: the novelist Etienne van Heerden, for one, has made such a switch (“Is English the New
Afrikaans?”). Some authors (and their publishers) are purposefully creating books in this variety of
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Afrikaans spoken by the “Coloreds” in the Cape—catering to this large group’s reading needs. An
example is André Trantraal, an author of comics and graphic novels in “Kaaps” (as this variety of
Afrikaans is sometimes referred to), published by LAPA Uitgewers.
Equal representation for languages in the publishing industry is indeed a difficult task, if not
impossible and impractical. Even among the African languages, there is an unequal division—there
are more books produced in the most spoken languages of isiZulu and isiXhosa than for example
siSwati. Minority language authors are thus more likely to write in another language (like English),
and the level of representation is too low to develop and sustain a literature in each of the official
languages, which is problematic for the existence of these languages.
Many mother-tongue speakers of African languages do not condone the use of these
languages in an official or educational context, while urbanised blacks seem to reserve
African languages for the home and for communication within the social group. African
languages seem to be considered as backward and non-progressive by their own speakers,
while English is seen as a sophisticated language, giving access to international markets and
literary success.
(Morgan 188–189)
While some African languages are thriving in the spoken sphere, they are not being published to
the same extent, and this is why translingualism takes place most often among African language
speakers.
Translingual Authors in South Africa

There are a number of well-known South African translingual authors, from the past to the present. One
of the earliest black South African translinguals is Sol T. Plaatje, author of Mhudi (1930), the first English
language novel by a black South African. Mhudi could be considered as the first case of translingualism
(from an African language to English) by a black African in South Africa.Though his native tongue was
Tswana, Plaatje also studied Afrikaans, Dutch, French, German, Sotho, Xhosa, and Zulu. In addition
to his original writings in English and Tswana, he collected and translated indigenous folk materials
into English and translated Shakespeare into Tswana (Kellman, The Translingual Imagination 38). Plaatje
studied different languages and cultures and was able to promote his own language through his know-
ledge and writings. “His native tongue was Tswana, the chief language of Botswana, but he also learned
English, Afrikaans, High Dutch, German, French, Sotho, Zulu, and Xhosa” (“Solomon Tshekiso Plaatje,
South African Writer”). Mhudi is a story of love and war set in the 19th century. The characters are
vivid and the style of a traditional Bantu storyteller (a mixture of song and prose) (“Solomon Tshekiso
Plaatje, South African Writer”). According to Mpe, Sol Plaatje perceived literacy as a mode of pre-
serving orality. He explains that he used proverbs and songs as mediative strategies as well as instruments
of various forms of subversion. In Mhudi he saw that he could employ orality for aesthetic as well as
political purposes (51). By writing his novel in English, he brought these aspects of African culture to a
wider (and different) English audience.This is an example of how African culture can be communicated
through storytelling without being written in the mother tongue.
An example of a current South African language author writing in English is Zakes Mda. Mda is a
painter as well as the author of plays and novels, mostly in English. He explains that “thirty-five years
in exile uprooted him from his mother tongue … and that is why he writes in English. It is the only
language he feels comfortable enough to produce literature in” (“Zakes Mda on His Latest Work”).
Mda further explores the language issue in South African trade titles by explaining that booksellers
do not stock their shelves with books in indigenous languages. “That is mainly the reason why many
people assume that there is no literature in indigenous languages—and yet Sesotho and Xhosa litera-
ture dates back to the 19th century” (“Zakes Mda on His Latest Work”).
250
Mda sees English as having
an important role to play as a means of communication … It is the language we need to

communicate with the rest of the world. However, there are also the dangers of cultural
imperialism, coming from countries such as America. But that does not negate the fact that
we need to have our own languages and to promote them. And to create literature in those
languages.
(Naidoo 259)
Mda has written one collection of poems, fourteen plays, and three books on satire, all in English.The
theme of orality comes through in his works, as it does in many works by African language authors.
Orality is important in most African cultures, and it is an element that is often communicated even
in translingual texts.
Another current example is the author Sindiwe Magona who writes in both English and Xhosa.
“Among her internationally acclaimed works are Beauty’s Gift; Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at
Night;To My Children’s Children;Teach Yourself Xhosa; and Push-Push and Other Stories. Her plays include
I Promised Myself a Fabulous Middle-Age and Vukani” (Sindiwe Magona, South African History Online).
Magona has a passion for her own language, Xhosa, and writes especially children’s books in her
mother tongue. However, most of her books for an adult audience are in English. The Xhosa titles
for children can be prescribed at school (ensuring sales) but in the adult trade sector English titles are
more likely to sell, and get wider reach.
Many Afrikaans authors translate their own titles into English. Deon Meyer is an internationally
known popular fiction author who always writes in Afrikaans first and may then autotranslate to
English. Some of his many novels include Ikarus, 7 Dae, Koors and Kobra. His titles have been translated
into twenty-seven other languages worldwide. He discusses his choice to write in Afrikaans in a 2012
interview with The Guardian:
Afrikaans is my mother tongue. I find writing difficult enough in my own language. English
is a second language, so to find the exact right word is just that bit more difficult. I work
through the English translation very thoroughly, though, to make sure it’s a perfect reflection.
(Flood)
South African author J. M. Coetzee, who was the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature,
writes in English though he spoke Afrikaans at home. His linguistic medium is thus a choice. Coetzee
“claims to have made a linguistic choice based less on politics than on his belief that Afrikaans is
‘frankly dull’ and that English has ‘a historical layer in the language that enables you to work with
historical contrasts and oppositions in prose’ ” (Kellman, ‘J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett’ 162).
Coetzee has clearly decided that English is a better language than Afrikaans—a decision that may
have been influenced (or an opinion that may have been strengthened) by the way Afrikaans was
politicized during apartheid. Under apartheid, language was deployed as a tool of tribalism by the
government. Part of the Afrikaner nationalist domination was the creation of the myth that only they
spoke for those identified as “Afrikaners.” Socio-political history often casts Afrikaans as the language
of racists, oppressors, and unreconstructed nationalists, but it also bears the imprint of a fierce tradition
of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, of humanism, and antiapartheid activism (Willemse).
Coetzee frequently taught at universities in the USA, and in 2002 he emigrated to Adelaide in
Australia where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide (“The Nobel Prize
in Literature 2003”). His relocation to Australia may further indicate a distancing from his roots in
South Africa.
Two well-known translinguals are Breyten Breytenbach and André P. Brink, who both rebelled
against apartheid policies through their literature. Breytenbach writes in both Afrikaans and English,
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Jana Klingenberg
and considered himself an interventionist writer during apartheid. Although Afrikaans is the language
in which he attained literary renown, he uses English to express his disgust towards it because it was
an Afrikaans government that imprisoned him for seven years for collusion with antiapartheid rebels
(Kellman, The Translingual Imagination 43). Breytenbach had a falling-out with his publishers when the
publishers distanced themselves from his political views. After his imprisonment, he wrote (in English)
The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984), his account of his arrest and detention. Breytenbach
seems to have mixed feelings towards his mother tongue, as some Afrikaners do because of the apart-
heid regime that gave Afrikaans the label as the language of the oppressor. Breytenbach (like André
P. Brink, among others) was an important Sestiger (‘Sixtyer’) who wrote—often controversial—titles
during apartheid. The Sestigers were named after a group of Afrikaans writers associated with the
short-lived journal Sestiger (Sixtyer, 1963–1965) and became the signature Afrikaans grouping of the
period after 1961. Writers such as Brink and Breytenbach contributed to the journal, which quickly
became known for its lively polemics, literary experimentation, and pronounced aim (Willemse in
Attwell and Attridge 439).
Brink’s novels, which he wrote in Afrikaans and English versions, often criticized the South
African government. Brink’s early novels Lobola vir die lewe (1962; The Price of Living) and Die
ambassadeur (1963; The Ambassador) were nearly banned (the publication control board received
complaints from several church groups) but escaped on account of the literary value. Kennis van die
Aand (1973; Looking on Darkness), ’n Oomblik in die wind (1975; An Instant in the Wind), and Gerugte
van reën (1978; Rumours of Rain) examined interracial relationships at a time where the govern-
ment censored such content, and as mentioned before, Kennis was the first banned Afrikaans novel.
Brink was perhaps best known internationally for the antiapartheid novel ’n Droë wit seisoen (1979;
A Dry White Season), in which a white liberal investigates the death of a black activist in police
custody. “Brink showed immense courage in his political dissidence, enduring security police har-
assment and general opprobrium from the Afrikaner establishment, while refusing to go into exile
as did his close friend Breyten Breytenbach” (“A Love for Writing and Women”). Opposition to
state censorship and pre-1994 politics compelled Brink and Breytenbach to write in English; for
Brink writing in Afrikaans and English meant that he was able to describe the situation in South
Africa to a wide audience. Breytenbach and Brink made choices to write in English often largely
influenced by the apartheid system, but unlike Coetzee they continued to also write in their mother
tongue.
Why South Africans Write in English

When books are written in a language other than English, there is always a hope that the (often fiction)
title is successful enough to be translated into English (and the possibility of reaching an international
market). Some authors are popular enough that English translations can be commissioned from
the beginning, but there are not many of those around. Non-fiction in South Africa is sometimes
commissioned this way, for example cookbooks (often appearing simultaneously in both English and
Afrikaans) and historical titles (e.g. books on the Border War or the Anglo-Boer War) (Möller and
Buitendach 163).
“Interestingly … the confluence of English and indigenous African languages— and indeed
other languages—has led to a condition that allows for the development of new varieties and new
meanings” (Andindilile 4).The use of standard and non-standard English creates a new kind of litera-
ture, in each case unique to the author and their mother tongue. However, writing in English does
come at the expense of African literature written in indigenous languages. Nevertheless, English gives
the world access to African literature and the African experience. Chinua Achebe talks about English
as “a new voice coming out of Africa, speaking of African experience in a world-wide language” (18).
He also claims that it is absolutely possible for an African to use English effectively in creative writing
though he hopes that they will never use it as a native speaker: the “African writer should aim to use
252
English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its
value as a medium of international exchange will be lost” (Achebe 18).
While translingualism occurs regularly in South Africa, “African translinguals who would address
both their native communities and a global public must move between radically different language
systems” (Kellman, The Translingual Imagination 42).The idea of the target reader becomes important—
whom the author wants to address and whether they are “selling out” if they aim towards an inter-
national audience. It is indeed difficult to address both a local and an international audience.
With many colonial and postcolonial authors, the prestige and power of a particular lan-
guage, its access to an alphabet, a printing press, and a reader have been the principal
determinants of translingualism.
(Kellman,The Translingual Imagination 36)
Furthermore, “African translingualism is symptomatic of imbalances of power—political, economic,

military, and cultural” (Kellman, The Translingual Imagination 40).
Today, the biggest motivation to write in English for authors in South Africa is probably to reach a
wider audience. Few authors in the country can rely on writing as the only source of income.Writing
in English means authors may reach a wider audience in the local and international market (though
success of a title is never certain). It can also be argued that titles need to be translated to English in
order to have the chance of selling translation rights to any other language, as English is a world-
wide lingua franca and international publishers will have access to local titles only through English.
A German publisher may not understand a text that is written in Afrikaans or another African lan-
guage, but if it has already been translated to English, that publisher may be able to read the title and
choose to buy the rights to translate and sell the title in Germany. (An exception is that a Dutch pub-
lisher may sufficiently understand an Afrikaans title in some instances in order to make the decision
without an English translation). “For an Afrikaans novel to be translated into English, for example,
has become a special mark of success … Because it potentially globalises the novel’s reception, and
it means the novel gets written twice” (de Kock in Attwell and Attridge 750–551). The same can be
said for a novel written in any of the African languages.
Some authors even feel more comfortable writing in English, though, as with Zakes Mda and
J.M Coetzee, it is not their first language, especially if school and tertiary education were in English.
In Mda’s case, immigration resulted in his choice of translingualism (moving from Lesotho to South
Africa); he spent so much time using English that he stopped feeling comfortable writing in his
mother tongue. While a language can be your mother tongue, it can cease to be your primary one
(Kellman, The Translingual Imagination 14). Some Afrikaans speaking authors who wrote in English
did so (and may still do so) to distance themselves from Afrikaans and its association with apartheid.
For the author writing in L2, there may or may not be issues with the grammar and expression. It
may also happen that certain elements of L1 will shine through in their work, creating a text in a new,
non-standard form of English. However, there may be elements that are lost in translation—when
translating idioms and expressions, words that do not exist in another language, or translating sarcasm
for example. Nevertheless, the “new” English that is created may make up for this loss.
For the reader, the “new” form of English and the unique way the text may be represented is
beneficial, because the reader is exposed to a different kind of text. In addition, the reader may have
access to the African experience through English, which would have been impossible if it was written
in the author’s L1 (unless translated afterwards).
Conclusion
South Africa is a multilingual society, but South African literature is dominated by English and
Afrikaans. English is becoming more and more prevalent, and many authors, although not first
253
Jana Klingenberg
language English speakers, will write in English. The rising popularity of English is not just a trend
in South Africa—English has grown to vast size and astonishing influence and it remains the world’s
lingua franca. The British Council estimates that there are now 1.5 billion English language learners
worldwide. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a sec-
ondary tongue and it is an official language in at least fifty-nine countries. No language in history has
been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe (Mikanowski; “The World’s
Changing Language Landscape”).
Literary translingualism in South Africa may come at a cost for the African languages, with
fewer trade titles produced in the nine official African languages (not to mention other spoken
African languages) than ever before. However it is argued that African stories can be effectively
communicated in English and that English is benefiting these languages by providing the rest of
the world access to them. The African language speaker cannot easily find a bookshop stocking
books in their mother tongue, which is a disadvantage to the development of African languages. On
the other hand, translinguals are ensuring that the world has access to South African and African
stories. Modern-day Afrikaans and African writers often depend on translation into English for eco-
nomic survival, as they shift their focus to Europe and America as markets for their translated novels.
Although one cannot but applaud the objective of linguistic multiplication via translation, the latter
often leaves the reader with a sense of nostalgia for the lesser-known original language which has
since disappeared (Morgan 193).
Note
1 The word volk (translated as a nation or people) refers specifically to Afrikaners.The meaning and associations
with volk developed and changed as it was shaped by historical events. Afrikaner nationalism underpinned the
establishment of white Afrikaner political and cultural control during the apartheid years, and the volk was
associated with nationalist, Christian Afrikaners.
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256
VII
Literary Translingualism in
Middle-Eastern Languages
20
ARABIC LITERARY
TRANSLINGUALISM
Paul Starkey
Introduction and Summary

Arabic literary translingualism in the medieval and pre-modern period is intimately connected
with the spread of the religion of Islam. Migration from the Arabian Peninsula after the death of
Muḥammad (a.d. 632) carried Arabic, a Semitic language, into areas where a variety of vernaculars
were spoken, including (though not confined to) Syriac, Coptic, and Persian. Speakers of these and
other languages—many of which belong(ed) to entirely different language groups from Arabic—
inter-reacted with the Arabic-speaking incomers in different ways, as native populations either
embraced or resisted conversion to Islam to different degrees. Arabization and Islamization frequently
went hand-in-hand, but the process was complicated by the special status that the Arabic language
held (and continues to hold) as the language of revelation of Islam—a status that in strictly theo-
logical terms maintains, for example, that the Qurʾān, as the vehicle of divine revelation, is itself
“untranslatable.”
Two particular phenomena relevant to Arabic literary translingualism are associated with this and
other related factors: The first is the existence of a large number of non-Arab Muslims, particularly
in (though not confined to) south and south-eastern Asia, who have some degree of “passive know-
ledge” of Arabic through its use in religious contexts; in extreme cases, this may extend to an ability to
recite extensive portions of the Qurʾān by heart while understanding little or nothing of the language
as such. The second is that the sacred character of the language for Muslims has effectively “frozen”
many aspects of the language, so that, although its vocabulary and lexis have evolved, the morph-
ology and syntax of formal modern Arabic remains essentially unchanged from that of the seventh
century. Meanwhile, a variety of spoken dialects has evolved, some mutually unintelligible or nearly
so (unsurprisingly, given the vast area over which Arabic is spoken)—the dichotomy between the
formal language (fuṣḥā = “eloquent”) and the colloquial language(s) (‘āmmiyya or dārija) being usually
described as “diglossia.” In a literary context, it suffices to note that, while there exists a rich literature
in dialectal, or “non-standard” Arabic, of which the Thousand and One Nights (or Arabian Nights) is
the best-known example, this literature has traditionally not been accepted into the literary canon.
Given these factors, the vast majority of literature written in Arabic can on a basic level be regarded
as “translingual,” since fuṣḥā is nobody’s native first language.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-20 259

Paul Starkey
In presenting an account of Arabic literary translingualism, this chapter will adopt a broadly
chronological approach, while recognizing that most “cut-off ” dates—particularly, given the vast
geographical area under discussion—are bound to be somewhat artificial:
1 From pre-Islamic times until c. 1250 covers the geographical expansion of Arabic and the main
flowering of “classical” Arabic literature.
2 Islamic Spain (711—1492) describes a period which brought together users of Arabic, Hebrew,
and Romance languages from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim backgrounds.
3 The pre-modern, or transitional, period (c. 1250 to c. 1850), discusses a period that remains relatively
under-researched.
4 The modern period (c. 1850 to present) discusses how Arabic literary translingualism has evolved in
light of more recent political and other developments.
From Pre-Islamic Times Until c. 1250

Despite the existence of a large number of pre-Islamic inscriptions in different varieties of Arabic in
various parts of the Middle East, it is impossible to reconstruct any plausible “history of Arabic litera-
ture” further back than around the middle of the sixth century, when a tradition of secular oral poetry
emerged among the Arab tribes in the Arabian Peninsula. Although the highly developed nature of
this poetry suggests a prior period of development of several centuries, it was only with the revelation
of Islam to the Prophet Muḥammad (c. 570–632) and the need to preserve this revelation in written
form that a mature writing system evolved capable of serving as a vehicle for recording any substan-
tive body of literature in Arabic.
Following the death of Muḥammad in 632, as the Arab armies moved out of the Arabian Peninsula
to conquer adjoining areas—predominantly controlled by the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires—they
brought with them not only a new religion but also a new language, in many cases entirely unrelated
to the existing local vernaculars. They also brought with them the seeds of a literature built on two
apparently divergent traditions: one almost entirely secular, the other profoundly religious. The Arab
armies’ advances took them in three main directions: north-west, into Egypt, where Coptic—a des-
cendant of Ancient Egyptian—remained the dominant spoken language, with Greek also in use as
the language of administration and some aspects of cultural life; north into Greater Syria (including
modern Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel), where Aramaic and Syriac—Semitic languages related
to Arabic—were widely spoken; and north-east into areas of the Sasanian Empire where Persian, an
Indo-European language, predominated.
In Egypt, the process by which Arabic progressively replaced Coptic in all but religious contexts
remains an elusive one, though in general, it appears to have occurred rather slowly, at least at
first: The first major Coptic writer in Arabic is usually reckoned as Sāwīrūs ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, who
composed his biographical History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria in Arabic in the latter part of the
tenth century, some three centuries after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639–646. By contrast, there
were already several distinguished authors writing in Arabic among the Christians in Syria and
Mesopotamia in the ninth century. The most interesting encounter from a translingual point of
view, however, was undoubtedly that between Arabic and Persian. Interaction between these two
languages was not entirely new, for the Qurʾān itself contains a small number of Persian words. By
651, however, the Arab conquest of Persia had been substantially completed, and the invading armies
had been brought into close contact with a civilization several centuries older than their own and in
many fields of activity self-evidently more advanced. The early acceptance of Islam by large sections
of the population lessened Arab resistance to acceptance of Persian civilization, and the “trade-off ”
between Arab and Persian culture was arguably responsible for giving medieval Islamic society
much of its distinctive flavor, particularly following the move of the caliphate from Damascus to
260
Arabic Literary Translingualism
Baghdad in 750.The interplay between the two languages began early, and was often aided by mixed
marriages. The poet Abū Nuwās (c. 755–c. 813), for example, notorious for his erotic and irreverent
poems, whose father was an Arab soldier and whose mother was Persian, used Persian vocabulary in
a number of his poems, which are referred to as Fārisiyyāt. The ability to write or compose poetry
both in Persian and Arabic quickly became widespread, those possessing fluency in both languages
being known as dhawū al-lisānayn (“possessors of the two languages,” or in modern parlance, simply
“bilingual”). Many examples of so-called mulammaʿāt (literally “variegated”, or “macaronic” verse)
can be found from this period, sometimes involving not only Arabic and Persian but other combin-
ations of languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic. Even Saʿdī (1210–1291 or 1292), reckoned as
one of the greatest poets of the Persian tradition, wrote a few verses in Arabic.The ability to write in
both Arabic and Persian was not confined to poets but was widespread across a variety of fields, and
translation between the two languages was also common. The scientist and polymath Abū Rayḥān
al-Bīrūnī (973–c. 1050), for example, a native of Persian-speaking Khwarezm in Western Central
Asia, wrote largely in Arabic in preference to Persian, considering Arabic to be a superior language
for scientific works; he is also said to have at least a superficial knowledge of Sanskrit, Syriac, and
Greek, though this has been called into question. In the field of theology, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (or
al-Ghazzālī, 1058–1111), born in Tus in north-east Iran, and one of the most prestigious scholars
of medieval Islam, wrote most of his best-known works in Arabic (including his spiritual auto-
biography, al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl [translated into English as Deliverance from Error]) but also left a
corpus of works in Persian for more local use, including his Kīmiyā-ye Sa‘ādat [= “The Alchemy
of Happiness”]. Despite the immense amount of scholarship on al-Ghazzālī by both Western and
Islamic scholars, the precise relationship between his Arabic and Persian works has not yet been fully
explored.
Also of relevance to translingualism during this period was the presence of sizeable commu-
nities of Jews, not only in the Iberian Peninsula (for which, see the following section), but also in
North Africa, the Levant, Yemen, and particularly Mesopotamia. A particularly interesting figure in
this context was Saʿadiah ben Yosef Gaon (Arabic Saʿīd bin Yūsuf al-Fayyūmī, 882–942), who, as his
Arabic nisba [= name of attribution] implies, was born in Egypt, but settled in Mesopotamia, where
he became a leading religious authority. Saʿadiah wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew: his first work,
the Agron, a dictionary for the use of Hebrew poets, was written in Hebrew, but he subsequently
wrote extensively in both Hebrew and Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew script), “borrowing
models of writing from the Arabic in order to express himself on Jewish matters” (Drory, “Saʿadiâ
Gaon” 670). Of particular significance was his translation into Judaeo-Arabic of the Hebrew Torah.
In this respect, his work may perhaps be seen as a complement to the translation movement centered
on the Bayt al-Ḥikma [= “House of Wisdom”] established in Baghdad by the caliph al-Maʾmūn in
832; this institution (about which many questions remain unanswered) is particularly associated with
the name of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (809–873), an Arab Nestorian Christian physician and scientist who
was fluent both in Syriac and in Arabic, and later acquired a knowledge of Greek; he is credited with
translating over a hundred Greek works into Arabic and played a leading role in ensuring the trans-
mission of Greek thought into the Islamic world.
Literary Translingualism in Islamic Spain (711–1492)

The phenomenon of “Islamic Spain”—the period between the initial Muslim conquest of the
Iberian Peninsula in the years immediately following 711 and the final end of Muslim rule in
1492—presents one of the most fascinating areas for the study of translingualism in an Arabic con-
text. This is partly due to the controversial nature of some of the wider cultural and historical issues
involved—the question of how far “convivencia” [= “coexistence”] was a reality or a myth remains
an ongoing one—but also because of the complexity of the linguistic make-up of the Peninsula
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during this period. In addition to the Romance language dialects spoken by the native population,
and Arabic, the primary language of the conquerors and the new religion of Islam, the Peninsula
was also home to a considerable number of Jewish communities, some of long standing, with a
quite different literary and linguistic tradition. These languages used three different writing systems.
A further complication was that a sizeable proportion of the Muslim armies was actually made up
of Amazigh (Berber) speakers, a language largely unwritten during this period and only distantly
related to Arabic.
The most controversial area of discussion in the translingual context relates to the muwashshaḥ
[plural muwashshaḥāt = “girdled”], a strophic poetic form that emerged in Spain in the late ninth
century, was adopted by local Hebrew poets, and subsequently spread to other areas and languages
of the Islamic world. The relationship between these poems, the structure of which is signifi-
cantly different from that of traditional Arabic poetry, and the Provençal troubadour tradition
is a matter of ongoing debate. Of especial interest in a translingual context, however, is the fact
that the closing segment of a muwashshaḥ (known as kharja, plural kharajāt = “exit”) typically uses
a different language (or different language register) from that of the main body of the poem, so
that a poem in classical Arabic or Hebrew may frequently end in either colloquial Arabic or a
Romance dialect. The interpretation of these kharajāt was a subject of intense, and sometimes
bad-tempered, debate in the period following the Second World War, and although the heat has
largely gone out of the discussion, it cannot be claimed that all the problems involved (many of
which relate to the writing of a Romance language in Arabic script, a practice known as aljamiado)
have been solved.
The phenomenon of literary translingualism in Islamic Spain extends far wider than the
muwashshaḥ, however. Of particular interest is the relationship between the use of Hebrew and Arabic
among Jewish writers from around the tenth century, when a new body of Jewish literature emerged
as a result of cultural contacts with Arabic. Linguistically, this literature took two forms: Hebrew, and
Judaeo-Arabic (that is, Arabic written in Hebrew script), a division of function between the two
languages being established at an early stage, according to which “Arabic served for lucid, straightfor-
ward expression, Hebrew for festive and grandiloquent writing, in no small measure at the expense of
a clear and unequivocal message” (Drory, “Hebrew Literature” 282). The result was a surge of poetic
writing in Hebrew in a style that adopted many of the themes and conventions of classical Arabic
poetry. Prominent among those associated with this movement—which is sometimes referred to as
the “Golden Age” of Judaeo-Spanish poetry—were Salomón ibn Gabirol (1021–1055), Moses ibn
Ezra (1055–1138), Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075–1141), and Abraham ibn Ezra (1092–1167). Meanwhile,
Arabic remained the principal written language for most other subjects, including Biblical and
Talmudic exegesis: The poet and philosopher Yehuda Halevi, for example, used Arabic for his work
on the merits of Judaism over other religions entitled Kitāb al-ḥujja wa-al-dalīl fī naṣr al-dīn al-dhalīl (=
“The Book of Argument and Proof in Support of the Despised Religion”), though the work today is
better known in its Hebrew translation under the title Sefer ha-Kuzari (= “The Book of the Kuzari”).
Somewhat later, the influential philosopher Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, Mūsā ibn Maymūn,
1135 or 8–1304)—who was born in Córdoba, though forced to leave Spain after Judaism had been
outlawed by the Berber Almohad dynasty in 1148—wrote most of his medical and other works in
Arabic, including his commentary on the Mishna (Arabic Kitāb al-Sirāj, translated into Hebrew as
Pirush ha-Mishnayot), though his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah [= “Repetition of the Torah”] was
written in Hebrew.
The Pre-modern, or Transitional, Period (c. 1250 to c. 1850)

Arabic literary translingualism during the period 1250 to 1850 is undoubtedly the most complex
period to explore. For this, there are two main reasons. The first is that this period has tradition-
ally been regarded, both in the West and in the Arab world itself, as a period of decline or even
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“decadence,” and although progress has been made recently in moving beyond this simplistic view,
it remains understudied and under-researched by comparison with other periods. The second is that
the sheer diversity of the field under discussion puts it beyond the reach of any single scholar. As one
recent publication has noted in speaking of this period:
Arabic was being written from Central Asia to the southern tip of India, from the Balkans
to Ghana and Zanzibar and from Morocco to Sumatra, furnishing a vast array of regions,
cultures and peoples with a scholarly, literary and liturgical language. In most of these
regions however, Arabic had to compete with other literary languages, such as Persian,
Turkish, Urdu or Malay.
(Lowry and Stewart, 5–6)
That said, the major new factor relevant to literary translingualism in the Middle East itself during this
period was undoubtedly the growing importance of the Turkic peoples. This phenomenon was not
entirely new, for waves of Turks had been migrating to the region from Central Asia for several cen-
turies, bringing with them a set of languages entirely unrelated to Arabic; but with the establishment
of the Seljuk dynasty in the eleventh century, their influence increased dramatically.
Two developments of particular significance for Arabic translingual activity may be identified
during this period. The first was the emergence of the Mamlūk dynasty, based on rulers of non-Arab
slave origin known as mamlūks (= “owned”), often from Georgia or the Balkans, and who governed
Egypt and Syria between 1250 and 1517. As part of their education, young mamlūks received training
not only in military and administrative matters but also in Arabic and Turkish, this apparently topsy-
turvy system of institutionalized translingualism producing in time what Irwin (502) has described as
an “unusually literate elite.” Thus, although some early sultans were scarcely literate, the Circassian-
born Sultan al-Ashraf Qaytbāy (r. 1468–1496), best known for his expansive architectural projects,
also wrote religious poetry in Arabic; slightly later, the Sultan Qānṣūḥ al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516)
wrote in both Arabic and Turkish, while more generally, the system also created a structure not only
for the forging of links between the Arab population and the ruling elite but also for the emergence
of many historians and other writers of distinction.
The second development was that, following the end of the Mamlūk dynasty, large parts of the
central Middle East, as well as south-eastern Europe, were for several centuries absorbed into the
Ottoman Empire, ruled from Constantinople—a situation that began to change only in the nine-
teenth century, as nationalism gathered pace and parts of the Middle East succumbed to Western
colonialism. Of the Turkic languages added to the Middle Eastern linguistic mix, the most significant
in cultural terms was undoubtedly Ottoman Turkish, a language that itself was a mixture of Turkic,
Persian, and Arabic elements—the latter mainly absorbed via Persian. Indeed, not only did Arabic and
Persian account for more than 80% of Ottoman Turkish vocabulary in some formal contexts, but the
rules of the language also allowed the importation of Arabic and Persian syntactical features, subject to
certain constraints. Given the hybrid nature of the language, it is therefore hardly surprising that many
Ottoman writers also wrote, either frequently or occasionally, in Persian and/or Arabic; and indeed, it
was hardly possible to participate fully in Ottoman literary and intellectual life without a knowledge
of the üç lisân [= “three languages”].
Perhaps the first significant figure to write in Arabic as well as Turkish was the mystical poet
Imadaddin Nesimi (c. 1369–1417), who produced work in Arabic and Persian as well as his native
Azerbaijani Turkish, before—according to most accounts—being skinned alive for heresy; his tomb
remains a place of pilgrimage in Aleppo to this day. Nesimi was followed by many other writers and
poets. In the sixteenth century, another poet of Azerbaijani lineage, Fuzûlî (pen name of Mehmed bin
Süleyman, c. 1495–1556), reckoned as one of the greatest figures of the Turkic literary tradition, wrote
poetry in Arabic and Persian as well as in his native Azerbaijani—his most famous work, Dâstân-ı Leylî
vü Mecnûn, an epic rendering of the Arab love story of Laylā and Majnūn, being a good illustration of
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how certain core motifs and themes had become the common property of the Islamic world. A little
later, the polymath Kâtip Çelebi or Ḥājjī Khalīfa (pen name of Muṣṭafā ibn ‘Abd Allāh, 1609–1657),
the leading Ottoman writer of his day, was equally familiar with Arabic, Persian, and Turkish and
compiled his most significant work, Kashf al-Ẓunūn—the most extensive bibliographical dictionary of
Islamic literature ever assembled—in Arabic rather than Turkish; itself partly based on an earlier work
in Arabic by another Ottoman historian, Taşköprüzade Ahmet (1494–1561), it was later published in
a Latin translation by the German Orientalist Gustav Flügel under the title Lexicon Bibliographicum et
Encyclopaedicum in Latin in seven volumes.
Translingual literary activity of this sort was not confined to Turkic-speaking areas. In Bosnia, for
example, the dervish and prose writer Abdulvehab Ilhamija Žepčevi (1773–1821) wrote in Arabic,
Turkish and Persian in addition to his first language, Bosnian, for which he used a form of Arabic
script known as Arebica. Nor was literary translingualism always a “one-way” phenomenon: The poet
Enderûnlu Fâzıl (1757–1810), for example, who wrote in Ottoman Turkish and achieved notoriety
after his death for his erotic writings as well as his homosexual proclivities, was born in Acre into
an Arab family originally from Medina and was brought up in Safad in Palestine; his Zenanname [=
“Book of Women”], which describes the virtues of women from different countries, is said to have
been the first printed book to be banned in the Ottoman Empire.
Analogous patterns of translingual behavior may be found elsewhere in the Islamic world during
this period. In Northern India, for example, knowledge of the “three languages” would have implied
Urdu (or another Indian language) rather than Turkish in addition to Arabic and Persian. The Indian
poet and scholar Āzād Bilgrāmī (1704–1786), for example, born in Maydānpūra, wrote mainly in
Arabic and Persian (only one work in Urdu is, doubtfully, ascribed to him), his work gaining added
importance from the way in which it links the Sanskrit/Indic and Arabic/Persian rhetorical traditions.
His almost exact contemporary, the religious reformer Shāh Walī Allāh (Quṭb al-Dīn Aḥmad al-
Raḥīm, 1703–1762), the greatest Islamic scholar of eighteenth-century India, also wrote in both
Arabic and Persian, and even translated the Qurʾān into Persian, a language more widely known than
Arabic in India at the time. A similar knowledge and use of Arabic in other parts of the Islamic world
in a religious context was (and remains) widespread, though the use of Persian is of course more
localized.
The Modern Period (c. 1850 to Present)

As we move into the modern period, we observe a marked shift in the phenomenon of Arabic lit-
erary translingualism. In contrast to previous periods, where the majority of translingual activity has
involved non-Arabs writing in Arabic, in the modern period the focus shifts to Arabs writing in
other languages. Given the disparate nature of the phenomenon, it will be convenient to discuss it in
four separate sections: literary translingualism in the Mahjar; literary translingualism in French North
Africa; Arabic literary translingualism in the twentieth and twenty-first century diaspora, and finally,
literary translingualism in Palestine/Israel.
Literary Translingualism in the Arab Diaspora: Mahjar Literature

The first manifestations of Arabic translingualism in the wider Arab diaspora were connected with a
series of waves of emigration from Arabic-speaking territories of the Ottoman Empire in the nine-
teenth century—mainly, from the areas corresponding to today’s Syria and Lebanon—often as a result
of economic hardship, inter-communal strife, or political persecution. Many, though not all, of these
emigrants were Christian rather than Muslim and although some found refuge in Arabic-speaking
Egypt, where they provided an important stimulus to new movements in Arabic literature more
generally, a large number traveled to North and South America, settling mainly in the U.S.A., Brazil,
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and Argentina. Here they formed émigré communities whose sense of identity was underpinned
by Arabic literary and other cultural activities. Unsurprisingly, however, writers also soon began
writing in the languages of their adopted homelands, whether in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.
In many places, second-and third-generation immigrants have continued the literary traditions of
their predecessors, though with time the translingual element of their activity has become diluted or
disappeared altogether.
The best known of these so-called “Mahjar” [= “diaspora”] writers, at least to English-speaking
readers, is undoubtedly Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān (= Kahlil Gibran, 1883–1931), who emigrated from
Lebanon in 1895 with other members of his family to the U.S.A., where he initially settled in
Boston. An artist as well as a prolific writer, Jubrān produced several dozen works in both Arabic
and English, of which the best known is undoubtedly The Prophet (1923), originally written in
English but quickly translated not only into Arabic but also into several other languages. It is
notable that Jubrān’s reputation in the West, where he enjoys almost cult status in some circles as
a Romantic “man from the East” is significantly different from the way he is viewed in Arabic
literary circles, where he is regarded as an important bridge between Western and Middle Eastern
traditions: One recent critic suggested, for example, that “he was able, singlehandedly, to revolu-
tionize the language of [Arabic] poetry in the twenties and thirties” and that “without his contri-
bution the story of modern Arabic poetry would have been a very different one” (Jayyusi, Modern
Arabic Poetry 72).
Space forbids a full discussion of other translingual Mahjar writers in English, but among writers
in both Arabic and English, mention should at least be made of the poet and critic Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿayma
(1889–1988), author of the Book of Mirdad, originally published in English in 1948, and who also
published a biography of his friend Jubrān; and of Amin Rihani (1876–1940), who in addition to
much poetry and prose writing in Arabic, produced a series of travel books in English centered on
the Arabian Peninsula, which proved very popular with English readers when they were published in
the 1920s and 1930s. Not unnaturally, much of this writing may be read as “exile literature,” in the
sense that it is focused on the home culture rather than the newly adopted homeland: It is notable
also that many Mahjar writers (not least, Jubrān himself) convey a strong sense of spirituality in their
work—a way, it has been suggested, of compensating for the trauma of separation from their original
homelands.
In South America, translingual writers were slower to emerge, not least because unlike in English-
speaking North America, the new immigrants—who were often referred to as turcos because they
arrived with Ottoman travel documents—usually came with no prior knowledge of the language
of their new homeland. A few Arab immigrants in Argentina and elsewhere began publishing novels
in Spanish during the 1910s–1930s, however: They include Juan Khury, Pablo Achem, and the
Lebanese author, journalist and editor Emin Arslan (1868–1943), who served as Consul General of
the Ottoman Empire in a number of posts in Europe before settling in Buenos Aires, and authored
books and articles in Arabic, Spanish, and French. A frequent element in later works in Spanish by
Arab immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, is to reflect on the experience of immigration itself,
which is recounted for the benefit of a Spanish-speaking readership.
Beyond Argentina, the characteristic theme of spirituality already noted in relation to North
American Mahjar authors may be observed also in the work of Jorge Elías Adoum (1897–1958),
a Lebanese of Maronite origin who emigrated to Ecuador in 1924 and published several dozen
volumes on the occult, as well as an eccentric novel Adonay, novela iniciática del colegio de los magos (=
“Adonai, Initiatory Novel of the School of Conjurers,” 1943). In Chile, the majority of the Arab
diaspora originated in Palestine rather than in Lebanon, giving a somewhat different flavor to their
literary production; here, the original nineteenth-century waves of emigration were supplemented
by further batches of immigrants after the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel and the 1967
Six-Day War.
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Literary Translingualism in French North Africa

Among the most obvious, as well as most thoroughly studied, examples of literary translingualism in
the modern Arabic context is that of French North Africa, the three countries of which (Morocco,
Algeria, Tunisia) were all subject to a period of French colonialism during the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.The experiences of the three countries differed considerably one from another. Algeria
fell under French control in 1830 and only achieved independence in 1962, after a bloody civil war
that cost thousands of lives on both sides. By comparison, the colonial experiences of Morocco
and Tunisia were relatively benign: Tunisia was occupied by France between 1881 and 1956, while
Morocco, despite a long history of French—as well as Spanish—interest in the country, was under
direct French rule as a French Protectorate (with a small area allocated to Spain) only between 1912
and 1956. It is important also to note that while literary translingualism in French North Africa is
usually discussed as a French /Arabic phenomenon, many North African writers, including many
writing exclusively in Arabic, are in fact of Amazigh (Berber) origin, having Arabic only as their
second language.
Against that background, literary translingualism has manifested itself in different ways, and in
different degrees, in the three countries. Tunisian writers, despite strong cultural links between the
two countries and a widespread knowledge of French among the country’s educated classes, have
shown little inclination to write in French at all. In Morocco, on the other hand, although the devel-
opment of modern literature in Arabic predated that in French, a number of translingual Francophone
authors, poets, and dramatists have since emerged whose work has reached wide audiences and
who have achieved international acclaim. A small number of Moroccan writers, including the poet
and novelist Mohamed Sibari (1945–2013), have chosen to write in Spanish rather than French—
unsurprising, perhaps, given the geographical proximity and longstanding historical ties between the
two countries, though this has not been a significant phenomenon as a language choice.
The first major Moroccan author to write in French was probably the novelist and short-story
writer Ahmed Sefrioui (1915–2004), whose first published work, Le Chapelet d’ambre (1949), consisted
of fourteen short pieces with a strongly mystical streak; this was followed by La Boîte à merveilles
(1954) and La Maison de servitude (1973), which are centered on family life in Fez and the conflicts
between tradition and modernity. Better known outside Morocco are the novelists Driss Chraïbi
(1926–2007), whose first novel, Le Passé simple (1954), can be read as a cry of revolt against traditional
Moroccan society, and which caused a considerable stir on first publication; Chraïbi went on to
write more than a dozen further novels, including Les Boucs (1955), which deals with the condition
of immigrant workers in France, and La Civilisation, ma mère (1972), which touches on themes of
women’s rights. A member of the so-called “Generation of ’52”—which also included the Algerian
novelist Kateb Yacine (see below) —Driss Chraïbi’s works are notable for the vigor of their style and
vocabulary as well as for their radical content. Among slightly later novelists, we may mention Tahar
Ben Jelloun (1947–), who like Chraïbi has lived much of his life in Paris, and who is also known as a
poet in French; among his best-known novels is L’Enfant de sable (1985), which like many of Chraïbi’s
works, critiques traditional Moroccan culture—in particular, the position of women in Moroccan
society—as well as issues of colonialism under the French Protectorate.
French-language poetry in Morocco emerged at roughly the same time, with the publication in
1952 of Chants d’espérance by Mohammed-Aziz Lahbabi (1922–1993), who taught philosophy at
university and wrote in both Arabic and French. Lahbabi paved the way for Abdellatif Laâbi (1942–),
who, with others, founded in 1966 the influential literary magazine Souffles, with its Arabic equiva-
lent Anfās; the periodical, with which Tahar Ben Jelloun was also associated, was initially intended
as a vehicle for literary experimentation in the Maghreb but after the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of
1967 it became increasingly politicized and was banned in 1972; Laâbi was arrested and has lived in
France since his release in 1980. Another poet and novelist, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine (1941–1995),
a translingual writer of Berber origin who was reckoned to be one of the leading advocates for
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Amazigh culture in Morocco, published a poetic manifesto in French, Poésie toute, in 1964 but was
forced to leave Morocco the following year for France, where he spent more than a decade before
returning to his homeland; his roman-poème “Agadir” describes the violence of the earthquake that
destroyed the southern Moroccan city in 1960.
In addition to prose and poetry writing, mention should also be made of the emergence in
Morocco of a theatrical tradition involving productions in both Arabic and French; outstanding in
consolidating this tradition have been the indefatigable playwright, author and film director Tayeb
Saddiki (al-Ṭayyib al-Ṣiddīqī, 1939–2016), whose name was at one time synonymous with Moroccan
theater, and Nabyl Lahlou (1945–), known for Ophélie n’est pas morte (1969), which references
Shakespeare’s character Ophelia.
In Algeria, the relationship between literature written in Arabic and “translingual” literature in
French has been somewhat different, largely because of the longer period of subjection to French rule
and the repressive policies adopted by the French toward the use of Arabic in the educational system.
The first works by Algerian authors using modern literary forms such as the novel were therefore
in French rather than in Arabic—the first one usually being considered as M’Hamed Ben Rahal’s
La vengeance du cheikh (1891). Despite sporadic publications in the first half of the twentieth century,
however, it was not until after the Second World War that modern Algerian literature, either in French
or in Arabic, began to bear fruit. Most major authors in the period leading up to Algerian independ-
ence in 1962 were supporters of, or indeed, active participants in, the movement for independence,
and many were arrested and imprisoned by the French authorities. Among the leading translingual
writers of this period were Kateb Yacine (1929–1989), whose reputation revolves around Nedjma
(1961), the eponymous heroine of which becomes in a sense a symbol for the Algerian homeland
constantly violated by others; Mohammed Dib (1920–2003), a poet as well as a novelist and play-
wright, best known for his La Grande Maison (1952), the first part of a partly autobiographical trilogy
about a large Algerian family; Mouloud Mammeri (1917–1989), an Amazig speaker who wrote four
novels, including La Colline oubliée (1952) and who also played a leading role in reviving Amazig cul-
ture; and Mouloud Feraoun (1913–1962), also of Amazig origin, known for his partly autobiograph-
ical Le Fils du pauvre (1950) and for La Terre et le sang (1953), who was assassinated by the French OAS
in 1962. A number of these writers, including Mohammed Dib and Mouloud Feraoun, are sometimes
referred to as the “Generation of ’52,” a designation that may also include the Algerian-born French
writer Albert Camus—an illustration of the complexity of French-Algerian cultural relationships at
the time. A number of women writers also wrote in French rather than in Arabic, including the poet
Leila Djabali (1935–), imprisoned in Barberousse Prison in Algiers in the 1950s for her involvement
in anti-colonial activity, and best known for her poem Pour mon tortionnaire, le Lieutenant D. (1957),
written while in prison; and the feminist novelist Assia Djebar (1936–2015), born into a Berber
family and originally named Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, who was the first woman of North African
origin to be elected to the Académie Française.
The writers discussed above generally formed a distinct group from those Algerian writers
writing in Arabic, most of whom did not come to prominence until somewhat later, and some of
whom adopted writing in Arabic as a conscious political decision. The issues involved are perhaps
best illustrated by the career of the modernistic novelist Rachid Boujedra (1941–), who began by
publishing several novels in French, beginning with La répudation (1969).This work evoked such hos-
tility in traditional circles because of its challenge to traditional Muslim culture in Algeria that a fatwa
was issued calling for his death and he was forced to live for several years outside Algeria in Morocco
and France. In 1982, however, Boujedra switched from French to Arabic for a series of novels begin-
ning with al-Tafakkuk (French title, Le Démantèlement), followed by several other novels written in
Arabic. He explained the switch by saying: “What could be more normal than seeking to use one’s
mother tongue to create literature which is essentially centered on one’s mother and father … This is
a political act: stating, claiming and taking on one’s differences” (quoted by Bois 160). Notably, how-
ever, Boujedra’s novels in Arabic were quickly translated into French in collaboration with the author
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and reissued; more tellingly, he appears to have dropped the practice entirely in the 1990s, when he
reverted to writing directly in French. It is not clear whether or not this decision was influenced by
commercial considerations—which have certainly played a part in other authors’ language decisions
of this kind.
Arabic Literary Translingualism in the Twentieth and

Twenty-first Century Diaspora
The account of literary translingualism in the Mahjar centered on communities established in the
Americas largely as a result of successive waves of emigration for social, political, and economic
reasons. Although the motivations for emigration have remained largely unchanged in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, the Arab diaspora has at the same time become more diverse, in terms of
both the origins and the destinations of the emigrants. As a result, there are now Arab expatriate com-
munities to be found in every continent. Although the Americas have continued to receive substan-
tial numbers of Arab immigrants, France and Britain have also become favored destinations for Arab
writers and intellectuals—not least because of their relatively proximity to the Middle East—and
both have emerged as centers for publishing in Arabic, as well as hosting translingual authors writing
in English and in French.
Two differences between the nineteenth-century “Mahjar” communities and the more recent
Arab diaspora may also be noted. The first is that, with the exception of emigration from Lebanon
and Palestine/Israel in response to conflict, migration from the region has become, if one may use the
term, more “individual”—a response on the part of individual authors to their personal circumstances
rather than a series of “waves.” The second is that, while the emigrants’ status in relation to their
homeland varies considerably, the relative ease and speed of travel compared with the nineteenth cen-
tury has meant that many members of the Arab diaspora have been able to travel frequently between
their old and new homes—a far cry from the days of Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, for example, when any
return to the homeland represented a major undertaking in both physical and financial terms.
Against that background, we turn to some more specific examples of translingual writers in the
twentieth century. Among the first Arab writers to publish in Europe in English was the Anglo-
Lebanese author and political activist Edward Selim Atiyah (1903–1964), best known for his 1946
autobiography An Arab Tells His Story, and his 1955 book The Arabs, but who also wrote fiction in
English, beginning with The Thin Line in 1951. Atiyah was followed by the Egyptian Copt Waguih
Ghali, whose novel Beer in the Snooker Club, published in 1964, paints a picture of Egyptian society in
transition, combining political insight with a sharp sense of humor. Later translingual authors writing
in English, some of mixed-race parentage, include the Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif (1950–), known for
her debut novel, In the Eye of the Sun (1993) and The Map of Love (1999), which was shortlisted for
the Man Booker Prize; Hisham Matar (1970–), an American-born Libyan, now resident in Britain,
author of In the Country of Men; the Jordanian novelist Fadia Faqir; the Palestinian Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā
(1920–1994), who studied in England and the U.S.A. and who wrote novels in English as well as in
Arabic; the Sudanese Leila Aboulela (1964–), born in Cairo, who now lives in Scotland and writes
in English; the Lebanese Tony Hanania (b. 1964); the Sudanese/British Jamal Mahjoub (1960–), and
Robin Yassin-Kassab (1969–). As will be evident from the names mentioned, women writers are well
represented among this group of authors.
In France, a group of translingual Arab writers from Egypt and the Lebanon has more recently
been added to those writers from French North Africa already discussed. Among these writers may
be mentioned Andrée Chedid (1920–2011), an Egyptian-French poet and novelist of Lebanese des-
cent; Albert Cossery (1913–2008), an Egyptian-born Christian writer of Syro-Lebanese descent,
nicknamed the “Voltaire of the Nile”; Vénus Khoury-Ghata, a Lebanese Christian poet who writes
in French; and the award-winning Amin Maalouf, another Lebanese Christian, who spent part of his
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childhood in Egypt and, in addition to fiction, is known for his works on the Crusades (Les Croisades
vues par les Arabes, published in English as The Crusades through Arab Eyes) and identity (Les Identités
meurtrières = In the Name of Identity). Mention should also be made of the Lebanese Francophone
poet Nadia Tuéni (1935–1983), best known for her Poems of Love and War /Liban: Poemes d’amour et
de guerre (2006).
In the U.S.A., “translingual” writers of Arab origin unconnected with the original Mahjar
movement include Etel Adnan (1925–), who has described herself as having become an “American
poet”: Born in Beirut in an Arabic-speaking environment to a Turkish father from Damascus and a
Greek mother, Adnan has lived in Paris and California as well as the Arab world, and in addition to
poetry and prose works in both English and French, has also worked as a visual artist. She is probably
best known for her experimental novel Sitt Marie Rose, inspired by the death of Marie Rose Boulos,
who taught deaf-mute children and helped to organize social services for Palestinian camps. Marie
Rose, whom Adnan knew personally, was executed by a Christian militia group in 1976, and Adnan’s
novel was hurriedly written, initially in French, but first published in Arabic translation in 1977, the
French version following a year later. Mention may also be made of the novelist Laila Lalami (1968–),
a Moroccan Arabic-speaker who studied in the U.K. before moving to the U.S.A., and whose novel
The Moor’s Account, written in English, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; and of Edward
Said (1935–2003), author of the controversial Orientalism, born in Jerusalem to Palestinian and
Lebanese parents and a major contributor to literary and academic life in the U.S.A. and beyond; Said
himself wrote that “I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in
neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in
Arabic, and vice versa” (Said, 556–557).
While it is difficult to generalize about the motivations for writing in a language other than
their first language, which varies from case to case, it is noticeable that Lebanese authors are par-
ticularly well represented in this group. Two reasons may be suggested for this. The first is that, since
the “Egyptianization” of Alexandria in the aftermath of the Egyptian Free Officers’ revolution of
1952, Beirut has emerged as probably the most cosmopolitan city in the Middle East, many residents
enjoying a reasonable knowledge of (if seldom total fluency in) French and/or English, in addition to
Arabic. The second is that the experience of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–1990 led to the exodus
of a considerable number of intellectuals for whom Britain or France was a natural destination—a
process that may be seen as a partial parallel to the nineteenth-century emigration movement. Many
of these writers were comparatively young, and have accordingly grown up in exile, giving a par-
ticular flavor to their writing on events in Lebanon: As a recent study of Anglophone Lebanese
literature has noted, “[e]‌ach text … is a fictional exploration of the complexities of personal iden-
tity, collective (national) identity and … of belonging/not belonging in the cross-cultural web of
diasporic existence and relocation, including possible repatriation” (Hout 13).
Arabic Literary Translingualism in Palestine/Israel

One final small group of writers relevant to Arabic literary translingualism in the modern Middle
East remains to be considered—the case of Arabic-speaking Jews who migrated to Palestine/Israel
either prior to, at the time of, or following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and who
subsequently adopted the newly revived Hebrew language as their means (or one of their means) of
literary expression. Most immigration to Palestine prior to 1948 had been from Central and Eastern
Europe, but the years following the establishment of Israel saw a vast influx of immigrants, mainly
from post-Holocaust Europe and the Arab and Muslim world. Although examples of literature in
Hebrew by Arab-Jewish writers can be found before this, it was not until the 1950s that literature in
Hebrew by Mizrahi [= Oriental] Jews acquired significance. Prominent among this group were Jews
of Iraqi origin, including Shimon Ballas (1930–2019), a novelist, short-story writer, and academic,
269
Paul Starkey
who has sometimes been regarded as the “unspoken voice of conscience for Israeli Jews,” and whose
first novel, ha-Ma‘abara (= “The Transit Camp,” 1964), was one of the first works to depict the trauma
of Arab-Jewish refugees forcibly displaced to Israel; Sami (or Sammy) Michael (born Kamal Salah,
1926–), a former President of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel), whose first Hebrew novel
Shavim ve-Shavim Yoter [= “Equal and More Equal,” 1974] marked the end of a long period of literary
silence as he “migrated” to his new language; and the novelist Eli Amir (1937–), who has also served
as an Israeli civil servant and whose writings suggest a greater alignment with the Zionist narrative
than those of many of his Mizrahi colleagues.
We conclude with two final examples that provide a slightly different twist to the modern Arabic/
Hebrew encounter. The first is that of the non-Jewish Christian Israeli Arab writer, poet, and trans-
lator Anton Shammas (1950–), who now works as an academic in the U.S.A. Shammas has both
published in, and translated between, the three languages of Hebrew, Arabic, and English, but is
best known for his semi-autobiographical Hebrew novel Arabeskot (1986, translated into English as
Arabesques (1988)), which touched on complex questions of Israeli identity, particularly in relation
to Israeli Arabs. Widely (though probably incorrectly) described as the first Hebrew novel written
by an Arab, the work received widespread acclaim on its publication in Israel and has achieved the
status of something of a “classic” in some academic circles, but although it has been translated into
several languages, it has not to date been published in Arabic. More recently, Shammas’s lead has
been followed by the Palestinian author and journalist Sayed Kashua (1975–), who wrote exclu-
sively in Hebrew until 2014, when he moved to the U.S.A. in apparent despair at the situation of
Israeli Arabs in Israeli society. Known for his popular Israeli sitcom series in Hebrew, Avoda Aravit [=
“Arab Labor”], as well as for four novels, Kashua has since his move to the U.S.A. also began to write
in English; his latest novel, Track Changes [= Aḳov aḥar shinuyim], written in Hebrew before being
translated into English, explores the complex issues of cultural identity that almost inevitably arise in
the fraught political environment of the contemporary Middle East.
Works Cited
Drory, R. “Hebrew Literature.” Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey.
Drory, R. “Saʿadiâ Gaon.” Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey.
Hout, Syrine. Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2012.
Irwin, Robert. “Mamlūks.” Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Lowry, Joseph E., and Devin J. Stewart. Essays in Arabic Literary Biography. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009.
Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Snir, Reuven. Arab-Jewish Literature:The Birth and Demise of the Arabic Short Story. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
Further Reading
Citations have been used sparingly in the above text. Where further information is sought on particular writers,
recourse is usually best first had to a standard encyclopaedia or reference work, either in hard copy or online.The
following list provides suggestions for works that may be of use or interest to those seeking further information
on the topic
‘Abbasid Belles Lettres. Ed. Julia Ashtiany, T.M. Johnstone, J.D. Latham & R.B. Serjeant. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period. Ed. A.F.L. Beeston, T.M. Johnstone, R.B. Serjeant and
G.R. Smith. Cambridge: CUP, 1983.
Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period. Ed. Roger Allen and D.S. Richards. Cambridge: CUP, 2008.
Encyclopaedia of Islam. Ed. P. Bearman et al. 2nd Edition. 12 vols. with indexes, etc., Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005.
Encyclopaedia of Islam. Ed. Kate Fleet et al. 3rd Edition. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Online.
270
Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. Ed. Julie Scott Meisami and Paul Starkey. 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1998.
Holes, Clive. Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions and Varieties. Revised Edition. Washington DC: Georgetown
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. The Legacy of Islamic Spain. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Modern Arabic Literature. Ed. M.M. Badawi. Cambridge: CUP, 1993.
Religion, Learning and Science in the ‘Abbasid Period. Ed. M.J.L.Young, J.D. Latham and R.B. Serjeant.
Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
The Literature of Al- Andalus. Ed. Maria Rosa Menocal, Raymon P. Scheindlin and Michael Sells.
Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions. Ed. Waïl S. Hassan, New York: OUP, 2017.
Versteegh, Kees. The Arabic Language. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
271
21
HEBREW LITERATURE
AS TRANSLINGUAL LITERATURE
FROM ITS ORIGINS TO ITS
PRESENT
Melissa Weininger
The origins of modern Hebrew literature itself lie in translingualism, and this literature would not
exist but for translingual writers. Hebrew, for centuries almost exclusively the liturgical language of
a global, stateless Jewish community, became a modern literary (and later vernacular) language in
the 19th century through the conscious and deliberate intervention of writers attempting to build
a Jewish national identity and community in Europe. Indeed, during the period of its origins there
were no “native” speakers or writers of Hebrew, which had not been spoken widely for almost
2,000 years, and in which no modern, secular literature existed.
But while the history of Hebrew literature is bound up with translingualism, it also challenges
definitions of translingualism, which assumes nativity and nation in language choice.The 19th-century
originators of modern Hebrew literature were largely stateless residents of European empires and
nascent nation-states, whose first language was often Yiddish, another Jewish language with a trans-
national history. Often, these writers were also fluent in at least one, usually more, other European
language, such as German, Russian, or Polish (Alter 17). They were frequently peripatetic, moving
among the cities of Europe, which were the birthplace of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature.1
All Hebrew literature originates from translingual practices, but not through a simple exchange of
one’s own language for another. Rather, Hebrew literature destabilizes not only connections between
nation and culture, land and language, but also the dichotomies between “native” and “foreign,” since
Hebrew was, while not a first language, still very much a native one. Its origin represents a case of the
translingual within, not between, cultures, although Hebrew’s history, as well as its entanglement with
other translingualisms, also traces the shifts in Hebrew’s territorialization, association with sovereign
nationalism, and development in a globalized 21st century.
The Translingual Origins of Hebrew

Hebrew literature was originally part of a nation-building project, designed to create a national cul-
ture for a stateless people without political sovereignty or a connection to national territory. All of its
original practitioners specifically chose to write in Hebrew, usually for socio-political purposes. At
the same time as they were embarking on a translingual project, they were also creating, from ancient
grammar and vocabulary combined with modern European grammars and syntax, a new literary lan-
guage. In some ways, early modern Hebrew literature cannot be said to be translingual, because the
272 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-21

Hebrew Literature and Translingualism
language it was written in didn’t even exist until the literature began to be written. Modern Hebrew
language came to exist through the literature itself. Even vernacular Hebrew, which would not be
widely spoken until the mid-20th century, owes its origins to syntactical experimentation with dia-
logue by modern Hebrew writers of the 19th century.
Even the literary language of Hebrew itself, then, might be considered translingual: it was, from its
inception, dependent on European languages, even rooted in them. Modern Hebrew writers, lacking
appropriate vocabulary and grammatical structures, borrowed liberally from European vernaculars,
including Yiddish, Russian, and German, to craft a workable literary language, one that would also
support dialogue in a language no one spoke. Robert Alter has described the translingual character of
the development of modern Hebrew as a
literary revolution … brought about by writers whose native language was Yiddish; whose
general reading—for the most part, autodidactic—was in Russian, occasionally in German;
and who would not even have agreed altogether on how to pronounce the texts they
produced.
(Alter 17)
One of the most important figures in the development of a modern Hebrew idiom (also
considered the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature), was S.Y. Abramovitsh, sometimes known by his
alter ego and pseudonym, Mendele Mokher Sforim (Mendele the bookseller). His style, or nusakh,
often considered definitive of modern Hebrew literature, was derived from various temporal layers of
Hebrew—biblical, rabbinic, and medieval—as well as Yiddish grammar and syntax and the work of
European writers as varied as Dickens and Gogol (Alter 33). Abramovitsh was an auto-translator, who
began his literary career as a Yiddish writer, later translating (and adapting) many of those works into
Hebrew. In doing so, he essentially invented spoken language in Hebrew, one that was, of necessity,
artificial. It was partially through this process of translingual autotranslation that, as Benjamin Harshav
points out, Abramovitsh “created the beginnings of great Hebrew prose” (Harshav 65).
The vocabulary of modern Hebrew literature also relied heavily on European languages, since
the ancient language lacked words for many modern materials and experiences. Writers borrowed
both conceptually and literally from other languages to describe their literary worlds. The writer Uri
Nissan Gnessin coined the modern Hebrew word for “consciousness,” hakarah, building it from the
Hebrew root for “knowledge” because in both German and French the words for “consciousness” are
related to “knowledge” (Alter 63). Referring to decades of Hebrew writing extending well into the
mid-20th century, Benjamin Harshav notes that
The stories of [pioneering Hebrew writer Yosef Chaim] Brenner, the poems of [Yiddish and
Hebrew poet, essayist, and politician] Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, the speeches of [the first Israeli
prime minister David] Ben-Gurion, and Hebrew journalism for decades, are replete with
words from European languages, as well as from Aramaic and Yiddish.
(Harshav 129)
Thus the origins of modern Hebrew literature as a fundamentally translingual process are encoded
in the language itself.
At its inception, this concentration of Jewish culture in the process of constructing a Hebrew
culture was also a transnational project, as Hebrew literature was intended to function as a national
literature for a stateless people scattered around the world.2 This is consistent with Steven Kellman’s
framing of translingualism as “a form of self-begetting,” although in this case not on an individual
basis but on a communal cultural basis (Kellman 21). Many of its earliest practitioners were peripat-
etic, crafting a home that existed only in language. They were all also multilingual, writing simultan-
eously in several languages, and thus to think of writers of the Hebrew Renaissance as translingual
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Melissa Weininger
again calls into question the meaning of the term. The critic Samuel Charney, writing about the role
of Hebrew and Yiddish in Jewish literary history, declared that “the Jewish cultural tradition is bilin-
gual” (Charney 42).3
Thus, even the poet laureate of the Hebrew Renaissance, Chaim Nachman Bialik, whose
style was the basis for modern Hebrew poetry from the late 19th century to the 1920s, also
produced a significant body of work in Yiddish. Another great Hebrew poet of this period, Shaul
Tchernikhovsky, had studied German, French, English, Greek, and Latin, and wrote and edited
texts in many of these languages, and the traces of his classical education are imprinted on his
poetry. One of his best-known works, “Before the Statue of Apollo,” reflects on the similarities
and differences between Greek and Jewish culture, reflecting questions of cultural patrimony
through language.
However, over time, one outcome of this process of redefining the national self through lan-
guage was the eventual alignment of Hebrew literature with a monocultural imperative and
national sovereignty. Zionist settlers of Palestine posited Hebrew as a “native” Jewish culture, as
differentiated from traditional, diaspora Jewish cultures (Regev 227). As Yael Chaver writes, “The
Hebrew literature produced in Palestine from the beginnings of proto-Zionist Jewish immigra-
tion in the 1880s and especially after the founding of political Zionism in 1897 was mobilized
toward creating a new national identity according to the Zionist ideal” (Chaver 45). However,
the literary critic Gershon Shaked notes that even in Palestine, it was not until the immigrants of
the Second Aliyah (the mass wave of immigration between 1904–1913) chose Hebrew as their
vernacular that it begin to establish itself as the national literary language (Shaked 3). After the
establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the adoption of Hebrew as an official language of
the state, the status of Hebrew literature as a transnational, transcultural, translingual enterprise
shifted. It became a national literature backed by sovereign power, one that sought to impose the
monocultural imperative of Hebrew on a diverse and heterogenous immigrant population. This
change gave rise over time to different forms of Hebrew translingualism, from extra-territorial
manifestations of Hebrew culture aligned with Zionism, to expressions of minority by Hebrew
writers in Israel from Arab lands or the Arab citizen minority.
American Hebraism and Tarbut Ivrit

At the same time that Hebrew writers were migrating to Palestine and creating a center of Hebrew
culture there in the early 20th century, a huge wave of Jewish immigrants was flooding the shores of
the United States to escape persecution, mostly from the Russian Empire. Among these immigrants
were a number of Hebraists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly men who had been
given a traditional Jewish education in Europe and had either migrated to secular schooling in the
Russian system or encountered European culture autodidactically. These Hebrew writers had a great
deal in common with their counterparts in both Europe and Palestine, and thought that there was no
reason why America could not become a world center of Hebrew culture, particularly in the period
between the world wars when some Zionist leaders spent those years of upheaval in the United States
(Mintz, “Introduction” 15).
Hebraism in United States, which saw its period of greatest flourishing in the interwar period,
was closely tied to the Zionist project, which affected both their literature and their attitudes toward
America. In 1917, some of the prominent American Hebraists founded the Histadrut Ivrit (The
Organization for Hebrew Culture), an organization whose purpose was to advocate for Hebrew and
its connection to Jewish nationalism, and to take positions on important Jewish issues in America
from the Hebraist perspective, which often differed from that of Yiddish writers as well as those who
advocated for assimilation (Mintz, “Sanctuary” 61). In other words, the Histadrut, as it was sometimes
known, recognized not only that the Hebrew translingual writer occupied a special place with regard
to both American and Jewish culture, but also that that position often differed or even clashed with
274
that of Jewish writers in other languages, even translingual ones. Indeed, these writers chose to call
themselves “ivrim,” or Hebrews, to differentiate themselves from Yiddish writers and connect them-
selves with a national idea embedded in the language (Mintz, “Sanctuary” 52).
One primary feature of Hebrew translingual writers in America was their contrary attitudes
toward their adopted home. As Michael Weingrad has argued, “the Hebraists were Jewish nationalists,
uninterested in and often vehemently opposed to the hybrid and highly Americanized forms of
Jewish identity and culture that emerged in the course of the twentieth century.They could not avoid
grappling with America and American identity, but they did so in ways that distinguished them from
the American Jewish mainstream” (xxiii). In other ways, too, these writers were often outliers: the
Hebraist movement in America was an elite enterprise, spearheaded by educated intellectuals, who
never saw Hebrew as a language for the masses, but rather the vehicle for serious discourse among
the Jewish intelligentsia (Mintz, “Introduction” 14).Whereas in Europe and Palestine Hebrew culture
was intended to build a mass culture for the nation, in America Hebrew translingualism remained a
cultural niche and a mode for Hebrew writers to express their alienation from the American melting
pot and Jewish culture.
The alienation of American Hebrew writers from their home and language, led to a debate
about “ameriq‘aiyut,” or Americanness, the extent to which their work should or should not focus
on themes, ideas, and landscapes inspired by its context. Ezra Spicehandler notes two tendencies in
American Hebrew literature, partially attributable to generational differences: one was to turn away
from American Jewish life toward the more universal themes of nature and sentiment, the other to
focus on America, either its landscapes or American Jewish life (68). In 1915, the writer and critic
Daniel Persky, one of the founders of the American Hebrew journal Hatoren (The Mast), laid out a set
of characteristics of American Hebrew literature that he felt distinguished it from its counterparts in
Europe and Palestine and offered it a particular appeal. Some of these included the ability to describe
Jewish life in various American milieus, translating important American and English literature into
Hebrew, the enrichment of American Hebrew literature with American motifs and urban and rural
landscapes, and the impact of the English language on its style (Spicehandler 80–81). Many of these
aspects did come to be represented in American Hebrew literature over time.
One of the prominent metaphors that American Hebrew writers chose to express their alien-
ation while at the same time engaging with ameriqa‘iyut was one of the most alienated and the
most American of figures: the American Indian. One of the first serious Hebrew works published
in America with an explicitly American theme was Benjamin Silkiner’s Mul ohel Timurah (Before
Timurah’s Tent), a book length epic poem written in a lyrical, romantic style consistent with the
earliest generation of Hebrew Renaissance poets. The poem concerns the downfall of a mythical
Native American tribe during the period of the Spanish Conquest, allowing the poet to draw a
parallel between the Spanish persecution of Jews in Europe with their persecution of native tribes
in the Americas. Describing the catastrophic fate of an American Indian tribe was also a vehicle for
him to explore the history of Jewish subjection and potential annihilation in Europe, from which
Silkiner himself had fled. This was characteristic of American Hebrew writing, mostly poetry, that
took Native American lives and histories as its theme: the American Indian presented the perfect
figure for Hebraists to express their alienation from America, especially its urban landscape, while at
the same time claiming a figure that typified an “authentic” Americanness (Weingrad 75). And they
used material about American Indians to illustrate modern Jewish experience as well: “The Indian,
a non-Jew yet entirely free from implication in the long history of anti-Semitism, was a safe figure
with which to identify. These poets’ interest in a “vanished race” reflects a range of Jewish national
concerns, from cultural assimilation to the possibility of genocide” (Weingrad 79).
In addition to Native American themes and subjects, many American Hebrew writers set their
work in familiar locales. One of the most prominent, and ambivalent, figures in American Hebrew
literature, Shimon Halkin—who eventually emigrated to the state of Israel in 1949 and had described
what he called the “acute uprootedness” of the American Hebrew writer —nonetheless peppered his
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Melissa Weininger
poetry with references to American locales, including place-names in the titles, including Ohio, Santa
Barbara, Michigan, and specific places in New York (Spicehandler, 88).4 His magnum opus, an unfin-
ished series of novels titled Ad Mashber (Until the Crisis), is set in New York among American Jewish
immigrants and chronicles the dilemmas and difficulties of assimilation and integration. Halkin’s
friend and fellow writer Gabriel Preil was drawn to both the landscapes of his beloved New York
City as well as to American literature, and many of these places and writers made their way by name
into his work. But Yael Feldman has also shown the ways in which is distinctive modernist style, quite
different from most of the other American Hebrew poets, was partly attributable to Yiddish influences
and his own processes of autotranslation from Yiddish to Hebrew (35). Again, this is a reminder of the
extent to which modern Hebrew literature, in its early years, was dependent on other languages for its
development, but also challenges simplifying dichotomies between native and foreign, inherited and
adopted language. American Hebrew literature of the interwar period—and beyond: Preil lived until
1993—shares its inherently translingual existence with its European counterparts of the prior decades
as well as its Palestinian contemporaries. Likewise, it demonstrates the extent to which local context
has influenced and entered into translingual Hebrew literature in the various locales of its practice.
Immigrant Writers in Israel-Palestine

In the period when the Hebrew literary renaissance was burgeoning in Europe in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, many European Jews, among them writers, also began to migrate to the
nascent Jewish settlement in Palestine. This wave of immigrants increased substantially in the years
preceding and just after World War II, and continued through the early years of the new state of
Israel, established in 1948. In the 1950s, a massive wave of immigrants from the Middle East and
North Africa joined them, bringing a very different approach and orientation toward Hebrew.
Many of the foundational literary figures of Israel’s early years were translingual, or multilingual,
writers, who by choice or necessity took up Hebrew as their literary language and in the process
transformed Hebrew culture.
While most of the first generation of Hebrew writers in Palestine were born in Europe, and
immigrated as children or young adults, those who formed the gatekeeping core of Hebrew literary
circles in Palestine often posited Hebrew as the only legitimate literary language for Jewish writers in
Palestine, claiming a kind of nativity for themselves. Avraham Shlonsky, founder of the literary maga-
zine Turim, which heavily influenced the world of Hebrew letters in Palestine and determined the
nature of Hebrew literary aesthetics for decades, wrote in 1927 of Jewish multilingualism,
We did not accept the match between the languages as a marriage made in heaven. … [W]‌e
view this catastrophe of bilingualism as we would view tuberculosis, gnawing away at the
lungs of the nation. We want Israeli [yisre’elit] breathing to be entirely Hebrew, with both
lungs!5
His remarks were in response to the suggestion by the eminent Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman
Bialik, considered the father of the Hebrew Renaissance, that Hebrew and Yiddish were “a marriage
made in heaven.”6 Instead, Shlonsky made clear that Hebrew literature was to divorce itself from any
entanglements with other Jewish or vernacular languages.
Nonetheless, many of the prominent Hebrew poets of this generation would go on to acknow-
ledge their own translingualism by writing about the impingement of their “home” languages and
cultures on their Hebrew writing. Leah Goldberg, one of the only women in the inner circles of
Hebrew letters during the statehood period, touched frequently on the languages and landscapes of
her youth. Goldberg was raised in a multilingual environment, but chose Hebrew as her literary lan-
guage at a young age, when she began keeping a childhood diary in Hebrew. In her poem, “Tel Aviv
276
1935,” dated to correspond with the year of her own immigration to Palestine, after a peripatetic
youth ranging from Lithuania to the German universities where she earned her doctorate, Goldberg
explores the experience of the immigrant, but also that of the translingual writer. Goldberg writes,
“The knapsacks of travelers walked the streets/and the language of a foreign country/pierced the
heatwave/like the blade of a cold knife” (Goldberg). The coldness of the foreign languages slicing
through the heat of a Tel Aviv summer suggests the contrast between the languages and cultures of
Europe and the new home in Palestine, as well as the violence of the transition. The final image of
the poem is of a hometown scene mixed with a quintessentially Middle Eastern landscape—the
immigrant’s town church floating in the Mediterranean Sea.
Even the poet considered representative of Israeli literature in the statehood generation, Yehuda
Amichai, was a translingual writer who chose Hebrew after his immigration to Palestine as a child.
Like many immigrants of his generation, even Amichai’s name reflects his status as translingual. Born
Ludwig Pfeuffer in Würtzburg, Germany, his family escaped the Nazi regime for Mandate Palestine
when he was twelve, and he changed his name to the Hebrew Yehuda Amichai as a young adult.
Amichai is considered the Israeli national poet, a role closely tied to his innovations in language and
dedication to the exploration of Israeli landscapes and national identity, but as Na’ama Rokem has
shown, several bilingual German-Hebrew journals in his archive demonstrate the extent to which
his bilingualism persisted in his writing, his Hebrew influenced by the poet’s grounding in another
language (Rokem).
The prose writer S.Y. Agnon, who began writing Hebrew literature in Europe and continued
through a first immigration to Palestine, a return to Europe, and a second immigration to Palestine,
set many of his works in the European landscapes and contexts he knew so well. His best-known
work, a novel titled, T’mol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), follows a young Jewish immigrant to Palestine
through the changes and trials of his new life. While the novel is often hailed as a classic of Hebrew
literature, its protagonist an ideological immigrant who believes deeply in the Zionist project, it
nonetheless reflects a certain disappointment with the settlement in Palestine as well as a kind of nos-
talgia for European Jewish life.
While many of the European translingual Hebrew writers became the giants of their generation,
a very different process attended the progress of translingual writers from the Middle East and North
Africa, who began arriving in Israel in the 1950s. After the establishment of the State of Israel in
1948, the majority of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa migrated to the
new state, not always by choice. For many immigrants to Israel from Arab lands, moving to Israel was
a necessity: they had been persecuted or expelled by their own countries. Unlike the adoption of
Hebrew by European Zionist writers, then, the adoption of Hebrew as a literary language by writers
from the Middle East and North Africa was not an enthusiastic choice but rather a fraught decision.
Their choice to write in Hebrew was often not an ideological one, as it had been for European Jewish
writers, but a practical calculation about audience and their ability to write about their new home in
the language of their old one.7
Mizrahi, or oriental, Jews who emigrated to Israel came from a wide variety of countries, cultures,
and backgrounds, and their material and social conditions varied greatly. But they also shared certain
experiences both as immigrants and as members of a group considered inferior by the dominant
Ashkenazi (European) culture and leadership of the state. One common experience for Jews from
Arab lands who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s was the ma‘abarah, or transit camp, meant to be
a temporary way station for immigrant absorption into the new state that became, for some, a per-
manent home. These settlements were often in undesirable locations, with poor infrastructure and
temporary, inadequate dwellings. An entire genre of literature, sifrut hama‘abarah, was born from the
experience of the transit camp. As Nancy Berg has written of Iraqi-Israeli writers, “Those who made
the commitment to writing in Hebrew were impelled to write about the experience of being an
immigrant in Israel” (71).
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Melissa Weininger
The first published novel about the transit camp experience by an Iraqi immigrant, Shimon Ballas’
HaMa‘abarah, was published in Israel in 1964. Ballas had actually begun writing the novel in Arabic
but rewrote it in Hebrew. While the novel has an ostensible protagonist, its many characters represent
various facets of the social experience within the transit camp and a variety of typical immigrant
experiences. Berg has even suggested that the camp itself functions as the main character of the novel
(77). Ballas began writing this novel in Arabic but later rewrote it in Hebrew, although it begins with
an Arabic phrase explained in a Hebrew footnote, making explicit its translingualism. Arabic in this
novel, as in others by Iraqi immigrants in this period, is used in ways that call attention to the diffe-
rence between the characters and their environments, creating a dissonance that highlights the con-
dition of exile expressed by the author and experienced by the characters (Berg, 62).
Ultimately, Ballas’ novel is not easily categorizable within the Zionist- Hebrew canon of
Israeli literature, which Berg notes is because of its different perspective on “the experience
of the ingathered exiles in the promised land of Zion” (100). In general, the work of Arab-
Jewish Hebrew translingual writers, like Ballas and his contemporary Sami Mikhael, was relatively
neglected or marginal within the world of Hebrew letters until decades after its publication.
Ammiel Alcalay attributes this to the difficulty that the literary critical establishment had in
placing their work within the Israeli context, “since it seems much more intimately related—
in terms of narrative structure, subject matter, and intentional trajectory —to modern Arabic,
North African francophone, African-American, or contemporary ‘Third World’ novels than the
last vestiges of ‘neomodern’ trends still prevalent among many of their own Israeli contempor-
aries” (Alcalay 244). The association even of their literary work with trends outside the Hebrew
norm, one of the things that characterizes their writing as translingual, distinguished them from
the European translingual writers whose work became the basis for a national Hebrew literature
and guaranteed their marginality.
Palestinian Hebrew: Israeli-Arab Writers

In contrast to the Jewish writers from Arab lands who chose to write in Hebrew after their immigra-
tion, the small group of non-Jewish Arab writers in Israel who have chosen Hebrew as their literary
language have received a great deal of attention and had tremendous influence on Israeli Hebrew
literature and popular culture.8 After 1948, Palestinian Arabs living within what became the de facto
borders of the new state of Israel were granted citizenship in the new country. However, Arab citizens
of Israel were subject to Israeli martial law until 1966, and continue to be largely segregated from the
Jewish population. While there is an Arabic school system in Israel, and until recently Arabic was one
of the official languages of the state, most Palestinian citizens also learn Hebrew in school and often
have to use Hebrew to navigate daily life. It is not surprising, then, that a number of Palestinian Israelis
have chosen Hebrew as their literary language.
The first published novel in Hebrew by a Palestinian Israeli was Athallah Mansour’s 1966 Beor
Chadash (In a New Light). The protagonist of the story is a Palestinian orphan raised by a Jewish
family living on a kibbutz, a Jewish collective farm that was one of the manifestations of a Zionist
ideology that emphasized settlement of the land and collective labor, and is therefore a foundational
symbol of the Jewish settlement of Palestine. Yossi, the protagonist, is never fully accepted by the
kibbutz, which might be seen as a microcosm of Jewish Israeli society more generally, because the
kibbutzniks’ socialist principles demand that he struggle for socialism with his own people. In this
understanding of identity,Yossi’s Arabness is considered original and ineradicable by the Jewish Israelis
he lives with, underlying the Jewish identity he was raised with.
Perhaps the best-known Palestinian Israeli writers of Hebrew are Anton Shammas and Sayed
Kashua, both of whom have since left Israel to live in the United States. Karen Grumberg has referred
to Shammas and Kashua as “men in no-man’s land,” referring to their unique position in Israeli letters,
as celebrated authors in a language that was, in a sense, specifically formulated to exclude them (126).
278
In 1986, Shammas published Arabesqot (Arabesques), a semi-autobiographical novel whose narrator is

also named Anton Shammas. Shammas’ novel was almost immediately understood within the context
of Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of minor literature as that which a minority constructs within
a major language, thus effecting a deterritorialization of the major language. Hanan Hever, reading
Arabesques as minority literature, points to Shammas’ own description of his position within the
world of Hebrew letters as similar to a Russian nesting doll:
As an “Israeli Arab,” Shammas is a member of a minority group—but as a Christian, he

falls outside the Islamic mainstream of the minority that, at least according to the prevalent
Israeli conception, tends more “naturally” to be identified with the Palestinians. On the
other hand, he writes in Hebrew, the language of the dominant Jewish culture, which is
itself a minority within the predominantly Arab Middle East.
(266)
Adel Shakour and Abdallah Tarabeih have noted the particular ways that Shammas’ work, both
his poetry and his prose, make use of Hebrew neologisms derived from Arabic forms and phrases.
As Ammiel Alcalay notes, “Shammas has pulled the proverbial finger out of the dike damming the
basic contradiction within the definition of Israeli nationality and nationhood,” forcing Israel to
come to terms with the fact that Hebrew language also belongs to Palestinian citizens like Shammas,
even within the context of the “Jewish state” (279). This analysis of Shammas’ work underscores the
extent to which Palestinian Hebrew translingualism reveals the changed status of Hebrew after the
establishment of the state of Israeli in 1948. Whereas Hebrew literature arose in the previous century
as a minor, diasporic, deterritorialized language itself, by the late twentieth century its association
with state power had rendered it a major language, the official tongue of a nation-state, with its own
translingual minority writers.
Hebrew literature as well as Israeli popular culture in Hebrew has been deeply influenced by the
work of the Palestinian Israeli writer Sayed Kashua, who in addition to publishing well-regarded lit-
erary fiction was also, for many years, the author of a popular column about daily life in the flagship
Hebrew newspaper Ha’aretz (The Land) as well as the creator and writer of several popular Israeli
television shows (and a script doctor for many more). In his novels, Kashua often writes metaphor-
ically about the role-playing required of Palestinian Israelis; as Gil Hochberg writes, “all of Kashua’s
protagonists must negotiate their (Arab) identity and place both within Israeli society and in relation
to the Palestinians of the occupied territories by way of secrecy, passing, and masquerade” (70). In
his 2010 novel Guf sheni yechid (Second Person Singular), Kashua follows two Arab Israelis living in
Jerusalem, loosely linked through an intricate subplot. The text explores the many ways that Arab
citizens of Israel living in Jewish spaces, often referred to in the novel as “Israeli-Arab immigrants”
even though they live in the land of their birth, negotiate their dual existence, linguistically, culturally,
and politically. The main arc of the plot takes this dual existence to its logical extreme: one of the
protagonists, an Arab Israeli social-work student who takes a job caring for a young Jewish man with
a severe brain injury, eventually ends up assuming the identity of his patient when the young man,
Yonatan, dies. Through this extreme transformation, Kashua explores questions of assimilation and
integration that are also implied in his own choice of literary language.
In his popular column in the prominent daily newspaper Ha’aretz, Kashua has written exten-
sively about the questions of identity and power raised by his choice to write in Hebrew. In a 2008
column titled “My French Boycott,” he wrote about being asked who he writes for: “Does the fact
that Hebrew and I chose each other automatically attest to a certain target audience?” (Kashua) Here,
as in his fiction, Kashua explores the political ramifications of choosing Hebrew, but his reflexive
formulation—“chose each other”—makes clear that while Arabic may have been his first language,
Hebrew has also fundamentally shaped him, even claimed him.This sentiment has also been expressed
by another contemporary Arab Israeli writer of Hebrew, the poet Ayat Abu Shmeiss. A native Arabic
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Melissa Weininger
speaker who was educated largely in French, Abu Shmeiss began writing poetry in Hebrew as an
adolescent, partly because her written Arabic was not strong enough for her to feel comfortable with
it as a literary language. She has said of the choice to write in Hebrew, “When I write in Hebrew,
I feel at home … I just treated it as my language, like Arabic was my language” (Bsoul). For Abu
Shmeiss, like Kashua, writing in Hebrew is simply a sign of the inherent multiplicity of her iden-
tity, claiming, “I’m this and that. I am two … I am two halves—the problem is that these two halves
never become one. They are incompatible. But I’ve made my peace with this” (Bsoul). Like Kashua’s
characters, who assume dual and sometimes incompatible identities, Abu Shmeiss’ characterization of
her own duality is expressed in her choice to write translingual literature in Hebrew, a language that
is associated with Jewish cultural and political hegemony in Israel, yet also belongs, as these writers
insist, to all its citizens.
Translingual Israeli Literature: Hebrew in English

Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Israeli literature has become almost solely iden-
tified with Hebrew literature, despite the persistence of Israeli writing in other languages.9 In the last
decade, particularly, abetted by globalization, the internet, and political and cultural movements linked
to post-Zionist politics, a self-conscious translingual non-Hebrew Israeli literature has emerged. In
particular, several contemporary works in English, which retain the traces of Hebrew, merit mention
in relationship to the phenomenon of translingual Hebrew literature.
In 2001, the writer and activist Rela Mazali published her genre-bending work Maps of Women’s
Goings and Stayings. As even the title makes evident, the book’s English is unconventional, and Mazali
purposely plays with grammar and syntax to call attention to the artificiality and choice involved
in her language of composition, as well as to retain traces of her native Hebrew. The title’s awkward
English syntax draws attention to itself as a possible “bad” translation from another language while
privileging the act of going rather than staying. That is, the book foregrounds its suspicion of loyalty
to the here of the homeland, to nation or national language.
Likewise the strange and sometimes awkward prose of the book, part of which records verbatim—
including, as Mazali writes, “all the stutters, all the tangled sentences sidetracked along the way and
left unending, all the uhms, the I means, the you knows”—conversations with actual and fictional
women about their travel experiences (34). This has the effect, she notes, of making the prose for-
eign and contrived, “a visible veil through which you’re aware, on and off, that you’re peering, as you
piece together a recounted reality, palpably non-real” (34). Thus Mazali preserves a sense even within
English of the Hebrew (and other languages) that lie behind her language of composition, and the
artificiality of language itself. She calls attention to her translations from Hebrew to English and back
again, writing of one of her transcriptions,
This section of the notes is written in my Hebrew. Maria was speaking her excellent Swedish
English and I was taking it in and recording it in Hebrew, which I writer quicker than
English. Now, in the absence of her exact words on tape, I’m translating back into English.
(194)
Mazali draws back the curtain on the wizard of language, revealing the utilitarian mechanisms
behind it and demystifying its connection to identity and home.
A similar mechanism is at work in two more recent translingual works by Israeli writers, Ayelet
Tsabari’s The Best Place on Earth and Shani Boianjiu’s The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. Each uses
linguistic techniques to denaturalize the language and remind the reader of their status as a kind of
translation-language. Boianjiu inflects her English with a Hebrew syntactical accent, often using literal
translations from Hebrew that sound slightly foreign or unusual in English. One character explains
that for breakfast, “my mother organizes a tomato and tea for me,” another “lives in Jerusalem Street
280
3.”10 She uses literal translations of Hebrew idioms rather than an equivalent English expression, as
when the protagonists’ hometown is described as having “a view of the entire world and its sister”
(9). While these linguistic tics could at first seem accidental, Boianjiu calls attention to them herself,
emphasizing their intentionality. In one of the interlocked stories that make up the novel, Boianjiu
uses the phrase “machine automatic gun,” which seems to be a reference to rules of Hebrew syntax,
in which the adjective follows the noun. But in this case it amounts to mere confusion, because it
simply reverses the two adjectives modifying “gun,” rather than placing them both after it. At the
same time, it is clear that this awkward phrase does not actually refer back to any Hebrew original,
because in Hebrew, “machine gun” is rendered as a single word, maklea. In effect, Boianjiu creates
her own non-standard English, inflected by a general foreignness that seems both connected to and
disconnected from Hebrew at the same time, calling into question the very notion of an authentic
original source language.
Tsabari uses a slightly different linguistic technique to mark her English as something other
than standard. Rather than Hebraizing her English, Tsabari frequently imports Hebrew (and occa-
sionally Arabic) words into the text, often translating them simultaneously. This tactic has the effect
of locating her English outside of Hebrew, a place into which Hebrew must be imported, and in
which it is always slightly artificial, requiring translation and explanation. In stories that are focused
largely on Israel and Israeli characters, this denaturalizes and deterritorializes Hebrew, reorienting it
to its polylingual origins. In just the first few pages of the first story in this collection, we encounter
“dossit,” slang for a religious woman; “ir lelo hafsaka,” the city that never sleeps, to describe Tel Aviv;
and “pigua,” the word for a terrorist bombing (the story is set during the second intifada) (Tsabari
3,5,7). These Hebrew terms are translated within the narrative, either directly or indirectly, a recog-
nition of their illegibility in the context of the English text. The main character in “Tikkun,” the
first story, tells us that he “had been dreaming about getting away, wishing I could afford a flight
somewhere” (10). Many of the characters in Tsabari’s stories are trying to escape—through drugs
and alcohol, sex, travel, immigration—which parallels the book’s own attempt to escape, in its way,
through English.
This escape from Hebrew monolingualism in Israeli literature has brought contemporary Israeli
translingual literature full circle to consider the origins of Hebrew literature and its association
with state power. It restores to Hebrew literature a sense of what Bakhtin called “linguistic con-
sciousness,” the ability to see language from outside the monolithic (and monolingual) frame-
work that formed it, transforming language “from the absolute dogma it had been within the
narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working hypothesis for
comprehending and expressing reality” (61). By looking in from outside the hegemonic national
framework supporting Hebrew literature as the national literature of Israel, translingual litera-
ture deconstructs the links between language and national myth. Translingual Israeli literature
demonstrates the extent to which Israeli culture has always been “intertwined with the cultures
of Jews and non-Jews abroad, as well as the non-Jewish and non-Zionist populations of Palestine
itself ” (Halperin 10). By writing in an English consciously inflected by or entwined with the
echoes of Hebrew, these writers situate their work within the context of the multilingual, diaspora
history of Hebrew and recover the complex literary languages overwritten by the cultural domin-
ance of Hebrew monolingualism.
Conclusion
The emergence of translingual Israeli literature in English, German, Russian, and other languages is, in
a way, a return of the repressed of Hebrew literature’s translingual past. While modern Hebrew itself,
as well as its early literary corpus, necessarily relied heavily on other languages and literatures, much
of this history was elided or erased by Zionist literary historiography that insisted on Israeli mono-
lingualism. Early writers of modern Hebrew were all translingual, because nowhere was Hebrew a
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native language; while Hebrew literature was always a national literature of the Jewish people, at its
inception in the nineteenth century it was a stateless national literature, spread across the cities and
Jewish cultural centers of Europe. Thus it was not unusual that one of these literary centers would be
located in New York, say, while others existed in Odessa, Warsaw, or Berlin.
The nature of translingualism in Hebrew literature, then, shifted tremendously with its adoption
as the national literature of the state of Israel after its establishment in 1948. The extent to which
the Zionist leadership of the new Israeli state insisted on Hebrew monolingualism is encapsulated
in the words of the poet Avraham Shlonsky, whose literary journal Turim for many years established
the aesthetic standards and boundaries of Hebrew poetry, when he called Jewish multilingualism a
“catastrophe” that he compared to “tuberculosis, gnawing away at the lungs of the nation.”11 What
Shlonsky’s conception of a pure Hebrew literature as the national literature of the Jewish state did not
account for was the presence of a substantial minority of Arab citizens who would also adopt many
aspects of Israeli culture as their own, including Hebrew literature.
Translingual Hebrew literature in the 21st century, along with translingual Israeli literature written
in other languages, challenges many of the cultural proscriptions of Zionism that were territorialized
and even, in some cases, codified by the establishment of the state of Israel. In an era of globalization,
technology and the circulation of both people and culture have ensured that Hebrew literature’s status
as an exclusively Jewish or exclusively Israeli literature is not guaranteed, nor desirable. In the words
of the scholar and literary editor Haim Weiss, “The isolation of a language, and the self-isolation of a
culture, is a death sentence. Such a culture will wither and become devoid of meaning” (Weiss). The
continued and robust existence of translingual Hebrew literature is one element in the continued life
of a literary culture that still belongs to only a small minority of Hebrew speakers, both in Israel and,
as always, around the world.
Notes
1 For an exhaustive account of the development of modern Hebrew literature in the cities of Europe, see
Pinsker 2011.
2 Although there were always Jewish communities outside of Europe, in North Africa, the Middle East, and
North America, this process of building a national culture through Hebrew literature was largely a European
project, which had consequences later for Jewish writers from non-European backgrounds.
3 I have chosen to use Charney’s given name, rather than his pen name, because his pen name has a history as
a racist slur. See Bromberg.
4 Halkin is quoted in Weingrad, 5.
5 Quoted in Chaver 106.
6 For more on this metaphor, including its highly gendered implications, see Seidman 124–127.
for an account of the “Yiddish Affair,” see Chaver 103–113.
7 For a discussion of these practical calculations, see Berg 49–59.
8 Reuven Snir claims that this imbalance is the effect of the tokenization and exoticization of Israeli Arab
Hebrew writers (222).
9 Some examples of writers who have challenged the sole identification of Israeli literature with Hebrew
include Karen Alkalay-Gut, an American-born Israeli poet who publishes in English; Ida Fink, the celebrated
Polish-language author of stories with Holocaust-related themes; and Yosl Birstein, the son of the eminent
poet Melekh Ravitsh who became a kibbutz shepherd and a Yiddish storyteller, among others. However,
these writers have historically worked in the shadows of Israeli, and Jewish, literature. Ida Fink, for example,
found it difficult to find a publisher for her work for many years, and Israeli literary prizes are generally
reserved for Hebrew writers only.
10 Boianjiu 17, 16, emphasis added. In Hebrew, it is idiomatic to use the word lehistader, literally “to organize,”
to describe the act of, for example, preparing breakfast, and the preposition used to indicate place, be-, can be
translated as either “in” or “on.”
11 Quoted in Chaver 106.
282
Works Cited
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Alter, Robert. The Invention of Hebrew: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism. University of Washington
Press, 1988.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981.
Berg, Nancy E. Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq. SUNY Press, 1996.
Boianjiu, Shani. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. Hogarth, 2012.
Bromberg, Eli. “We Need to Talk about Shmuel Charney,” In Geveb, October 2019, https://ingeveb.org/articles/
we-need-to-talk-about-shmuel-charney.
Bsoul, Janan. “My Identity Has Nothing to do with the Language in which I Write.” Tel Aviv Review of Books,
Winter 2019, www.tarb.co.il/my-identity-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-language-in-which-i-write/
Charney, Samuel (Shmuel Niger). Bilingualism in the History of Jewish Literature. Translated by Joshua A. Fogel,
University Press of America, 1990.
Chaver,Yael. What Must Be Forgotten:The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine. Syracuse University Press, 2004.
Feldman,Yael S. Modernism and Cultural Transfer: Gabriel Preil and the Tradition of Jewish Literary Bilingualism. Hebrew
Union College Press, 1986.
Goldberg, Leah. “Tel Aviv 1935.” Translated by Adriana X. Jacobs, 2017, teachgreatjewishbooks.org/
1-poem-tel-aviv-1935-leah-goldberg-1964
Grumberg, Karen. Place and Ideology in Contemporary Hebrew Literature. Syracuse University Press, 2011.
Halperin, Liora. Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948. Yale University
Press, 2015.
Harshav, Benjamin. Language in Time of Revolution. University of California Press, 1993.
Hever, Hanan “Hebrew in an Israeli Arab Hand: Six Miniatures on Anton Shammas’s Arabesques.” Translated by
Orin D. Gensler. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. Edited by Abdul R. JanMohamed and David
Lloyd. Oxford University Press, 1990, 264–293.
Hochberg, Gil. “To be or Not to Be an Israeli Arab: Sayed Kashua and the Prospect of Minority Speech-Acts.”
Comparative Literature, 62, 1, 68–88.
Kashua, Sayed. “My French Boycott,” Ha’aretz 7 Feb 2008, www.haaretz.com/1.4988685?lts=1596117953546
Kellman, Steven G. The Translingal Imagination. University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Mazali, Rela. Maps of Women’s Goings and Stayings. Stanford University Press, 2001.
Mintz, Alan. Introduction. Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects. Edited by Alan Mintz. Wayne State
University Press, 1993, 13–26.
———. “A Sanctuary in the Wilderness,” Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects. Edited by Alan Mintz.
Wayne State University Press, 1993, 29–67.
Pinsker, Shachar M. Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe. Stanford University
Press, 2011.
Regev, Motti. “To Have a Culture of our Own: On Israeliness and its Variants.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23,
223–244.
Rokem, Na’ama. “German-Hebrew Encounters in Yehuda Amichai and Paul Celan.” Prooftexts 30, 1, 97–127.
Seidman, Naomi. A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish. University of California
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Shaked, Gershon. Modern Hebrew Fiction. Translated by Yael Lotan. Edited by Emily Miller Budick. Indiana
Shakour, Adel and Abdallah Tarabeih. “Hebrew Neologisms in the Writings of Anton Shammas.” Hebrew Studies
56, 295–314.
Snir, Reuven. “‘Postcards in the Morning’: Palestinians Writing in Hebrew.” Hebrew Studies 42, 197–224.
Spicehandler, Ezra. “Ameriqa‘iyut in American Hebrew Literature.” Hebrew in America: Perspectives and Prospects.
Edited by Alan Mintz. Wayne State University Press, 1993, 68–104.
Tsabari, Ayelet. The Best Place on Earth. HarperCollins, 2013.
Weingrad, Michael. American Hebrew Literature: Writing Jewish Identity in the United States. Syracuse University
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Weiss, Haim. “Israel Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Great Hebrew Literature.” Jewish Daily Forward, June 8, 2015,
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283
VIII
Literary Translingualism
in Asian Languages
22
CHINESE TRANSLINGUAL
WRITING
In and Out
Elaine Wong
Since the late nineteenth century, Chinese translingual writers have produced a diverse corpus,
including public discourse fighting racial injustice or embracing cosmopolitanism, essays bridging
East-West understandings, plays adapted from Chinese drama, fiction about China and Chinatown,
writings produced in colonial or postcolonial power structures, autobiographies, poetry, travelogue
series, detective series, etc.While each transnational writer has their unique translingual journey, several
historical events affecting Chinese people in and outside of China have conditioned the translingual
switches. Before turning to these switches, it is helpful to explore the internal translingualism of the
Chinese language.
Translingualism within Chinese

Chinese offers a complex picture to the concept and practice of translingual writing. Depending on
the relationship between spoken and written varieties, translingualism may appear within Chinese to
various extents.
Chinese comprises seven dialect groups: Mandarin (Beifanghua) in northern China, and Wu, Gan,
Xiang, Min, Hakka, and Yue in the south and southeast (Norman c1988, Chen 1999, Sun 2006).
Mutual intelligibility is absent between Mandarin and the southern dialect groups, and largely absent
across the southern groups. In some cases, even varieties within the same southern group are mutually
unintelligible, such as Northern Min, spoken in inland Fujian province, and Southern Min, spoken
in coastal Fujian and Taiwan (Sun 2006:29–33). What enables communication among the plethora of
dialects is a common writing system, Modern Written Chinese (Chen 1999:xi). Although speakers
of two Chinese dialects may not understand each other, they can communicate in writing if they
are literate. Modern Written Chinese is based on Mandarin, with absorptions of linguistic elements
from other dialects as well as foreign languages (81).The southern dialects can be quite different from
Modern Written Chinese in grammatical norms, morphological forms, and lexical expressions (114).
To southern dialect speakers, acquiring and using Modern Written Chinese involves translingual
processes, the extent of which depends on how different a southern dialect is from Mandarin and
whether a speaker knows Mandarin or not.
Modern Written Chinese is often times adopted as an overall linguistic frame incorporated
with the lexical and grammatical features of local dialects. This middle ground enables writers to
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-22 287

Elaine Wong
present local flavors and reach beyond dialect audiences. Even so, writers from the southern dialect
regions feel translingual effects when they write. As Donald B. Snow observes, in Hong Kong, “Even
Cantonese-speaking writers who have gained their reputations writing in Standard Chinese,” such as
Ng Chun-bong, Lo Wai-luen, and Hua Jia, “feel that to some extent they are still working in a for-
eign idiom” (2004:182).
The above overview of the relationship between spoken and written Chinese, stemming from the
observation that substantial linguistic differences may occur between the two, illustrates that a person’s
first written language is not always derived from the person’s mother tongue. In the following dis-
cussion of Chinese translingual and bilingual authors, I specify that the linguistic switch is from
one medium of writing to another, with the first medium of writing not necessarily the same as
the author’s mother tongue. Along this line, some Chinese writers who are considered bilingual or
multilingual are beyond the scope of this study, such as those who speak Chinese dialects and English
but write exclusively in English, like Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Ruthanne Lum McCunn, and Xu Xi, to
name just a few, and Chinese-speaking authors who have moved to a foreign country at a young age,
like the Eaton sisters and Timothy Mo.
In the literary developments of Chinese-speaking regions, translingualism has significant impacts
on a generation of writers in Taiwan.Their linguistic switch is an outcome of oppressive colonial and
postcolonial language policies.
Switching into Chinese: The “Translingual Generation” of Taiwan

The “translingual generation” of Taiwan was born out of a change of ruling power in the mid-
twentieth century. Taiwan was under Japanese occupation between 1895 and 1945. During this
time, the Japanese language was imposed on Taiwan’s population comprising mostly ethnic Chinese,
who spoke mainly Min and Hakka dialects, and a smaller number of aboriginal natives who spoke
Austronesian languages.
Taiwanese literature began to take shape in both Japanese and Chinese in the 1920s. In the 1930s,
Taiwanese literary outputs increasingly shifted to Japanese in both writing medium and literary
influences. Some Chinese-language writers incorporated more and more Japanese borrowings; others
began to write in Japanese.Whereas Chinese was a language of anti-colonial resistance, works in both
Chinese and Japanese frequently depicted the miseries and struggles of ordinary Taiwanese people.
As Japan moved toward a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, Chinese was banned from public use
in Taiwan. Bilingual creativities came to an end. With Japan’s defeat in the Second World War in
1945, the Kuomintang Party from China under Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership took control of Taiwan.
Mandarin Chinese, spoken by Chiang and his followers, became the new official language. In 1946,
public use of Japanese was prohibited. After 1949, Chinese dialects were banned in public, including
schools, and in the media.
The new language policy means that for the generation of writers in their twenties or early thirties
who learned Japanese at school and wrote only in Japanese, they had to forsake Japanese and learn
Mandarin Chinese from scratch in order to continue writing and publishing. One of them, poet
Lin Hengtai, coined the term “translingual generation” to express the conundrum he and his peers
faced due to this coercive linguistic switch (2014:354). He and a number of writers decided to take
the leap. The experiences of Zhan Bing (1921–2004), Chen Hsiu-hsi (1921–1991), Chen Qianwu
(1922–2012), Lin Hengtai (1924–),Yeh Shih-tao (1925–2008), Hsiao Hsiang-wen (1927–1998), and
Jin Lian (1928–2013) can illustrate the transition. All of these writers were avid readers of Japanese lit-
erature as well as Western and Chinese literatures in Japanese translation in their formative years, and
started to write creatively before turning twenty. After the ban of Japanese writing, they learned to
write in Chinese in different ways. For example, Chen Qianwu, a Hokkien speaker, applied Mandarin
pronunciations to Hokkein sentences in poetry writing and everyday speech (2006). He and Yeh
Shih-tao copied Chinese texts by hand (L. Kuo 2006, Wang 2014:337). Hsiao Hsiang-wen, who
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Chinese Translingual Writing
began publishing Japanese poems when he was twelve, used his knowledge of kanji to read the works
of Mainland Chinese authors Mao Dun, Lao She, and Ba Jin (Hsiao 1995:303). Jin Lian practiced
writing Chinese by translating Japanese and Chinese poems (Jin 2010:34, M. Lee 2019).
Hsiao Hsiang-wen was the first in the translingual generation to publish a short story collection in
Chinese in 1951. Zhan Bing, Chen Hsiu-hsi, Chen Qianwu, and Lin Hengtai experienced intervals
of nine to twelve years from the time they learned Chinese writing to their first Chinese publications.
In particular, Chen Hsiu-hsi, generally considered Taiwan’s first female poet, had written more than
3,000 tanka and other poems in Japanese before learning to write in Chinese when she was thirty-
seven. By the time her first Chinese poems came out in the late 1960s, she was forty-six (H. Chen
2005, Mo 2007:46). These long transitions reflected not only the difficult adaptation processes but
also the silencing effects of the martial law imposed by the Kuomintang since 1947 and the anti-
Communist literary propaganda in the 1950s. Yeh Shih-tao, who wrote his first short stories in
Japanese at age sixteen, had a fourteen-year hiatus since 1951 when he was imprisoned for three years
on a Communism-related charge. He learned to write Chinese in jail and did not resume writing
until 1965 (Tu 2013:xi–xiii, F. Chen 2001).
It was common for the translingual generation to employ Taiwanese as an intermediary between
Japanese and Chinese. According to Zhan Bing, he and many of his peers underwent a three-stage
adaptive process (Chuang and Zhan 1993:27). The first stage involved drafting in Japanese and trans-
lating the draft to Chinese. In the second stage, Japanese ideas were verbalized in Chinese through an
inner translation in the mind. Going over the Japanese ideas in Taiwanese (which included Hokkien
and Hakka to Zhan Bing) reinforced the inner translation. The third stage disengaged Japanese
altogether, using only Chinese to think and write. Chen Qianwu noted the difficulties in the second
stage especially because Japanese, Taiwanese, and written Chinese differed grammatically (Shy et al.
1993:257).
Endeavors to overcome the difficulties in switching languages can generate translingual creativity.
Chen Tsai-Yu observed three of such features in Jin Lian’s early attempts in Chinese poetry: translit-
eration of Japanese onomatopoeias into Chinese, such as rendering katakoto katakoto into kādá kādá
kādá kādá dì to describes the sounds of a train; the direct use of kanji in Chinese, like kagaku-sha (“sci-
entist”); and the adoption of Japanese loanwords borrowed from English or other foreign languages,
as in a line from “Mùqíng” (affection), “yīzhí huó zài chúncuì de passion lǐ” (“always live in a pure
passion”), with “passion” motivated by the Japanese borrowing, passhon (2004:190–193).
A productive aspect of translingual creativity in Taiwan was the instigation of concrete poetry.
Zhan Bing wondered how “people who don’t know Chinese [could] write modern-form Chinese
poems” (1978:60). He made a point of using nouns only, skipping the verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.
that he was unfamiliar with. The result was two concrete poems: “Affair” (title in English), featuring
seven ways of pairing the nouns nán 男 (male) and nǚ 女 (female), and “Zìhuàxiàng” (“Self-Portrait”),
a circular diagram made of the characters xīng 星 (star), huā 花 (flower), and lèi 淚 (tear) (2008:26,
20). Lin Hengtai created fifteen concrete poems within a few months around 1955, the best-known
one being “Fēngjǐng No.2” (“Scenery No.2”) (1998a:127). Lin considered his concrete works not
so much a translingual outcome as a response to the budding Taiwanese Modernist Movement, with
influences of avant-garde aesthetics that Lin studied via modern Japanese literature. Lin treats Chinese
written characters as objects that have their own existences: “the sensory effects of their graphemic
variability such as differences in pen strokes and size are capable of driving a poem” (1998b:65).
While the material features of Chinese characters have been noted since classical times, Lin’s lan-
guage crossing nurtured his visual sensibility and his inexperience with Chinese writing gave him the
boldness to experiment with concrete poetry.
After switching to Chinese, the translingual generation continued to make significant contributions
to Taiwanese literature, especially in advocating nativist writing. Some of them resumed working
in Japanese after the government shifted to suppress the non-Mandarin dialects in the 1960s. For
example, Chen Qianwu,Yeh Shih-tao, and Jin Lian were prolific translators of Japanese and Chinese.
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Hsiao Hsiang-wen promoted tanka writing in Chinese and Zhan Bing adapted the haiku into a ten-
character poetic form. Although Lin Hengtai’s poetic career was interrupted by illnesses, he eventu-
ally switched back to writing in Japanese as an octogenarian.
Switching out of Chinese: Transnational Translingualism by Chinese Writers

Just as the Taiwanese translingual generation’s switch from Japanese to Chinese was situated in pol-
itical developments, writings by Chinese authors in non-Chinese languages are often politically
conditioned. The majority of them write in transnational contexts after relocating to other countries
or returning to China from their sojourns.While each writer has their individual translingual journey
and subjects of concern, by situating their writing experiences in larger political and sociocultural
contexts, several phases of Chinese translingual writings can be discerned. This section surveys these
phrases in broad strokes, without aiming to be exhaustive.
Public Discourse
Chinese translingual writing began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as Chinese
emigrants, sojourning students, and diplomats participated in Western public discourse to address
anti-Chinese sentiments and racial injustice. One of the earliest writings is “The Chinese in
Cuba,” an English-language essay by Wong Chin Foo published in The New York Times in 1874.
Having moved to the U.S. from Shandong province in 1867 when he was twenty, Wong was a
prolific translingual immigrant writer. Between 1874 and 1897, he authored 164 English news-
paper articles on various subjects about China and Chinese immigrants (Seligman 2013:297–303).
Wong was the first to embrace “Chinese American” in both name and spirit: he titled two of
the four Chinese newspapers he founded Chinese American, fought for equal rights for Chinese
immigrants in the U.S. by promoting acculturation, and appealed to the Chinese for making the
U.S. their permanent home (290).
Education was a main reason for the relocation of the pioneering Chinese translingual authors
in the U.S. Wong was brought to the U.S. by his adoptive American missionary family in China for
an American education. Lee Yan Phou (1861–1938) and Yung Wing (1828–1912), both of whom
initiated the use of autobiography in English-language public discourse on China, began their trans-
national journeys to the U.S. as students. Lee’s When I Was a Boy in China (1887) describes Chinese
people’s high moral and cultural standards as Lee sees it in his privileged socio-economic position.
In My Life in China and America (1909), Yung uses his personal experience to expound on his belief
in making China strong through Western education. Both Lee and Yung were affiliated with the
Chinese Education Mission (CEM, 1872–1881), a study-abroad program under the late-Qing “Self-
Strengthening Movement.” Yung coordinated the CEM and Lee was one of the program’s 120
students. Born near Macau,Yung studied in the U.S. from 1846 to 1855 and was the first Chinese to
graduate from an American college (Yale University). Lee left Guangdong for the U.S. in 1873 when
he was twelve. Despite the Chinese government’s recall of all CEM students in 1881 due to the con-
cern of over-Westernization, Lee managed to return to the U.S. and graduated from Yale University
in 1887. Lee took part in more heated debates with two essays, “Why I Am Not a Heathen: A
Rejoinder to Wong Chin Foo” (1887), which contends that the problems of Christians came from
human flaws rather than Christianity, and “The Chinese Must Stay” (1889), which argues against
the Chinese Exclusion Act. Commenting on Lee’s rebuttal to Wong, Scott D. Seligman notices not
only the two writers’ “exquisite, idiomatic English” but also their “radically different and competing
perspectives” on the cultures of their home and adopted countries” (2013:147). Through different
views and approaches in their writings, Wong, Lee, and Yung established themselves as translingual
public intellectuals with the shared concern of giving the West what they believed to be a true pic-
ture of the Chinese people.
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In Australia, translingual voices on Chinese issues were those of successful entrepreneurs. In 1879,
a pamphlet titled The Chinese Question in Australia, 1878–79 was published in Melbourne. It urges the
British colonial government to treat Chinese immigrants fairly and equally as Europeans ones. The
pamphlet was co-edited by Lowe Kong Meng (1831–1888), Cheok Hong Cheong (1853–1928), and
Louis Ah Mouy (1826–1918), all of Cantonese descent. While Cheok, who moved to Melbourne
when he was ten and was receiving missionary training at the time of publication, was identified as
the main author, Lowe and Ah Mouy exerted their influences as prosperous merchants and Chinese
community leaders in Victoria (Macgregor 2004: 48). Yett So War Way Lee (c.1853–1909), who
emigrated from Guangdong province to Australia around 1874, played a similar role in Adelaide. He
published six newspaper articles protesting the restrictions that blocked Chinese immigrants from
traveling freely between the Australian colonies, as well as expounding on Australia-China relation-
ship. The articles were collected in The Chinese Question from a Chinaman’s Point of View (1907).
In France, the diplomat Chen Jitong (1851–1907) was the first Chinese Francophone writer. He
was considered “at the time in the West the most famous living Chinese author” (C.Yeh 1997:436).
Born in Fujian, Chen learned French at the Fuzhou Navy Yard, a navigation and engineering training
institute taught mostly by French personnel. 1n 1877, Chen accompanied a CEM cohort to France
as a secretary. With his erudition in Chinese and Western literatures, charismatic appearance, and flu-
ency in French, Chen gained popularity among the Parisian elite (Ren 2016:92). He wrote seven
books in French. With Le roman de l’homme jaune: Mœurs Chinoises (1890), Chen opened the doors to
a Chinese world in the novel form, albeit “presenting a China preconditioned by a European point
of view” (C.Yeh 1997:443).The first and last of Chen’s books, Les Chinois peints par eux-mêmes (1884)
and Les Parisiens peints par un Chinois (1891), demonstrate his position as a cross-cultural representative
between Chinese and French cultures. Similar stances were taken by two other Chinese diplomats
writing in English: Wu Tingfang (1842–1922) in Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (1914)
and Min-chʻien Tuk Zung Tyau (1888–1970) in London through Chinese Eyes (1920).
The forerunners of Chinese translingual writing discussed above wrote predominantly for host-
country audiences. An early translingual initiative that involved a bilingual readership was The China
Critic, one of the English-language periodicals published in Shanghai by bilingual intellectuals.
A weekly circulating between 1928 and 1945 in China and overseas, The China Critic focused on
current events and contained mostly original writings in English. Its major readership comprised
not only expatriates in China but also a growing population of Chinese bilinguals formed by local
intellectuals and college students (“What We Believe”). Long-serving editorial board members,
including Ma Yinchu, Pan Guangdan, Gui Zhongshu, and Zhang Xinhai, were trained in the human-
ities or social sciences in the U.S. and were well-versed in Chinese culture (Shen 2009:33). English
as a medium of international communication was crucial to The China Critic’s aim of giving “a fair
presentation of all issues arising between China and the other Powers,” and of being “just to all, ready
to defend China’s rights and equally ready to admit her shortcomings” (“Foreword”). By functioning
as a platform for translingual public discourse, The China Critic offered its bilingual writers and readers
a channel for cosmopolitan perspectives.
Creative Writing
In the late 1920s and 1930s, Hsiung Shih-I (1902–1991), Chiang Yee (1903–1977), H.T. Tsiang
(1899–1971), and Lin Yutang (1895–1976) were driven abroad by different circumstances in the
Republic of China and began writing translingually. In particular, Hsiung, Chiang, and Lin were
committed to rectifying Western understandings of China and its people like the early translingual
authors. Stronger literary and artistic emphases distinguish their works from the pioneers’.
Hsiung Shi-I is best known for his English play Lady Precious Stream (1934) and its stage success
from West End to Broadway. Born in Jiangxi province, he learned English in China and translated
English literary works into Chinese, including several plays by George Bernard Shaw. Hsiung went
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to England in 1932 and studied at University College London. Encouraged by a professor to trans-
late Chinese drama, Hsiung adapted the Peking opera Wang Baochun into Lady Precious Stream, which
celebrates a young woman’s devotion to her husband after his forced conscription. Hsiung uses this
plot as well as that of The Bridge of Heaven (1943), a novel about a revolutionary in late Qing, to break
away from the stereotypes of Chinese people common in the West (D.Yeh 2014:35).
Chiang Yee, who was Hsiung’s flatmate in London, went through a linguistic journey from
knowing “only five English words upon arriving” in England to writing the popular travel-
ogue series The Silent Traveler, in addition to publishing books on Chinese painting and callig-
raphy (Zheng 2010:49). Chiang went to Britain in 1933 to study its political system after being
disillusioned by bureaucracy and corruption as a government official in China. He worked hard to
study English and was admitted to the London School of Economics at the University of London.
The first of his travelogue series, The Silent Traveler: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland (1937), was written
after his first trip to the Lake District. A key attraction of the book is thirteen plates of landscape
paintings of the region in traditional Chinese style. Through painting English landscapes with
Chinese brush and ink, Chiang aims to depict a universal expressiveness of Chinese art, with the
belief that genuine cross-cultural understanding is based on commonality rather than difference
(Zheng 2010:73).1
H.T. Tsiang, who worked as an aide in the Republic of China and fled to the U.S. in 1926 after
the death of Sun Yat-sen, self-published one of the earliest poetry collections written in English by
a Chinese poet, Poems of the Chinese Revolution (1929). Tsiang’s poems scream out the hardships of
working-class Chinese in the U.S. as well as those oppressed by military factions in China. Tsiang
wrote three novels in the 1930s, the last of which, And China Has Hands (1937), is considered the first
novel about Chinatown by a Chinese author (Hsu 2016).
A key contributor to The China Critic, Lin Yutang’s English column “The Little Critic” in the peri-
odical was instrumental in establishing him as a leading national intellectual in China (Qian 2017:95).
With a prolific and diverse corpus, Lin is arguably the most accomplished Chinese-English bilingual
author to date. His English writings include mostly non-fiction works about Chinese culture, people,
and philosophy, as well as several novels and a biography. Born to a Chinese Christian family in Fujian
province, Lin learned English in a missionary education. He completed a Ph.D. in Linguistics at the
University of Leipzig in Germany and returned to China in 1923 to be an academic. Lin met Pearl
S. Buck and, through Buck, the publisher Richard Walsh when they visited Shanghai in 1933 and
1934, respectively.2 They brought him to the doors of American readers and to the U.S., where he
moved to in 1936 due to increasing political attacks by the Chinese Communists. Lin stayed in the
U.S. for most of the next thirty years. His first book-length work in English, My Country and My
People (1935), “for years was regarded as a standard text on China” (“Lin Yutang”). The book explains
various aspects of Chinese lives and culture to Western readers by appealing to universal principles.
For example, in “The Chinese Mind,” Lin posits that whereas both Chinese and Western philosophy
conceive humans as reasoning beings, Chinese philosophy values “the spirit of reasonableness” that
incorporates human nature into reasoning (1935:85–86). My Country and My People built Lin’s repu-
tation as “the ‘Interpreter of the East to the West’ ” (Sample 2015:185), a role that he assumed in
almost all of his English works.
While Chen Jitong is the first Chinese translingual author who adapts stories from Chinese clas-
sical tales, Lin Yutang’s bestselling Moment in Peking (1939), which relates the fortunes of three upper-
class Chinese families from the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) to the beginning of Japan’s invasion of
China in the 1930s, marks the dawn of original China fiction in non-Chinese languages. Since the
1940s, fiction and autobiographies gradually became the major forms of Chinese translingual works
written for general audiences. Four translingual authors published their first English-language novels
against the backdrop of Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s: Helena Kuo (1911–1999),
a Macau-born bilingual journalist; Han Suyin (1917–2012), a Eurasian who grew up in Beijing, and
Adet Lin (1923–1971) and Tai-yi Lin (1926–2003), two of Lin Yutang’s three daughters who, despite
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having left China for the U.S. at an early age, continued to receive Chinese tutoring from their father.
In their first novels, the four writers were eager to express their patriotism for China and sympathy
for Chinese people’s sufferings during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Han’s semi-autobiographical
Destination Chungking (1942) and Adet’s Flame from the Rock (1943) depict young people’s love while
incorporating social critique. Tai-yi’s War Tide (1943), published when the author was only seven-
teen, and Kuo’s Westward to Chungking (1944) exalt human resilience through the tales of war-fleeing
families.3
In the decades that follow, LinYutang, Lin Tai-yi, and Han Suyin continued to publish translingually.
Hazel Lin (1913–1986), Eileen Chang (1920–1995), and C.Y. Lee (1917–2018), who all wrote in
English, came to the translingual scenes midcentury. Hazel Lin’s career as a physician informed her
fiction writing. Eileen Chang was a renowned bilingual writer in Shanghai in the 1940s. Due to pol-
itical pressure, she left for Hong Kong and wrote her first two English novels, The Rice-Sprout Song
(1955) and Naked Earth (1956), with sponsorships from an anti-Communist initiative of the U.S.
Information Services (D. Wang 1998: vii). Chang continued to write novels in English after moving
to the U.S. in 1955 but had a hard time finding a publisher. C.Y. Lee emigrated to the U.S. after
the Second Sino-Japanese War. Chinese immigrant experiences play a significant role in his prolific
translingual career. His first two novels, The Flower Drum Song (1957) and Lover’s Point (1958), depict
immigrant lives from two perspectives: the former shows the collision, resistance, and adaptation
to life in San Francisco Chinatown in the Wang family; the latter focuses on a lone immigrant in
Monterey and his long-distance connection with his family in China.
Besides fiction, autobiographical writing by Chinese translingual authors developed steadily, so
much so that it has become a defining feature of Chinese translingualism. Chinese authors who
published autobiographies in the 1940s and 1950s include the Lin sisters, Helena Kuo, whose I’ve
Come a Long Way (1942) was the first book-length autobiography by a Chinese woman published
in the U.S. (D. Yeh 2014: 159), John Ching Hsiung Wu, and Dymia Hsiung, wife of Hsiung Shih-
I, whose Flowering Exile: An Autobiographical Excursion (1952) was the first book published by a
Chinese woman in Britain (D.Yeh 2014:3). Chow Chung-cheng, the first Chinese woman enrolled
at Sciences Po in the late 1920s, wrote Kleine Sampan (1960) and other autobiographical novels
in German. Han Suyin authored eight autobiographical volumes since 1965, seven in English and
one in French, in addition to novels and monographs. Other Chinese writers who wrote more
than one autobiography in English since the late 1990s include Adeline Yen Mah, Chen Da, Chang
Jung, and Anchee Min.
An even stronger presence of autobiographies can be seen in the next phase of distinct
developments in Chinese transnational translingualism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the years
after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), international travel out of China slowly resumed. This
phase marks the proliferation of works about the Cultural Revolution, most of which are memoirs.
Following the success of Cheng Nien’s Life and Death in Shanghai (1987) and Jung Chang’s Wild
Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), a legion of writers published single-authored translingual
memoirs, including Lo Fulang, Niu Niu, Luo Zi-ping, Zhai Zhenhua, Anchee Min, Wu Ningkun,
Rae Yang, Jiang Ji-li, Ye Ting-Xing, Zhu Xiaodi, Da Chen, Chao Lien, Nanchu, Fan Shen, Sheldon
Lou,Yu Chun, Lu Shu Jiang, Li Moying, Ping Jian, Chao Wei Yang, Shan Weijian, and others. Cultural
Revolution memoirs are probably the most popular sub-genre of Chinese translingual writing in the
West.4 Gianni Criveller observes several features of the memoirists: they are predominantly female,
from urban cities, college educated, and have left China and developed professional careers in their
adoptive countries by the time of the writing (1998:6). English is the translingual medium for almost
all of the memoirs with occasional exceptions, such as Pas de larmes pour Mao in French (Niu 1989).
The Cultural Revolution memoirs weave political and social critiques into life narratives that detail
private moments of sufferings caused by political persecution. For the memoirists who had been Red
Guards, i.e. youths endorsed by the Mao government to humiliate and brutally attack those categorized
as enemies of the state, their narratives are a space for both confession and self-confrontation. Some
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examples are Morning Breeze: A True Story of China’s Cultural Revolution (F. Lo 1989), Red Flower of
China (Zhai 1992), Spider Eaters (Yang 1997), and Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard (F. Shen 2004).
In addition to memoirs, He Dong and Dai Sijie, both of whom moved out of China in the mid-
1980s, wrote fiction about the Cultural Revolution. Writing in Norwegian, He Dong authored
the short story collection Spør solen (1995). Dai Sijie wrote Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (2000)
in French as well as directing the film adaptation in Chinese (2005). Ying Chen, the most pro-
lific Chinese Francophone writer in Canada, moved to Montreal to study creative writing in 1989
before the Tiananmen Square Protests took place. Although her works do not deal with the Cultural
Revolution directly, she considers writing in French “an act of rebellion against the formal education
she received in China during the Cultural Revolution” (Rodger 2016:1).
Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests, many exiles and self-exiles joined the Chinese
diaspora. Gao Xingjian, who had been living in France and writing in Chinese, renounced his Chinese
Communist Party membership after the protests and published his first French-language play, Au bord
de la vie, in 1993. Gao received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000. Ha Jin, whose early fiction
about Communist China received prestigious awards, and Qiu Xiaolong, whose Inspector Chan
detective series has reached eleven volumes, were studying in the U.S. during the political upheavals.
They decided to stay there and began writing in English. Shan Sa was seventeen when she moved
to France in 1990 and debuted as a French novelist in 1997. Diane Wei Liang, Chai Ling, and Anna
Wang published English-language memoirs about the Tiananmen Square Protests. C.Y. Lee, Annie
Wang, Ouyang Yu, Lisa Zhang Wharton, and Yang Huang authored novels against the backdrop of
the protests in English.
In the three decades after 1989, increased global mobility by Chinese nationals created more
opportunities for translingual writing, especially by those who pursued higher education overseas.
Three authors of this background have made significant achievements in their host countries: Ouyang
Yu in Australia and Guo Xiaolu in the U.K., who write in both Chinese and English, and Yiyun Li in
the U.S., who writes in English. Other translingual authors of this period include Fan Wu, Lijia Zhang,
Jie Li, and millennial writers Liuyu Ivy Chen, Karoline Kao, and Na Zhong, who all write in English.
Poetry by Chinese translingual writers has developed a smaller corpus in comparison to prose. In
transnational contexts, a number of Chinese translingual authors write both poetry and prose. Those
who began with poetry writing are François Cheng, whose dialogic poetics since the 1970s blends
Chinese aesthetics into Francophone poems; U.S.-based Alex Kuo, whose poems traverse cultures
and places; Ha Ji, who probes into the exile’s mind in his American poems; Ouyang Yu, known for his
bold postcolonial critiques of Australia and the academia, and Canada-based Lien Chao, who creates
bilingual poems. Gao Xingjian, Qiu Xiaolong, and Shan Sha also write prose and poetry. In addition,
Hong Kong, a former British colony, is a base for Chinese Anglophone poets such as Louise Ho,
Agnes Lam, Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, and Nicholas Wong.
Translingual Implications
Autobiographical Self
The rich output of Chinese translingual autobiographies demonstrates an effect of translingualism
in life writing: not only does the translingual medium bring the Chinese memoirs to readers of
other cultures, but it also adds new dimensions to the autobiographical self. Sidonie Smith and
Julia Watson’s four-part model of the autobiographical self—the authorial “I,” the narrating “I,” the
narrated “I,” and the ideological “I”—is useful for illustrating this point (2010:72).
The authorial “I” is “the flesh-and-blood person located in a particular time and place” (72). This
“ ‘real’ or historical ‘I’ ” is usually “unknown or unknowable by readers,” especially those from different
time-spaces (72). Nevertheless, the authorial “I” does have an obvious role in translingual autobiog-
raphies, i.e. to make the decision of switching languages. In addition, several Chinese translingual
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authors have talked about how the encouragement of a friend speaking their adoptive language
has motivated them to write. For Cheng Nien, it was Peggy Durdin, “a retired journalist and a dear
friend of forty-five years,” who first suggested the project of a memoir (1987:538). Han Suyin wrote
Destination Chungking, after Marian Manly, the American missionary doctor with whom Han worked
in Chengdu during the Second Sino-Japanese War, had read Han’s autobiographical sketches and
eagerly encouraged her to write a book (1953:vii–viii). Rae Yang states that she would not have
written Spider Eaters had she not met and shared her stories with Tom Tymozcko, her host when she
was a graduate student in the United States (2013:xii). Her authorial “I” experiences a perspective
change consequently: “My memory of the Cultural Revolution changed as soon as Tom and I started
talking. … Simple conclusions I had accepted became questionable” (xii). Such cross-cultural dia-
logic encounters, together with the translingual decision encompassing lived experiences of second-
language acquisition, evoke the presence of the authorial “I” that is otherwise less visible.
The narrating “I” is “a persona of the historical person” who tells the story (Smith and Watson
2010:72). In translingual life writings by Chinese authors, the narrating “I” actualizes the linguistic
switch and in doing so, mediates between a translingual present and a Chinese past. The translingual
narrating “I” also mediates between the reader and the characters populating his/her life story, going
back and forth between storytelling and cultural translation.
The narrated “I” is the protagonist,“the version of the self that the narrating ‘I’ chooses to constitute
through recollection” (Smith and Watson 2010:73). This aspect of the translingual autobiographical
self differs the most from the monolingual one: the narrated “I” is reconstructed in another language.
Moreover, the translingual medium adds a new dimension to the reflective distance between the
narrating “I” and the narrated “I.” A common strategy of the Chinese translingual autobiographers
(as well as fiction writers) is the incorporation of Chinese proverbs and idiomatic expressions into
their narratives. The strategy functions differently for the narrating “I” and the narrated “I.” Proverbs
and idioms is an effective tool for constructing the identities of the narrated “I” and other characters.
For example, in Spider Eaters Rae Yang describes herself when she was little: “Everybody said I was a
tomboy. ‘Play crazy, run wild.’ ‘No heart, no lungs.’ (Insensitive and thoughtless.)” (1997:70). On the
narrative level, proverbs and culture-specific expressions can be used to interpolate the narrating “I’s”
commentary in the reminiscences. In recounting a series of mishaps in her nanny’s family,Yang uses a
Chinese expression to frame the storytelling: “Then as the saying goes, ‘Good luck does not come by
twos. Misfortunes never travel alone’ ” (78). Although proverbial expressions may be seen as enhancing
cultural authenticity in translingual writing, the constructedness they lend is noticeable in both the
narrating “I” and narrated “I.”
The last component of the autobiographical self, the ideological “I,” refers to “the concept of
personhood culturally available to the narrator” (Smith and Watson 2010:76). Such a personhood
comprises a set of identities such as “gender, ethnicity, generation, family, sexuality, religion, among
others” (77). In translingual life writings, encountering a different culture often creates discontinu-
ities in the ideological “I.” In the Cultural Revolution translingual memoirs, the ideological “I”
encompasses the identity crises and disillusionment experienced by the memoirists. For example, in
Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard (2004), sitting on a plane that takes him out of China to the U.S.,
Fan Shen writes, “I had finally done it; I had beaten the Great Leader and I did not have to pretend
to be a revolutionary anymore” (276–279). It is worth noting that such a change in ideological values
is within the expectations of Western audiences who take the Cultural Revolution memoirs as anti-
Communist and the memoirists as agreeing with their own ideological stances and interests (Zarrow
1999:167). Seen in this light, the cultural content is as much Western as Chinese.
Cultural Knowledge
Translingual writings by Chinese authors have a long history of functioning as transmitting Chinese
cultural knowledge, whether intended by the writer or not. For instance, Cultural Revolution
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translingual memoirs “have most shaped the cosmopolitan understandings of the Cultural
Revolution” (Zarrow 1999:166). From the early public discourse defending China’s image and the
rights of Chinese immigrants to the fiction and autobiographical works about lives in China, Chinese
translingualism commonly deals with a Chinese content in a non-Chinese language. The Chinese
content is often constructed with cultural knowledge taken to be true by both writer and reader, and
the writer’s right to transfer such cultural knowledge is presumed on both sending and receiving ends.
However, in treating cultural knowledge as a stable, transmittable source of content, the translingual
author could be trapped in an insider-outsider double bind.
As self-appointed spokespersons of China and Chinese people, the early Chinese translingual
authors who partook in transnational public discourse firmly upheld the strategy of transmitting cul-
tural knowledge. They positioned themselves as public intellectuals on the basis of their knowledge
and understanding of Chinese emigrants and the Chinese way of life.To these and other writers who
assume the role of mediator between China and the world, their translingual acts are performatives
that make the role happen. This is because non-Chinese readers readily take the writer’s Chinese
point of view as representative of Chinese culture. If the writing was done in Chinese, the writer’s
perspective would be met by those of the Chinese readers, to whose scrutiny the cultural content
would be subject. In this sense, translingual writing triggers a change in the signification of the
writer’s perspective: by writing in a nonnative language, the translingual writer and her writing are
re-represented by the realities produced in that language for its speakers.
Chinese readers, however, are less concerned about the realities of the translingual medium than
their own. Harsh criticisms from Chinese bilingual critics and readers on translingual works or the
Chinese translations of these works are not infrequent.The accusations are of two broad types: appro-
priating things Chinese for the West, and appropriating the Chinese idiom through direct transla-
tion to impress the West. Shan Sha and Ha Jin, for instance, have succumbed to these accusations.
Shuangyi Li finds Shan Sha “recycling … Chinese cultural clichés” in her Francophone novels set in
China, albeit with “the effect of a striking aesthetic étrangeté” (2018:118, 121). Taiwanese writer Zhu
Tianwen calls Ha Jin’s English translations of Chinese expressions “not worth a penny” (2002).5 Hong
Kong critic Kwai-Cheung Lo detects “a fake Chinese accent” from the Chinese linguistic features
in Ha Jin’s writing (2005:66). The problem, it seems to me, is that by treating cultural knowledge as
a stable source of notions and ideas translatable and transmittable to foreign audiences, the Chinese
translingual writer positions herself as both insider and outsider: insider for the outsiders (i.e. host-
language readers); outsider for the insiders (home-language readers).
The insider-outsider dilemma can be illustrated by Chinatown Inside Out (1936), one of the first
translingual monographs on Chinatown communities. Writing under the pen name Leong Gor Yan,
Chu Yiu Kui (1906–?) emigrated from China to the U.S. in 1927 and was a Chinese newspaper
editor in New York. Targeting mainstream Americans, Chu’s purpose was to reveal the real sources of
Chinatown problems. For example, he blames the Chinese immigrants for their disregard of educa-
tion that in turn worsened Chinatown vices such as gambling. When asked “who he thought could
write for Americans about the Chinese in America,” Chu said, “Leong Gor Yan,” meaning “two
people” in Cantonese (Leong 1936:15). “Leong Gor Yan” could refer to the double identity Chu
assumes: the insider who leads Americans to mysterious Chinatown and the outsider who lashes
out at the stakeholders of Chinatown in the Americans’ language. The insider-outsider-in-one is
symptomatic of the translingual authorial position as a cultural broker whose existence relies on the
dealing of cultural knowledge.
Undoubtedly, cultural knowledge provides a necessary footing for translingual authors who want
to write about their home country. But taking the role of a cultural broker who transmits presum-
ably stable, unquestioned cultural knowledge may get the writer trapped instead of moving in and
out. This can be illustrated by Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family (1948), which depicts how the Fongs,
an immigrant family from Canton, take roots in mid-1930s New York Chinatown and how their
different attitudes toward Chinese values and traditions shape their American lives. As novelist, Lin
296
maintains his role as an interpreter of China for the West. According to Richard Jean So, the novel
was the brainchild of Richard Walsh in an attempt to expand the China books market (2010:43–44).
The effects of cultural knowledge transmission in this project are two-fold. First, Lin knew little about
Chinatown and Chinese Americans when Walsh commissioned him the novel (41). Lin was subject
to Walsh’s high-handed intervention in the first half of the project but eventually took control as he
became more familiar with the research of Chinese immigrants (45–46, 53).
Second, Chinatown Family displays a mismatch in the cultural knowledge that the author possesses
and the cultural specifics required by the story. Like most Chinatown residents during the time of the
story, the Fongs’ native language is Cantonese, which Lin did not speak. As with many translingual
texts, Chinatown Family uses code mixing to express culture-specific terms. Instead of rendering
the code mixing entirely in Cantonese, Lin resorts to a combination of Cantonese and Mandarin,
which he spoke alongside his native Hokkien. In Lin’s code mixing, Mandarin is used when the
terms are known commonly to Chinese people whereas Cantonese is reserved for kinship terms
and dialogues. The Cantonese transcriptions are less accurate than the Mandarin ones. Moreover, the
tension between Cantonese and Mandarin is heightened through the character Elsie Tsai, a new-
comer whose hometown is Fujian like Lin’s and who teaches Mandarin Chinese in Chinatown.
When she first meets Tom Fong Jr., the protagonist whom she will marry, Tom remarks that she
“speak[s]‌the language of Tongshan [China] like a foreigner” (Lin 1948:130). To Tom, Cantonese is
the language of Tongshan, a term used commonly by Cantonese immigrants. But to Elsie, the “sons of
Tong ought to speak the Tongshan language properly” and Tom “ought to learn to speak [M]andarin”
(131). The linguistic hierarchy created in this dialogue aligns not so much with the linguistic realities
of Chinatown as with the cultural knowledge Lin was able to broker.
There are, on the other hand, instances of Chinese translingual writing that transform or trans-
gress cultural knowledge. Using cultural knowledge as a point of departure or a process rather than
an end, a translingual writer can produce transcultural meaning in the liminality of language crossing.
For instance, instead of directly translating Chinese idiomatic expressions, Yiyun Li adapts them as
creative allusions that fit the flow of the English-language narrative and, for the bilingual reader,
produce suggestive nuances. Li’s Where Reasons End, in which a mother converses with her recently-
deceased son, opens with Nikolai calling his mother “Mother dear” (2019:1). Although their Chinese
ethnicity is not revealed until later, “mother dear” suggests mǔqīn, a formal Chinese term literally
meaning “mother dear” but conventionally translated as ‘mother.’ The Chinese referential scope is
blurred when the mother recalls calling her own mother “Mamita” (1). However, Nikolai’s occasional
switches from “Mommy” to “Mother dear” throughout the novel foregrounds an endearment that
might have been lost in the formal, idiomatic mǔqīn. In Lydia H. Liu’s words, “Mother dear” “help[s]‌
open up, rather than assume, the hypothetical equivalence of meanings between languages” (1995:19).
Another way of transforming cultural knowledge is to integrate Chinese cultural content into char-
acterization, plot design, or narrative frame. In the Inspector Chen series, Qiu Xiaolong incorporates
classical and modern Chinese poetry into the narrative to provide clues for crime investigation and
to characterize Inspector Chen Chao, an amateur poet. A long poem that Chen composes in Don’t
Cry, Tai Lake (2012:93, 180, 195, 258) becomes such a clue in Hold Your Breath, China (2019:41, 79,
86, 108, 113, 114, 137–8, 199). On the unexpected combination of crime fiction and poetry, Jonathan
Stalling observes that Qiu has “found a way to increase the readership of poetry by embedding it in
a popular form” (Stalling and Qiu 2017:96).
A transgressive treatment of cultural knowledge takes place in a series of seven novels by Ying
Chen from Immobile (1998) to La Rive est loin (2013), where she breaks the confines of origin
and destination. In her words, the series is “a fictional ensemble ... having as a central character a
woman of ambiguous nature who relates frameless vicissitudes of time and space” through various
reincarnations, one of which as a cat (translated by Rodgers 2016:4). In addition, Guo Xiaolu’s A
Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) enacts confrontations between home and host
languages. The protagonist, Zhuang Xiao Qiao, is a Chinese study-abroad student newly arriving in
297
Elaine Wong
Britain. Her mostly Chinglish first-person narrative defies the dictionary-style definition of the word
that frames each chapter. As the story unfolds, Zhuang herself becomes an interlingual process of
discovering the meaning of love beyond dictionary definitions.
Translingualism operates through a multitude of crossings contingent on historical and linguistic
specificities.The developments of Chinese translingual writing inform a continued broadening of the
understandings, practices, and representations of switching languages. Each step of the translingual
journey leads the writer not so much to a destination as to an emergence of linguistic and cultural
possibilities unique to the language crossing. From one language to another, to borrow Ying Chen’s
words again, “what matters is to continue walking rather than to arrive” (translated by Rodgers
2016:5).
Notes
1 On Chiang’s concern about his English fluency and the assistance Chiang obtained in writing his first book,
see Zheng (2010:60–62).
2 On Lin’s first meetings with Buck and Walsh, see Qian (2017:172–174).
3 See Ling (2009:61–81) for a detailed discussion of the four writers’ wartime novels.
4 Zarrow (1999:167–69) discusses why Cultural Revolution memoirs are popular in the West.
5 For a background of Zhu’s attack, see Tsu (2010:102–103).
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23
IN HINDI AND URDU
Walter N. Hakala
Introduction: The Status of Hindi and Urdu in Present-Day India

and Pakistan
Nearly a quarter of the world’s population resides in South Asia, variously defined to include
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (the region also
includes Myanmar and the Tibet Autonomous Region in some formulations). Its two largest nation-
states, India and Pakistan, despite being nuclear-armed military rivals, nevertheless share a linguistic
legacy that has seen both retain English for official purposes up to the present. This use of the
colonizer’s language is not without controversy. Article 343 of the Constitution of India states, “The
official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanāgarī script,” while also permitting English,
“for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution [effective 1950] … [to]
continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union” (“The Constitution of India”).
Acquiescing to the infeasibility of implementing Hindi as the official language across the entire
country, the government passed in 1963 the Official Languages Act, which permitted the continued
use of English “in addition to Hindi” for all official purposes (Forrester 22; Gusain 46). Hindi then
was the most widely spoken language in this diverse nation, but it was a minority language known
mostly in the North. Resistance to Hindi (an Indo-Aryan language related to Bangla, Gujarati,
Kashmīrī, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhī, etc.) was greatest in the South among speakers of the Dravidian
languages such as Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. Despite assurances from Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru and his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri for the continued use of English for official
purposes, the Dravida Munetra Kazhagam (Dravidian Progressive Federation) in January 1965 (i.e.,
fifteen years after the Constitution of India went into effect) initiated mass action in the former
Madras State against the “Hindi imperialism” of the central Congress government. Several widely
publicized suicides by anti-Hindi activists were followed by general strikes, which were violently
repressed by the police. Official figures indicate that 66 died during the three-week agitation, but
unofficial estimates are substantially greater (Forrester 25).
The so-called “Three Language Formula” was devised as a way to appease both the anti-and
pro-Hindi camps (Gusain 47). It stipulates that students first study the official language of the state
in which they reside (the 8th Schedule of the Indian Constitution currently designates 22 official
languages). The second language should be English or another language spoken by a significant
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-23 301

Walter N. Hakala
minority within the school. The choice of the third language, as the linguistic anthropologist Chaise
LaDousa explains, “depends on the axis of northern (Indo-Aryan) and southern (Dravidian) language
difference”:
For students from the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, or Tamil Nadu, speakers
of Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, or Tamil, respectively, Hindi or some other official state lan-
guage of the north should be required. For students from one of the northern states, outside
of the Dravidian language area, one of the four aforementioned languages should be required.
(605)
As may well be imagined, there have been formidable challenges to the implementation of such a
complex system across diverse and frequently recalcitrant populations with deeply held ethnolin-
guistic sentiments; ground realities have rarely matched the formula’s ideals. Significantly, the Official
Languages (Amended) Act of 1967 has ensured that English will be retained indefinitely along with
Hindi as an official language of the Union (Gusain 47).
The current Constitution of Pakistan (ratified on August 14, 1973) declares Urdu to be the
“National language of Pakistan” and specifies that “arrangements shall be made for its being used
for official and other purposes within fifteen years from the commencing day.” It adds the proviso,
however, that the “English language may be used for official purposes until arrangements are made
for its replacement by Urdu” (“The Constitution of Pakistan”). It is no coincidence that a year and
half before its ratification, Bangladesh had sought and won its independence in a bloody civil war
that was framed in part around a Bangla linguistic nationalist movement opposed to the deeply
unpopular imposition of Urdu as official language in what had been the Pakistan’s eastern provincial
wing. Following independence from Britain in 1947, Bangla speakers constituted some 55% of the
total population of Pakistan while Urdu was the first language of only 3%—a population consisting
primarily of émigrés (muhājirs) from India concentrated in Karachi in Sindh (Islam 142). In light of
these figures, the statement of Muḥammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and its first Governor
General, at a large gathering in Dhaka on March 21, 1948, gives some sense of the hubris of Pakistan’s
Urdu-speaking elite:
Let me make it very clear to you that the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu
and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan.
Without one state language, no nation can remain tied up solidly together and function.
Look at the history of other countries. Therefore, so far as the state language is concerned,
Pakistan’s shall be Urdu.
(quoted in Islam 144)
Shortly after the conclusion of the 1971 war, the Sindh Provincial Assembly (in West Pakistan)
was emboldened to pass a bill declaring Sindhī to be its official language. A week of violent
clashes between the Urdu-speaking Muhājir minority and Sindhī communities would result in
the loss of at least 22 lives in Karachi (Abbasi; Kennedy cites 55 lives lost, see 944). The Sindhis’
complaints of “Punjabi-Muhājir imperialism” found justification in figures showing the Urdu-
speaking Muhājirs (comprising about 8% of the total population of the remaining provinces of
Pakistan sans Bangladesh) to be vastly overrepresented in the upper levels of the civil bureaucracy,
military, and business (Kennedy 942–43).
In a ruling issued in September 2017 in response to several petitions demanding that the gov-
ernment fulfill its long-deferred promises regarding the implementation of Urdu as the sole national
language of Pakistan, the Supreme Court declared, “In the governance of the federation and the
provinces there is hardly any necessity for the use of the colonial language which cannot be under-
stood by the public at large” (Haidar). Despite a proliferation of official Government of Pakistan
302
Literary Translingualism in Hindi and Urdu
agencies intended to facilitate the adoption of Urdu as the national language—including the National
Language Authority (established in 1979 and renamed National Language Promotion Department
in 2012), Markazi Urdu Board (established in 1962 and subsequently renamed Urdu Science Board),
and Pakistan Academy of Letters (established in 1976), not to mention private organizations like
the Anjuman Taraqqī-i Urdū—English has for nearly 75 years remained firmly entrenched as a lan-
guage of administration, inter-ethnic link language, and medium of education for the upwardly
mobile (Raj).
The challenge faced by both postcolonial governments in imposing a single national or official lan-
guage uniformly within their political boundaries reflects a failure to recognize the complementary
functions that different languages have traditionally served in South Asian societies. The monolingual
ideal implied by a single “national language” demands that the demonstration of social capital once
possible through the production and appreciation of literature written in a separate prestige language
be replaced by new forms of linguistic distinction within a single nationalized language. The persist-
ence in South Asia of multilingualism in spoken communication and ubiquity of translingualism in
literary production belies the ideals of monolingual nationalism. It is thus ironic that the intended
national languages of the partitioned post-Independence India and Pakistan—Hindi and Urdu—
cannot on the basis of linguistic evidence properly be considered distinct and separate languages.
As will be discussed in greater detail below, both are built upon a common morphosyntactic (i.e.,
grammatical) foundation that derives from the spoken language of the Delhi region in present-day
northern India. They are differentiated primarily in their source of technical vocabulary (Sanskrit for
Hindi; Persian and Arabic for Urdu) and preferred writing systems (i.e., script). As literary mediums,
however, they have, on occasion, diverged insofar as they draw on different cosmopolitan traditions
and models. More recent reappraisals, however, emphasize the so-called gaṅgā-jamnī tahzīb, or com-
posite culture—a reference to the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers—cultivated through
the interactions of Hindus, Muslims, and other socio-religious communities in the subcontinent over
more than a millennium.
Literary translingualism in South Asia remains very much the norm rather than the excep-
tion. South Asian authors have often—even typically—preferred languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic,
Persian, and now English over their mother tongues. Steven Kellman usefully calls authors who write
in a single language other than their native tongue monolingual translinguals: “A taxonomy of literary
translingualism would begin by differentiating between authors who have written important works
in more than one language, the ambilinguals, and those who have written in only a single language but
one other than their native one, the monolingual translinguals” (The Translingual Imagination 12). Those
who did venture into the vernacular (almost always in addition to their primary literary production
in a cosmopolitan language of prestige—Kellman’s ambilinguals) often felt the need to apologize for
the impropriety of writing in the spoken tongue. The most celebrated poet of Urdu, Asadullāh Ḳhān
‘Ġhālib’ (1797–1869), declared (in Persian),
fārsi bīn tā bĕhbīnī naqsh-hā-ye rang rang

bĕguzar az majmūʿ-i urdū kĕh be-rang-i man ast
Go look at my Persian, so that you may find
Paintings of many hues and colors;
Pass over my Urdu collection, for it’s only
An initial drawing, devoid of color.
(Translated by Faruqi, “Unprivileged Power” 30)
Writing in a similar vein in Persian the following century, Muḥammad ‘Iqbāl’ (1877–1938), a Kashmīrī
raised in Punjab who is celebrated as the spiritual founder of Pakistan, considered “Hindi” (that is to
say, Urdu) to be an inferior medium for literary expression:
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Walter N. Hakala
garćĕh hindī dar ʿużūbat shakar ast

t̤arz-i guftār darī sherīn-tar ast
Though Hindi is, in sweetness, sugar,
The Darī [Persian] style of speech is sweeter
(Translation adapted from Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture 24; original text
Asrār-i ḳhudī, 1915)
Even in the case of the so-called vernaculars, the language employed in literary production often
differs so substantially from spoken forms as to serve only a limited function as a vehicle of oral com-
munication (Schiffman 362–363). This situation in northern India (and, with some modification, in
Pakistan) is neatly summarized by Gumperz:
At the local level there are the village dialects, which vary from village to village. In the
small market centers, a form of speech is current which avoids many of the divergent local
features and is relatively uniform over a large area; this is the regional dialect.The third form,
Standard Hindi [or Urdu in Pakistan], is used most widely in larger cities such as Delhi,
Agra, and Lucknow. It is native only to certain groups which have traditionally been city
residents; others speak some regional dialect. The amount of difference between the above
three forms varies. There are many regions where at least two of the three are mutually
unintelligible, but in others the three are relatively close.
(670)
The questions of what constitutes a “mother tongue” and who has the best claim to linguistic and
literary authority over it remain politically contested and conceptually vague across South Asia
(for an overview, see LaDousa). As the Hyderabad (India)-based Urdu author Adhiraj Parthasarathy
explains,
How is first language defined? By language of best command or by mother tongue or

ethnicity? My mother was North Indian—from Uttarakhand—and my grandmother
only spoke Hindi—so I could make the argument that Hindi was a language of the
house—though all other family members spoke in English only with each other and
with me … [M]‌y grandparents’ generation spoke Kumaoni Pahari at home—but it was
just on occasion.They never passed it on to their kids and it had very low status … I can’t
say Hindi is my mother tongue. Urdu definitely isn’t but it was the language of the street
in Hyderabad. English was from childhood my language of best command—even now.
All other languages—Telugu is primarily passive comprehension and I struggle to read
it. I speak Telugu with moderate fluency. Tamil is only for obscure religious purposes at
most.
(Personal communication with the author, August 2, 2020)
In order to explain the rise of Hindi and Urdu as two literary registers of a single language, it will
first be necessary to explain the shifting denotations of these terms. Then, we will examine the
processes through which this spectrum of spoken languages developed into literary registers through
vernacularization. Once established as vehicles for literary expression, Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script
and, subsequently, Hindi in Devanāgarī (hereafter Nagari) were deployed by the British colonial state
as official languages for administrative, educational, and a range of new social functions. Nationalist
advocates for Hindi and Urdu have failed to displace English and regional South Asian languages in
their efforts to create what Benedict Anderson characterized as “print created monoglot mass reading
publics” (43). This study will be limited to an analysis of literary translingualism by authors writing
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in the dialect of the Delhi region. It will offer a few case studies and conclude with thoughts about
broader literary patterns across South Asia.
Defining Hindi and Urdu

Many misconceptions arise from the shifting and contested denotations of the terms Hindi and Urdu.
In its early use, Hindi (or, more commonly, hindvī) did not originally refer to any particular dialect,
but was rather a Persian adjective describing anything associated with northern India—that is, the
region east of the Indus river, sometimes called Hind or Hindustan (McGregor 62). The great Indian
poet Amīr Ḳhusrau (1253–1325) gives some sense of the geographic range of the term in his Persian
narrative poem (maṡnavī) Nūh sipihr (1317–1318):
… In this land
In every territory, there is
A language specific, and not so
By chance either. There are
Sindhī, Lāhorī, Kashmīrī, Kibar,
Dhaur Samandarī, Tilangī, Gujar,
Maʿbarī, Gaurī, and the languages
Of Bengal, Avadh, Delhi
And its environs, all within
Their own frontiers.
All these are Indic [hindvī], and
Are in common use
For all purposes since antiquity.
(Translated by Faruqi, Early Urdu
Literary Culture 66; original text
Khusrau, Nuh Sipihr 179–180)
Hindi (or Hindvī), was written right to left in a modified version of the Perso-Arabic script as well as
in Nagari, which is written from left to right and notable for the horizontal bar written above most
characters. Another common script, the cursive Kaithī, was widely used by merchant communities
in the present-day Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but British colonial policies during the
nineteenth century ensured its demise (King, One Language,Two Scripts 65–69).
The spoken language in the Delhi region, a center of Muslim political and spiritual power throughout
much of the past millennium, emerged as a lingua franca, particularly in urban centers with sizable
Muslim and Hindu professional classes (Digby 346–349, 355–356). Called by various names, including
Kharī Bolī (pure or unalloyed speech), Dihlavī (literally “of Delhi”), and, from the first half of the eight-
eenth century, zabān-i urdū-i muʿallā or urdū-i bādshāhī (“language of the exalted or royal encampments,”
sometimes specified as the language of the Mughal capitals at Delhi and Agra), it was thereafter shortened
to urdū, which now refers to the Delhi dialect as written in the Perso-Arabic script (Faruqi, Early Urdu
Literary Culture 24–27, 32; see, e.g., Ārzū and Hāṅswī, Nawādir al-alfāz̤ 248–249). An eighteenth-century
northern Indian fashion for writing poetry using this Delhi dialect with Persian genres was known as
reḳhtah, as in this verse from c. 1785 by Shaiḳh Ġhulām Hamadānī Muṣḥafī (1750–1824):
albattah muṣḥafī ko reḳhte meṅ duʿā

yaʿnī kĕh hai zabān-dāṅ urdū kī vŏh zabāṅ kā
Muṣḥafī most certainly has a claim on reḳhtah:
That is to say, he is well-versed (zabān-dān) in the language of [the?] Urdu.
(107)
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Walter N. Hakala
In the sixteenth and particularly the seventeenth centuries, it flourished far from its linguistic
“homeland” of northern India as a phenomenon of peninsular India (where the style is now
called Dakhnī, or “southern,” Urdu) as well as in various centers in present-day Gujarat (known
as Gujrī Urdu). After the Mongol irruption of the thirteenth century, Persian emerged as a pri-
mary language of governance across much of South Asia. Its significance increased with the rapid
expansion of the Mughal bureaucracy under that dynasty’s third emperor, Akbar (1556–1605),
with a concomitant growth in madrasas offering Persian language instruction to Muslims and
Hindu children of the Kayasth, Khatri, and Kashmīrī Brahman castes seeking lucrative careers in
imperial service (Alam 319–330, King 10, Dudney). His reign coincides with a rapid increase in
the number of bilingual pedagogical texts prepared to assist children who were fluent in one or
more of the South Asian vernaculars to gain literacy in Persian (Hakala 223–226). Early “Hindi”
in the Delhi dialect absorbed a substantial corpus of Persian and Persianized Arabic vocabulary
into its colloquial and literary registers. Early fourteenth-century graffiti inscribed in Nagari
inside Delhi’s most famous monument the Qut̤b Minār utilize the Kharī Bolī genitive postpos-
ition kī in combination with Arabic-derived titles like surtrāṇa (from the Arabic sult̤ān) and malak
dīn (elsewhere, malik dīn, from the Perso-Arabic mālik dīn ‘lord [of the] faith’) (Prasad 2–3, 20).
Unlike Urdu, which had by the eighteenth century established robust prose and poetic traditions
(Farooqi), “Hindi” in Nagari rarely utilized the Kharī Bolī Delhi dialect for poetry before the
1870s, with poets preferring such dialects as Avadhī (resembling the speech of present-day cen-
tral Uttar Pradesh), Braj Bhāṣā, and those of Rajasthan (Walle 278–279; Goulding 76–78; for
notable exceptions, see Bangha). These languages, while typically classified as “Hindi” for largely
political reasons, are nevertheless characterized by substantial morphosyntactic diversity (see,
e.g., Kellogg). Though this is often ignored by linguistic nationalists, the grammars of Modern
Standard Hindi and Urdu are nearly identical. It is impossible in colloquial speech to determine
whether common phrases such as a āp kaise haiṅ (How are you [male, polite]?) or pānī pilā do
(Give [informal] me water) belong to one or the other.Where they differ substantially is in formal
and (sometimes) literary discourse, which manifests primarily in their graphic form (i.e., script)
and vocabulary. Modern Standard Hindi in academic, literary, and other formal registers appears
with a greater proportion of Sanskrit-derived tatsama loanwords (particularly nouns); Urdu, in
similar contexts, typically draws upon a Persian and, increasingly, Arabic loanwords. In less formal
registers, both Hindi and Urdu employ a shared vocabulary of desī (native), tadbhava (adapted
and modified Indo-Aryan), and Persian terms (Masica 30–31, for illustrations of the range of
vocabulary available to speakers of Hindi-Urdu, see Y. Kachru 263, Schmidt 292). Contemporary
urban speech patterns are marked by a particularly high incidence of English terms. Some studies
estimate the prevalence of English terms and borrowed collocational expressions to exceed 40%
(B. Kachru 206).
Expansion into Peninsular India

A mature Urdu literary tradition has been cultivated in South and Central Indian urban centers from
the sixteenth century.The Qut̤b Shāhī dynasty (c. 1518–1687) of Golconda (present-day Hyderabad)
was one of five successor states established within the territory of the erstwhile Bahmanī kingdom
of central India (c. 1347–1527). The Bahmanī territories included speakers of four major South
Asian languages: two Indo-Aryan (Gujarati and Marathi) and two Dravidian (Kannada and Telugu).
Bahmanī successor states like Qulī Qut̤b Shāh’s Golconda state and the rival ʿĀdil Shāhī dynasty in
neighboring Bijapur competed to recruit Persian-speaking administrators, theologians, and soldiers
from Iran. At the same time, they offered patronage to authors writing in Dakhanī (sometimes written
Dakani, Dakhnī, or Deccani), a variety of Urdu spoken mainly by elite Indian Muslims residing in
region. The earliest literary works written in Dakhanī, such as the brief poems of the Bijapur poet
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Mirāṅjī (c. 1490), predate by a full two centuries the beginning of significant literary production in
the main “northern” variety of Urdu (Matthews 40).
Dakhanī is grammatically similar to the Kharī Bolī and Braj dialects of Hindi spoken, respect-
ively, in the Delhi and Agra regions, though its authors in Bijapur, Golconda, and elsewhere in the
Deccan plateau did not hesitate to include local Telugu and Marathi terms in their works and often
preferred to write Persian-derived vocabulary not according to the orthography of classical Arabic
but rather local pronunciation. Some have argued that it shares many grammatical features with
other northern Indian languages like Punjabi (Sherānī). With the incorporation of the Bahmanī
territories into the Mughal empire in seventeenth century, this style of hindavī would come to
be known as dakhanī, from the Sanskrit dakṣaṇ or “south,” “southern.” This was a term employed
pejoratively by northern Indian literary critics seeking to exclude poets hailing from the southern
periphery of the Mughal empire from an emerging Urdu literary canon. It also became a focus of
ethnic pride as the Deccan region was able to reassert its political and cultural independence as
the Mughal empire lost most of territories in a series of disastrous defeats suffered throughout the
eighteenth century (Eaton).
Mullā Vajhī (d. circa 1659) of the Qut̤b Shāhī court in Golconda left us with works that demon-
strate the sophistication of this tradition. Vajhī was conscious of having created something new. In a
section entitled “In explanation of the composition of poetry” of his maṡnavī (narrative poem), Qut̤b
mushtarī (1609–1610), he lays claim to preeminence within his native region, writing
dakhan meṅ jo dakhanī miṭhī bāt kā

adā naiṅ kiyā koʾī is dhāt kā
In the Deccan, such sweet Dakhanī speech
No one has achieved this style
(Vajhī, Qut̤b mushtarī 119)
Vajhī frequently uses the word dhāt, translated above as ‘type,’ interchangeably with tarḥ, which in
addition to meaning “type,” “manner,” or “mode” in a generic way, also has a specific literary sense
in describing a verse set that indicates the metrical and rhyme scheme for poetic imitation. In a later
couplet, we get a better sense of this synonymy:
dakhan meṅ uthiyā le t̤arh hor maiṅ

diyā yūṅ salāsat kūṅ bhī zor maiṅ
I have raised up more style in the Deccan
I have also given force to such simplicity
(120)
Vajhī’s boastful claims to originality, however, extend even beyond the southern Deccan region, into
Hindustan and even to Khurasan (in present-day Iran), the cradle and home of classical Persian poetry:
nah panće nah panćiyā hai gun gyān meṅ

so t̤ūt̤ī munj aise hindustān meṅ
Never before has appeared in praise
A parrot like me in Hindustan
kĕh bātāṅ yū sun kar mirī gyān kiyāṅ
rahiyāṅ ṭhuk ho qumriyāṅ-i ḳhurasān kiyāṅ
When, having heard such things and understood,
The turtle-doves of Khurasan should be beaten
(118)
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Walter N. Hakala
Vajhī writes with self-confidence of one firmly convinced of his standing within a vast transregional
community of peers—a contrast with the later denigration of Dakhanī poets by northern Indian
chauvinists (Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture 121). Indeed,Vajhī includes himself among the parrots
of Hindustan, a sobriquet common to many poets but associated in particular with Amīr Ḳhusrau, the
t̤ūt̤ī-yi Hind or eloquent “parrot of India” (see above).
Professionalization and Canonization

A fashion for composing ġhazals (a Persianate genre of erotic couplets sharing a single rhyme) spread
across northern India following the arrival in the early decades of the eighteenth century of the
poetic collection of a later Dakhanī poet,Valī (1665/67–1707/8) (Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture
129–139). These northern Indian poets, though fluent in one language (the Delhi dialect of Hindi-
Urdu) and literate in another (Persian), nevertheless sought to achieve through their vernacular
literary production both continuity with and the prestige of the kind of Persian literature once gen-
erously remunerated by the Mughal courts (Sharma, Mughal Arcadia). Confronted with the uncanny
feeling of seeing their local language written down and hearing it recited in a verse forms that were
familiar only through their education into a transregional literary culture, they would populate their
verses with figures imported from Central Asian literary ecologies.
Despite being raised in the Agra region, where the Urdu was influenced by the Braj Bhāṣā (the
source of many “archaisms” described by Pritchett and Hook), Ġhālib demonstrated a kind of lin-
guistic chauvinism typical of the so-called ahl-i zabān, or elite native speakers (literally, “people of
the language”). Though he would deprecate his own Urdu verse (see above), Ġhālib superciliously
declared (in Urdu) himself to be one of only two “masters” (ustād, mīr) of reḳhtah, the register of
Hindi-Urdu written according to the stringencies of classical Persian poetry:
reḳhte ke tumhīṅ ustād nahīṅ ho ġhālib

kahte haiṅ agle zamāne meṅ koʾī mīr bhī thā
Of Reḳhtah, you are not the only master [ustād], ‘Ġhālib’
They say that in an earlier age there was also some ‘Mīr’ [literally, ‘master’]
(Pritchett’s translation)
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has provocatively argued that Urdu literati, beginning with Ġhālib’s gener-
ation, privileged Iranian authors over Indian authors of Persian and writers whose Urdu conformed clas-
sical Perso-Arabic linguistic norms. Lowest of all on this “linguistic totem pole” were those poets whose
Urdu did not conform to Perso-Arabic literary and linguistic models (“Unprivileged Power” 3–4).
Stated another way, Urdu cognoscenti considered monolingual (or at least non-Urdu-speaking) Persian
authors to be greater authorities than “monolingual translingual” (to use Kellman’s phrase) Persianate
South Asians who wrote exclusively in Persian. They in turn were ranked above the “ambilinguals”
who wrote in both Persian and Urdu. Beneath them were the quasi-bilingual Urdu authors capable of
reading Persian. Lowest of all were South Asians with limited or no passive command of Persian.
In the previous century, the “master” to whom ‘Ġhālib’ made this equivocal tribute, Mīr Muḥammad
Taqī ‘Mīr’ (1723–1810), also distinguished his poetry from that of the common people. As we have
seen, part of the process entailed adapting the speech of the Delhi region to Persian models:
turk-bache se ʿishq kiyā thā reḳhte kyā kyā maiṅ ne kahe

raftah raftah hindustāṅ se shiʿr mirā īrān gayā
I had fallen in love with a Turkish boy—how many reḳhtahs I recited!
In stages, my poetry went from Hindustan [northern India] to Iran
(Pritchett’s translation of Mīr, Ghazal 1554,Verse 6)
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His reputation for linguistic prejudice probably gave rise to this apocryphal account of his journey
to Lucknow:
When he went to Lucknow, he did not have even enough money for a whole coach.
Having no choice, he shared a coach with another man, and said farewell to Delhi. After
they had gone a little way, the other man made some remark. Mīr Sahib turned his face
away from him and sat silent. After a while, the man again made some remark. Mīr Sahib
frowned and replied, ‘Noble sir, you have paid the fare.You are no doubt entitled to sit in the
coach, but what does that have to do with conversation?’ The man said, ‘Hazrat, what’s the
harm? It’s a pastime while traveling—we can entertain ourselves a bit with conversation’.
Mīr Sahib replied angrily, ‘Well, for you it’s a pastime; as for me, it corrupts my language’.
(The English translation appears in Āzād 186–187)
Mīr hints at the role of his generation in elevating speech (suḳhan) to a profession (fan) when he
writes,
kiyā thā reḳhtah pardah suḳhan kā

so ṭherā hai yihī ab fan hamārā
We had made reḳhtah the veil/tone/pretext of speech/poetry [suḳhan]
Thus this itself has now been established as our skill/profession [fan]
(Pritchett’s translation of Ghazal 1554,Verse 6)
kućh hind hī meñ mīr nahīñ log jeb-ćāk

hai mere reḳhtoṅ kā divānah dakan tamām
Not only in Hind, Mīr, are people collar-r ipping
It is mad for my reḳhtahs, the whole Deccan!
(Pritchett’s translation of Ghazal 1554,Verse 6)
Muṣḥafī, who belonged to the generation that followed Mīr’s, would write:
Muṣḥafī fārsī ko t̤āq pĕh rakh

ab hai ashʿār-i hindvī kā ravāj
Oh Muṣḥafī, put this Farsi away on a shelf!
The fashion now is for Hindvī verses.
(167)
From the 1830s, when the British colonial state elevated Hindustani (their term for Urdu in
the Arabic script) to official language throughout much of northern India, and the Delhi dialect of
Hindi-Urdu became firmly established in parts of South Asia (as was the case within the present-day
boundaries of Pakistan, see Mir 41, 51–53) where it had not hitherto served as a spoken language,
displacing Persian, these same elite groups were pulled in two directions. On the one hand, they
became more concerned with consolidating their status by excluding groups who, by learning Urdu
as non-native speakers, sought to gain employment in the colonial region. On the other, the Urdu
literary elites discovered that they needed to prove the value of their language in terms that would
be legible to the British colonial government. By conflating Hindu with Hindi, advocates for the
adoption of the Nagari script for writing Hindi in the Delhi dialect effectively marshaled evidence
generated by the colonial state (the census in particular) to justify the inclusion and, at Independence,
displacement of Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script as national language of the post-colonial Indian state
(Rai, Dalmia).
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The Persistence of Diglossia

The persistence of diglossia in South Asia—both of the “classical” sort described by Ferguson fea-
turing two related languages (e.g., Classical and colloquial Tamil) and in Fishman’s “extended” case
of genetically unrelated languages (e.g., English and Bhojpuri) (Schiffman 118–120)—is in part an
artifact of its comparatively low rates of literacy. The limited adoption of movable print, South
Asian preferences for lithography, and the pervasiveness of professional writers, typists, and
typographers perhaps encouraged the composition of texts in longhand and via dictation longer in
India than in Europe. Census data suggest that male literacy across British India did not surpass 20%
until the 1930s, and literacy of the population as a whole did not surpass 10% until the 1921 census
(Shāh 13). Thought in this way, however, one runs the risk of treating the relations of Hindi and
Urdu textual production as somehow divergent from a model whose typical form is normalized to
European linguistic examples. C.A. Bayly has depicted eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
South Asia as a “literacy aware” society, where, despite low levels of literacy, “most north Indians
had access to literate people and knew the meaning and power of writing” (Bayly 36, 39). With
“craft literacy” came the assumption that no one single language was capable of fulfilling all the
social functions required of a literate individual. Instead, languages were keyed to particular social
domains: A typical literate individual might have a passive knowledge of a language of ritual (in
reading and reciting limited liturgical passages by rote), an active command of the written form of
the language of governance (though quite possibly little experience actively speaking or hearing
it), and full competence in speaking and understanding (but not necessarily in reading or writing)
one’s own so-called “mother tongue.” Some of these orthographic variations one finds in early
manuscripts may have been due to differences in the phonological repertoire of specific authors or
copyists. In the case of the Qaṣīdah dar luġhat-i hindī, a bilingual Hindi-Persian medical vocabulary
in verse prepared in the early sixteenth century by Yūsuf bin Muḥammad Yūsuf Ḳhurāsānī, an
immigrant to India from Herat in present-day Afghanistan, it is evident that the author was
unfamiliar with seeing Hindi written on the page. His representation of common Hindi terms like
bijlī (‫ بجلي‬lightning) as bizhlī (‫ )بژلي‬suggests that he developed his limited proficiency with Hindi as
an adult and only as a spoken language (Hakala 226). In addition to his difficulty in graphically
indicating unfamiliar Indic consonants (e.g., retroflex and aspiration), the author of this text fre-
quently represents vowel length in ways that would be unrecognizable to modern readers and cer-
tain to be condemned by later reformers who have sought to impose orthographic discipline.
Urdu in Pakistan: The Place of Punjabi

The contemporary Urdu poet ʿAlī Akbar Nāt̤iq (b. 1973) worked for many years as a mason and then in
the dairy industry in rural Punjab before gaining some renown as a poet of Urdu. He composes Punjabi
poetry in a variety of genres, which remains the most commonly spoken language of Pakistan yet lacks
the elite status of English and Urdu. Indeed, it is the only regional language of Pakistan that does not
enjoy official status: “Urdu remains the official language in Pakistani Punjab, just as it was in colonial
Punjab” (Mir 192). He became frustrated both by his poverty and what he perceived to be barriers to
advancement erected by the Urdu-and English-language “national literary mainstream.” He explains,
I feel no shame or self-consciousness either in speaking Punjabi or writing in Punjabi or

in talking about Punjab. If I were to admit the truth, I would say that I don’t really know
Urdu. I don’t know how to speak it, that is. My accent is not a proper Urdu accent. I do
manage to write in Urdu, but in terms of speaking the language, it is obvious to those who
listen to my conversation how well I manage that–-how unmusical and out of tune my
Urdu sounds as I speak.
(Sabri)
310
His Urdu poetry draws from an unusually expansive lexical range, “stretching from abstruse Perso-
Arabic terms to more rustic elements of Indic (leaning towards the Punjabi) speech.” Even the
celebrated poet Muḥammad ‘Iqbāl’ (1873–1938) was criticized by the elite Urdu ahl-i zabān (“people
of the language” or native speakers) for permitting Punjabi-isms to appear within his Urdu and
Persian poetry (Shackle 242). The ability of both poets to shift between Punjabi and Urdu is not in
and of itself remarkable, for as Alyssa Ayres points out, “formal literacy” in Punjab means literacy in
Urdu” (922).Though the situation is not entirely the same, this division between spoken Punjabi and
written Urdu is not unlike the status of Latin in Europe since ad 700 where, “Of the millions who
spoke [Latin] for the next 1400 years, everyone was able also to write it. There were no purely oral
users” (Ong 111). About half of the population of Pakistan’s Punjab province was illiterate in 1998,
and while many among this group are capable of communicating in spoken Urdu, census figures
indicate that less than 8% of the Pakistani population considers Urdu to be their first language (Ayres
921–922).
Hindi as a Regional and Cosmopolitan Language

Phaṇīśvaranāth Reṇu (1921–1977) was particularly inventive in his use of Hindi. He set his novels
in Purnea District, a Maithili speaking region of the Indian state Bihar that is adjacent to West
Bengal. Renu was raised in an environment where, in addition to Maithili and archaic recensions of
the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata epics, he also was exposed to Nepali and Bengali in both spoken
and written form (Hansen, Phanishwarnath Renu 237–238). Despite being the dominant language
of the region, Kathryn Hansen explains, “Renu did not write in Maithili, nor do his characters
speak Maithili except on rare occasions” (Hansen 274). Instead, Renu chose to write in a “polished,
Sanskritized literary style of Kharī Bolī … elevated several steps above ordinary conversation” (274–
275). For the village residents of Renu’s fiction, however, the use of Sanskritized diction and gram-
matical patterns consistent with the formal Kharī Bolī of the Delhi region represented a foreign
language—one belonging to “a world outside, a world that must be translated to be understood”:
To remove this sense of being outside, to take the reader inside the village, Renu has
developed a style of Hindi based on rural speech. This language, as mentioned previously,
is not a local dialect-which would be unintelligible to the urban reader and would reduce
Renu’s audience to fellow Purnea residents. It differs primarily from standard literary lan-
guage in the degree to which it brings the linguistic patterns of uneducated speakers of
Hindi onto the written page.
(276)
Renu marks his characters’ speech by incorporating linguistic elements that his readers would rec-
ognize as rustic. This includes orthographic substitutions, transpositions, insertions, and deletions that
reflect his characters’ divergence from the phonology of educated high-status urban Hindi speech,
particularly when reproducing Sanskrit tatsama, Perso-Arabic, and English terms. The resulting text,
while not itself an accurate rendering of Maithili speech, reproduces in its orthography what Kharī
Bolī speakers would recognize as patterns of Eastern Hindi speech framed within Khari Boli morpho-
syntax: This is a style that “jars the educated reader’s sense of linguistic propriety” (277). This deploy-
ment of quasi-Maithili phonological patterns permits Renu to depict particular social domains (i.e.,
illiterate villagers of eastern Bihar) vividly and, inasmuch as they are legible to his Hindi readership as
metapragmatic stereotypes, authentically in their enactments of particular semiotic repertoires (Agha
150–159).
The prominent literary scholar Harish Trivedi lists other prominent twentieth-century authors
“who came to Hindi from another language or from a bilingual upbringing” including Nirālā (1896–
1961, Bangla), Amr̤itlāl Nagar (1916–1990, Gujarati), and Kr̤ishṇā Sobtī (1825–2019, Punjabi). One of
311
Walter N. Hakala
these bilingual authors, the Hindi-language poet Gajānan Mādhav Muktibodh (1917–1964), was born
in a Marathi-speaking family, in what was then the princely state of Gwalior (presently near Madhya
Pradesh’s western border with Rajasthan).The spoken language of the region, which lies between Braj
and eastern Rajasthani zones, is a variant of the Western Hindi macrofamily, and his formal education
was also in Hindi. His family traced its roots (through his great-grandfather) to northern Maharashtra,
and he grew up speaking Marathi at home. Indeed, his younger brother, Śharaććandra Muktibodh
(1921–1984), became a prominent Marathi-language poet, novelist, and critic (Goulding 75–76).
Though the elder Muktibodh appears to have used Hindi and English exclusively in his writing, he
indicated in letters that he was more comfortable conversing in Marathi (28). He once explained in
a short unpublished essay in English on “Marathi Literature” that he had chosen to write in Hindi
because of its “full scope … for self-expression” (quoted in Goulding 29). In Goulding’s formulation,
“Marathi,” for Muktibodh, “was the language of the home, and Hindi the language of the world” (29).
Muktibodh has sometimes been categorized along with Reṇu as an ānćalik (marginal or regional)
Hindi author. Goulding, however, argues that Muktibodh’s “marginal” or “regional” status was not the
result of his representation of folk culture in a transregional idiom (as was the case for Reṇu), but rather
his displacement from another major literary tradition—Marathi—and choice to write in another,
Modern Standard Hindi: his “distance from Hindi [was] based not in speaking a rural dialect, such as
Bhojpuri, that had a subordinate relationship to Standard Hindi, but rather in speaking Marathi, which
supported a distinct literary culture” (37). His Hindi has been characterized as “crude”—the result,
according to some, of his Marathi background and distance from traditional centers of Hindi literary
culture (13). Goulding convincingly demonstrates, however, that Gajānan Muktibodh was inspired
in his unusual Hindi free verse by the abhaṅga meter of the Marathi santa tradition of devotional
poetry. Abhaṅga meter is based on syllable number rather than weight and diverges from the more
typical quantitative mātrik meters (where syllables are differentiated by vowel length) that had been
incorporated into Modern Standard Hindi from Braj Bhāṣā verse and Sanskrit models (22, 78–86).
Conclusion
Accounts of European authors of Hindi and Urdu have on occasion drawn the curiosity of the public.
Babu Ram Saksena’s European and Indo-European Poets of Urdu and Persian (1941), while dated, remains
the most comprehensive treatment of the subject. Two examples here will have to suffice. Captain
Alexander Heatherly (c. 1829–1861) was a “country-born” (i.e., child of an Indian mother) poet
who adopted the pen-name Āzād (free) for his Urdu poetry (Losty). He even makes an appearance
in Farḥatallāh Beg’s (1883–1948) Urdu novel Dihlī kī āḳhirī shamaʿ, translated into English by Akhtar
Qamber as The Last Musha’irah of Delhi (88–89). His posthumously published dīvān (collection of
verse) contains a wide range of genres (qaṣīdah, ġhazal, qit̤ʿah, maṡnavī, chronograms, and even a
musaddas in praise of Jesus Christ) (Saksena 77–78). His laudatory qaṣīdahs are “written in approved
style and show his considerable poetic powers and command of the language. The verses are correct
and have a flow and swing” (78). Āzād’s lyric ġhazals, modeled on his contemporary Mirzā Ġhālib,
“have terseness and fluency;” his language, in Saksena’s judgment, is “simple and flowing” (78–79).
More recently, the French author Julien-Régis Columeau (1972–) has achieved some notoriety for
his Urdu-language novels, collections of short stories, and translations (“French Author Becomes an
Urdu Novelist”; Nayyar). He has gone on to examine the status of Punjabi as a literary and political
language in contemporary Pakistan for his academic research (Columeau).
Other examples of European authors of Hindi and Urdu could easily be adduced, drawing in
particular from among the global South Asian diaspora. As I have argued in this chapter, however, the
pervasiveness of diglossia among South Asian speech communities, the persistence of literary Hindi
and Urdu as distinct registers with a limited social range and strongly demarcated social domains, and
the continuing processes of vernacularization have combined to make literary translingualism very
much the rule rather than the exception in premodern, colonial, and postcolonial India and Pakistan.
312
The efforts of elite groups to police the boundaries of the so-called “people of the language” (ahl-i
zabān) and regulate the forms of “unadulterated” (śuddh) Hindi or “pure” (ḳhāliṣ) Urdu betray anxie-
ties attending the multilingualism obtaining across South Asia in the past and present.
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24
BENGALI LITERARY
TRANSLINGUALISM
Kaiser Haq
Introduction
“It is very much in the Indian tradition to write in a second language,” declared A. K. Ramanujan,
the great Indian translingual poet-writer-scholar-translator in an interview.
When Kalidasa wrote his best classical Sanskrit poems I’m sure he … probably spoke some
rather far-out dialect related to Sanskrit, but certainly not the ‘high’ Sanskrit he wrote.
And later, when the Persian tradition came to India, people wrote ghazals and masnavis1 in
Persian.
(Ramanujan, 50)
Translingual writing has become a strong literary tradition in the Indian subcontinent (or South
Asia, as it is often called nowadays). “Translingual authors,” notes Steven G. Kellman, “write in more
than one language or in a language other than their primary one” (Kellman, ix). However, Kellman
also adds “that, though switching languages has a long antiquity, the business has been particularly
brisk in recent years” (xvii). In the last couple of centuries, South Asian writers from varied linguistic
backgrounds have created one of the most vibrant traditions of anglophone writing, and there are
interesting instances of creative forays into other European languages as well.
As in South Asia as a whole, so in Bengal, the eastern part of the region, inhabited by the Bengali
(also called Bangla) speaking people, the fifth largest linguistic community in the world. The Bengali
language evolved out of one of the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars known as Prakrits around 1000 c.e.
But Sanskrit continued as the language of learning and a literary language for some time yet, making
Bengal part of what Sheldon Pollock has dubbed “the Sanskrit cosmopolis” (Pollock 2006, passim).
At about the time the first significant literary work in Bengali was composed, Jayadeva produced the
last of the great Sanskrit classics, the Gita Govinda (C12), a long poem devoted to the god Krishna.
The establishment of Muslim rule introduced Persian and Arabic culture into India, a phenom-
enon comprehensively studied in Richard Eaton’s recent book, India in the Persianate Age: 1000–
1765. In the age of Muslim domination Persian was the official language, and thousands of works
in different genres were produced in it, and survive in book or manuscript form. Between the mid-
eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth century half a dozen Persian newspapers flourished. The
Persian travel memoir of Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, Shigurf nama-e-Vilayet, presents observations of
316 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-24

Bengali Literary Translingualism
the western world between 1766 and 1769 from the viewpoint of a Bengali intellectual educated
in the traditional manner in Persian and Arabic, who lived through the transition to British rule. An
abridged English translation of 1828 was soon forgotten; but Kaiser Haq’s comprehensive transla-
tion of the work, The Wonders of Vilayet, is getting some attention from literary critics and historians.
Persian crossed with Hindi produced Urdu, and some Bengalis wrote in Urdu as well, for instance
Hakim Habihur Rahman (1881–1947), poet, literary editor, and author of a highly regarded social
history of Dhaka.
The end of India’s Persianate Age followed the British East India Company’s conquest of Bengal in
1757. With the consolidation of British rule, which involved setting up an administrative machinery
and a judiciary on the British model, a debate ensued over educational policy. Anglicists favored
English-medium education, and were opposed by Orientalists, who wanted the continuance of edu-
cation in Sanskrit and Arabic, and also by those who advocated education in the Indian vernaculars.
In the end Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education (1935),” which advocated
education in English, carried the day. English education, he argued, would “form a class who may be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and
color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Kumar).
The debate was not confined to the British ruling class but involved Indians as well. The social
reformer Ram Mohun Roy (1772–1883), who polemicized in his native Bengali as well as in Persian,
Arabic and English, argued in favor of English education. Roy was one of the native elite responsible
for setting up the Hindu College in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) in 1817 with the aim of imparting
modern secular education to native children. There were practical reasons behind the Indian enthu-
siasm for English education.The colonial polity had created new and numerous job opportunities for
those with English language competence, and Indian parents wanted their sons to become eligible for
these jobs. The unintended consequences of English education brought about a sea-change in Indian
culture; one aspect of this was the rise of translingual writing in English.
The primary focus of this chapter is on Bengali literary translingualism after the coming of the
British. We can divide the rest of the chapter into three sections on the basis of the political and
cultural history of the region. The first section deals with the colonial period, when Kolkata was
the metropolis of Bengal. The Indian Partition of 1947 divided Bengal into two parts; West Bengal,
which has a Hindu majority, became a part of the Republic of India, and Muslim-majority East
Bengal became a province of Pakistan, and following an independence war in 1971, morphed into
the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. Postcolonial Bengali literary translingualism, therefore, can be
split into two sections, one dealing with Indian Bengalis, the other with Bangladesh.
Bengali Literary Translingualism: the Colonial Period

The appointment of the 19-year-old Eurasian poet-journalist Henry Louis Vivien Derozio as a
teacher in Kolkata’s Hindu College in 1826 had explosive repercussions. A charismatic, iconoclastic
free-thinker, he inspired his disciples, who later earned the sobriquet of Young Bengal, in ways that
discountenanced their guardians. Flouting Hindu taboos, they ate beef and drank alcohol, and avidly
read such intellectually subversive works as Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791). A number of them
followed their master into a literary career.
Whether Derozio, son of an Indo-Portuguese father and an English mother, can be counted as an
exemplar of Bengali translingualism may be a moot question, but before answering in the negative
one should remember that he proudly identified himself as a native of East India. His collected works,
Derozio, Poet of India, edited with commentary by Rosinka Chaudhuri, reveal a hitherto unknown
range of poetic achievement, and firmly establish him as a seminal figure in the development of colo-
nial modernity. Derozio’s coeval and pupil, Kasiprasad Das (1809–1874) was the first Bengali Hindu
to publish a book of English verse, The Shair and Other Poems (1830), a slighter achievement than his
master’s, though more obviously rooted in Indian social realities.2 Das was comfortably bilingual and
317
Kaiser Haq
wrote a number of Bengali lyrics as well. Another disciple of Derozio, Krishna Mohan Bannerjea
(1813–1885) was the first Indian to publish a play, The Persecuted, or Dramatic Scenes Illustrative of Present
State of Hindoo Society in Calcutta (1831). Bannerjea was one of many upper-class Hindus in Kolkata
whose Western education alienated them from their ancestral religion, and converted to Christianity.
He became an Anglican priest. His play, unsurprisingly, is a trenchant critique of some of the social
ills of orthodox Hindu society.
Bilingualism can lead to high tension, with dramatic results, as the career of the ebullient Michael
Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873) illustrates. Fired with the ambition to be a great poet in English, he
undertook a complete self-refashioning, converting to Christianity while still a student. He became a
schoolteacher and journalist in Madras, where, in 1849, he published two collections of English verse,
The Captive Ladie: a Fragment of an Indian Tale, and Visions of the Past, under the fanciful pen-name of
Timothy Penpoem. The first is a historical tale in a Byronic mode. But it is a delicate lyric that still
resonates with its emotional charge: the speaker sighs “for Albion’s distant strand/As if she were my
native land” (Dutt 1993, 438). The phrase “As if ” marks the impassable gap between his native land
and Albion.
Dutt became painfully aware of this when he went to London to train to be a barrister. He
had by then become the first great modern poet in Bengali, with a revisionary epic based on The
Ramayana. He continued to correspond with friends in English, producing a body of lively prose
integral to his oeuvre. On the question of choosing one’s literary language, which has aroused much
debate—witness, for instance, the debate between Chinua Achebe and N’gugi wa Thiongo at the
1962 “Conference of African Writers of English Expression” in Makarere, Uganda. Achebe favored
the use of English; Ngugi, who had debuted in English before switching to Kikuyu, advocated the
use of one’s mother tongue.3 Dutt, like N’gugi, repudiated his younger self and scoffed at those who
wouldn’t follow his example.
Dutt wrote to a Bengali friend, explaining his relationship to Western literature after he had
started using Bengali as the sole vehicle of creative expression. French, German and Italian, “are
well worth knowing for their literary wealth.” He hoped “to familiarize my educated friends
with these languages through the medium of our own.” He drew inspiration from Milton, who
had wanted “to do something for his mother tongue.” Dutt believed that “European scholarship
is good, in as much as it renders us masters of the intellectual resources of the most civilized
quarters of the globe; but when we speak to the world, let us speak in our own language.” He
works himself up
into a passion and declares: “Let those who feel that they have springs of fresh thought in
them, fly to their mother-tongue. Here is a bit of a ‘Lecture’ for you and the gents who
fancy that they are swarthy Macaulays and Carlyles and Thackerays. I assure you they are
nothing of the sort. I should scorn the pretensions of that man to be called ‘educated’ who
is not master of his own language.”
(Murshid, 241)
One writer whose career followed Dutt’s trajectory was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–
1894), regarded by many as the greatest Bengali novelist, as well as one of the intellectual stalwarts of
Hindu revivalism. He made his debut with a rather indifferent English novel, Rajmohan’s Wife (1861),
after which he switched to Bengali and wrote his masterpieces; but he continued to make powerful
use of English in literary and polemical essays, an example followed by many: primary creative expres-
sion in Bengali; and secondarily, writing occasional essays in English, and perhaps translating some of
one’s Bengali originals.
Many “swarthy Macaulays, etc.,” however, remained unregenerate, and their numbers grew steadily
for a century or more, and almost exponentially since then. The Dutts of Rambagan, near Calcutta
(no relations of Michael) also converted to Christianity, and two generations, brothers and two
318
generations of the extended Dutt family became the most prolific Anglophone writers of Bengal in
the nineteenth century. The tradition of Anglophone Indian fiction, which receives global attention
today, was inaugurated in 1835 by Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859) with his futuristic tale of a failed
anti-colonial uprising, “A Journal of Forty-eight Hours in the Year 1945.” Kylas’s cousin Shoshee
Chunder Dutt (1824–1886) published the equally futuristic anti-colonial tale of militancy, involving
Tribals, “The Republic of Orissa: a Page from the Annals of the twentieth Century (1845).” Also a
poet, ethnographer and prolific essayist, Shoshee has been partially retrieved from obscurity by the
publication of Alex Tickell’s Selections from “Bengaliana.” Shoshee’s later books were co-published by
Calcutta and London houses, a trend that Rosinka Chaudhuri in her study, Gentlemen Poets in Colonial
Bengal (133), identifies as the emerging norm in the 1870s.
Four of the Rambagan Dutts, the brothers Govin Chunder, Hur Chunder, Greece Chunder, Kylas
Chunder, and Kylas’s son Omesh, put together a poetry anthology, The Dutt Family Album, published
in London in 1870. The most outstanding of the Rambagan Dutts, whose reputations have endured,
are from the second literary generation: Govin Chunder’s daughter, Toru Dutt (1856–1877), and
nephew Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909). Govin Chunder Dutt took his family on an extended
visit to Europe, covering France, Italy and England. His daughters, Aru and Toru, were put to school
in France for some months; both kept up their study of the language and acquired remarkable com-
petency. Later, they attended the Higher Lectures for Women at Cambridge.
A year after their return to India in 1873, Aru died of consumption, leaving behind only a few
translations of French poems; these were included, along with those of Toru, in the latter’s first book,
A Sheaf Gathered in French Fields, published in Calcutta in 1876, and in London by Kegan Paul in
1880. A teenaged Bengali girl putting together a volume of English verse translations of French poetry,
along with pithy and perspicacious notes, is remarkable enough; more so is the presence among the
translations of two avant-garde poets of the time, Gerard de Nerval and Charles Baudelaire. Hers must
have been among the earliest English versions of Baudelaire to appear in print.
Next, Toru took up Sanskrit lessons and began writing English versions of stories from the Indian
classics. She didn’t live to see the book in print. She too succumbed to tuberculosis, in 1877. Ancient
Ballads and Legends of Hindustan was published in London in 1882 by Kegan Paul. Interestingly,
the book includes a section of “Miscellaneous Poems,” seven in all, which are entirely Toru’s own
creations. There would no doubt have been more had she enjoyed even an average life span. Among
her papers was a complete novel in French, and the first five chapters of another in English. Le Journal
de Mademoiselle d’Arvers appeared in Paris from the house of Didier in 1879, with a preface by Clarisse
Bader; it remains the only novel in the language by an Indian. Both the French novel and Bianca
have European characters in a European setting, but the romantic yearning that permeates both is no
doubt a projection of the young author’s mindscape.
Romesh Dutt, who was Toru’s second cousin, in a busy civil service career, published condensed
English verse translations of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata in “Locksley Hall” hexameters for
Dent’s Everyman’s Library, and general and economic histories of India, as well as other volumes of
Indian poetry in translation. He also proved to be a successful bilingual writer, with several well-
received Bengali novels that he later translated into English.
Westernization might have been the dominant cultural current in nineteenth century India, but
there was a counter current of Hindu revivalism as well. One form of Hindu revivalism took a mys-
tical slant. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), for instance, blended a mystic philosophy with a modern,
realistic understanding of Indian history. Besides being a prolific bilingual writer (his collected works
make up nine volumes) Vivekananda was instrumental in organizing the Ramakrishna Mission.
There is another interesting example. Manhohan Ghose (1869–1924) and his brother Aurobindo
Ghose (1872–1950) were sent to school in England by their father, who wanted them to grow up
in the mold of proper Englishmen. Manmohan won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford; and
Aurobindo to King’s College, Cambridge. On their return to India, both took up college teaching,
but Aurobindo was soon drawn to nationalist politics, and put inside as a suspected militant. Later, he
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escaped to the French enclave of Pondicherry, had a mystic vision, and set up an ashram. His writings
comprise a massive amount of verse, including an epic, Savitri, and many expositions of Indian mys-
tical philosophy. But it was the apolitical and less prolific Manmohan who was the finer poet. His best
Songs of Love and Death (1926) was published posthumously. In England he had been befriended by
Laurence Binyon, with whom and two other friends he co-authored a poetry pamphlet, Primavera
(1890). Manmohan’s poetry is characterized by a plangent lyricism and technical finesse that has
stood the test of time. Another Bengali poet who wrote in the mode of the Fin-de-Siècle and the
Edwardians, Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), found a mentor in Arthur Symons. Her poetry, which
gives a sympathetic portrait of the multicultural and multi-religious mosaic of Indian society, is still
widely read.
The greatest Bengali writer of all time, Rabindranath Tagore, was prolific in all literary genres, and
in 1913 became the first non-European writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He also turned
out to be one of the most successful Bengali translingual writers. Before a visit to England in 1912,
he began translating some of his intricately rhymed lyrics into English prose poetry.Yeats, whom he
showed the manuscript, was bowled over, and arranged for its publication under the title, Gitanjali
(1912). Tagore launched into a translingual career with gusto, to Yeats’s dismay. “Damn Tagore,” he
expostulated in a letter. “We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then … he brought
out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation.” Yeats pontificated that it was impossible to
write with “music and style in a language not learned in childhood and ever since the language of
his thought.” However,Yeats conceded that Tagore had also written “in English, prose books of great
beauty” (Dutta, 4). Tagore’s collected English writing, published in three massive volumes by India’s
Sahitya Akademi, totals over 3000 pages, and includes poetry, prose, and drama.
Amidst the Apocalyptic fears of the collapse of civilization that were common among writers and
intellectuals in the early twentieth century Tagore’s Oriental quasi-mystical idealism was welcomed
by a global audience. His Oxford lectures, published as The Religion of Man (1931) is a good example
of the idealist Tagore; but this needs to be counterpointed by such adversarial works as Nationalism
(1917), which places him alongside Victor Hugo and Friedrich Nietzsche as a robust critic of
nationalism.
Indian Muslims were slow to take advantage of the opportunities opened up by Western education,
and the so-called Bengal Renaissance of the nineteenth century was entirely the creation of those of
Hindu origin. The first significant literary work in English by a Bengali Muslim is a story, “Sultana’s
Dream” (1905), published in a Chennai (formerly Madras) journal. The author, Rokeya Sakhawat
Hussain (1880–1932), founded and ran a girls’ school and vigorously championed women’s education.
Her polemical and literary output is in Bengali, with the story as the sole exception. Using the age-old
convention of a dream-narrative, she presents a feminist utopia; set up after a devastating war brought
on by men, a matriarchy has created a peace-loving society where gender roles have been reversed.
Another Bengali Muslim, Shahid Suhrawardy (1890– 1965), deserves recognition as the
subcontinent’s first modern poet. Beginning in an Aestheticist mode with Faded Leaves (1910), he
went on to absorb the influence of T. S. Eliot, evident in Essays in Verse (1937), and like Pound
translated Chinese poetry, in Poems of Lee Hou-Chu (1948). Humayun Kabir (1906–1969), though
an East Bengali Muslim, opted for India at Partition, and rose to be the country’s minister for edu-
cation. A philosopher by training, he was a bilingual writer, and published a novel in English before
producing its Bengali version. Men and Rivers (1945), set in riverine East Bengal is a highly colored
tale of the psychological complexities of a simple rural society locked in a perennial struggle with
unpredictable natural forces.
Postcolonial Bengali Translingualism: The Indian Scenario

By the time India became independent, Kolkata was no longer the center of Anglophone literary
activity in the subcontinent. Instead, as the hub of a vibrant modern movement in Bengali letters, it
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looked askance at translingual writing as a colonial hangover; and so, when P. Lal, a Calcutta-based
Anglophone poet and academic, set up Writers Workshop in 1958 to promote and publish what
he christened Indo-Anglian writing, i.e. Indian writing in English, the Bengali literary establish-
ment reacted with contempt. Asked to contribute the entry on “Indo-Anglian Poetry” in the Concise
Encyclopedia of English and American Poetry, edited by Donald Hall and Stephen Spender, the doyen of
the Bengali literati, Buddhadev Bose, sneered that it was the “outcome of the anglo-mania” which
seized some upper-class Indians in the early years of British rule, questioned if it had “a real public
in India, where literature is defined in terms of the different native languages,” and dismissed it as “a
blind alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere” (142–143).
Ironically, Bose was himself a considerable bilingual talent; he published insightful essays and
a critical study in English, and translated his own poetry and that of others for an Indian issue of
Poetry (Vol. 93, No. 4, January 1959). Anyway, Bose’s attack was no more than a quixotic exercise, for
post-independence Indian English poetry experienced a boom, although among the best-known
of the new poets there isn’t a single Bengali. In Anglophone fiction as well, the major figures at the
time of independence were from outside Bengal: R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, G. V.
Desani, Ahmed Ali. Only gradually did Bengali translingual writers carve out a significant place for
themselves.
Among those born in British India mention must be made of Sudhin N. Ghose (1899–1965) and
Bhabani Bhattacharya (1906–1988), both sadly forgotten, but deserving of a revival. Ghose’s tetralogy
of novels, And Gazelles Leaping (1949), Cradle of the Clouds (1951), The Vermilion Boat (1953), and
Flame of the Forest (1955), written in a lush, romantic prose, presents highly colored autobiograph-
ical material intersecting with key historic events. If Ghose is something of an aesthete, Bhabani
Bhattacharya, with his leftist orientation, is more of a social realist wielding prose as a practical tool
to lay bare the problems and tensions in society. Both Sudhin N. Ghose and Bhabani Bhattacharya
completed their education abroad, and eventually became diasporic, or transnational.
A bigger literary sensation than either of these novelists was the memoirist Nirad C. Chaudhuri
(1897–1999). After years of journalism in both Bengali and English, he burst upon the global lit-
erary scene with his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1954). Chaudhuri took a degree in History
from Calcutta University, then dropped out halfway through the MA examination; but his ambition
was staggering—to rank with great historians like Mommsen. He ended up being an idiosyncratic
writer, recherché and reactionary, egotistic and outrageously provocative. He had been taught English
by Indian teachers; his Hindu upbringing had given him Sanskrit, and his fierce autodidacticism
added French, German, and Latin to his linguistic repertoire. When the tide of nationalism was full,
the dedication to his first book was addressed “To the memory of the British Empire.” But those
who reacted with shock and anger missed the latter part of the passage, where he complains that
the Empire conferred on him subjecthood, but not citizenship. Herein lies the essential iniquity of
imperialism.
The common reader saw him as a gadfly or an intellectual entertainer, but the depth and com-
plexity of his ideas was phenomenal, and has been brought out fully in Ian Almond’s The Thought of
Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss. Chaudhuri’s sensibility had an apocalyptic cast; his entire
oeuvre is a protracted elegy for Empire and civilization; and he did equate the two. This extended to
his translingualism; he saw himself as the last of a line, and thought that with decolonization English
would go into a decline in India. At a seminar on Indian writing in English, organized in London in
1982 by the Commonwealth Institute, he declared that “our literary effort in English is being carried
on in a reservoir made out of the broad river that the great movement of adoption of English in India
was. What is more ominous, the river itself is no longer strongly flowing. It is silting up” (Butcher,
15). He couldn’t be more wrong.
The Indian constitution initially decreed that English be replaced by Hindi, but the move was
resisted throughout India, and particularly vehemently in the south. Finally, the Official Languages
Act, ratified in 1967, declared English as “an associate official language” (Sedlatschek, 19).The Sahitya
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Akademi, India’s national organization for promoting literature, introduced an award for writing
in English, thereby recognizing English as one of the languages of India. New writers of talent
kept appearing. Anita Desai (b. 1937), daughter of a Bengali father and a German mother, made
her debut in 1963 and has had a long and distinguished track record, with several masterpieces to
her credit: Clear Light of Day (1981), a sensitive, tangential take on Partition; In Custody (1984), an
elegy to the embattled Urdu poetic tradition; Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), a moving account of the
tribulations of a German Jew who flees the Nazis and fetches up in India, where he is incarcerated
as an enemy alien. Another writer with a Bengali father, Arundhati Roy (b. 1961), whose Booker-
winning God of Small Things (1997) is an assured classic, has combined her literary career with social
activism, setting standards in polemical writing in the latter capacity.
There has been a boom in Indian writing in English, facilitated by the emergence by the 1970s of
a generation of Indians who habitually used English (Tickell, 19); they fashioned a distinctive Indian
variety of Modified Standard that can be heard in every city in the country. Deregulation and global-
ization helped sustain the boom by increasing transnationality and bringing diverse writers under the
umbrella of Global or World Literature, which now has designated academic specialists and degree
programs.
First to emerge among Bengali translingual writers in the age of globalization, Amitav Ghosh (b.
1956), has an impressive and varied oeuvre. He debuted with a magic realist novel, The Circle of Reason
(1986), which would put him in Rushdie’s camp; but immediately after, he swerved away from magic
towards stylistic clarity. An Oxford-trained social anthropologist who spent some time in academia,
his academic background is a factor in his creative output, and not only in the docu-fiction of In an
Antique Land (1992). He dramatizes historical events through studying families, including his own,
and all through his career his novels have ranged over broad swathes of space and time. The ambi-
tious “Ibis Trilogy” of novels, comprising Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011), and Flood of Fire
(2015), offers insights into the maritime world of colonialism around the time of the Opium Wars; a
special flavor comes from the varieties of pidgin dialogue, and the incorporation of Indian words in
sailors’ jargon.
Ghosh’s intellectual breadth is demonstrated in his essays, and a recent book, The Great
Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), whose themes inform his latest novel, Gun
Island (2019). Taking off from the milieu of the earlier novel, The Hungry Tide (2005), it also brings
together other urgent contemporary concerns like the migrant crisis and people-trafficking. Intensely
aware as Ghosh is of the problems of the postcolonial world, he is as aware of the burden of using
the colonizer’s language. In an interview with Chitra Sankaran, he mentions “the historical burden
that English places upon us, because, within English, there is a constant tendency to whitewash the
past” (Quoted in Tickell, 265). Minus the political edge in this statement, it is what Naipaul has said
about English while commenting on R. K. Narayan in his Time magazine obituary, “Master of Small
Things” (Monday, June 11, 2001):
All languages have their own heritage, and English (forgetting American for the moment)
cannot easily escape its associations with English history, English manners, Shakespeare,
Dickens, the Bible. Narayan cleansed his English, so to speak, of all these associations,
cleansed it of everything but irony, and applied it to his own little India.
Amitav Ghosh has admitted to the influence of Naipaul’s prose on his own writing; and so has his
younger contemporary, Amit Chaudhuri (b. 1961) (Tickell, 20). Chaudhuri too acquired an Oxford
doctorate, but in English, and has produced an oeuvre comprising fiction, poetry, criticism, and non-
fiction, that can match Ghosh’s in its extent and quality; but unlike the latter, his orientation is more
aesthetic than sociological. It is not irrelevant to mention that he is a classical Indian singer of pro-
fessional caliber. The world of Indian classical music is the subject of his novel The Immortals (2009).
His award-winning coming-of-age novels, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), and Afternoon Raag
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(1994), introduced a new mood in Indian fiction, poetic, melancholy, elegiac, and he has since kept
up a steady output.
The historian Sudipta Kaviraj comments that “A new [Bengali] middle-class elite has developed
that uses English as its only serious language, and the literary productions of this social group has
tended to be in English” (Pollock 2003, 563). A roll call of emerging writers would be long, and
without further discussion, pointless. But one could single out Neel Mukherjee (b. 1971). He works
on a large canvas, and his two novels, Past Continuous (2008; UK edition, A Life Apart, 2010); and
the Booker shortlisted The Lives of Others (2014), dealing with the generation that grew up in the
late 1960s and early 1970s amidst a murderous Maoist insurgency, and state terror, have been widely
acclaimed.
There are a few noteworthy Bengali translingual writers in America, where they are showcased
as exemplars of multiculturalism. Bharati Mukherjee (1940–2017), won the National Book Critics
Circle Award. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (b. 1956) has been a popular chronicler of diaspora lives,
and won the American Book Award. Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967) won the Pulitzer with her debut short
story collection, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and bagged a few more prizes before startling her
readers with a book in Italian, a language she had been learning for some years. An autobiographical
reflection on translingualism, the book, translated as In Other Words (2015), is perhaps her most read-
able work, and raises many questions about the role of language in defining one’s identity, or choice
of identity.
Postcolonial Bengali Translingualism: The Bangladeshi Scenario

During colonial times the region that is now Bangladesh formed a part of the hinterland to Kolkata.
Its major city, Dhaka (old spelling, Dacca), once the Mughal provincial capital, had been reduced to
a mofussil town. Literary and cultural activities, such as they were, at best qualified it to be regarded
as a satellite of Calcutta. There were a few newspapers and periodicals, like the monthly Dacca Review
(1911–1922), while books published were few and far between.
With the partition of India, Dhaka became the capital of the eastern province of Pakistan, and the
center of a cultural resurgence that would develop into Bengali linguistic nationalism. The Pakistan
government, whose seat was in the western province, 1,000 miles away, tried to impose Urdu, a lan-
guage understood by very few in the eastern province, as the country’s sole official language. Students
protested, demanding that Bengali be recognized as a state language alongside Urdu; a number of
demonstrators were shot dead by police, which only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, the govern-
ment acceded to the demand, but by then the Bengali-speaking population had become alienated
from the ethos of Pakistan, grew increasingly aware of the economic disparities between the western
and eastern wings of the country, and eventually demanded full autonomy. War broke out in 1971,
the Pakistan Army was defeated by Bengali freedom fighters in alliance with Indian forces, and the
People’s Republic of Bangladesh was born.
Linguistic nationalism conduced to the growth of a modern literature in Bengali, and lively lit-
erary milieus sprang up in Dhaka and other cities. However, the attitude towards the English lan-
guage, particularly its creative use, was complex, ambivalent, and often imbued with ressentiment; one
writer has compared translingual Bangladeshi writing to the transsexual hijras (Haq). The resurgence
of pride in Bengali culture engendered the belief, at least in some sections of the intelligentsia, and
particularly after the birth of independent Bangladesh, that English, the former colonizers’ language,
ought to be phased out. In 1987, the Bangladesh parliament decreed that “except in the case of for-
eign relations, in all other cases, records and correspondences, laws, proceedings in court and other
legal institutions shall necessarily be written in Bengali, by Government offices, courts, half-official
and autonomous institutions everywhere in Bangladesh” (Bengali Language Introduction Act np).
The Act is more honored in the breach than in the observance. English remains the second lan-
guage of the educated classes; and it is the chosen literary language of a steadily growing number
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of Bangladeshis. The health of a second language depends largely on the quality of teaching in
schools, and its subsequent use in practical life. When Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan, English
was used for all official purposes, and was the medium of instruction from high school onwards.
A number of elite schools taught in English right from the elementary level, but followed the
national curriculum. Bangladesh put an end to this; the vacuum was filled by private institutions
preparing students for the English IGCSE, which helps them get admission into Western univer-
sities. This added to the brain drain, an unavoidable consequence of globalization. It should be
no surprise that all but a handful out of a total of a hundred or so translingual Bangladeshi books
have appeared in the twenty-first century.
In defining Bangladeshi literature it is customary to retroactively claim earlier writers hailing from
its geographical area, and those whose families migrated to it. The first post-Partition writer we have
to consider is Syed Waliullah (1922–1971), a major novelist in Bengali, but comfortably bilingual.
“Escape,” first published in the Pakistan P.E.N. Miscellany, No. 1 (1950), and later anthologized by
Niaz Zaman in Escape and Other Stories of 1947, is a commendable expressionistic treatment of the
horrific sectarian violence unleashed by Partition. It is set in a train in a region that is unspecified
but is obviously in northern India. As Muslims fled to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs to India, the
railway held out the most hope, but it was also vulnerable to hold-ups and the wholesale massacre
of passengers.
Waliullah’s greatest translingual work is his own augmented English version of his most famous
Bengali novel. The Bengali Lal Shalu [“Red Pall”] of 1948 became Tree without Roots, first published
in 1967 in London by Chatto & Windus under UNESCO patronage. Majeed, a madrasa-educated
mullah, fetches up in a remote village and persuades the villagers that an old mossy tomb is the last
resting pace of a great dervish, and establishes himself as its self-appointed caretaker. Berating the
simple villagers for their neglect of religion, he cajoles them into coming to the shrine for prayers and
sermons, and quickly becomes a power in the land, an ally and spiritual preceptor of the local honcho,
and acquires considerable landed property and two wives. Premature death prevented Waliullah from
polishing a novel of great potential, The Ugly Asian, whose draft was published in 2013. The only
other Anglophone works to appear in Pakistan times were a few undistinguished self-published verse
collections and fugitive pieces in newspapers and magazines.
The situation remained unchanged in independent Bangladesh for some years. Then a trickle of
publications began, the authors, unsurprisingly, all English literature specialists. Razia Khan Amin
published two collections of English verse, Argus under Anesthesia (1976) and Cruel April (1977). Kaiser
Haq and Feroze Ahmed-ud-din, who had begun writing poetry in the late 1960s, broke into print.
Feroze published his lone collection, This Handful of Dust in 1975, and then, sadly, lapsed into silence.
Haq, with two inaugural collections in 1978, has been publishing fitfully ever since; virtually his entire
output so far is available in Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (2015) and Pariah and
Other Poems (2017). A number of younger poets have appeared since the fag end of the last century.
The most outstanding among them is Nausheen Eusuf, whose debut collection Not Elegy but Eros
(2019) includes a poem that won a Pushcart, and another anthologized in the annual Best American
Poetry (2018).
Niaz Zaman published an autobiographical debut novel, The Crooked Neem Tree (1982) and
followed it up with a couple of story collections and another novel. She is doubly translingual, for
her mother tongue is Punjabi, but after marriage to a Bengali-speaker she learned the language, and
as an Anglophone writer has dealt with Bangladeshi themes with sensitivity, and also translated from
Bengali into English. Translingualism, bilingualism, or multilingualism, and literary translation form
a continuum that will be increasingly significant in a globalized world. Professor Zaman has set up a
publishing house, Writers Ink, comparable in its mission to P. Lal’s Writers Workshop. The only other
venture of this sort is ULAB Press (formerly Bengal Lights Books), run by a private university. A few
of the bigger publishers occasionally add literary works to their lists. Publishing abroad is an option
for the lucky few.
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Bangladeshi translingualism received a boost with the increasing mobility brought by globaliza-
tion. Adib Khan, who went to Australia for higher studies after taking a degree in English literature at
Dhaka University, became a naturalized Australian citizen and academic, before making his novelistic
debut with Seasonal Adjustments (1993), which won a Commonwealth First Book Award. The novel
deals with the independence war of 1971 and its aftermath from the viewpoint of someone who has
emigrated. Khan’s later novels have attracted less attention.
In the twenty-first century, a younger generation that lacks personal memories of the war, have
made their literary presence felt; but with many of them too, the war remains the crucial event
in the national narrative of Bangladesh, lending support to Fredric Jameson’s theory that Third
World narratives are essentially national allegories. The Bangladeshi-British writer Monica Ali was
a four-year-old prattling in Bengali when the family went to Britain to escape the war. She has
since lost her Bengali but retains an attenuated cultural link to her father’s homeland. Her debut
novel, Brick Lane (2003), made it to the Booker shortlist and was subsequently filmed, stirring
some controversy over her portrayal of the immigrant Sylheti community. But its depiction of a
struggling Bengali family in London’s East End, both realistic and shot through with genial humor,
remains unmatched. The letters of the heroine’s sister, however, offer an object lesson in what to
avoid in translingual writing. Absurdly, their broken English possesses grammatical features that do
not exist in their purported original language, Bengali. Her subsequent novels draw mainly on her
Western self.
The East End Bengalis, it is worth remembering, were first made the subject of fiction by an older
Bangladeshi-British writer, the former academic Manzu (Syed Manzurul) Islam (b. 1953), in The
Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1998); this was followed up by an ambitious novel about East Enders, Burrow
(2004), and an independence war novel, Song of Our Swampland (2011).
Tahmima Anam, another Bangladeshi-British writer, won the Commonwealth First Book Award
and attracted wide attention with The Golden Age (2007), a tale of the war based on family anecdotes
(members from both parents’ sides had been freedom fighters). In The Good Muslim (2011) she
delves into the war’s aftermath, again making good use of the experiences of family members. Bones
of Grace (2016), which completes a trilogy, brings in the author’s persona, ranging over a failed
traditional marriage, romance, and a second marriage to an American, and varied problems in the
globalized world, for instance the human rights issues surrounding the ship-breaking industry in
Bangladesh.
The most outstanding Bangladeshi-British writer so far is Zia Haider Rahman, whose hefty debut
novel, In the Light of What We Know (2014), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His protag-
onist, Zafar, is a war baby born in a village in Sylhet, Bangladesh, moves at four to London with his
adoptive parents, and, like him, wins a scholarship to Oxford, where he takes a First in Mathematics
before studying law and becoming an international human rights lawyer. His rollercoaster affair with
a flaky upper-class Englishwoman is interwoven with stints in Bangladesh and Afghanistan, and his
friendship with the Pakistani-British narrator. At the psychological core of the story is a mysterious
breakdown, while the intellectual teaser of Gödel’s theorem, according to which we know more
truths than we can prove, hovers over everything, including a quasi-mystical episode in Dubai. The
intricacies of the plot are matched by the paratextual array of copious epigraphs to each chapter, and
an assured handling of English prose that renders “chutnification” (Salman Rushdie’s innovation)
unnecessary.
While many Anglophone Bangladeshi writers are NRBs (Non-resident Bangladeshis), a number of
prominent and productive ones are not.The novelist and short story writer, K. Anis Ahmed, author of
The World in my Hands (2013), the novella Forty Steps, first published in The Minnesota Review in 2001
and shortlisted for a Pushcart, and Goodbye Mr. Kissinger, and Other Stories (2012) lives in Bangladesh
but travels frequently.The most successful Bangladeshi writer of genre fiction, Saad Z. Hossain, author
of Djinn City (2017) and the Locus Award finalist The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday (2019), too, lives
in Bangladesh. The demographics of translingual Bangladeshi writers—indeed, of all translingual
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Bengali writers—will no doubt keep changing, in unpredictable ways. Translingual writing too will
keep developing, if only because it allows greater freedom of expression than would be tolerated in
the mother tongue in a repressive society.
Notes
1 Both the ghazal and the masnavi are popular poetic forms in the Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and related traditions.
Ghazals are short, deal with mystic or romantic themes, and are often set to music; masnavis too are on spiritual
themes but may run to thousands of verses.
2 “Shair” in the title is a word in numerous Indian languages for “poet,” and many of the poems deal with
social issues
3 See “Imperialism of Language: English, a Language for the World?” by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and “The African
Writer and the English Language” by Chinua Achebe, in Kellman for their opposed views.
Works Cited
Almond, Ian. The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Print.
Bengali Language Introduction Act 1987. Accessed April 30, 2015 www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/workgroups/
bdlaw/1987-a02.htm>
Butcher, Maggie. The Eye of the Beholder: Indian Writing in English. London: Commonwealth Institute, 1983. Print.
Chaudhuri, Rosinka. Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project.
Calcutta: Seagull, 2002. Print.
Dutt, Michael Madhusudan. Madhusudan Rachanabali [“The Collected Works of Madhusudan”], Kshetra Gupta,
ed. Calcutta: Sahitya Sansad, 1993. Print.
Dutt, Shoshee Chunder. Selections from “Bengaliana”. Alex Tickell, ed. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005. Print.
Dutta, Krishna and Andrew Robinson. Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. London: Bloomsbury,
1995. Print.
Eaton, Richard M. India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765. London: Penguin, 2019. Print.
Hall, Donald and Stephen Spender, eds. The Concise Encyclopedia of English and American Poets. London: Hutchinson,
1963; in new format, 1970. Print.
Haq, Kaiser. “The Hijra Comes in from the Heat and Dust,” Wasafiri, Issue 84, Winter 2015. Print
I’tesamuddin, Mirza Sheikh. The Wonders of Vilayet. Kaiser Haq, trans. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003. Print.
Kellman, Steven G., ed. Switching Languages:TranslingualWriters Reflect onTheir Craft. Lincoln and London: University
of Nebraska Press, 2003. Print.
Kumar, Anu. “Thomas Macaulay Won the Debate on How to Shape Indian education. So Who Were the
Losers?” Scroll.in. Accessed, January 1, 2021. https://scroll.in/magazine/821605/thomas-macaulay-and-the-
debate-over-english-education-in-india
Murshid, Ghulam, ed. The Heart of a Rebel Poet: Letters of Michael Madhusudan Dutt.Delhi: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.
Naipaul,V. S. “Master of Small Things,” Time. May 11, 2001. Web. October 4, 2020.
Pollock, Sheldon, ed. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley: U of California P,
2003. Print.
———The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: U
of California Press, 2006. Print.
Ramanujan, A. K. Uncollected Poems and Prose. Molly Daniels-Ramanujan and Keith Harrison, eds. Delhi: Oxford
UP, 2001. Print.
Sedlatschek, Andreas. Contemporary Indian English:Variation and Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Print.
Tickell, Alex, ed. The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in South and South East Asia since 1945.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. Print.
326
25
AND THE POLITICS OF A
NATIONAL LANGUAGE
Hispanofilipino Literature in a Multilingual
Philippines
Marlon James Sales
Introduction
One of the major challenges in researching literary translingualism in the Philippines emerges from
the discomforts of applying the current scholarly models to the specificities of linguistic diversity in
this former colony of Spain and the U.S. in Southeast Asia. If, as Kellman posits, literary translingualism
encompasses texts “written in a language other than the author’s primary language” (“Does Literary
Translingualism Matter?” 109), any endeavor to investigate translingual literature in the Philippines
will have to resolve first how a language achieves primacy. Should primacy always refer to the author’s
L1? Can it also be an author’s dominant L2? What happens when an author is a simultaneous bilin-
gual and thus has multiple L1s? Alternatively, if by translingual literature we mean texts “written in a
language not native to the author, in two languages, or in a mix of languages” (Kellman and Lvovich
152), we need to figure out how an author becomes native to a language. A straightforward response
cannot always be had in the Philippines, a linguistically plural society where code-switching is widely
used as a mode of discourse (Thompson 1–2). Implicit in such models is the widely held belief that
monolingualism is the default mode of authoring literature (Wiggin 488). Translingual literature is
hence thought of as a marked piece of writing in somebody else’s tongue or in a babel of tongues,
or what Kellman calls as monolingual translingualism and ambilingualism, respectively (The Translingual
Imagination 19). But what happens if the linguistic borderlines that should contain literature are fluid
to begin with? Does writing in a language that by definition is a composite of languages make one
a translingual author?
In an archipelago such as the Philippines where around 170 languages are spoken across more
than 7,000 islands (Aguila 40; Tupas 589), a national language policy enshrined in the law oversees
how linguistic diversity operates in public institutions. The present Constitution, promulgated in
1987, declares that the national language of the Philippines is Filipino. It also designates Filipino as an
official language “for the purposes of communication and instruction” (Article XIV, Section 7). The
Constitution, however, does not fully discuss how a “national language” differs from an “official lan-
guage,” and what functions the former fulfills. Whereas an “official language” can be operationalized
in terms of its legally enforceable utilization as a means of communication in specific contexts, a
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-25 327

Marlon James Sales
“national language” is a cultural construct that appeals to affective notions of belongingness, self-
expression, and collective ownership (Constantino 391). As with any abstractions, fealty to these
notions requires so much more than legislation.
A major controversy in the Philippine national language policy is the choice of language. Although
Filipino is named outright in the Constitution, what it is and what comprises it is not immediately
clear. A tentative response can be extracted from the Constitutional provision itself. By stating that
“[a]‌s [Filipino] evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine
and other languages” (Article XIV, Section 6), the Constitution is emphasizing that Filipino will be
an amalgam of languages that will go through various stages of development. To what degree this
vision has been accomplished is subject to protracted debates that have divided scholars into two
factions. There are those who contend that Filipino is, in fact, Tagalog, a major Philippine language
spoken primarily in the capital city of Manila and its neighboring areas (e.g., Hidalgo 24; Tupas 590),
and there are those who say that Tagalog and Filipino are different languages altogether (e.g., Almario
17; I. Cruz 20). Such association between Filipino and Tagalog, and perhaps, even more saliently,
the denial that this was the case, has earned the ire of speakers of other Philippine languages, espe-
cially Bisaya, spoken on the central islands of the Visayas, which at one point had more speakers than
Tagalog (Gonzalez 113–114; Hidalgo 28).1
Studies on the Philippine national language policy overwhelmingly reference English, the
country’s co-official language, as a point of comparison. This is so because the search for a national
language was broached for the first time when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony and was thus
entangled with the use of English. English had been taught in the Philippines since 1898 (Frei 31) but
a formal Constitutional recognition of its status did not come until after three decades. The 1935
Constitution conferred English its official status while guaranteeing the development of “a common
national language based on one of the existing native languages” (Article XIV, Section 3; emphasis added).
The Institute of National Language chose Tagalog in 1937 as the basis of the still inexistent national
language, arguing that it had the most extensive written literature and the largest number of speakers
among all Philippine languages (Frei 87). Two years later, Manuel L. Quezon, president of the U.S.-
backed commonwealth government, coined the phrase wikang pambansa [national language] in refer-
ence to Tagalog. In 1959 wikang pambansa became Pilipino (i.e., spelled with a P) when José Romero,
the then secretary of education, used the name to emphasize the national identity of the language.
Pilipino was used until a new Constitution was enacted in 1973, which mandated that the name of
the national language would henceforth be Filipino (i.e., spelled with an F). The orthographical shift
from P to F was described as a sign of Filipino’s purported openness towards other languages (Tupas
594) because Tagalog traditionally did not have the /f/sound.
Throughout the evolution of the national language policy, Spanish never disappeared from the
prose of the Constitution. Its status, however, went from being an official language in 1935 to being
placed alongside regional languages in the current Constitution from 1987. At first glance, one might
speculate that the diminishment of its status stemmed from a decline in speakers. But Spanish has
always been a minority language in the Philippines, confined mostly to the elite circles of society
(Lipski 125). A travelogue from the 1870s estimated that after more than three centuries of colonial
rule, only 87,302 people could speak Spanish, or less than 2 percent of a total population of about
5 million (González Fernández 51–53). In 1939, only 2.6 percent of a 16-million strong popu-
lation spoke the language (Rodao 96). The most recent census figures from 2013 show that only
3,325 people in a population of 99 million knew Spanish. Despite the limitations of the survey
and the disagreements on how the data they yielded should be interpreted (cf. Fernández 368–369,
Rodao 96–97), such numbers suggest that the importance of Spanish in Philippine society was
never demographic in the first place. That it remains in the law to this day has more to do with its
symbolic value for a nation that has both accepted and disavowed its Hispanic heritage at different
moments of its history. Nowhere is this fraught relationship more evident than in Hispanofilipino
literature.2
328
Hispanofilipino Literature
Hispanofilipino literature has been defined as “the writings in [Spanish]—whether utilitarian,

artistic or creative—written by Spaniards, mestizos or native Filipinos” (Peralta-Imson 1; her italics).
Defining a literary tradition using its primary language is useful for delimiting its scope, but it also
unwittingly represses the complex linguistic landscape it inhabits. It is as if Hispanofilipino litera-
ture came to being in a genuinely monolingual vacuum and there remained unperturbed by the
translingual activities of its interlocutors. But take the case of the Noli me tángere [Touch Me Not]
(1887) and El filibusterismo [Subversion] (1891).Written in Europe by the intellectual and martyr José
Rizal in the late 1800s, the novels are the best-known works in the Hispanofilipino canon. A close
reading of the Spanish-language originals unearths a number of Tagalog realia, Latin aphorisms,
random French phrases, a German epigraph from Friedrich Schiller, and even a conversation in the
Philippine Spanish-based creole called Chabacano.3 The novels’ subsequent privileging as the foun-
dational fictions of the Filipino nation turned them into obligatory readings in schools. Rizal’s novels
are seldom read in the Philippines in the original Spanish. Many Filipino versions exist, no one of
which is official. Several English-language editions have been published, yet a number of Philippine
languages have yet to produce their own translations.The linguistic traffic where Rizal’s novels subsist
is so intricate that it would be myopic to restrict their analysis to any single language.
Literary translingualism is not exclusive to Rizal. Although what little attention accorded to
Hispanofilipino literature generally revolves around him, there are other authors who demonstrated
their competency in various languages while maintaining Spanish as their main literary language.
A key feature of Hispanofilipino literature often blotted out in the current scholarship is that it
embodies a translingual consciousness emanating from its authors’ plural linguistic selves. Francesca
Orsini’s concept of the “multilingual local” in her study of South Asian literature is salutary in this
regard because it eschews misconceptions that literary traditions in a colonial language necessarily
transpires as an encounter with the foreign (cf. Rafael 2–4). Hispanofilipino authors certainly did
not consider Spanish foreign to Filipinos despite social conditions that kept it at a distance from
the masses. As the nationalist writer Rafael Palma once asserted, Filipinos were “españoles aún en la
lengua, en las maneras y en los vicios” [still Spaniards in language, manners and vices] (179).4
What follows is an inexhaustive list of examples of translingual writing in Hispanofilipino litera-
ture sequenced according to successive historical movements that have shaped the language politics
of a multilingual Philippines.The term “translingualism” and its derivatives are used in this chapter to
name diverse though interrelated practices involving multiple languages such as code-switching, loan
blending, loan coinage, hybridization, parallel self-translation, etc., which appeared in the examples
either as a motif, a technique in composition, or a metalinguistic device. Hispanofilipino literature has
traditionally been portrayed as a monolingual corpus, while studies in Filipino multilingualism hardly
ever focused on its incursions into literature. Those that did examine multilingualism in literature
were concerned mainly with English and Filipino. This chapter presents a more diverse portrayal of
Filipino literature by foregrounding examples from several languages that co-occurred with Spanish.
Writing Ladino
As in Hispanic America, Castilian Spanish was the official language of the Philippines under Spain
between 1565 and 1898. Several royal decrees were issued to extend its use in the archipelago (Frei
9–15). However, unlike in America, where a sustained influx of migrants from Spain allowed Spanish
to thrive, Spanish migration to the Philippines was sparse. In many places, the only Hispanic con-
tact the indigenes ever had was with Catholic missionaries. Instead of teaching Spanish, these mis-
sionaries opted to study indigenous languages to facilitate the task of preaching Christianity (Quilis
26), a move that had enduring consequences on the literary practices of local communities. Literary
translingualism in this early stage of colonialism had a decidedly religious bent, appearing mostly
as bilingual confession guides, sacramentaries, and other devotional materials used for performing
Catholic rituals. The oldest surviving examples are two xylographic copies of the Christian doctrine
329
Marlon James Sales
from 1593, one in Spanish and Tagalog, printed both in the precolonial syllabary called baybayin and
in its romanized form, and the other in Spanish and classical Chinese (Van der Loon 8, 21). Trade
relations between the Philippines and China predated the arrival of the Spaniards, so it should come
as no surprise that Chinese-language materials were being produced in the archipelago alongside
publications in Philippine languages.
The missionaries’ fascination with indigenous literatures led them to compile literary specimens of
Philippine languages. Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín devoted the eighth chapter of his Compendio [del] arte
de la lengua tagala [Grammatical Compendium of the Tagalog Language] to Tagalog poetry. He cited
examples from unnamed local sources, as well as from fellow missionaries who were already com-
posing poetry in this language, such as the Spaniards Pedro de Herrera (177) and Alonso de Santa Ana
(178), and the Bohemian Pablo Clain [Pavel Klein] (179). San Agustín was a poet in Tagalog himself,
whose pieces were featured in the preface of his own grammar, as well as in the writings of other
missionaries. The same goes for Fr. Alonso de Méntrida, who discussed the poetry of Hiligaynon,
a major language spoken on the island of Panay, in his Arte de la lengua bisaya hiliguayna de la isla de
Panay [Grammar of the Visayan Language of Hiligaynon from Panay Island]. Méntrida’s grammar
had a prefatory balac [balak in the modern-day spelling], a type of Hiligaynon poem, which the friar
composed in honor of the Virgin Mary.
Although many documented translingual writers in the first two centuries of Spanish rule
were Europeans, there were a few translingual locals whom the friars referred to as ladinos (not
to be confused with Ladino or the Judaeo-Spanish language) who stood out for their distinctive
style of combining languages together to form a literary whole. Fernando Bagongbanta was
one of them. Nothing is known about his life save for his poem Salamat nang ualang hanga
[Eternal Thanks], which figured prominently in the Memorial de la vida christiana [Memorial of the
Christian Life] of Fr. Francisco Blancas de San José. In eleven stanzas of alternating Tagalog and
Spanish lines, Bagongbanta enumerated metaphors exemplifying the Christian conceptualization
of the divine before finally exhorting his fellow Tagalogs to learn Spanish as a means of achieving
racial equality:
[B]‌ago,y, ang daming paquinabang/mucho es lo que se interesa/dudunong na di sapala/seremos

hombres de ciencia/at maguiguing banal din/y de ajustada conciencia/na ualang pagcacaibhan/
que no haya ya diferencia/nang Castilla,t, nang Tagalog/del de España al de esta tierra
(¶9, n.p.; italics in the source)
[A lot of things are of interest.You will be men of science and righteous conscience. There
will be no difference between a man from Spain and that from this land.]
Its problematic idea of colonial literacy notwithstanding, Bagongbanta’s poem heralded a literary style
that would resonate in later Hispanofilipino texts. What differentiated it from the poetic works of the
missionaries was its two interspersed languages that were intended to be read integrally. We know this
because the Tagalog lines, when considered separately, had neither rhyme nor consistent meter. The
only way to preserve the poetic elements of the poem therefore was to read the Spanish as components
of the Tagalog lines. Bagongbanta’s translation decisions relied heavily on form rather than on meaning.
Phrases such as “dudunong na di sapala” [lit., you will be more intelligent] and “nang Castilla,t, nang
Tagalog” [lit., between a Spaniard and a Tagalog] were interpreted freely in Spanish to fit the stanza
formalistically even if it meant having significant departures in denotative equivalence.
Another ladino was the Tagalog printer and author Tomás Pinpin, who filled his Librong Pagaaralan
nang mga Tagalog nang Uicang Castilla [Book with which the Tagalogs will Study the Spanish Language]
with translingual poems. While many of his poems functioned as mnemonic devices for teaching
vocabulary, Pinpin also resorted to literary translingualism to recreate vivid slice-of-life conversations
330
in his grammar, such as this passage about a Spaniard commanding his servant to deliver a message
to a friend:
Dapouat con baga,/empero si acaso,/ natotolog siya,/ adormir se ha echado,/homintay ca

doon,/ espera lo vn rato,/at capagca guising,/luego en dispertando,/manhic ca sa ytaas,/sube
arriva a lo alto./At con yaong alipin,/y si aquel esclavo,/yaong malalang̃ohin,/ aquel gran
borracho,/ sumavay saiyo,/ quisiere estorvártelo:/ pagpaloin mo,/ dale de porrazos,/acona ang
bahalà,/ sobre mi sea el cargo.
(n.p.; italics in the source text)
[However, if he is sleeping when you arrive, wait for him there. Once he wakes up, climb
into the house. If his drunkard of a servant tells you off, beat him with a stick. I’ll take care
of the rest.]
Pinpin explained that his intention in writing these longer poems was pedagogical. He wanted to
entice readers to “magtipontipon nang manga uicang Castila, at mangusap na nang mahahabang
uica” (n.p.) [gather Spanish words into longer sentences].
The extant sources from the long 18th century were silent about ladino poetry. It would surface
anew only toward the end of the 19th century in a lesser-known poem by Francisco Balagtas, author
of the revered Tagalog epopee about the star-crossed lovers Florante and Laura. Entitled Paalam na
sa Iyo [Goodbye to You], the poem had two of its six verses written in a combination of Spanish and
Tagalog. The first verse reads thus:
Inhumano dolor—hírap na matindí,/ sufrí [sic] despreciado mi pecho constante,/ mis tiernos
amores—na iyóng inapí,/ destruye [sic] mi alma con rigor y fuerte.
(H. Cruz 153; italics in the source)
[An inhuman sorrow and a great pain my faithful heart suffers disdainfully. My tender love
that you scorned destroys my soul severely and strongly.]5
Balagtas’s style was different from earlier ladino poems. Cosmetically speaking, he collocated Spanish-
Tagalog lines with lines in untranslated Spanish. He further complicated the poem by writing the
remaining verses exclusively in Tagalog. But the more significant change Balagtas effected was an
unfettering of literary translingualism from translation. In contrast to Bagongbanta’s and Pinpin’s
poems, whose Spanish lines were translations of the preceding Tagalog, neither of the two languages
in Balagtas’s poem translated the other but instead constituted a true case of code-switching. We see
this clearly in the third line with the noun phrase starting in Spanish (i.e., mis tiernos amores) and
ending in Tagalog (i.e., na iyóng inapí) then finally connecting to its predicate in the fourth, which
was in Spanish.The incorrect verb conjugation (i.e., ‘destruye’ instead of ‘destruyen’) was almost cer-
tainly a case of language transference. It may have been caused by the incommensurability between
the pluralizable ‘amores’ of Spanish and its tacit equivalent in Tagalog, ‘pag-ibig,’ which in this accep-
tation could not be pluralized, or the fact that Tagalog verbs have the same aspectual inflection for all
grammatical persons. On the other hand, the error in the second line may have been phonological,
given that /e/and /i/are allophones in some varieties of Tagalog.
A more academic form of literary translingualism took shape in Isabelo de los Reyes’s two-part
masterpiece El folk-lore filipino, which contained a novel application in a language other than Tagalog.
Isabelo paired off Spanish with his L1, Ilokano, the lingua franca of the northern Philippines. Many
of the materials included in his collection came from unnamed oral sources, although there were a
few whose provenance was known, such as this passage from an epithalamium by Isabelo’s mother,
331
Marlon James Sales
Leona Florentino, for the wedding of a certain Severino and Vicenta, which the folklorist rewrote
translingually:
Nupay casano ti saquit ti naquemna/Aunque (es) el dolor de la razón suya/ á mangisina,

mangyadayó ti dinnana/que la separa, la aleja de la cercanía suya/ maipapilit itayen á purosenna/
se obligó antes va á cortarla (del tallo)/á yaoat tap no sica pay met ti manapaya/á entregar (la)
para que tu también quien la cuide.
(322; italics in the source)
[lit., Although (it is) the pain of her reason that separates her and distances her from her
closeness, she forced herself before cutting her (from the stem) to surrender (her) so that
you too *who take care of her.]
Unlike in earlier ladino poems, Isabelo’s treatment of literary translingualism was oriented toward
philological analysis (328). Instead of recreating the aesthetics of indigenous poetry, he utilized lit-
erary translingualism to explain the structures of Ilokano. This was evident in those elided words
that were marked in the translation with parenthetical commentaries. The Spanish parts came out
deliberately ungrammatical because the interspersed lines in Spanish were not intended to facilitate
reading. Isabelo wrote a more polished translation some pages after, revealing that what this specific
passage was saying was that although it was painful for the bride’s mother to let go of her daughter,
she mustered the courage to give her away (330).
Nationalist ferment soon swept across the Philippines. By 1897, a provisional Constitution signed
at Biak-na-Bato in the province of Bulacan stipulated that Tagalog was to be the official language of
the Filipino republic (Frei 27). Independence from Spain was proclaimed in June of 1898 but was
truncated after six months when Spain refused to recognize Filipino independence and ceded the
control of archipelago to the U.S. A revolutionary republic was founded in 1899 by virtue of the
so-called Malolos Constitution, which declared, among other things, that Spanish would be used
for public and legal purposes but was not given the status of a national language. The republic was
dissolved in 1902 when the Filipinos lost the Philippine-American War.
Deflecting English
U.S. colonialism came with political changes that weighed heavily on the Philippines’ language policy.
Measures were set into motion to ensure the spread of English between the arrival of the Americans
in 1898 and the promulgation of the 1935 Constitution, which formally made the language official.
The most consequential measure was the expansion of the public school system, established originally
by the Spaniards in 1863, but now with English as the medium of instruction. About 600 American
teachers popularly known as the Thomasites were dispatched to Manila onboard the transport ship
Thomas in 1901. Their presence in the Philippines helped cement the U.S.’s self-portrayal as a ben-
evolent colonial power and justify its occupation of the islands (Thompson 13–23). The English-
based education system turned out to be more successful than the Spanish system because of its
promise of social mobility for ordinary Filipinos (De la Peña 9–10).
America’s plan to impose English was rooted in a primordial disavowal of Filipino nationhood.
A 1901 report submitted to President William McKinley by the commission headed by Jacob
Schurman of Cornell stated that there was “no Philippine nation, but only a collection of different
people” (Frei 32). A second commission, headed by William H. Taft, then recommended that English
be used to unite the islands under one tongue (32–33). The shift from Spanish to English proceeded
gradually. A 1916 report by Princeton professor Henry Jones Ford, who headed a fact-finding mission
sent by President Woodrow Wilson, noted that Filipinos who were taught the language spoke it with
so strong an accent that it was difficult to recognize it as English. Ford concluded prematurely that
332
America’s language policy in the Philippines was failing (Fernández 369). The view on the Filipino
side was not much different. The U.S.-trained academic Paul Versoza (13–14) contended that any
attempt to put English as a replacement of Spanish, Tagalog, or Bisaya would be disastrous for the
Philippines, given that no nation in the world should be made to speak a language by imposition.
Disdain for English’s role in American colonialism was palpable in Hispanofilipino literature. In
this poignant scene from an essay first published in 1901 in the newspaper El nuevo día [New Day],
Rafael Palma brooded over the changes he experienced in Escolta, Manila’s financial hub:
Los rótulos y letreros anunciadores de la Escolta están escritos en idioma extraño: apenas
lo español queda: se oye hablar en las aceras y puertas un lenguaje violento, monosilábico,
al que no están acostumbrados los oídos … Cada día la ola crece é inunda el Archipiélago.
El vigor de la raza sajona se comprueba de manera muy palmaria. Llega, y lo absorbe todo.
(138)
[The signs and billboards in Escolta are written in a strange language. There is hardly any-
thing in Spanish. A violent, monosyllabic language is heard in the streets and doorways,
which the ears cannot get used to … The wave surges and floods the archipelago each day.
The vigor of the Saxon race is quite obvious. They come and absorb everything.]
Underpinning Palma’s discontents was his rejection of the social affordances of American colonialism.
He perceived the coming of English not only as a shift in the linguistic landscape but also as a por-
tent of an impending cultural cataclysm. For many Hispanofilipino authors, English was a ubiquitous
reminder that American rule was subverting the way things were. As such, Hispanofilipino writings
were infused with a nostalgic veneration of Spanish arising from a conscription of Hispanism to the
Filipino identity and resulting in its weaponization against the new foreign power (De la Peña 9–10;
Peralta-Imson 4). Variations of this trope reverberated from as early as Cecilio Apóstol’s 1899 poem
Al “Yankee” [To the Yankee], included in his poem collection entitled Pentélicas (73–74), and long
after the Americans gave up control of the Philippines, as in Adelina Gurrea’s 1954 play Filipinas: auto
histórico-satírico [The Philippines: Historical-Satirical Play].
But there were also Filipino writers who were more accepting of English. Gregorio Nieva, editor
and proprietor of the bilingual magazine The Philippine Review/Revista filipina, asserted in its maiden
issue that “we have two languages which, as if by nature, are as our own: the English and the Spanish
[sic]” (7). Of course, Nieva’s unidiomatic use of the article “the” in his essay somewhat undermined
his claim that English had become a language of the Philippines—or at least it gave credence to
Ford’s report about the kind of English some Filipinos were speaking. It did not take long though
before more substantial literary texts began cropping up. Zoilo Galang’s A Child of Sorrow, published
in 1921, became the first English-language novel written by a Filipino. Galang had a prolific bilingual
writing career between English and Kapampangan, his L1, spoken in the province of Pampanga and
its environs, before writing solely in English from 1925 onwards for reasons yet unknown (Galdon
26). His works, together with those of Paz Marquez Benitez, Maximo Kalaw, Jose Garcia Villa, Angela
Manalang Gloria, etc., whose names in Spanish would shake off the prescriptive tilde over time,
account for the earliest harvest of Filipino literature in English.
To a certain degree, translingual writing functioned in Hispanofilipino literature as a praxis of
resistance against English. Some texts, like Apolinario Mabini’s The Philippine Revolution, a self-
translation from Spanish of his account of the independence movement, acknowledged that English
was alien to the writer. “The reader will note,” wrote Jacinto Manahan of the Bureau of Printing in
his foreword to the posthumously published translation, that “he had committed some grammatical
errors” because “Mabini learned English practically by himself ” (n.p.). Other authors were more
aggressive. Jesús Balmori, one of the most important Hispanofilipino luminaries of his generation,
wrote passionately against English in many of his poems such as No, no es lo mismo [No, It’s Not the
333
Marlon James Sales
Same] from the anthology El libro de mis vidas manileñas [The Book of my Manila Lives]. Instead of
just the usual Spanish, Balmori caricatured the aberration of forcing Filipinos to sound American by
mimicking their accented English in verse:
No es lo mismo decir con gangosa eufonía:/ “Bat last nait in di packard ay lob yu best of ol”,/
Que gemir un “te adoro hasta la tumba fría”,/En correcto español.
(31; emphasis supplied)
[Saying “But last night in the Packard, I loved you best of all” with a nasal twang is not the
same as sighing “I’ll love you until my cold grave” in correct Spanish.]
Balmori’s take on literary translingualism entailed inserting an invented language into a Spanish-
language poem. The second line of the stanza was rendered in a mock variety of English inflected
with the sounds of Spanish. The effect it produced was one of ridicule brought about by the incom-
prehensibility of an invented language interrupting the flow of a monolingual speech. In the following
verses, Balmori proceeded to contrast English with Kapampangan, Ilokano, Tagalog, and Hiligaynon
to show that English’s incompatibility with Spanish also applied to other languages in the Philippines.
Note that Balmori was already counting Spanish as a Philippine language. No longer was it the for-
eign language Bagongbanta imagined it to be three centuries earlier. Spanish was already a heritage
language of the Filipino nation trying to survive the onslaught of American colonialism, at least in
those parts where it had taken root.
Spanish’s nationalist undertones led to the formation of a kind of golden age of Hispanofilipino
literature in the first half of the 20th century (Fernández 375). Never before had literary production
in Spanish been more abundant, with texts circulating even in the archipelago’s numerous periodicals.
Newspapers with Spanish and Tagalog editions like El Renacimiento/Muling Pagsilang, El Ideal/Ang
Mithi and La Vanguardia/Taliba became important conduits of literature as well as spaces for articu-
lating Filipino nationalism (Checa Godoy 37; Rodao 99–100). Beyond the Tagalog-speaking regions,
translingual periodicals were also being published to varying success. Examples included El Mensajero
in Spanish and Ilokano, El Paladín in Spanish and Kapampangan, Palaris in Spanish and Pangasinan,
the language of the northern province with the same name, La Verdad in Spanish and Ibanag, a lan-
guage spoken in the northeastern province of Cagayan, El Heraldo de Bicol in Spanish and Bikol,
spoken in the southeastern tip of the island of Luzon, and El Precursor in Spanish and Cebuano,
spoken in Central Visayas, to name a few (Checa Godoy 39, 43–46). There was also a strong tradition
of Hispanofilipino fiction outside Manila, particularly in the Visayan region with Guillermo Gómez
Windham,Vicente Sotto, Jaime de Veyra, Adelina Gurrea, and Antonio Abad as some of its most rep-
resentative figures.
Nevertheless, it is in the works of authors more closely identified with indigenous languages
where we can get a sense of the extent of literary translingualism in the Philippines. Take the five-
stanza poem Verdugo ug Defensor [Executioner and Counsel] from an anthology by Fernando Buyser,
a bishop of the Philippine Independent Church, a Filipino Christian denomination that broke away
from Rome at the beginning of American rule. Buyser’s poems, which his contemporaries considered
as generally mediocre (Quintero 616), are usually classified as Cebuano, making him a leading poet of
Cebuano literature’s own golden age (Evasco 321). The following poem, however, is a versified con-
versation between an executioner and a legal counsel in a curious mixture of Spanish and Cebuano.
The executioner began thusly:
Tindog kinsay mga defensores/Sa pagpangitag mga rasones/Kinsay buot usa ka sumaria/
Mangabot hangtod sa Espanya./Porque soy valienteVerdugo/Katluan na ka tuig sa servicio/
No hay defensa ni sufrido/Cuartesa el cuerpo.
(62)
334
[Stand up, defenders, and probe for motives.Whoever wants an indictment shall reach Spain.
For I am a valiant executioner with thirty years of service. There is neither reason nor
suffering. Cut (their) body into pieces.]
To which the counsel replied:
¡Oh! tantas lagrimas [sic],Verdugo/Basta ya quitar de amigo/Me muero vergonzozo [sic]/

Tu [sic] eres arrepentido.
(62)
[So much tears, Executioner! Enough of taking away friends. I will die in shame.You (should
be) filled with remorse].
The Spanish borrowings in the preceding example might have been a part of Buyser’s own idio-
lect and not of any diatopic variety of Cebuano. Yet they illustrate how a hybridized language was
already being employed even outside Manila to author literature. Buyser inserted the borrowings into
the verses in different ways. Some were transposed to Cebuano as loanwords (‘sumaria,’ ‘servicio,’
‘defensa,’ ‘cuerpo,’ ‘arrepentido’); others were orthographically localized as loanblends (‘rasones’ for
‘razones,’ ‘Espanya’ for ‘España’); and a few came about either because of loan coinage (‘cuartesa’
from ‘descuartiza’) or hypercorrection (‘vergonzozo’ instead of ‘vergonzoso’). Spanish would become
an important linguistic superstrate in many Philippine languages. Linguist Antonio Quilis (29–30)
estimated that about a fourth of all Tagalog words came from Spanish while around 3,000 Spanish
words were present in Cebuano.
The U.S. language policy ultimately succeeded in transplanting a new language, but it also paved
the way for the consolidation of indigenous literary cultures as a reaction to English’s perceived
usurpation of the discursive spaces they were occupying. When Japan invaded the Philippines in
1942, English was already widely used while “nobody spoke of the primacy of Spanish anymore”
(Fernández 378). The brief but intense Japanese occupation of the islands until 1945 made Tagalog a
national language and tolerated English, thus further weakening Spanish (Rodao 103).
Decline and Survival

The U.S. granted the Philippines its independence in 1946 almost a year after the surrender of
Japan and the end of World War II. The post-war period was characterized with increased pro-
Americanism among Filipinos and an estrangement from Hispanism, which shed its nationalist
character and became more identified with conservative sectors of society (Rodao 104–105).
Some Hispanofilipino stalwarts like politician Claro M. Recto no longer campaigned to make the
masses speak the language, since this was already viewed as a lost cause, but rather to preserve its
legacy for future generations (724–725). To this end, laws were passed to promote Spanish in aca-
demia (Fernández 372–373). The 1949 Sotto Act, originally intended to make Spanish mandatory
in schools, only succeeded in making it optional. Another attempt happened in 1952 with the
Magalona Act, which mandated that twelve units of Spanish (i.e., equivalent to four subjects) be
taught as a college requirement. The Cuenco Act doubled the required units in 1957. This sparked
protests from students who thought that the additional study load in Spanish, already a hated
college subject at that time, was unnecessary (Thompson 64). Republic Act No. 5182 reduced the
requirement back to twelve in 1967.
All these legal measures proved inadequate. Spanish eventually lost its official status in the 1973
Constitution but received a temporary reprieve from the dictator Ferdinand Marcos due to pressure
from Spanish-speaking business elites (Thompson 65). Fractures in Marcos’s strongman rule prompted
him to launch an ideological project of national unity summed up in the utopic motto “Isang bansa,
335
Marlon James Sales
isang diwa” [One nation, one spirit], proclaimed in 1978 through Presidential Decree No. 1413 and
further expanded in the popular imaginary with the addition of “isang wika” [one language]. The
Constitution ratified a year after Marcos’s ouster in 1986 declared that Spanish was no longer official
in the Philippines.
Despite the best intentions of the current language policy, its emphasis on a single language as
the linguistic vehicle of national identity became a mechanism of exclusion for other Philippine
languages (Aguila 48–49). The underlying philosophy was that for a text to acquire a national char-
acter, it had to be received, whether as an original or in translation, in Filipino (Constantino 395).
Any text in another Philippine language was given the politically loaded descriptor of “regional,” thus
attaching it to a particular language and, in many cases, to a peripheral geographic region. This was
how Hispanofilipino literature became foreign. In the absence of a geographic region where it could
be located, Spanish was displaced to the terrain of memory and myth where its historically fluctuating
role was fixed to elitism and impracticality. Spanish had to be eliminated because it was incompat-
ible with the reputed imperative of a nation to speak in one unifying tongue. But the irony was that
English did not suffer the same fate. Even though Spanish and English had similar colonial origins,
the former became unmoored from a national locale while the latter was claimed by the Philippines
as its own and was therefore niched in officialism.
The unfavorable social climate toward Spanish was what nurtured literary translingualism in
Hispanofilipino writing in this period of rapid decline. Anthologized references for teaching lit-
erature in Spanish classes were published bilingually such as Pilar Mariño’s Philippine Short Stories in
Spanish, 1900–1941, which contained a selection of texts from canonical authors both in their ori-
ginal version and their translation into English. The works of Edmundo Farolán, Marra Lanot, and
Edwin Agustín Lozada, among others, also benefited from parallel self-translation, which allowed the
authors to express themselves simultaneously in Spanish and another language (cf. Donoso and Gallo
31–47). Its most notable exponent, however, was the poet Federico Espino Licsi, whose prolific career
spanned the turbulent Marcos years. Among his last published works was Opus Almost Posthumous, an
anthology in English, Spanish, and Ilokano. His poems in Spanish and Ilokano appeared with his own
English-language translations, but those he wrote in English remained untranslated. Espino Licsi had
written texts in Filipino/Pilipino/Tagalog before, but he did not use it in this anthology.
As in the previous periods, literary translingualism in contemporary Hispanofilipino literature
approximated actual language practices. We see this unfold in the short story El chino asiste a una misa
católica by Paulina Constancia, which appeared alongside its English-language version, A Chinese Man
Goes to Mass, in the book she co-authored with Edmundo Farolán. The story revolved around Chan
Kuai Le, a Chinese immigrant in the town (now city) of Carcar in the province of Cebu, whose inte-
gration in Cebuano society required conversion to Catholicism and marriage with Maricar Zaragoza,
a local mestiza. In this scene we hear Kuai Le asking for Maricar’s hand in marriage:
Bueno, mi amol, fui a la iglesia como tú me lo pediste. ¿Ya soy católico? Cásate conmigo
pol favol. Asistilé a la Misa. Repetilé ‘Santa Malía’ un milón de veses si tú quieles. Cásate
conmigo, Malical, mi amol y te halé la mujel más felis de Calcal.
(100)
Constancia self-translated this passage into English thus:
Well, my love, I went to chulch as you had asked me. Am I Catholic now? Will you please mally
me? I will go to mass. I will even lepeat the Santa Malía a million times if that what you ask
of me. Mally me, Malical, my love—and I will make you the happiest woman in Calcal (101)
To establish Kuai Le’s Chinese-ness, Constancia employed a common, albeit extremely racialized,
phonological stylization of Chinese discourse in Hispanofilipino literature, in which the /r/sound
336
was replaced with the /l/. Hispanofilipino authors have a history of reimagining diasporic Chinese
communities in this manner. José Montero y Vidal’s El payo de Chang-chuy [Chang-chuy’s Umbrella]
(225–263) and Manuel María Rincón’s El mercader chino [The Chinese Merchant] (63–69) were
some examples from the Spanish period. But what made Constancia’s story different was how it was
presented. Since its Spanish and English versions were set side by side in the same book, the readers’
experience of literary translingualism was translingual in and of itself. Whereas translingualism in
earlier periods was largely a reported phenomenon, this passage was a translingual account (i.e., par-
allel Spanish and English versions) of the translingual practices of a multilingual Cebuano society (i.e.,
a Chinese speaker code-switching to Spanish).
It would be inaccurate to say that Hispanofilipino literature enjoys a strong following in the
Philippines at present. The impetus to publish new material in Spanish comes largely from diasporic
authors and publishing houses overseas (Donoso and Gallo 33), and the yield to date has been few and
far between. Literary circulation is generally limited to academic libraries and interested individuals
who have resources to access them digitally or in print, thus making it relatively static in comparison
to, say, Latin American literatures. However, the appeal of Spanish as a foreign language has been
growing of late because of the economic opportunities it brings within the country’s multimillion-
dollar call center industry.6 It remains to be seen if this resurgence can transcend its immediate finan-
cial motivations and cross over to literary production.
Conclusion
Various shifts in the social roles attributed to Spanish in the language politics of the Philippines compelled
many Hispanofilipino authors to deal with literary translingualism. Literary translingualism was very
much present in the development of Hispanofilipino literature, whether as a motif of literary creation, a
practical technique for composing texts, or as a metalinguistic device for describing the linguistic land-
scape where literature was produced. In the first stages of Spanish colonization, translingual poetry came
to being as a testament to an incipient hybridized literary tradition. Spanish acquired a nationalist guise
as the Philippines transitioned between two colonial powers but subsequently evolved under unfavorable
circumstances during the American period. Translingual writing was deployed in Hispanofilipino litera-
ture as a technique for denouncing U.S. colonialism and the rapid spread of the English language, which
was still seen as intrusive. The decline of Spanish, the institutionalization of English, and the creation of
Filipino as the national language in the post-war Philippines resulted in a more vigorous application of
literary translingualism in Hispanofilipino literature as a means to survive. These shifts were reflected
in legislation. The different legal provisions that either advanced or suppressed of the use of Spanish
responded to both pragmatic and affective considerations of every generation.
Reinstating Spanish as an official language of the Philippines may no longer be feasible, but it
should not preclude any endeavor to reintroduce its literary legacy to new readers, even if this means
mediating it through translingualism. Although the prevailing ideal favors linguistic unity as the nor-
mative condition of nationhood, its implications on the preservation of literary traditions in other
languages ought to be examined, mindful of the anomaly of concealing linguistic diversity in a nation
that has historically imagined itself as multilingual.
Notes
1 However, as Andrew Gonzalez (120) points out, the survey results were deceiving because Bisaya was the gen-
eric name of several closely related languages such as Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray, etc.
2 The name of this literary tradition is not without its controversy (Donoso and Gallo 14–15). My personal
preference is to transpose the term Hispanofilipino from Spanish to English.
3 Chabacano is the only Spanish-based creole in Asia, spoken mainly in the city of Zamboanga on the southern
island of Mindanao and the cities of Ternate and Cavite in Luzon. See John Lipski’s article for a brief descrip-
tion of the language and its place in the Philippine linguistic profile.
337
Marlon James Sales
4 Unless otherwise specified, the translations in this essay are mine.

5 Vicente Rafael (208) uses Bienvenido Lumbera’s corrected transcription and translation of this verse (106),
saying that he did not have any access to the primary source. However, the only known source of this verse
is Hermenegildo Cruz’s 1906 text, which Rafael also cites. The English-language translation in this chapter
is mine.
6 Lower operation costs and a young, highly skilled workforce made the Philippines a world leader in business
process outsourcing (B.P.O.), catering mostly to customers in America. The bulk of call center work requires
English but employees who have additional languages, particularly Spanish, tend to receive higher wages.
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26
TRANSLINGUAL/TRANSNATIONAL
WRITERS OF JAPAN
Reiko Tachibana
In the world of globalization and its counter-currents, cultural maps of the world continue to be fre-
quently redrawn.Nnational and regional boundaries are being stretched or redefined, and it is now
commonplace to observe that in many situations people and ideas have become more interconnected,
mobile, and diasporic. As part of this overall development, translingual/transnational authors are
playing an active part in reshaping literatures in many parts of the world. In Japan, too, translingual
writers have become increasingly visible, especially since the 1990s, and Japanese literature in the
twenty-first century has been more inclusive and diversified through their works. For instance,
Tawada Yoko (1960–), born and raised in Japan, then moved to Germany, writes in both Japanese and
German, while Hideo Levy, from the U.S., living in Japan, writes in Japanese. Their translingualism
(in and out) of Japan is sensational not only because they exemplify patterns of immigration, travel,
and residency in more than one nation, but, more importantly, because they represent a relatively new
turn in Japanese literature in which the expression of the writer’s dual or multiple contexts produce
an environment in which they remain in the interstices between cultures. In so doing, they question
and help to redefine what it is to be Japanese, and literature of Japan.
This chapter explores transnational/translingual writers of Japan who have gained in promin-
ence in the 1990s. Due to the limitations of the scope, my chosen focus is the sample of Japanese
translingual authors: Tawada Yoko (1960–), who has been living in Germany for nearly four decades
and writes in both Japanese and German; the Polish-Jewish American writer Hideo Levy (1950–)
who has lived in Japan since the 1980s and writes in Japanese (only); and Yang Yi (1964–) from China
who went to Japan to study the Japanese language in her early twenties and has lived in Tokyo since;
and Zainichi (residing Japan) Korean writers,1 such as Lee Yangji (1955–1992), whose parents were
brought to Japan during the Japanese colonization of Korea. I also consider writers from previous
generations, Lee Hoesung (1930–), who was born in what was then the Japanese territory of Karafuto
(now Sakhalin), relocated to mainland Japan with his family after the war, and started writing in
Japanese two decades later.
The works of these writers reflect not only their critical views of both Japan and their other
cultures, but also their chosen stance of remaining in the interstitial gap between cultures and
languages—the Zwischenraum, or in-between space, as Tawada puts it. To bring these writers together
under the rubric of the “transnational” underscores their attempts to deconstruct the ideologically
and politically charged term “nation” (or what Anderson put it, the “imagined” communities—the
collective notion of “imagined” nation through the shared monolingual language) along with their
340 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-26

Translingual Writers of Japan
resistance to conventional ideas of Japanese-ness. The languages in which they create their writings,
whether their mother tongue (bogo) or a language acquired later or both, signify conscious choices,
and their works often thematically express the reasons for such choices.
Notion of Specular Border Writer

The translingual/transnational writers described here can be called specular border writers, to use
Abdul JanMohamed’s term, or writers of exophony, to use Tawada’s term. In his essay “Worldliness-
without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual,”
JanMohamed distinguishes between two types of border intellectuals. In contrast with those whom
he describes as syncretic border intellectuals (such as Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe), who are
more or less “at home” in both their initial and adopted cultures and are “able to combine elem-
ents of the two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and experiences,” JanMohamed
explains that specular border intellectuals (such as Edward Said and Richard Wright), though also
familiar with two cultures, are nevertheless “unwilling to be ‘at home’ in these societies,” con-
sciously situating themselves in their “interstitial cultural space” where they can engage in “ana-
lytic scrutiny rather than combining [cultures]” (97). While syncretic border writers attempt to “fill
the gaps … or bridge the gaps” between cultures (114), the intention of specular border writers is
instead to produce work that “reflects (on) the gaps and that articulates their nature and structures”
(114). JanMohamed further elucidates the functions of the specular border intellectual by using
Said’s concepts of “worldliness-without-world” and “homelessness-as-home.” While “worldliness-
without-world” emphasizes the specular border intellectual’s awareness of being located outside the
group in question, “homelessness-as-home” accentuates a jouissance derived from transitoriness, from
giving preference to process and relationship over allegiance to groups or to objects that represent
reified relationships. Instead, “homelessness-as-home” privileges the pleasure of border-crossing and
transgression (JanMohamed 114). Although such a distinction among intellectuals is, according to
JanMohamed, based on “the intentionality of their intellectual orientation (as opposed to a categor-
ical epistemic differentiation)” (97), one might debate how the distinction is sometimes applied; for
instance, whether Rushdie in fact belongs to the syncretic border intellectuals. However, I argue
that the writers explored in this chapter can indeed be called specular border writers because they
locate themselves in the gaps between cultures to maintain their critical distancing, and their products
represent translingual literature of Japan.
Notion of Exophony
Moreover, these transnational/translingual writers also can be considered to represent the condition
of “exophony,” to borrow Tawada’s neologism and the title of her 2003 book, Ekusohoni: Bogo no soto
e deru tabi (Exophony: Journeying Away from the Mother Language). As Tawada explains it, “exophony,”
a term that draws upon analogies to music, refers to the productivity of writers whose creative
inquisitiveness and enthusiasm lead them to compose fresh tunes, for a new instrument, in a language
other than their mother tongue (bogo). Some exophonic writers use languages other than their own
due to forced disasporic situations, as in experiences of exile, immigration, colonization, etc., while
others (including Tawada and Levy) have chosen to use acquired languages for personal reasons. In
either situation, for such writers the language of expression is deconstructed and re-constructed as
they experiment with ways for language to represent cultural gaps and embrace exophony, with its
dissonant tones, rather than seeking to achieve euphony, a smooth and assimilated flow in harmo-
nious tones. Such attempts—stepping out from their mother tongues that would wrap or bind them
up—emphasize that language is a choice, thereby raising a question for any transnational writers who
do not “go out,” but who write in mother tongues: why have they chosen their mother tongues? In
that sense, exophony is a “basic condition of an innovative literary language that is always trying to
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implode and break its own vessel from within. Only through self-destruction can a language attain a
new life” (Suga 27).
Exophonic writers, like specular border writers, step outside, literally or figuratively, of their native
languages not to become native-like speakers in another language, but to express a critical distance
both from their initial locus and from languages and cultures not their own.
Although it is often assumed that the condition of the immigrant, exile, stranger, or trav-
eler is that of alienation and discomfort, for the transnational writers considered here the pos-
ture of being self-situated in the gaps is not invariably painful. Writing in both her mother
tongue (Japanese) and her acquired language (German), Tawada repeatedly expresses her pleasure
at staying in the Zwischenraum constituted by the “poetic space” (Tawada 2003: 32) between the
two languages and cultures to cultivate it, rather than crossing the boundary or building a bridge
between and across languages.2
According to Tawada, her concept of exophony is addressed especially to audiences in Japan,
where many people are still bound to an imagined formulation of Japanese-ness as a monolithic,
homogenous entity—the so-called “quadruple” myth (yonmi ittai) of one nation, one race, one lan-
guage, and one culture: Japan, the Japanese people, the Japanese language, Japanese culture. Such
a monolingual paradigm—the myth of “the homogeneous, monolithic, and monolingual nation”
(Yildiz 114)—still weighs heavily in people’s minds.
Furthermore, in light of the legacy of Japan’s colonization of Korea (1910–1945), Zainichi
Korean writers —especially the first and the early second generation—were more familiar with
Korea’s language and culture. Similar to Said and Wright, they see themselves both as exiles who
were “forced to leave their original cultures, and [as] immigrants, [who] operate more or less
effectively in their new culture. However, neither becomes a full-fledged subject of the latter”
(JanMohamed 102). Like Said, these writers choose not to evince an “uncritical gregariousness”
(JanMohamed 102), and like Wright in the U.S., they are also the subjects of discrimination, treated
as second-class citizens.
The younger generations of Zainichi Korean writers born and raised in Japan find themselves
in a more typically monolingual situation where their mother tongue is Japanese. They have little
knowledge of the Korean language or culture, yet they must begin with a fundamental question.
Who are they? And for them, what does it mean to be Korean? Azade Seyhan’s query, whether “lan-
guage is the single most important determination of national identity” (8), weighs heavily on them.
Their use of Japanese is, at first, a necessity rather than a choice. They realize that their “Japanese”
upbringing, including their formal Japanese education, rather than their Korean heritage, has formed
their thoughts and lifestyles. They nevertheless often seek to distance themselves from Japanese to
remake the language into a means of expression that differs from that used by the Japanese, from
whom they are differentiated. Through unwrapping themselves from the monolingual paradigm or
quadruple myth, they create their own Japanese. They seek ways to step out of what is, for many of
them, their only available language.
Tawada’s reasons for writing in two languages are similar: to gain distance from both languages,
and to attempt new textual creations. In 1994, after a decade of living in Germany, she stated:
The purpose of my writing in German is to create a language different from the native
speakers’. By doing so, I also attempt to destroy the notion of the beautiful’ or fine Japanese
(if such a thing ever exists) when I write in Japanese. That is, I don’t intend to be a writer
who skillfully manages both languages. Nor do I intend to abandon one language to grasp
the other. ‘Reconstructing’ both languages while deconstructing them is my aim.
(Interview with Levy 139–140)
Her opposition to the concept of a “beautiful” language was meant specifically as a rejection
of the exclusivity and exceptionalism embedded in the quadruple myth, with its claim that the
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Japanese language and culture belong to “authentic” Japanese people only, and that this homogeneity
characterizes Japanese-ness.
Hybrid Language and Translingual Writers in Japanese History

The existence of translingual/transnational writers and of heterogeneity in Japanese literature can be
traced back more than a thousand years, when poets and intellectuals from China and Korea were
welcomed to the Yamato court during the Nara (710–794) and Heian (794–1185) eras. It is well
known that the “Japanese” language is in fact hybrid. Since no written language existed in Japan by
the fifth century or so, Japan borrowed written characters from China and then created Japanese
alphabets (kana; hira gana, and katakana). In short, “the coexistence of something foreign (Chinese
ideograms called kanji) and something native (kana) is the organizing principle of the Japanese lan-
guage” (Sakai 40).3 It is written in characters derived from Chinese ideograms (kanji), which fre-
quently have two types of pronunciations (“on” and “kun” readings). “On” is based on the perceived
Chinese sound of the word. As Hideo Levy, conscious of his own position, describes it, one of the
leading poets and compilers of the Manyoshu (759, Ten Thousand Leaves, translated by Levy in 1981),
a profoundly important early anthology of Japanese poetry, was Yamanoue no Okura (ca. 660–733),
who is said to have come originally from Kudara (Korea). As a kentoshi (遣唐使；envoy to Tang
Dynasty), Okura was sent as a Japanese representative to the center of civilization at that time—Tang-
Dynasty China (618–907). He chose to write poems in Japanese (manyo gana) rather than kanshi
(poems in Chinese, the official language of the time), and his poetry expresses what Levy calls “bilin-
gual excitement” (2007: 158), an excitement deriving from perceiving both languages, his mother
tongue and the later acquired language, through a foreigner’s eyes and in a bilingual-like manner.
More than 1,000 years later, Japanese literature, along with Japanese society, displays a resurgent het-
erogeneity through the increase in exophonic and specular border writers who nourish their creative
spaces with bilingual (and translingual) excitement, or we could also say, the richness of translingual/
transnational literature of Japan.
Changing Contexts
As mentioned above, public recognition of Japan’s translingual/transnational writers has greatly
increased since the early 1990s. In the earlier history of modern Japanese literature, given the pre-
dominance of the quadruple myth, the writing of fiction belonged almost exclusively to the Japanese
(except for the Zainichi Koreans). As the representative of translingualism of Japan, the writers that
I discuss here are: Tawada Yoko, Levy Hideo,Yi Yang, and a Zainichi Korean writer.
Tawada Yoko
Tawada Yoko, born and raised in Japan, has lived in Germany since 1982, and writes in both Japanese
and German. Her debut as a writer in Germany with a collection of poems and a short story, entitled
“Nur da wo du bust ist da nichts/anata o iru tokoro dake nani mo nai” (1987), which is set, as the title
suggests, with Tawada’s Japanese version and a German translation by Peter Pörtner, facing each
other. The (traditional) vertical writing in Japanese and the horizontal writing in German offers
a visual contrast or mizo (gap) or Zwischenraum (in-between space/gap/edge (“third space” in
Homi Bhabha’s term) where she deconstructs and (re)constructs the languages. According to Tawada,
writing itself is an act of translation. She explains that in German, übersetzen (to translate) can also
mean “To steer boat from one shore to the other,” while in Japanese ‘honyaku’ (翻訳）(to translate)
is also a Sino-Japanese word. The first ideogram of this word (翻）suggests a slightly dramatic and
romantic gesture, which means “to turn over,” or “to flip over,” rather than to simply turning a page
(Interview with Tawada: 2008 CLS 21).
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This act of honyaku echoes what Walter Benjamin calls the significance of translation. In “The
Task of the Translator,” quoting Rudolf Pannwitz, Benjamin underlines the importance of “allowing
[one’s] own language far different from his own” (like Japanese and German in Tawada’s case), he “must
got back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to the point where work, image are
to converge. He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language” (81). This
procedure echoes Tawada’s exophony attempt to journey away from her native language (Japanese),
to allow the foreign language (German) to deconstruct and (re)construct her mother tongue. Her
“Germanized” Japanese and “Japanized” Germany display the inter/trans/texuality of her own and
other writers’ texts—flipping them over to create something unexpected, from the Zwischenraum
(in-between space or poetic space) in which Tawada constantly supersedes in the tension not to fall
into either hole (language). From this critical distance, Tawada’s works challenge what Derrida calls
logocentrism through the interplay of discourses—resisting the historical binary (and hierarchical)
opposition between western (European/phonetic writing) culture and non-western culture.
In her frequent and well-known performances in Germany, the U.S., and Japan, in which she
typically reads her works in more than one language, Tawada visualizes the act of translation through
gestures. For instance, she might “attach bits of scrap paper on [her] table, read from these bits like
from the pages of a dictionary, only to finally disseminate them into the delighted audience” (CLS
20). Or in the middle of her reading, from the fingers of a thin, white glove, she turns the glove inside
out, and continues reading the kanji letters, written inside. Through these performances, Tawada
attempts to visualize honyaku, and underlines the writer’s practice of exophony—how to set out
one’s mother language with which one is wrapped/bound and what would happen when one steps
out—whose inquisitiveness then causes them to produce some “unexpected” turns, use a new instru-
ment, a language other than their mother tongue. For Tawada, writing is a “constant process of self-
translation” (Saga 27).
Tawada’s debut work in Japan, “Kakato o nakushite” (1991, “Missing Heels” 1998), is a Kafkaesque
story about a week in a “marriage” by a first-person narrator in a nameless strange town. Traveling
by train and crossing an apparently invisible national border, the protagonist comes to a town in an
unidentified foreign land as “an official mail-order bride” (75) where, stigmatized as an inferior being
from a barbarian country, she experiences the impact of a hegemonic culture rather than merely a
different culture.The story emphasizes the self-conscious protagonist’s sense of stumbling and floating
not only in her physical movements, but also in Tawada’s “dissonant” words and long “stumbling”
sentences. For the protagonist, everything—the platform, floor, and ceiling of the train station, the
streets—seems slanted, and everyone is stumbling and moving with an odd posture as they walk. In
the reaction of her body to this strange environment she feels that she too is “stumbling,” but she
believes the town itself is built on an incline.
The title of the story, “Missing Heels” or “kakato o nakushite,” is a metaphor for those who live
in a foreign land and therefore lose their heels—that is, they do not walk firmly and naturally on the
ground. Instead, they seem to be “floating” or moving rootlessly, alienated in the societies in which
they try to settle. Or perhaps Tawada is asking readers whether people can live without heels? At the
end of the story, resisting the doctor’s order that the protagonist reconstruct the (missing) heels, she
decides to remain without heels, rejecting becoming “normal/harmonious.” Her decision implies
that Tawada’s writing exemplifies exophony—living in “stumbling” tunes.
Furthermore, after the Tohoku Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011,
Tawada published two futuristic dystopian stories, “Fushi no shima” (“The Island of Eternal Life”)
and Kentoshi (The Emissary) in 2012 and 2014, respectively. In “The Island of Eternal Life,” post-
Fukushima Japan was completely cut off from the world, and readers are informed through rumors
and unreliable sources that Japan’s elderly acquired their eternal life (they simply cannot die), while
youth has become ill and fragile. In Kentoshi, such transformations are real and the (private) govern-
ment reinforces the sakoku policy (closed nation; as in Edo Japan, 1604–1868), prohibiting use of
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foreign words (as during World War II). Both stories seem to present a dystopian world, yet readers
soon realize that Tawada’s narrative reflects the very reality of Japan. For instance, Japan today is a
nation of elderly people (disproportionately elderly due to very low birth rates). The welfare of
elderly people, financially and physically, is the most serious problem in Japanese society today. In
Tawada’s stories, however, the situation is reversed. The strong elderly cannot die since they are the
weak and fragile children’s caretakers.
In Kentoshi, the young and fragile protagonist named Mumei (lit. no name) is cared for by his
strong 115-year-old great-g randfather, Yoshiro. In an isolated (closed) nation, the use of foreign
words is not allowed and Tokyo has become an empty shell—a deserted area without human
beings. Besides Tawada’s defamiliarization of the reader’s pre-conception—strong elderly and fra-
gile children, this story is remarkable because of her play of words. The title Kentoshi (献灯使：lit.
votive light envoy) signifies children who are secretly sent outside Japan in the hope that for-
eign researchers will find cures for them. Toward the end of the story, Mumei turns 15 years old,
becomes weaker and wheelchair-bound, and is chosen as a kentoshi and about to be sent to a
foreign world.
The term “kentoshi” reminds Japanese readers of the more common term, kentoshi (遣唐
使；envoy to Tang Dynasty, 618–917; the majority are government officials, artists, and educators in
the Nara and Heian eras (710–1185), as mentioned above), who were sent to Tang-Dynasty China to
learn about Chinese civilization. More than a century later, in Tawada’s story, sending a kentoshi (like
the sick child Mumei) is the only hope for the elderly to “save” Japan—if they do not, the younger
generations and the nation itself might be extinguished.
The story also attempts to resolve the dichotomy between the human and animal (bird), and blur
the gender lines between female and male: Mumei is described like “a baby bird” (3) with big head
“much too large for his slender long neck” (3); His mother’s body is transformed into an “animal/
bird” like figure after her death on her child’s birth; and Mumei’s body has metamorphosed into that
of a girl at the moment he leaves Japan for the outside world.
Furthermore, Tawada’s playful textural experiments cause the reader to experience “stum-
bling” sensations (like the protagonist in “Missing Heels”)—for instance, Yoshiro’s shoes, made in
Iwate, was written Iwate [岩手] “in India ink with a brush, followed by the kana for [まで] ma
and de” (5). The narrator explains that due to younger generation’s lack of knowledge of English,
they read “made” as ma + de (in Japanese, “to” or “until”; (5) the translator’s footnote was added
to the novel): on another occasion, to commemorate the day that the internet has died as “Off-
Line” day, and that foreign words were inscribed in kanji as 御婦裸淫 (56)—literally meaning of
“Honorable-Woman-Naked-Obscenity” (44). Tawada’s creation of such playful words (without
any logical meanings) with often phonetic translations of foreign words into Japanese provides the
reader with exophonic excitement.
Levy Hideo
Born Ian Hideo Levy in the United States, to a Jewish father and a Polish mother, he was given the
middle name Hideo in honor of his father’s Japanese-American friend who had been held in an
Internment camp during World War II. His father, who is a scholar of Chinese, eventually became a
diplomat and the young Levy spent his childhood in Asia, living in Taiwan between 1956 and 1960
(ages 5 to 10_. After his parents’ divorce, and two years’ stay in Hong Kong, his mother took him and
his brother to the U.S.
Levy, who currently lives in Japan and writes in Japanese (only), is literally what Tawada calls an
exophonic writer—one who steps out of his mother tongue, in Levy’s case English, the hegemonic
language of the world. He calls his choice “nihongo no shori” (the triumph of the Japanese language),
stating that the language itself does not discriminate against people.When Levy went to Japan for the
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first time in 1967, at the age of sixteen, he encountered strong resistance as a gaijin (the most com-
monly used word for foreigners) who was attempting to master the Japanese language and culture. As
noted earlier, in 1992 he was awarded the Noma Bungei prize for new writers, and was nominated
for the Akutagawa Prize for his novel, Tiananmen, in 1996. Tawada’s conscious efforts to be a specular
border and exophonic writer—though when she writes in German she is “stepping out” of Japanese
rather than into it—have had a significant impact on Levy and on other transnational writers. Levy
made his debut in Japan with the short story “Seijoki no kikoenai heya” (“The Room where the
Star-Spangled Banner Can’t be Heard,” 1987. “November” 1989;and “Nakama” 1991 form a trilogy
with Seijoki no kikoenai heya). The seventeen-year-old protagonist, Ben, like the author, lives in Tokyo.
Through reflection on his early experiences in foreign lands—an American boy in the East—Levy
raises questions of identity or identities and problematizes the ethnocentric ideologies of Japan. For
Levy, identity means knowing two (or more) languages, or the process itself of crossing over from
one language to another (2001: 201). His debut in the Japanese literary world made history, for as
mentioned earlier, the literature of Japan was generally believed to be the product of “authentic”
Japanese writers, with the only exception being the so-called Zainichi Korean writers residing in
Japan who had no choice but to write in Japanese. Levy’s intervention into Japanese literature was
different because he did have a choice: he could have written his stories in his mother tongue,
English, the hegemonic language of our time. His translingual writing—writing in Japanese—with
his passion for Japanese language further expands when he began to visit China in the mid-1990s.
To his surprise, Levy’s Chinese (Mandarin), which he learned while living with his family in
Taiwan more than four decades ago, was coming back. His experiences motivated him to commu-
nicate with local people in villages in China. His aim was to write down his experiences in China
in Japanese. His “doubly” translated writings, from Chinese which he hears on a trip in China, to
Japanese provides him with more pleasure through the process of exophony: self-translation of two
acquired languages.
Based on his travelogue in China, Levy published the novel Tiannamon (天安門1996) and
collections of travlogues in book form, such as Wareteki Chugoku (我的中国—the title
written in kanji with furigana in hiragana for reading aid, consisting of smaller kana printed
next to a kanji to indicate its pronunciation, 2004) and Identities (アイデンテイテイズ,
1997). He visited China, rather than Taiwan where he lived from age 5 to 10, because he
wanted to maintain his (pastoral and warm) memories of Taiwan. He visited remote villages
in China, seeking his vision of “old Taiwan” there.
In 2014, Levy finally decided to visit Taiwan for the first time in nearly fifty years. To his surprise,
the childhood house in which his family lived was gone, yet the exact same type of the house was still
there. His memories of this visit to his “hometown” in Taiching, Taiwan led him to publish a travel
log entitled “Mohankyo” (模範郷; lit. model home town/land; model village, the image of a utopian
homeland), published then in book form as Mohankyo. This book included several other essays in
2014.The house was a Japanese-style house, built by the colonizing Japanese in the image of a utopian
homeland compound during the colonization of Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. After the war, foreigners
(from the West) occupied that district.
In Taichung, Taiwan, both Chinese (Mandarin) and Japanese were used as “non-native languages”
mainly by newcomers/former colonizers. For Levy, Chinese became a “quasi” mother tongue, reflecting
his childhood memories, while Japanese was the language of exophony for his creative writing.
Yang Yi from China

.Yang Yi (ca. 1964–) from China, whose mother tongue is Chinese (Mandarin), started her exophonic
practice with Japanese two decades earlier. A year before receiving the Akutagawa Prize, she was
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awarded the 2007 Bungakukai new author’s prize (Bunakukai shinjinsho); here, too, she was the
first non-native Japanese speaker to receive this honor. Her prize-winning novel, Toki ga nimiju asa
(2008, A Morning Steeped in Time), takes place in her native land, China. Her young protagonist, Ryo
Koen (Chinese names in the story appear as Japanese transcriptions with Chinese pronunciation in
katakana), who is from a rural town, passes the extremely competitive national exam and begins uni-
versity life in a city. The excitement of university life is soon destroyed due to the Tiananmen Square
Incident of June 4, 1989. After the incident, expelled from the university, Ryo Koen and his Japanese
wife emigrate to Japan. Paralleling the author’s experience, her protagonist’s journey from China
to Japan is literally a journey away from their mother tongue, Chinese, toward a foreign language,
Japanese.
Yang Yi’s exophonic experiments are visible in her insertion of multilingual quotations, including
English poems and words, Chinese poems (sometimes along with Japanese translation) and idiomatic
phrases; and “uncommon” Japanese expressions. For instance, Koen and his friend listen to the pro-
fessor reading the early 20th-century Chinese poems (along with classical ones, prohibited during the
Cultural Revolution) with much feeling. Those poems are Chinese originals, followed by Japanese
translations. The logos on the “made-to-order” T-shirts reflect the prodemocracy movement—they
are written both in Chinese, 我愛中国 (lit. my love China) and in English, “I Love You” (implying
the double meaning of Koen’s friend’s love for a leader of the movement and for China). Yang Yi’s
figurative expressions often sound impressive and humorous. The protagonist expresses astonishment
at the picture of his old friend and his (physical and ideological) metamorphosis: “I was blown away
[shocked] by my friend’s photo, and instantly became like a dried-up [old and almost rotten] radish”
(129). In this manner, the author’s deliberate insertion of Chinese, Chinese idioms, English words and
poems, “unusual” figurative expressions, defamiliarized the Japanese language and the perceptions of
Japanese readers. Her use of ideograms—a mixture of Japanese kanji and original Chinese—produces
“dissonant” tunes in her exophonic writings.
Zainichi Korean Writer, Lee Yangji (1955–1992)

The birth of Zainichi Korean literature (zainichi chosen-jin bungaku, or literally, literature by Koreans
residing in Japan) occurred in the 1950s and came to be gradually acknowledged in Japanese literary
circles starting in the 1970s when the Japan’s prestigious literary prize (Akutagawa sho) was awarded
to Lee Hosesung (1935–), the first Zainichi Korean writer and the first “foreigner.” He received the
award for his semi-autobiographical novella, “Kinuta o utsu onna” (translated into Korean in 1972
and into English in 1986).4 The story focuses on the protagonist’s mother, who dies just before the
end of World War II. Lee Hosesung compared the story to a requiem for all Korean women who had
struggled during Japan’s colonization of Korea.
Nearly two decades after Lee Hoesung’s requiem, another Zainichi Korean writer, Lee Yang (李
良枝; 1955–1992), received the Akutagawa Prize for her novella, “Yu-Hee.” The story is based on
her own study-abroad experience in Korea. On full display are the conflict between Korea—her
“mother” land—and Japan, where she was born and raised. The twenty-six-year old Zainichi Korean
Yu-Hee visited Korea for the first time to learn the “mother language of the nation” (bokokugo).
Although she wanted to grab hold of the “kotoba no tsue” (crutch of words) between Korean and
Japanese, her Japanese upbringing leads her to reject her native land, Korea.
For both Hoesung and Yangji, their “mother” tongue is Japanese, since they were born and raised
in Japan.They also were educated in Japanese rather than Korean schools and have only a basic know-
ledge of Korean. As young adults, they both underwent a quest for identity. Their initial attempts to
write in the Korean language failed due to their insufficient language skills. Their literary develop-
ment thus reflects the long and difficult process of regaining or reformulating their identities, over-
coming their own form of the quadruple belief (in their case, the identification of Korea, Korean, the
Korean language, and Korean culture), and constructing unique forms of Japanese that differ from the
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general usage, so that they produce their works from the space between Japan and Korea. Aware of
the socio-political relationships between the two countries, they too are in the position of specular
border writers who seek to write from the gap between cultures and societies.
Reflecting Yi Yanji’s conflict, her protagonist,Yu-Hee, indirectly exhibits her struggle in her con-
versation with a Korean woman in whose house in Seoul Yu-Hee has lived in. At the time the story
opens,Yu-Hee has returned to Japan after three and a half years’ stay as a student in Korea, her “native”
land. Korea is thus observed (in Japanese) through the memories of a Korean woman recalling the
experiences of the Zainichi KoreanYu-Hee. Reality is doubly or triply filtered asYu-Hee’s experiences
in Korea are retrospectively and indirectly described by the first-person narrator, who tries to com-
prehend Yu-Hee’s decision to suddenly leave Korea in the middle of her course of study. In fact, she
also leaves her nearly 500-page-long journal, written in Japanese, in the narrator’s house.
Although the narrator does not know Japanese, she feels that Yu-Hee’s written characters are
speaking to her, and that her “living” journal also reminds her of what Yu-Hee called “kotoba no
tsue” (the crutch of words). During one of their walks,Yu-Hee explains that when she awoke, she
uttered the vowel sound “ah” and tried to ascertain whether it was the Korean “ah” or the Japanese
“ah.” “If it’s the Korean ah, I would grab the crutch which continues, ya, o, yo (written in Korean
with katakana pronunciation). If it’s the Japanese ah, that crutch goes on, i, u, e, o” (Kotoba kara
naru tuse: 450) in order to continue uttering vowels in Korean or Japanese. She continually fails
to do so (her frustration reminds us of Hoesung’s comment on language as the ningen no gokan
or roots of the human being). At the end of the story, the narrator also seeks to pronounce the
“Korean” ‘ah’.”
Yu-Hee’s writing then appears. Yu-Hee’s [written words in Japanese, overlapping with the
hangul words that Yu-Hee has written] … Yu-Hee’s two kinds of language pierce my eyes
like thin needles … the reverberation of [Korean] ah was just stuck in my throat … [the
[vowels] which floor ah don’t come out.
(450)
Her mother tongue—Korean—has led her, for the first time, to feel distanced from herself, as
though she is becoming a “foreigner to her own language” or someone experiencing the euphonic
moment, to use Tawada’s term.
As shown in “Yu-Hee,” the troubled nature of personal and collective identity was the main sub-
ject for the second-and third-generation Zainichi Korean writers, especially in the 1980s through
the early 1990s. To the extent that they are bound by the monolingual diagram and the nationalistic
concept of one language—one culture—one race—one nationality, Zainichi Koreans who want to
be identified as Korean fail because they have little knowledge of the Korean language. Those who
want to be Japanese do not fit the equation either. Yangji states that upon arriving in Korea and
studying Korean at the university, she soon realized that kankokugo (the Korean language) should be
her bokokugo (mother tongue of the nation) and the source of her identity. In reality, kankokugo has
never become her mother tongue, but remains a foreign language.
The transnational positioning of Zainichi Korean writers derives not so much from individual
itineraries as from their (or their parents’ and grandparents’) participation, often involuntarily, in larger
political events or communities of migration.Yet, younger generation Zainichi Korean writers (after
the Yangji generation) seem to enjoy the exophoric experiences of writing in Japanese, using their
own “dissonant” tunes.
This chapter does not attempt to identify all aspects of the development of Japan’s translingual/
transnational writing. Instead, the objective is to highlight certain writers who stand out for their
translingual qualities and to point to significant trends, such as the increasing presence of women
writers, especially Zainichi Korean writers, and the consciousness of the crucial and creative role of
translation.
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In the twenty- first century, translingual writers of Japan have become more diverse and
acknowledged in the literary world.This includes the Zainichi Korean Yu Miri (1968–) who won the
2020 National Book Award for her novel, Tokyo Ueno Station;5 Wen Yuju (1980–) from Taiwan, who
moved to Japan with her family at the age of three; David Zoppetti (1962–) from Switzerland, who
has been living in Japan since the mid-1980s; and Shrin Nezammaffi (1970–) from Iran who moved
to Japan in 1999 to study and who began to write in Japanese. These, and others, are welcomed in
the literary world of Japan and beyond. Translingual/transnational writers of Japan examined in this
chapter enjoy writing from the Zwischenraum, and pursue their responsibility as critical translators
of the world in which they live.
Notes
1 The term zainichi (residing in Japan) mainly used for Koreans who remained Japan after World War II as Japan
expected them to return to Korea (similar connotation of Gastarbeiter in Germany), yet the term has become
more “positive” among Koreans who resist assimilation into Japanese society. For instance, the Zainichi Korean
Kang Sung Jung (1950–), a former Political Science professor at the University of Tokyo, published his semi-
autobiographical novel, entitled Zainichi (2004).
2 From Tawada’s talk at Hitotsubashi University in 2000, entitled “Kyokai o tagayasu” [Cultivating the in-
between space].
3 Sakai Naoki, Ch. 3, “Image and the Unity of a language.” In Yoko Tawada, ed. Doug Slaymaker, 2020. 35–47.
4 English translation of Lee Hoesun’g story, “Kinuta o utsu onna” (literally, “The Woman Who Beats the Fulling
Block,”) was published, using uncommon word, “to full” as “The Woman who fulled the cloth.”
5 It is worth mentioning that Tawada’s The Emissary also won the same national book award in 2018.
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351
IX
Literary Translingualism
in Latin America
27
THE AMERINDIAN AND
EUROPEAN SWITCH
Translingual Writing and Latin American
Literature
Latin American literature, like Latin America itself, is a construct whose touchstone is largely lin-
guistic. The “Latin” invokes the Roman lineage of the region’s two major languages: Portuguese,
spoken in Brazil; and Spanish, the main tongue of nineteen countries from Argentina and Chile all
the way north to Cuba and Mexico. But the Iberian dyad, if efficiently minimalistic, is rather dis-
ingenuous. For one, it expunges the vital presence of multiple Amerindian languages, spoken by
the peoples who first settled and still inhabit this vast part of the world. Further, it sidesteps other
European tongues adopted as literary tools from colonial times to the present. Acknowledging the
contexts and forms of translingual writing reveals Latin America’s linguistic diversity and extrater-
ritorial bonds. Choosing to write in Spanish or Portuguese instead of an indigenous tongue began
as a response to metropolitan power and prestige. In the viceroyalty of Peru, for instance, a Quechua
speaker adopted Spanish to reach dominant audiences. Conversely, an author in New Spain, mindful
of her multilingual world, wrote occasional verses in Nahuatl. Latin, cultivated everywhere, was the
universal language of an elite.The translingual experience has also been the outcome of migration to,
or from, Europe and North America (Asia too), and is often linked to cosmopolitan affinities. Since
the nineteenth century, writers have authored verses in French,1 regarded as the preeminent language
of modernity, or written in English to reach a larger readership. The translingual archive is rich and
varied; Spanish and Portuguese bedeck the official façade, but many other tongues dwell in the house
of Latin American literature.
The import of Amerindian languages cannot be overestimated.2 If the languages that Columbus
heard in the Caribbean on his first journey to the Americas are now extinct, and others are critically
endangered, a substantial number of indigenous tongues have been recognized as national languages
or enjoy co-official status with Spanish in several countries. While many are spoken in small geo-
graphical pockets, a few, like the four branches of Quechua, prevail across borders. The corpus of
writing in tongues as diverse as Nahuatl or Mapudungun continues to flourish, but whether to write
in Spanish or Portuguese instead of the mother tongue remains a dilemma for speakers of Amerindian
languages.3 In the early seventeenth century, the Inca Garcilaso had rendered in Spanish stories told
by his great-uncle in Quechua, but he poignantly underscored a sense of loss in translation:
Esta larga relación del origen de sus Reyes me dio aquel Inca, tío de mi madre, a quien yo
se la pedí, la cual yo he procurado traducir fielmente de mi lengua materna, que es la del
Inca, en la ajena, que es la castellana, aunque no la he escrito con la majestad de palabras que
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-27 355

el Inca habló ni con toda la significación de las de aquel lenguaje tienen, que, por ser tan
significativo, pudiera haberse entendido mucho más de lo que se ha hecho.
(42)
This long account of the origin of our kings was given to me by the Inca, my mother’s
uncle, of whom I asked it. I have tried to translate it faithfully from my mother tongue, that
of the Inca, into a foreign speech, Castilian, though I have not written it in such majestic
language as the Inca used, nor with the full significance the words of that language have.
(46)
Similarly, Fredy Chikangana views his own poetical use of Spanish with estrangement in “En verbo
ajeno” (“In Alien Words”), written in Colombia around 1992: “Hablo de lo propio /con lo que no
es mío; /hablo con verbo ajeno. /Sobre mi gente /hablo y no soy yo /escribo y yo no soy” (qtd. by
Vivas 88; “I speak about what is mine /with that which is not; /I speak with an alien word. /About
my people /I speak and it’s not me /I write and I am not”). Spanish belongs to Chikangana as much
as it does to anyone else, but as a member of the Yanakuna people, he eventually adopts the name
Wiñay Mallki, which means “rooted in time” in Quechua, and publishes a bilingual book of poetry
titled Kentipay llattantutamanta /El colibrí de la noche desnuda (The Hummingbird of the Naked Night).
Born in Cusco but a resident of Spain since his youth, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616)
is one the great artificers of Spanish prose and the first native of the Americas to be read widely in
Europe. In Comentarios reales de los incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas), an account of Inca history,
legends and mores, Garcilaso, who was a mestizo, sought to comment on and expand the chronicles
written by Spaniards, basing his authority on his native knowledge of Quechua and stories about
Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire:
de manera que no decimos cosas nuevas, sino que, como indio natural de aquella tierra,
ampliamos y extendemos con la propia relación la que los historiadores españoles, como
extranjeros, acortaron por no saber la propiedad de la lengua ni haber mamado en la leche
aquestas fábulas y verdades como yo las mamé.
(83)
So that we are not making new assertions, but merely amplifying and extending with our
own account—as a native Indian from those parts—what the Spanish historians, as strangers,
have told in brief because they did not know the language properly and could not suck in
with their mother’s milk, as I did, these fables and facts.
(93)
The allusion to maternal milk, iterated several times, bespeaks heartfelt loyalty to the Andean
language—a legacy from his mother, an Inca noblewoman. Garcilaso also rendered Leone Ebreo’s
Dialoghi d’amore in Spanish—a translingual’s translation trophy, if you will, for neither the original
Italian nor the target language were his mother tongue, as he reminds the reader in the prologue to
Historia general del Perú (General History of Peru), the second part of Comentarios reales: “Un antártico,
nacido en el Nuevo Mundo, allá debajo de nuestro hemisferio, y que en la leche mamó la lengua
general de los indios del Perú, ¿qué tiene que ver con hacerse intérprete entre italianos y españoles?”
(29; “An Antarctic, born in the New World, down there below our hemisphere, who drank the gen-
eral language of the Peruvian Indians in his mother’s milk, what business does he have becoming
an interpreter between Italians and Spaniards?”). As Margarita Zamora shows, Garcilaso stresses the
complementarity of indigenous and European histories “in order to achieve the Renaissance ideal
of concordia, or the conciliation of opposites” (3). He is at home in European cultures, yet his Royal
Commentaries is an elegant translingual work delicately sustained on a language from the Americas.4
356
The Amerindian and European Switch
Garcilaso’s translingualism is hardly unique in viceregal Peru. Also born just after the conquest,
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1536–1616) learned the rulers’ language and managed to craft
El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), addressed to
Philip III of Spain. The almost 1,200-page manuscript, housed at the Royal Danish Library, describes
ancient and early colonial Peru even as it indicts Spaniards for mistreating the native population.
Richly illustrated by Guaman Poma himself, the interlingual work, as Rolena Adorno shows, shatters
the practices of conventional chronicles of the so-called Indies to emerge as “a critique of European
discursive formations” (10) and “an epic tale of the Andean experience” (11). While Spanish prevails,
Quechua accounts for Andean specificity, as in a depiction of girls gathering herbs:
Estas dichas muchachas tenían de edad de nueve años y de doce años; con estas yerbas se
servían al sol y capacocha del Inga y a los señores grandes y capitatenes [sic], y de señoras
coyas y ñustas y de mujeres principales para cumbe, auasca, y combana y flauto y ojotas,
cunbana, uincha, chumbi, chupacuro.
(171)
These girls were between nine and twelve years old.These herbs were offered to the sun and
capacocha [royal sacrifice] of the Inca and to the important lords, captains, noble ladies, coyas
and ñustas. Cumbi, auasca, cumpana [cloth], llauto [headband for men], ojota [sandals], uincha
[headband for women], chumpi [sash for women], chupa curo [a strip of fabric].
(174)5
Guaman Poma’s translingualism is not just about adopting Spanish; it also entails the permutation
of the imperial tongue into a richly interlingual (and intermedial) form of expression.
Baroque writers in the Spanish viceroyalties and Brazil, as multilingual readers living in multilin-
gual societies, wrote not infrequently in more than one tongue. Also a native of Andean Peru, Juan
de Espinosa Medrano (1630?–1688)—known as Lunarejo because of the lunar, or birthmark, on
his face—is remarkable for his linguistic versatility. His Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora, a
defense of the Spanish poet, is the first major work of literary criticism in the Americas. But he also
penned Philosophia Thomistica, written in Latin and published in Rome, plus two autos sacramentales in
Quechua. One of these short plays is Prusirpinata suwasa, known in Spanish as El rapto de Proserpina
y sueño de Endimión (The Abduction of Proserpina and Endymion’s Dream). Derived mostly from
Ovid, this version of the classic myth adopts some conventions of Spanish Golden Age drama,
including octosyllabic verses and the character of a gracioso, whose name, as Jean-Philippe Husson
shows, emerges as a bicultural sign of sorts: Taparaco, as he is called, denotes a nocturnal butterfly
in Quechua even as it recalls Ovid’s Ascalaphus, a nocturnal bird in Greek (446). Indeed, the works
of Espinosa Medrano, who also translated Virgil into Quechua, were typically viewed as a harmo-
nious bridge between European and indigenous cultures. But, as Juan M. Vitulli argues, Espinosa
Medrano’s mastery of metropolitan canons also deploys “una prefiguración de la emancipación cul-
tural” (11; “a prefiguration of cultural emancipation”). In Brazil, Gregório de Matos (1636–1696)
wrote sonnets in Spanish and flirted with the interlingual—in Portuguese poems containing words
of indigenous or African origin. “Aos principais da Bahia chamados os Caramurus” (“To the Notables
of Bahia, Named Caramurus”), for instance, invokes the mestizo descendants of one of the first
Europeans to live in Brazil, known as Caramuru in Tupi.The sonnet’s ironic absorption of a sonorous
native lexicon—“paiaiá” (shaman), “cobepá” (a dialect spoken near Bahia), “pititinga” (a small fish)—
suggests a double verbal interchange between imperial possession and subaltern rebellion. As Luzia
Aparecida Oliva dos Santos concludes, the indigenous peoples are disempowered by the imposition
of the invader’s tongue, yet “a literatura, de modo particular, subverte essa língua” (316; “ literature,
particularly, subverts that language”). Hospitable to strangeness and mixture, baroque aesthetics is
arguably a natural home for Medrano’s and Matos’ linguistic hybridity.
357
At the very center of the Latin American baroque canon, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–
1695) crafted her oeuvre in Spanish, but occasionally adopted Nahuatl or Latin. From a certain
angle, these translingual incursions are elements of a broader interest in the diction of ethnic
groups—persons of African descent, for instance, or from various regions in Spain. She wrote
verses in Nahuatl for one of the villancicos (an Iberian poetic and musical form) celebrating
the Assumption in 1676. Indigenous players (“Mejicanos alegres”; “happy Mexicans”) sing “las
cláusulas tiernas /del Mejicano lenguaje” (“the tender clauses of the Mexican language”) as they
perform a tocotín, a native song-and-dance:
Tla ya timohuica, If you leave,

totlazo Zuapilli, [sic] our precious lady,
maca ammo, Tonantzin, our mother, let it not be
titechmoilcahuiliz that you forget it.6
In yet another villancico, written for the Feast of St. Peter Nolasco in 1677, verses in Latin and non-
standard forms of Spanish are sung, and an indigenous speaker engages in interlingual Spanish and
Nahuatl: “Los Padres bendito /tiene on Redentor; /amo nic neltoca /quimati no Dios” (qtd. by
Egan 215; “The blessed Fathers /have uh Redeemer /I don’t believe it, /my God knows better,” Sor
Juana 134, translator’s emphasis). As Caroline Egan explains, scholars disagree on Sor Juana’s Nahuatl
performances. While some praise her elegance or view the indigenous tongue as a form of native
empowerment, others underscore her “infelicities” (212), and Serge Gruzinski regards it “exotismo
para la exportación” (qtd. by Egan, 210 n. 4; “exoticism for export”). Closely examining the Nahuatl,
Camilla Townsend concludes that Sor Juana “did in fact use a smattering of the Nahuas’ language
to objectify them,” but this may in fact render the author “more interesting, not less” (7). Attentive
to these competing judgments, Egan views Sor Juana’s translingualism as an ambiguous practice, at
least in the Assumption tocotín, where Nahuatl bursts as “a gesture that simultaneously includes a
marginalized community and maintains its alterity” even as it reminds Spanish-speaking readers of
“the sonorous presence of the Nahuas and their lyric tradition” and “their linguistic inscrutability”
(231). Indeed, Egan’s reading could apply to much of the translingual viceregal archive. Spanish or
Portuguese occupy central positions, yet other tongues, often not understood by monolingual readers,
can also be heard and read in palpable ways, as in Guaman Poma or Matos, or surmised as ghostly
figurations, as in the Inca Garcilaso.
Sor Juana’s Latin verses are often playful. In the villancico to St. Peter Nolasco, as mentioned above,
Latin and Spanish are humorously adjoined. A proud student of Latin says, “Hodie Nolascus divinus /
in Caelis est collocatus” (“Today divine Nolasco is placed in heaven”), to which a monolingual inter-
locutor replies: “Yo no tengo asco del vino, /que antes muero por tragarlo” (“I have no disgust for
wine; rather, I’m dying to swallow it”)—mishearing the saint’s surname as the homonymous Spanish
word for “disgust,” and mixing up the rhyming “divine” and “wine.” But Sor Juana’s lightness is just a
tiny fraction of the history of Latin in the region.
As Andrew Laird discusses in his comprehensive account of the Latin corpus in Latin America,
Spanish and Portuguese became the linguae francae for the multilingual peoples living in the vice-
royalties, but Latin functioned as an elite language—a tool used, for instance, to correspond with
rulers and scholars across the Atlantic. The first work written in the Americas and published in
Europe, in 1537, was in fact composed in Latin and addressed to Pope Paul III: De capacitate et
habilitate gentium (The Capacity and Aptitude of Native People), by Fray Julián Garcés (1452–1541).
But, as Laird underscores, the language was not the exclusive domain of Spaniards or creoles (per-
sons of European descent); indigenous subjects too could plea their own cases to distant monarchs,
brandishing classical and biblical references in Latin. Laird cites a 1552 letter to Charles V whose
author reworks Julius Caesar’s famous division of Gaul into three parts to describe his own native
land: “Has Indias antiquis in temporibus fuisse divisas in tres partes nimirum Mexicum, Tlacubam,
358
et Tetzcocum atque ex consequenti tres dominos seu rectores habuisse qui dominabantur aliorum
populorum circumiacentium” (qtd. by Laird 531; “In former times these Indies were divided into
three parts, namely, Mexico, Tlacopan, and Texcoco, as a consequence they had three lords or rulers
who also ruled the other people situated nearby” 531). Another translingual work is the Libellus de
medicinalibus indorum herbis (Little Book of the Indians’ Medicinal Herbs), an illustrated herbal crafted
for Philip II by indigenous students at the Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, then near Mexico
City. As Alejandra Rojas Silva explains, its authors were native speakers of Nahuatl and Spanish who
understood both Mexican pictographic conventions and Latin grammar and rhetoric, boasting a
“dual status as civilized Christians, and as inheritors of an indigenous nobility worthy of guiding their
people into a new era” (43). The use of Latin, then, emerges not just as a sign of foreign domination,
but as a tongue mastered for writing back to the centers of empire as well.
A more intricate deployment of Latin along with other languages is that of José de Anchieta
(1534–1597). One of the first Jesuit missionaries in Brazil, he composed De gestis Mendi de Saa
(The Deeds of Mem de Sá) in Latin, the first epic poem written in the Americas, but adopts other
languages elsewhere. Written in Portuguese, the Arte da gramatica da lingua mais usada na costa do
Brasil (Art of Grammar of the Language Most Used on the Coast of Brazil) is a pioneering work
on the now extinct classical Tupi language. In a daring translingual display, Anchieta also wrote plays
in a mixture of Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and Tupi. In Na festa de São Lourenço (At the Feast of
St. Lawrence), an uncanny deployment of multiple tongues exemplifies Viktor Shklovsky’s notion
of estrangement, as Renata Wasserman observes. A cast that includes devils, Roman emperors, and
Christian saints variously exchange Amerindian and European languages, gainsaying characterization
and habitual moral associations; the use of Tupi, for instance, suggests that “language is transparent to
meaning, specifically to doctrine, and therefore cannot determine moral status” (74). Like Sor Juana,
Anchieta works within a literary culture and social milieu that cannot be encompassed in just one
language.
Like Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales, Latin America’s most emblematic work of Latin literary
translingualism was written in Europe. A Jesuit born in Guatemala, Rafael Landívar (1731–1793)
went to Bologna, in the Papal States, after Charles III banned the Society of Jesus from the Spanish
Empire in 1767.7 There he wrote Rusticatio mexicana (Mexican Country Scenes), a poem of over
5,000 hexameters on nature and culture: the lakes of Mexico and the waterfalls of Guatemala; coch-
ineal, purple, and indigo; birds and wild beasts; even sports, from cockfights and bullfights to voladores,
or flying men, of Mesoamerican origin. Scholars of the Rusticatio cite Virgil’s Georgics as an inspiration
for Landívar’s Latin poem, yet from its first lines the speaker underscores his lyrical filiation with his
birthplace: “Salve, cara parens, dulcis Guatimala, salve, /Delicium vitae, fons et origo meae” (45; “Hail,
dear mother-city, fair Guatemala, hail—joy of my life, its fountain and its source.” Regenos 163).Why
Landívar chose Latin has been a matter of speculation. In the introduction to his Spanish translation,
Octaviano Valdés muses that writing in that language could be an escape from a turbulent era, but
he opts for Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo’s theory that Landívar’s Latin is the natural, if not native,
tongue of humanist circles “acostumbrados a pensar, a sentir, a leer en lengua extraña, que no era para
ellos lengua muerta sino viva y actual” (qtd. by Valdés 20; “used to thinking, feeling and reading in
a strange tongue, which for them was not a dead tongue but a living and present one”). Be that as
it may, the poem’s Latin has not impeded its broad appeal; in his 1950 facsimile edition, José Mata
Gavidia notes that the poem’s invocation has been rendered in four European languages as well as
K’iche’ and Kaqchiquel, two Maya languages, plus Quechua.
Even in Latin, numerous passages in Landívar’s text reveal a patriotic sensibility shared by other
creole writers who, unlike him, wrote in Spanish. After describing silver and gold, emblems of
metropolitan extractionism, the speaker relishes the sweetness of sugar cultivated in a Mexican
manner: “Luteis me dulcia formis /Cogere mella juvat: non quae Sicania campis /Carpit apes,
truncisque cavis studiosa recondite; /Sed quae Mexiceus praelis expressa colonus /Atque recepta
cadis igni condensat ahenis, /Fictilibusque trahit candentia sacchara conis” (207; “My delight
359
is found in condensing sweet honey in earthen molds, not what the Sicilian bee gathers in the
fields and industriously stores in the hollow trunks of trees, but what the Mexican planter, having
pressed in the mill and condensed in copper kettles over the fire, takes as white sugar from
cone-shaped molds of clay.” Regenos 233). If the text estranges Mexico through a medium that
present-day readers may deem extraordinary, translingualism does not cancel domestic famil-
iarity. Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–1787), also a Jesuit from New Spain in Bologna, wrote
about his native land in the Storia antica del Messico. Even in Italian, he seeks to rectify indigenous
names disfigured by Spanish chroniclers: “Chi sarebbe capace d’indovinare, che il Solis parla di
Quauhnahuac dove dice Quatlabraca, di Huejotlipan dove mette Gualipàr, e di Cuitlalpitoc dove
scrive Pilpatoe?” (1:3; “Who could guess that [Antonio de] Solís is speaking of Quauhnahuac
when he writes Quatlabraca, of Huejotlipan where he puts down Gualipàr, and of Cuitlalpitoc
where he writes Pilpatoe?”). Clavijero’s spellings are inexact, but his attempt at precision mimics
Garcilaso’s sense of linguistic authority. But there is yet another way to read Landívar’s and
Clavijero’s translingualism. The absence of the native tongue often denotes exile, also the case of
many Latin American authors writing principally in French and English, but in other languages
as well, in the centuries to come.
Indeed, numerous authors born in Latin America residing in France have chosen to write in
French. For María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo (1789–1852), known as Condesa de
Merlín or comtesse Merlin, absence from her native Cuba resulted in nostalgic Francophone works.
Mes douze premières années, her childhood memoirs, and La Havane, a travel narrative chronicling
her sole return journey to Cuba, have typically been excluded from national canons for linguistic
reasons. But Merlin’s translingualism has been reassessed as a potent sign of exile. The workings of
memory tinge her first vision of Havana from the ship on which she returns “home”: “Portes et
fenêtres sont ouvertes; tout est à jour, l’œil pénètre jusqu’aux intimités de la vie domestique, depuis
la cour arrosée et couvertes de fleurs jusqu’au lit de la niña, dont les rideaux de linon sont garnis de
nœuds roses” (1:286; “Doors and windows are open; everything is exposed, and the eye reaches the
intimacy of domestic life, from the courtyard watered and covered with flowers, to the niña’s bed,
whose linen drapes are decorated with pink knots”). As I have argued elsewhere, Merlin’s telescopic
eye encompasses private spaces, like the young girl’s bedroom, possibly concealed for other travelers;
the author’s Havana is as much a foreign city as a postcard from a native’s past.8 Merlin is not alone
in her invocation of distant homes. Born in Buenos Aires, Eduarda García de Mansilla (1834–1892)
wrote Pablo ou la vie dans les pampas, a novel set among gauchos that Carlos Alvarado-Larroucau
identifies as “la publicación inaugural de la francofonía argentina” (23; “the inaugural publication of
Argentine Francophone literature”). Ramón Emeterio Betances (1827–1898) wrote Les deux Indiens,
a novella set during the Spanish conquest of his native Puerto Rico. As Kahlila Chaar-Pérez argues,
its protagonists “exemplify the fraternal love between ‘great men’ that Betances linked to the creation
of a Caribbean federation” (47); indeed, the author’s French gestures toward the multilingual Greater
Antilles, whose political struggles Betances supported.
Other writers connected with Latin American have left a rich imprint in French poetry, but whether
everyone in this extraterritorial poets’ society can really be regarded as translingual is an open question.
Consider, for instance, José-Maria de Heredia (1842–1905), the great Parnassian born near Santiago
de Cuba, author of Les Trophées and a member of the Académie Française. Bilingual as a child, his lit-
erary language was consistently French, and only occasionally did he write in Spanish. Three sonnets
commemorating the centennial of José María Heredia—the great Romantic poet of Cuba, his dis-
tant cousin—allude to a double linguistic detachment: “Y abandonando el habla de la Francia …
hoy recuerdo la lengua de mi infancia” (qtd. by Goldgar 24; “and forsaking the speech of France …
today I remember the language of my childhood”). By contrast, Augusto de Armas (1869–1893), also
a Cuban-born Parnassian, began his career in Spanish, but switched to French upon moving to Paris;
partly due to his translingualism, Rubén Darío included him in Los raros. In Montevideo, there is a
sculpture dedicated to the three Francophone poets born in the city: Isidore Ducasse (1846–1870),
360
known as the Comte de Lautréamont; Jules Laforgue (1860–1887); and Jules Supervielle (1884–1960).
While Ducasse and Laforgue left for France as children and never returned to Uruguay (both died
young in Paris), Supervielle joked that he owed less to Homer than to the passenger liners on which he
regularly crossed the Atlantic between Bordeaux and Montevideo.9 He reminisced about his birthplace
in Boire à la source, a book of memoirs, and wrote two novels, L’Homme de la pampa and Le Survivant,
with South American settings, but his poetry mostly eludes the local. Discussed by Sylvia Molloy under
the rubric “violencia,” Supervielle linked becoming a French poet to strict monolingualism: “fermer
à l’espagnol mes portes secrètes, celles qui ouvrent sur la pensée, l’expression et, disons, l’âme” (qtd. by
Molloy 51; “closing my secret doors to Spanish, those that open onto thought, expression, and let’s say,
the soul”). Indeed, Supervielle has remained mostly outside the established discussion of Latin American
literature.10
Other poets, situated at the very center of the Spanish-language canon, wrote Francophone poems
expressing an affinity with various aspects of French literary culture. Born in Nicaragua, Rubén
Darío (1867–1916), one of the founders of Spanish American Modernism, adapted French metrics
to Spanish verse and adopted Parnassian and Symbolist stances. In “France-Amérique,” a rare poem
in French, Darío exalts the nation, especially its capital, as the repository of liberty: “Et toi, Paris!
magicienne de la Race, /Reine latine, éclaire notre jour obscur” (145; “And you, Paris, magician of
the Race, /Latin queen, illuminate our dark day”). Spearhead of the Latin American avantgarde, the
relentlessly cosmopolitan Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948), born in Santiago de Chile, spent much
time in Parisian artistic circles. Signing himself “Vincent Huidobro” in such collections as Saisons
choisies (which features a portrait of the author by Picasso) and Automne régulier, he rendered his own
poems and wrote directly in French, adapting at times Dadaist and Surrealist tactics. As René de Costa
explains, Huidobro’s self-translations, as seen in the passage from “Tarde” to “Clef des saisons,” read
at times as “expansions” bereft of their original “efecto vigoroso” (10; “vigorous effect”). Other pairs,
though, such as “El espejo de agua” (a key text) and “Le miroir d’eau,” are the pinnacle of translata-
bility: “Mi espejo, corriente por las noches, /Se hace arroyo y se aleja de mi cuarto” (Selected Poems
24; “My mirror, current through the nights, /Becomes a stream and moves off from my room” 25) is
indeed mirrored by “Mon miroir, coulant par les nuits /Se fait ruisseau et s’éloigne de ma chambre”
(Saisons choisies n.p.).11 In Altazor, Huidobro later recommends, “Se debe escribir en una lengua que
no sea materna” (11; “One should write in language that is not a mother tongue”), which is what
César Moro (1903–1956), switching from Spanish to French, does too. Besides his native Lima, Moro
lived in Paris, where he joined the Surrealists, and Mexico City, coinciding there with André Breton.
As Yolanda Westphalen Rodríguez argues, Moro elevates French as the lingua franca of transnational
Surrealism, even as his own translingualism, marked by interlingual “errors” and puns, stands as a
“lengua híbrida y mestiza” (180; “a hybrid mestizo language”)—a kind of diglossia in which Moro’s
imperfect bilingualism recalls the hierarchies of Spanish and Quechua for speakers of the latter in
Peru. But not every Latin American adopted French for its experimental value. Writing about what
he calls “les Précieuses argentines,” Carlos Alvarado-Larroucau warns against sweeping accusations of
snobbery, yet defines these women poets as “un peu anachroniques” (204; “somewhat anachronistic”),
stressing their outmoded practices.
Beyond poetry, Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979), editor of Sur, the famed literary journal, and
author of essays and memoirs, reversed the typical translingual passage from Spanish to French.
As a child in Argentina, she learned English and French, reportedly her best written language, but
felt the need to publish in Spanish to reach readers in her native milieu. Self-translation, though
difficult, was her chosen path, as she explains in the original preface to 338.171 T.E. (Lawrence
d’Arabie): “J’ai cru devoir m’infliger ce supplice et cette déformation parce que je vivais dans un
pays—le mien—de langue espagnole et parce que je m’adressais à son public” (qtd. by Castillo
and Ayerza de Castillo 180; “I felt I needed to inflict that suffering and deformation on myself
because I lived in a country—my own—where Spanish is spoken, and I was addressing its audi-
ence”). While translingualism from French to Spanish is rare in Latin American, Ocampo’s search
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for a readership in another tongue is not; as we saw, authors have often forsaken an Amerindian
tongue for Spanish (or Latin), or Spanish for another European tongue. Ironically, the second
volume of her autobiography, El ramo de Salzburgo, which she wrote in French before rendering
it in Spanish, was translated “back” into French as Le Rameau de Salzbourg by someone else.
A similar, albeit more cryptic, case is Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980). Born in Lausanne, he claimed
Havana as his birthplace, invented the marvelous real (often associated with magical realism), and
became one of the region’s foremost novelists. He was indeed bilingual, but whether Spanish was
his mother tongue, as he upheld, remains undeterminable. Gustavo Pérez Firmat highlights an
“air of strangeness” in his baroque prose revealing “a deep-seated anxiety about his relations with
Spanish, a tense tongue-tie that shapes his literary performances” (184); the Spanish-language
oeuvre, which displaced the earlier Francophone publications, emerges then as Carpentier’s
furtive translingual act, needed to achieve the status of a Latin American author.
The corpus of Latin American translinguals cultivating various genres in French has continued to
expand. It includes authors like Eduardo Manet (1930), a novelist from Cuba, plus several writers from
Argentina: Silvia Baron Supervielle (1934), a poet, essayist, and fiction writer; Copi (1939–1987), also
a fiction writer, playwright and cartoonist; and Santiago Amigorena (1962), a novelist. Most prom-
inent is Héctor Bianciotti (1930–2012), also from Argentina, who wrote several Spanish-language
novels before switching to French, becoming the second Latin American, after Heredia, elected to
the Académie Française. In his inaugural lecture, Bianciotti defined himself as someone arriving from
afar who adopted the language of his literature of choice “par des chemins de contrebandier, sans rien
apporter d’autre, en guise de présent, qu’un imaginaire venu d’ailleurs” (“following a smuggler’s path,
bringing nothing, by way of a gift, except an imagination arriving from somewhere else”).12 Indeed,
Bianciotti’s works, like those of other Latin American translinguals, can be read as singular chapters in
the global realm of Francophone literature.
Along with French, English is the other European tongue in which a substantial number of
major Latin American writers have opted to write.13 These Anglophone detours, though, have been
mostly occasional and relatively minor. José Martí (1853–1895), the Cuban Modernist, wrote essays
on art and literature for New York newspapers. Raised bilingually in Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges
(1899–1986) composed “Two English Poems,” which he then decried, while María Luisa Bombal
(1910–1980), having left Chile for the United States, radically transformed La última niebla into House
of Mist.14 Writers from Latin America’s Boom of narrative fiction in the 1960s crafted Anglophone
texts too. Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), who learned English as the child of a Mexican diplomat,
wrote essays, such as those in Myself with Others; and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929–2005), an
exile from Havana in London, wrote Holy Smoke, a pun-filled history of cigars translated as Puro
humo. A reverse case is Calvert Casey (1924–1969), born in Baltimore to a Cuban mother. He started
writing in English, but adopted Spanish to become, like Carpentier, a Latin American author.A cryptic
translingual, Manuel Puig (1932–1990) used English (and other languages) in preliminary drafts of
fiction eventually published in Spanish.15 Rosario Ferré (1938–2016), from Puerto Rico, translated
her own fiction, probing the process in “On Destiny, Language, and Translation; or, Ophelia Adrift
in the C. & O. Canal.” In recent decades, the corpus of English-language works by authors from the
region residing in the United States has mushroomed.Visible in Latin American milieus, Chile’s Ariel
Dorfman (1942) and Mexico’s Valeria Luiselli (1983) are also very much a part of U.S. literary culture.
Indeed, the bulk of writing in English by authors linked with Latin America falls mostly under the
rubric of U.S. Latinx literature.
An author’s choice of language opens up new prospects of readers. W.H. Hudson (1862–1922),
the Anglo-Argentine naturalist and ornithologist, must have known Spanish but opted for his parents’
tongue upon moving to Britain, writing fiction and books about nature, plus the autobiographical
Far Away and Long Ago; John Galsworthy called him admiringly “a very great writer; and—to my
thinking –the most valuable our age has possessed” (qtd. by Miller 4). His translators in Argentina,
362
where he is known as Guillermo Enrique Hudson and considered a national author, have typically
rendered his Victorian prosody, as Molloy observes, in a gaucho’s “tono apaisanado” (54; “countrified
tone”). In fact, a number of his works focus on Argentina, occasionally deploying Spanish words and
invoking a measure of nostalgia. In Idle Days in Patagonia, enthralled by the landscape’s emptiness,
Hudson invokes the region’s first natives: “I sometimes attempted to picture to myself something
of the outer life of the long-vanished inhabitants” (39). He relishes the notion that those ancient
Patagonians, whose material remains amount to little more than arrowheads or skull fragments, were
“alone with nature” (40), yet he dismisses their descendants as “savages,” foreseeing that “as a race they
will be blotted out from earth” (39). Nothing is said about their languages, unlike what happens in
Uttermost Part of the Earth, by E. Lucas Bridges (1874–1949), the Anglo-Argentine author who opts to
write in his parents’ language even as he praises another of his native languages, learned in Tierra del
Fuego: “We who learned as children to speak Yahgan know that, within its own limitations, it is infin-
itely richer and more expressive than English or Spanish” (34). Bridges then refers to the numerous
words for “snow” and “beach” in Yahgan.
Hudson’s mournful musings are belied by the power of indigenous tongues all over Latin
America. In the twentieth century and still now, some of the region’s key authors choose to write in
Amerindian languages, or incorporate aspects thereof into their Spanish-language texts. In Peru, José
María Arguedas (1911–1969) composed poetry in Quechua and powerful novels and short stories
whose Spanish fabric bears the evolving imprint of the indigenous tongue.16 Augusto Roa Bastos
(1917–2005), too, informed his fiction with the genius of Guarani, widely spoken in his native
Paraguay. That both authors elect Spanish over the other language may appear as yet another epi-
sode in the history of metropolitan linguistic conquests. If nothing else, that choice allows for large
readerships and international markets, or at least, as Roa Bastos put it early in his career, a “campo
de resonancia más vasta” (35, qtd. by Bareiro Saguier; “an area of larger resonance”). Rigoberta
Menchú (1959) faces a similar dilemma when she chooses Spanish over K’iche’ to tell the world
about the abuses against indigenous peoples in Guatemala. Lúcia Hiratsuka, whose first language was
Japanese, writes her series of “contos e lendas do Japão” (tales and legends of Japan) in Portuguese
to reach fellow Brazilians.17 Language is indeed community, and Ana Luisa Valdés (1953), an exile
from Uruguay, opts to write about her youth in Swedish, the tongue of her new country.18 But the
translingual permutation is not about just one language; other tongues, albeit banished, reappears as
ghostly figurations.
In 2020, the poet Elicura Chihuailaf (1952), who writes in both Mapudungun and Spanish, became
the first Mapuche author to be awarded Chile’s Premio Nacional de Literatura. Unbeknownst to
Hudson far away and long ago in London, indigenous cultures are alive and well, even in the south-
ernmost reaches of South America. Eschewing monolingualism, authors at times offer language
lessons, as when Chihuailaf explains his surname in Recado confidencial a los chilenos (Confidential
Message to Chileans), a bilingual text: “Chihuailaf: Neblina extendida sobre un lago [Chiwai: neblina;
lafvn/lafken: contracción de extendido y lago]” (“Chihuailaf: Mist spread over a lake [Chiwai: mist;
lafvn/lafken: contraction of spread and lake”]). Only bilingual readers will know every word—but all
Chileans are invited to read it. Many tongues are heard and unheard in the translingual habitations
of Latin American literature.
Notes
1 French is of course also derived from Latin and spoken in various parts of the Americas, but this chapter
focuses on traditional literary-historical definitions of Latin America, which typically exclude French Guiana
and the Francophone territories of the Caribbean—and, for that matter, other geographically adjacent places
where English and other languages (Creole, Dutch, Papiamentu) are spoken. My focus, then, is on translingual
authors variously related to those countries in the region where Spanish and Portuguese are the main
languages.
363
2 In 2015, 560 indigenous tongues were spoken in Latin America, including 186 in Brazil, 67 in Mexico, 65 in
Colombia, and 47 in Peru. See World Bank, 27. Cf. del Valle Escalante 8, who states the number of indigenous
languages in Latin America to be closer to 800.
3 See del Valle Escalante for a series of essays on literary production by indigenous persons, including
some translingual authors, writing in indigenous languages as well as Spanish and Portuguese in various
countries.
4 On Garcilaso’s Quechua, see Cerrón Palomino, who underscores the author’s unique position as both native
speaker and student of the language; his knowledge is not just empirical, but also “producto de la reflexión
y del análisis” (221; “product of reflection and analysis”), as evidenced in his “Advertencias acerca de la
lengua general de los indios del Perú” (“Notes on the General Language of the Indians of Peru”) in the
Royal Commentaries. See also José Antonio Mazzotti on how Garcilaso’s aristocratic Cuzco-inflected Quechua
orality informs the structure and symbols of his work.
5 For a concise summary of linguistic research on Guaman Poma’s Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish, see Adorno
xviii–xix.
6 Quoted and translated by Townsend 8
7 On the connection between the expulsion of the Jesuits and writing in Latin by Landívar and others, see
Laird 533–537.
8 See Díaz 104.
9 See Duprey 700.
10 A poem by Supervielle is the epigraph of Carlos Fuentes’ Una familia lejana, a novel about Latin American
French translingualism. See Díaz 179–193.
11 On Huidobro’s belief in the translatability of poetry, see Balderston, who concludes:“Huidobro has succeeded
in producing a poetry which we would have to adjudge translatable, at least in relative terms” (72).
12 See “Discours de réception de Hector Bianciotti” on the Académie Française website, www.academie-
francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-de-hector-bianciotti.
13 One important exception to the prevalence of French and English is J. Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978), who
wrote in both Spanish and Italian.
14 For an analysis of Bombal’s recasting of the original novella as a longer text full of “truculent scenes, sur-
prising plot twists, and even a happy ending” (123), which attracted Paramount Pictures, see Pérez Firmat,
Tongue Ties 123–138.
15 Cabrera dissects the multilingual genesis of Puig’s fiction as a “trahison” (52; “betrayal”) of the monolingual
literary paradigm in Spanish America.
16 For a detailed investigation of Arguedas’ “linguistic and cultural drama” (71), including the evolution of
Quechua, see Moraña, especially 69–102.
17 López Calvo studies Hiratsuka’s children’s and young adults’ works as part of the “progressive delinking from
Japan” of Brazilian authors of Japanese descent, which includes adopting Portuguese as a literary tongue.
18 As Svensson explains, writing in Spanish made Valdés feel “muy lejos de sus lectores” (118; “very far from her
readers”).
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Issues in Literary Translingualism

28
SELF-TRANSLATION
Eva Gentes and Trish Van Bolderen
Introduction
Literary self-translation is most commonly defined as the phenomenon of an author producing an add-
itional text by translating their own written work into another language. Alternative interpretations,
related to “mental self-translation” (Tanqueiro 2011) or translations of the self (e.g. Besemeres 2002),
often raise questions about “what distinguishes the metaphor of self-translation from that of translation”
(Cordingley 2018: 357–358; emphasis in original). According to other understandings, “the mere act
of writing in a language not one’s first is, in a sense, a type of self-translation” (Anderson 1251).Yet the
more familiar definition, invoked here, pertains to intertextual and interlingual translations by the self.
Considering how self-translation and literary translingualism intersect sheds light on both concepts.
If translingualism refers to “the phenomenon of authors who write in … a language other than their
primary one” (Kellman 2000: ix), then any literary self-translator who writes in an L2 (or L3, etc.) and
then translates the work into their L1 would be classified as a translingual writer. Except, of course,
that the author’s translingual status would be independent of the fact of self-translation. Indeed, as far
as their products are concerned, self-translation and translingualism are mutually extrinsic here, on
account of the self-translation existing in L1 and therefore being denied translingual status. Would
such denial be resolved if, irrespective of the source language, the author self-translated into L2(+)?
And what can be made of authors who grow up bilingual (e.g. in diglossic areas) and self-translate
between what are effectively two L1s? In other words, what are the circumstances under which
a self-translation constitutes a translingual text? And what can be gleaned from investigating such
questions? The answers depend on how “writing” is defined vis-à-vis translingualism, how “transla-
tion” is defined in relation to self-translation, and what the compatibility of those two definitions is
deemed to be. The answers also hinge on a closer examination of the history of self-translation and
its scholarship; the factors that encourage and discourage self-translation practices; the processes and
products associated with self-translating authors; and the scholarly gaps still waiting to be explored.
These provide insight into the conceptual and ideological intricacies of literary authorship, transla-
tion, L2(+) writing, and how they are perceived when they come together in one person.
History of Self-translation
In their historical analysis of literary self-translation, Hokenson and Munson (2007) show that, since
the Middle Ages, self-translation has had a long tradition in Western literature. Santoyo (2005: 860)
cites Ramon Llull (1232–1316) as the best-known self-translator of the early Middle Ages; he wrote
DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-28 369

Eva Gentes & Trish Van Bolderen
in Arabic and translated into Catalan and Latin. Until the 17th century, the simultaneous use of
lingua franca Latin and vernacular languages was a decisive factor in the emergence and spread of
self-translation. As literature had previously been written only in Latin, self-translation represented a
means of strengthening the national language and developing a poetics in vernacular languages. In
most cases, Latin remained the source language; however, authors like Joachim du Bellay (~1552–
1560) and René Descartes (1596–1650) wrote some of their works in the vernacular first. Many
writers, however, still aspired to seeing their work—whether original or translation—appear in Latin,
for posterity’s sake.
During Louis XIV’s reign, French flourished as the language of diplomats and scientists in
Europe. As early as 1549, Du Bellay, on behalf of the Pléiade poets, declared French to be the lan-
guage of letters. By the close of the 17th century, French finally replaced Latin as the leading literary
language of Western Europe. Many classical works were translated first into French and, from there,
into various other national languages. French also played a central role in self-translation, as it “was
in many ways a lingua franca of the early modern era” (Hokenson and Munson 85). During the 18th
and 19th centuries, self-translation became less important but never went out of practice. With the
rise of linguistic nationalism, monolingualism became the new ideal, and writers were expected to
espouse linguistic fidelity. Multilingual writing and self-translation were thus excluded from the
possibilities of literary expression, since the ability to write effectively in a non-native language was
denied (Hokenson and Munson 143). The ideological relationship between nation and language
remained strong until the end of the 20th century, when “the breakdown of nation” began (Mackey
46, quoting Kohr).
Evidence of such collapse partly lay in the increasing presence of multilingual writers, calling into
question the conceptual limits of national literatures. Yet the legacy of the monolingual paradigm is
all too real. Hence Yildiz’s description of present-day writing conditions as “postmonolingual,” which
“refers to a field of tension in which the monolingual paradigm continues to assert itself and multi-
lingual practices persist or reemerge,” and which “can bring into sharper focus the back-and-forth
movement between these two tendencies that characterizes contemporary linguistic constellations”
(5). For Lamping, the adoption of new and/or additional writing languages is “one of the most
irritating literary phenomena of modernity” (33), a description illustrating the extent to which
reflections about literature are still haunted by expectations that authors will write exclusively in
L1. Indeed, self-translators are typically seen as eccentrics, as “rather idiosyncratic anomalies, mostly
preening polyglots or maladaptive immigrants” (Hokenson and Munson 1).
In the 20th century, self-translation is a common practice among authors of migration and exile,
including such well-known cases as Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen (1885–1962), Vladimir Nabokov
(1899–1977), and as many as nine Nobel laureates.1 Although English served as a target language for
five of these laureates, that “language was the mother tongue for but one of them, namely [Samuel]
Beckett” (1906–1989) (Grutman 2013: 70). According to Kippur (5), such established figures are key
to disseminating literary self-translation as a 21st-century practice.
Research has shown that literary self-translation is globally widespread in contemporary litera-
ture, including among “sedentary self-translators” (Grutman 2015). It is the norm for Indigenous
writers in Mexico (Gentes 2019) and a current practice among authors living in other multilingual
societies. Due to migration, self-translation is practiced throughout the world, as exemplified by
Romanian-born Felicia Mihali (b. 1967) in Canada, Kenyan-born Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938) in
the U.S.; German-born Robert Schopflocher (1923–2016) in Argentina, Japanese-born Yoko Tawada
(b. 1960) in Germany, Canadian-born Lisa Carducci (b. 1943) in China, Chinese-born Ouyang
Yu (b. 1995) in Australia and Swedish-born Linda Olsson (b. 1948) in New Zealand. Some self-
translators are not only translinguals, but also transmigrants: Vassilis Alexakis (b. 1943) lives in France
and Greece; Miroslav Penkov (b. 1982) in the U.S. and Bulgaria. Quantitatively, however, the practice
of self-translation is unevenly represented worldwide. Only in spaces where not only the author but
also a host of readers are multilingual is self-translation commonly practiced.
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Self-Translation
“Self-translation Studies”: The Emergence of a New Research Area

From the end of the 20th century to the dawn of the 21st, researchers such as Fitch (21), Grutman
(1998: 17), Scheiner (175) and Santoyo (2006a: 22) were concerned about the scant scholarly interest
in self-translation, especially within translation studies. Indeed, the long tradition of literary self-
translation tells us that, for a considerable period, it did not receive the attention it deserved. The
shortage of research was largely due to self-translation being considered too rare a practice to be sci-
entifically relevant (Kippur 13). It can also be traced to the ongoing debate about the phenomenon’s
nature and, in turn, its disciplinary headquarters: is self-translation a double writing process, i.e., a
form of bilingual writing, and therefore the domain of Comparative Literature? or is it first and fore-
most a translational activity and thus the province of Translation Studies?
Despite or perhaps precisely because of such unresolved questions, research has developed sig-
nificantly in recent decades. The first bibliography on self-translation (Santoyo 2006b) consisted of
266 entries, whereas the latest version at the time of writing (Gentes, July 2020) lists 1,648 articles
and monographs, 16 edited volumes, and 15 special issues. The increase is partially explained by the
rise in conferences dedicated entirely to self-translation and by their published proceedings (e.g.
Rubio Árquez and Nicola D’Antuono 2012, Ceccherelli et al. 2013, Lagarde 2013, Lushenkova
Foscolo et al. 2019). Today, talks and panels devoted to self-translation are standard at conferences,
large and small, within Comparative Literature and Translation Studies. Self-translation has also
become the subject of university courses and a growing number of bachelor’s, master’s, and doc-
toral theses. Furthermore, recognition of self-translation as a topic within Translation Studies is
evident in the increasing number of Translation Studies handbooks and dictionaries containing
“self-translation” entries. Whereas more than 20 years separate the first (Popovič 1976) and second
(Shuttleworth 1997) appearances of the term “auto-translation” in translation reference material,
the renowned Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies published its inaugural entry only a year
later, and several other entries followed thereafter (e.g. Anderson 2000, Montini 2010, Grutman
and Van Bolderen 2014, Gentes and Van Bolderen 2015/2018, Cordingley 2018). In newer editions
of the Encyclopedia (2009, 2019), Grutman published revised versions of his entry, both under the
lemma “self-translation.” For Anselmi (2012: 17), this terminological shift “obviates the confusion
created by ‘auto-translation’, which also signifies ‘automatic translation’, i.e. computer-mediated
translation.”
Initially, researchers concentrated on comprehensive individual case studies dedicated to the
likes of Nabokov (Grayson 1977), Hebrew-Yiddish poet Gabriel Preil (1911–1933) (Feldman
1986) and Beckett (Fitch 1988). Since the new millennium, research has become more nuanced
and diversified, with researchers exploring various facets of self-translation: translation strategies
(Oustinoff 2001), academic self-translation (Jung 2002, Costa and Hönes 2018), history (Hokenson
and Munson 2007), motivations (Anselmi 2012), migration (Ferraro 2011), genetic studies (Van
Hulle 2009, Anokhina 2012), sociolinguistics (Lagarde 2015), power dynamics (Castro et al. 2017),
visibility (Dasilva 2011, Ferraro 2016), autofiction (Falceri et al. 2017), and allograph translations
of literary self-translations (Montini 2006, Sindiĉić Sabljo 2011). Cordingley 2013a accounts for a
range of perspectives on self-translation, including those exploring the limits of the notion itself,
namely with respect to second language writing and the translation of the self. Researchers have
also investigated self-translation in specific geographic areas, like the Basque Country (Manterola
2011; 2014), Catalonia (Ramis 2019), Galicia (Dasilva 2009), Canada (Van Bolderen 2014), Mexico
(Gentes 2019) and South Africa (Bandín Fuertes 2014), as well as in Francophone (Puccini 2015)
and Hispanophone (Bujaldón de Esteves et al. 2019) contexts, and within specific literatures, such
as Occitan (Lagarde 2017), Gaelic (Krause 2013) and Russian poetry (Wanner 2020). Recuenco
Peñalver (2011) and Santoyo (2013) propose preliminary typologies of self- translation. Ramis
(2014) and Gentes (2017) offer the most comprehensive theoretical accounts of self-translation
to date. Given the growth in both the quantity and complexity of research in the 21st century,
371
Anselmi (2012: 11) identifies “self-translation studies” (her own coinage) as a “rapidly growing
subfield within translation studies.” Lagarde (2013: 10) shares this assessment, proposing the notion
of “autotraductologie” (“self-translation studies,” in French).
Reasons For and Against Self-translation

Just as not all authors who speak multiple languages opt to write in more than one of them, not all
authors who write in multiple languages opt to translate their own works. Indeed, self-translating
can seem to be an “absurd exercise or, worse, a waste of time” (Grutman and Van Bolderen 325).
For many translingual writers, self-translation remains a one-time experience. Like Paris-based
British writer Ian Monk (b. 1960), these authors prefer their future works to be translated by
someone else. Monk (2013) recalls feeling like Dr. Frankenstein during the self-translation pro-
cess, explaining: “The further I got stuck into the two texts in question, the more my translations
seemed utterly limp and lifeless.” In the context of languages of lesser diffusion, politics can
also play a decisive role in linguistic choice. In order to ensure that his work is read in Scottish-
Gaelic rather than in English, Scottish poet and translator Christopher Whyte (b. 1952) refuses
to self-translate (Whyte 2002). While some authors reject self-translation completely, others limit
themselves to a particular genre. After growing bored with translating his longer novels, French-
American Raymond Federman (1928–1999) restricted his self-translation practice to poems and
shorter novels (Federman 1993).
In light of these considerations and reservations, one is left wondering what it is that motivates
multilingual writers to translate themselves.This question becomes all the more urgent when we con-
sider that self-translation often constitutes a necessary evil, a painful experience, a dull repetition of a
once-creative act. At least this is the image routinely evoked by scholars: Cordingley (2013b: 93) refers
to its “masocritical dimension”; Beaujour (37) goes so far as to speak of the “hell of self-translation.”
It is true that numerous authors struggle with the time-consuming nature of self-translating, since
they could have instead been creating something “new.” What is rarely acknowledged, however, is
that this perspective is not unanimous and that many complaints end in a “but”: Nancy Huston (b.
1953) explains that self-translation “is definitely a long, laborious, and somewhat infuriating pro-
cess … but I feel it’s worth it” (13). Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov (1928–2008) even derived
“enormous pleasure” from translating between Kyrghyz and Russian, regardless of the direction
(Dadazhanova 70), and South African writer S. J. Naudé (b. 1970) concludes that “it might be best to
translate your own work if you are able to” (Naudé 2015).
Researchers have developed different categorizations for describing the motives underlying
self-translation. Anselmi (2012: 35) identifies four main classifications: “editorial, poetic, ideological
and mercantile”; Antunes (47) distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic motives; and Manterola
(2014: 79) discusses “author-related” reasons (corresponding to Antunes’ intrinsic motives) versus
those “related to the literary system” (cf. extrinsic). The decision-making process often depends on
several factors, and these can vary between works, even within a given writer’s oeuvre. A special case is
the author’s first self-translation, which is usually triggered by external factors: e.g., unsatisfying allo-
graph translations, rejected manuscripts, interests in accessing new readerships after migrating (Gentes
2016). This first experience can be pivotal in determining whether or not self-translation remains
a one-time occurrence. Indeed, according to Beaujour (51), self-translation is a “rite of passage” for
most authors who become bilingual writers.
Publishers may be directly involved in encouraging authors to self-translate or may do so more
indirectly, by rejecting their submissions. When external factors outweigh individual motives, self-
translation shifts from being an option to being an obligation. Given book market conditions, and
in order to access larger markets, authors writing in lesser-used languages are often left with no
choice but to self-translate. A striking example is Indigenous writing in Mexico: “these authors have
neither the possibility to publish their work in a monolingual edition in the Indigenous language
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Self-Translation
nor the option to hire a professional translator, and therefore, writing in an Indigenous language in
Mexico inevitably implies self-translation into Spanish” (Gentes 2019: 95). Censorship is another
important factor. Syrian-born author Samar Attar (b. 1945) self-translated the Arabic original of her
novel Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl (1994) because it was denied distribution in Arab countries
(Attar 2005).
Intrinsic motivations vary among authors: some want to optimize their control over the transla-
tion; others seek experience writing in other languages; in other cases still, authors aim to make their
work accessible to new literary audiences and/or simply do not want to abandon their first literary
language after adopting an alternative one. For many systematic self-translators, translation becomes
an integral part of the writing process, a “precious, quality check,” in Huston’s words (13). While
self-translators may decide to retranslate works previously translated by allograph translators, the
reverse—allograph retranslations of self-translations—is very rare.
Self-translation as Process
The process of self-translation has been discussed in terms of directionality, temporality, agency and
genetics. Self-translators regularly refer to their process as rewriting (Brink 1999: 43) or transacting
(Federman 2001) instead of translating. But if all translation is rewriting (Lefevere 1992), to what
extent does the self-translation process differ from that of “normal” (allograph) translation?
While relatively straightforward in the context of allograph translation, directionality becomes
rather complex and blurry when framed in relation to self-translation. The first problem arises when
attempting to apply L1 and L2 status to multilingual authors’ writing languages. Many grow up
bilingual, potentially attributing L1 status to both languages. Nonetheless, they may write in only
one. Bernard Manciet (1923–2005) consistently wrote his poems in Occitan before translating them
into French. Since he translated from a dominated into a dominant language, his self-translations
can be labeled “supra-self-translations” (Grutman 2011: 81). Brina Svit (b. 1954), another unidirec-
tional self-translator, initially writes her novels in French and then translates them into Slovenian.
Her self-translations, involving dominant-into-dominated language transfers, constitute “infra-self-
translations” (Grutman 2011: 81). Both infra-and supra-self-translations are variants of “vertical self-
translations”—the most common scenario—versus “horizontal self-translations” (Grutman 2011: 70),
whereby transfers occur between languages of equal status. Examples of the latter are works by
Rosario Ferré (1939–2016) and Ariel Dorfman (b. 1942). Having written in either Spanish or English
and self-translated into the other language, these authors are also bidirectional self-translators. With
respect to multidirectional self-translators, Gentes (2017: 195) proposes three options for how writers
incorporate more than two languages into their process: 1) translating a heterolingual (Grutman 2019)
text into a third language; 2) using different language combinations when self-translating other
works; 3) translating a same work into two more languages. Only the third option would be labeled
“multidirectional self-translation” (Santoyo 2013: 215). Laia Fàbregas (b. 1973), who migrated from
Catalonia to the Netherlands, wrote her novel Landen (2010) in Dutch and then translated it into
Catalan and into Spanish (Gentes 2017: 213). Russian poet Elizaveta Kul’man (1808–1825) wrote
parallel Russian, German, and Italian versions of her poems (Wanner 2020: 19–43).
Translators typically begin translating only after the initial work is published. Because of the coin-
cidence between author and translator, self-translators can initiate the translation process whenever
they like, freely alternating between authoring and translating. Systematic self-translators often explore
different ways of combining these two processes. Building on the manuscript stages developed by
de Biasi (1996), Grutman (2016) develops a tripartite typology distinguishing between simultaneous,
consecutive and delayed self-translation.
“Simultaneous self-translation” (Grutman 2016: 122) most clearly underscores self-translation’s
translingual character. Gentes (2017: 153–168) identifies three variants thereof, their common fea-
ture being that the translation process begins before manuscripts in any language reach a definitive
373
form. In the first variant, writers like Domingo Villar (b. 1971) and Olsson work on two versions
side by side while moving between writing, translating and editing. Since both versions mutually
influence one another throughout, both or neither can be labeled “original” and/or “translation.” In
the second variant, authors produce a pre-definitive heterolingual manuscript whose monolingual
fragments are eventually translated into the other language. In the manuscript of A Chain of Voices,
André Brink (1935–2015) alternated between Afrikaans and English, depending on the characters’
language. In the manuscript of Imaginings of the Sand, dialogue was written entirely in Afrikaans, with
descriptive passages articulated in English (Brink 2007: 248–249). After finishing the pre-definitive
manuscript, Brink translated the corresponding segments into the other language, creating two
final manuscripts, in English and Afrikaans respectively. In the third variant of simultaneous self-
translation, authors like Huston and Anne Weber (b. 1964) write a pre-definitive manuscript in one
language and subsequently self-translate into the other, the translation process sometimes leading
to edits in either initial text. In each case, the manuscript is deemed definitive only once translation
has concluded.
Whereas simultaneous self- translation sees authoring and translating intertwined, “consecu-
tive” and “delayed” self-translation (Grutman 2016: 122; 120) each involve two subsequent processes.
With consecutive self-translation, authors do not begin translating until they consider the as-yet-
unpublished original to be complete. The self-translation is thus based on a definitive manuscript.
With “delayed” practices, translation begins only after the original has been published. Self-
translators—as author-translators—have the legal freedom, if not also the poetic license, to deviate
from the original without necessarily facing criticism for doing so. The grounds on which authors
justify introducing changes often coincide with those invoked by allograph translators (e.g. adapting
cultural references for the new target audience).Yet other reasons are distinctive: the evolution of the
author’s writing style; insights gained through re-reading their own words.
Given the differences between the texts, self-translation poses a special challenge for allograph
translators who are proficient in the languages of more than one of the self-translator’s works.
Should a single text be selected as the source? If so, which one? If not, how should variations
between the versions be handled? In rare instances, deviations between original and self-translation
are such that the author decides to re-(self-)translate the self-translation into the initial language.
The most famous example is Nabokov’s autobiography, Conclusive Evidence. A Memoir (1951). After
self-translating the English into Russian (Drugie berega, 1954), he translated the latter back into
English (Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited, 1966), a process Nabokov (12) described as
“re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian mem-
ories in the first place.”
According to Hernández (118), a writer’s first single-handed self-translation is often preceded
by a collaborative one. Two prominent illustrations are Beckett’s inaugural solo self-translations
into English and French, which were actually collaborations with allograph translators. Depending
on time constraints and the direction of the linguistic transfer, self-translators sometimes prefer
collaborative approaches even after engaging in solo endeavors.Various typologies of collaborative
(self-)translation have recently been developed by Manterola (2014), Sperti (2016), Dasilva (2016)
and Gentes (2017: 220–247). The emerging field of genetic translations studies (Nunes et al. 2020)
is particularly valuable for understanding the process of self-translation, as traces in manuscripts
provide insights into the compositional intersections between L1 and L2, and between writing,
translating, and editing. Digital genetic editions of Beckett’s manuscripts, published as part of the
Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org/), are groundbreaking: with intertextual
variations highlighted in different colors, they allow both versions to be systematically compared,
whether for synchronic or diachronic study. Genetic analysis is the focus of Paris-based research
group Multilinguisme, Traduction, Création. In her study of Nabokov’s translation manuscripts,
Anokhina (2012) shows the extent to which the author edited translations drafted by allograph
agents.
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Self-Translation
Self-translations as Products
A useful way to think about the products of self-translation is to consider the texts’ status. Here, “text”
refers chiefly to a published version of the author’s own translation but also to the corresponding
works written by that writer in one or more other languages. It also typically refers to the result of
intertextual transfer, versus intratextual self-translation, which Santoyo (2011) introduced to describe
self-translation within a single heterolingual text. Whereas more conventional scenarios involve two
(or more) linguistic versions being in public circulation, it is not uncommon for only one of them to
be published, with others remaining in manuscript, draft, or even journal entry form.
In light of the complex genesis underlying self-translation products, a first and fundamental
question to contemplate is how the notions and binary logic of “translation” and “original”—
routinely applied to allograph translation—are relevant here. Are we instead faced with two originals,
where the self-translation constitutes “a second original” (Santoyo 2013)? Are we, in some cases,
dealing with two translations (Gentes 2017: 157)? Or, as suggested by the titles of certain monographs
about self-translation (e.g. Ceccherelli et al. 2013; Kippur 2015), does the phenomenon reinforce
Lefevere’s contention that all translation is “rewriting” (1992)? Given that “original” and “translation”
are so historically and ideologically charged, self-translators and self-translation scholars alike often
drop these terms altogether, preferring the more impartial “versions.”
The texts’ status is also informed by the perceived hierarchical relationship between the corresponding
works. Some view the relationship as ranked, where the original is deemed higher in importance than
the translation, or vice versa. Alternatively, the relationship is conceptualized along more democratic
lines, attributing equal status to the different versions. According to this understanding, the texts can
be further characterized as complementary or mutually independent. Adopting the democratic view,
Federman (1993: 78) asserts that,“[w]‌hether written in English or in French first, the two texts comple-
ment and complete one another.” He has also expressed “a need to abolish the ‘original’ ” and an interest
in seeing each version labeled “translated by the author,” without the linguistic direction of transfer
identified (quoted in Beaujour 198–199). This view seemingly reflects a ranking that prioritizes the
translation process. For Ukrainian author Hryhoriy F. Kvitka-Osnovyanenko (1778–1843)—who self-
translated from Ukrainian (L1) into Russian (L2) when the former’s literary legitimacy was dismissed
and derided—self-translation was rooted in two goals: asserting “the authority and viability of the
Ukrainian language and show[ing] that is was fully suitable for belles-lettres,” and “creat[ing] the best
possible translations of his works to prove that even the most exact and meticulous translation could
not replace the original” (Kalnychenko and Kamovnikova 2019, citing Finkel’). While Kvitka may
privilege the original artistically and the self-translation rhetorically, the two texts are also complemen-
tary in advancing his political project. Complementarity is perhaps most comprehensively argued by
Fitch: calling for a bitextual appreciation of the works, he contends that “both versions are, in them-
selves, incomplete,” and that isolating them implies “fail[ing] to recognize that [the text] was followed
by another version” or “that another preceded it” (227). Less convinced by the imperative of reading
the original and self-translation in tandem, Oustinoff believes the works can stand alone, coherently, in
their equivalence (248, 278).
The status of self-translation products also depends on perceptions of the works’ intertextual cor-
respondence.What makes self-translations “successful”? They are generally held to a different standard
of correspondence than allograph translations (e.g. Wechsler 214). Where the latter are typically
expected to strike an appropriate balance between “adequacy” and “acceptability” (Toury’s notions
of how translations reflect source-and target-language norms, respectively (56–57)), self-translations
are predominantly assessed vis-à-vis author intentionality: Indo-Pakistani author Qurratulain Hyder
(1927–2007) believed she was best placed to translate her works from Urdu into English “because
only she knew the meaning that she, as the author, intended” (Asaduddin 238–239). Underlying this
view are ethical and epistemological assumptions (Cordingley 2018: 356) that reflect how, by dint
of the same person housing author and translator, self-translators are endowed with considerable
375
authority and agency (Grutman and Van Bolderen 2014). Thus, Oustinoff finds that, in addition to
foreignizing and naturalizing approaches to translation, self-translators have a third option at their
disposal: “auto-traduction recréatrice” [re-creative self-translation], whereby major modifications to
the original text are introduced (33).
An important question to consider is how perceptions of the self-translator’s familiarity with the
writing language affect the legitimacy of the text. All self-translators are subject to at least the pos-
sibility of being seen as translinguals. Do readers, or even the authors themselves, deem the piece to
be expressed in the writer’s L2(+)? And to what extent does that assessment undermine or boost
the work’s perceived value? Even though “no person ever writes perfectly in even one language”
(Kellman 2019: 338), a double standard in this regard may apply to self-translators.
Another key consideration is the self- translation’s “pacte autotraductif ” [self- translational
pact] (Ferraro 2016), the implied reading protocol established by paratextual declarations about
the writer’s self-translator status and, by extension, the self-translation status of the text. Often,
paratexts do not make the fact of authorial translation visible, which results in a self-translation
that is opaque, rather than transparent (Dasilva 2011). In such cases, paratexts fall short of accur-
ately representing the underlying processes and/or agents involved, perhaps crediting the trans-
lation to a fictional translator, with or without the author’s knowledge or consent (Todó 17),
or assigning the label “translation” to an “original” (Gagnon 46), even against the author’s will.
Discussing the choice of titles, Dasilva (2011: 51) shows that opacity increases when very different
titles are selected in each language, as in the novels O fácil que é matar (1998, Galician) and
Peregrino en invierno (2000, Spanish) by Alfredo Conde (b. 1945). Paratextual material shaping
the self-translational pact can thus be either “editorial” (owing to the publisher or editor) or
“authorial” (Genette 1987). It is not clear where pseudo-self-translations (Regattin 2015)—
allograph translations that are presented as self-translations—might fall on the opaque-transparent
or authorial-editorial spectrums. Depending on the circumstances, authors may or may not
desire transparency: e.g., whereas Huston claims to want to remove the traces of her double
belonging for the reader (Armel 94), Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt (b. 1928) decided to reflect
on his self-translation experience in the preface to and 62 footnotes of his autobiography Über
die Flüsse (2001), which constantly reminds audiences that they are reading a translation. Thus,
while paratexts do not necessarily identify self-translations accurately or offer reliable information
about the texts’ genesis, they do play a fundamental role in reflecting how readers are intended
to perceive the publication. They also provide spaces for “self-translators to craft their persona”
(Grutman 2018: 15), alerting us to the fact that one of the products “within” a self-translation is,
indeed, the self-translating agent.
Readers’ appreciation of self-translation products is also informed by presentation variables such
as the medium of self-translation and its textual layout. The real and perceived nature, function,
and stability of authorship and written content can shift in potentially significant ways depending
on whether the texts are published on online social media platforms (Desjardins 2019) or in print
or digital formats. Similarly, bilingual editions narrow the tangible distance between corresponding
originals and self-translations and make both versions visible. In doing so, they shape reading strategies
and understandings of equivalence between the works, attempt to reflect the self-translator’s linguis-
tically divided or doubled identity, and contribute to supporting or subverting existing (a)symmetries
between languages (Gentes 2013).
Future Directions
In recent years, we have gained a much deeper understanding of literary self-translation, partly thanks
to the “collect[ion of] substantial quantitative data concerning self-translation in specific times, places
and literary communities” (Filippakopolou 25), which has begun in earnest over the last decade.
Nevertheless, this space-time survey is far from complete, and many other research gaps remain.
376
Self-Translation
Especially for earlier periods (e.g. the Renaissance), scholarship needs to move beyond individual case
studies. Regarding genre, investigations into self-translated graphic novels, operas, and radio plays are
almost nonexistent. Staged plays, meanwhile, deserve greater attention in terms of how the fluidity of
their performative dimension influences self-translation processes and products: e.g., Canadian Marc
Prescott (b. 1971) explains that he edited his Fort Mac plays after watching rehearsals in both languages
(Ladouceur 44). As translingual writers, self-translators sometimes create heterolingual texts, but the
degree of heterolingualism in both versions often varies. In the English self-translation Dear Rafe (1985),
by Rolando Hinojosa-Smith (b. 1929), the code-switching characterizing the Spanish version (Mi
Querido Rafa, 1981) disappears entirely. Huston’s novel Danse Noir (2013) /Black Dance (2014), by
contrast, is heterolingual in both languages, though particularly in the French. Since heterolingualism
presents specific challenges for any translator, understanding how self-translators tackle it would be
useful. It would also be beneficial to look more closely at authors who self-translate only once. They
represent the majority of self-translators but, paradoxically, receive very little attention. Why does self-
translation so often remain a one-time experience?
In terms of agency, it would be instructive to examine more closely self-translators who have
also translated others’ works. How might experiences of allograph and self-translation influence one
another? Are altogether different strategies deliberately chosen (Anselmi 2018)? One important yet
scarcely discussed agent is the reader. Even if “the possibilities afforded by the ability to compare
versions, pose a direct challenge to the idea of a stable text or subject” (Kippur 65), do readers actu-
ally opt for a stereoscopic reading (Gaddis Rose 1997) of self-translated texts? If so, what are the
consequences? Does the existing translation fill gaps, in the Iserian sense (1976)? What new gaps
might be created? Particularly noteworthy here is the poetry collection Mivolana an-tsoratra = Dire par
écrit = Le dire par écrit (2004) by Malagasy poet Esther Nirina (1932–2004), as an allograph translation
accompanies the self-translated version. For Hawkins (40), this strategy seems to constitute “an invi-
tation to the reader to participate in the subtleties of translation.”
Unfortunately, non-Western research on self-translation and self-translators are hardly taken into
account by Western scholars, and academics in the East seemingly only acknowledge studies written
by Western researchers and published in English. Finding ways to do away with such mutual invisi-
bility and encourage more varied exchanges about self-translation would stimulate new horizons of
reflection, enriching our collective knowledge.
Note
1 Frédéric Mistral Prize (first awarded in 1904), Rabindranath Tagore (1913), Karl Adolph Gjellerup (1917),
Luigi Pirandello (1934), Samuel Beckett (1969), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), Czeslaw Milosz (1980), Joseph
Brodsky (1987), Gao Xingjian (2000) (Dutrait 2011; Grutman 2013).
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29
METAPHORS OF LITERARY
TRANSLINGUALISM
Rainer Guldin
The struggle now is to find new metaphors that would capture plurilingual communica-
tion. How do we practice linguistics that treat human agency, diversity, indeterminacy and
multimodality as the norm?
(Suresh Canagarajah and Indika Liyanage 2012: 60)
Translingual writers are authors “who write in more than one language or at least in a language other
than their primary one” (Kellman 2000: ix). In both cases, this entails a creative tension between
different linguistic universes that interact in complex and often contradictory ways. Herta Müller
uses a telling space metaphor to describe this specific existential condition. Translingualism implies a
painful but liberating split, einen Riss, a crack, a rift, from the verb reißen, to rip, to tear apart (Müller
2009a). This rupture in the apparently homogeneous monolingual fabric of one’s world recasts lin-
guistic identities in terms of a plural worldview and opens up the possibility “of self-begetting,” of a
“willed renovation of an individual” (Kellman 2000: 21) identity.
Contrary to the notion of multilingualism, translingualism emphasizes process and literary inter-
action between different languages.The prefix ‛trans’ suggests movement, expansion, and a crossing of
borders.The prefix ‛multi’, on the other hand, often implies a series of languages existing next to each
other without actually engaging in any exchanges. A monolingually interpreted notion of multilin-
gualism, furthermore, defines languages in purely quantitative terms and focuses on the predominant
idiom, relegating all others to a subordinate or marginal role.
Translingualism “is not always an expression of autonomy, of independence from a culture that
forces us to think and speak along its particular lines” (ibid.: 18). In some cases, it may also allow for
existential disarray, as the case of Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1998) forcefully proves. However,
rather than lingering on the possible deceptions, divisions and drawbacks of a multilingual writing
identity, the notion of translingualism emphasizes freedom from cultural and monolingual restraint.
In the following pages, I want to focus, therefore, primarily on metaphors that highlight the creative
implications of translingual writing. In this sense, the focus of this chapter is on metaphors of an
interacting plurality of different languages and on creative freedom.
In the following, I want to introduce translingual authors who have attempted to capture these
elusive aspects of translingual writing processes with the help of metaphors that can be subsumed to
the three main interlinked metaphorical domains of monolingualism that developed from the late
18th century on: organic body metaphors, family metaphors and spatial metaphors (Guldin 2020). In
382 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-29

Metaphors of Literary Translingualism
this sense, the metaphors of translingualism I want to discuss in this chapter can be considered insur-
gent metaphors—in the case of family ties one could call them transgressive—in that they radically
question traditional monolinguistic assumptions associated with the notions of mother tongue, native
speaker, and national language. These three closely interlinked notions are based on an ontological
vision of languages and linguistic identities as self-contained independent units. In the same way that
languages are circumscribed organic bodies, native speakers are defined by one specific language
only—their mother tongue—and each national language is confined to one specific territorial entity.
The borders of languages coincide with the borders of nations. This triple ontology led to the cre-
ation of an arsenal of metaphors that stress authenticity, purity, primordiality, sanctity, untranslatability
and innateness (Bonfiglio 2010: 35) which resulted in the creation of a complex many-layered meta-
phor cluster in defense of monolingualism that still exerts a strong influence in present day visions of
translingualism both in everyday discourse and across scientific disciplines (Yildiz 2012). In the same
way, the different insurgent metaphors echo each other and sometimes join to bolster the argumen-
tation (Guldin 2020: 121–136).
I would like to begin with the body metaphors of the tongue and the eye. These contrasting
but complementary metaphors articulate a double perspective on translingualism. If the tongue is
centered on articulation and expression, the eye revolves around perception and cognition. Both
metaphors question the unity of organic language systems through plurality and mobility.Tongues are
flexible, and can easily twist and turn this way or the other. In the case of the tongue, the transition
from one language to another is fluid, with the eyes—which already come in pairs—the differences
stand out.
As Emine Sevgi Özdamar put it in her short story Mutterzunge—which literally translates into
English as “mother-tongue”—a tongue does not have any bones and can therefore easily turn wher-
ever it wants to. “Zunge hat keine Knochen, wohin man sie dreht, dreht sie sich dorthin” (Özdamar
2010: 7). A boneless tongue can find its way around any kind of word. The first sentence of the story
points to the linguistic rift that separates German from Turkish. Mutterzunge is a literal translation from
the Turkish ana (mother) and dil (tongue). In German, however, mother tongue is Muttersprache. “In
my language, tongue means: language (In meiner Sprache heißt Zunge: Sprache)” (ibid.: 7).
Emine Sevgi Özdamar was born in Malatya (Turkey) in 1946, and grew up in Istanbul and Bursa.
After the establishment of a military dictatorship in 1971, she left her home country for good. She
was assistant director at the Volksbühne in East Berlin, worked as an actress, and wrote plays, poems,
and short stories. Turkish was the language she spoke first, but through her grandparents, she was also
exposed to Anatolian dialects. In this sense, her linguistic set up is at least trilingual.These three idioms
cohabit the same textual space.
The metaphor of the tongue is complemented by a spatial metaphor. Özdamar’s texts are many-
layered palimpsests (Weissman 2017). The German surface of their texts hides and at the same time
reveals the presence of another language. Özdamar links the metaphor of the tongue to her plural-
izing writing strategy. At the outset of Mutterzunge, the displaced exiled narrator is sitting in a café in
Berlin, which at that time was still a divided city.“I was sitting with my twisted tongue (gedrehte Zunge)
in this city of Berlin” (Özdamar 2010: 7). The absence of an article before tongue in the sentence
“Zunge hat keine Knochen, wohin man sie dreht, dreht sie sich dorthin” (ibid.), and the difference
in sentence structure—the adverb dorthin should be put before dreht sie sich—reinforce the feeling of
estrangement the text intends to convey to a German reader.This freely twisting tongue can be traced
back to the Turkish saying that “anyone who can master his languages without a problem has a ready
tongue,” and to the Turkish expression dilin kemiği yok that means “speaking without thinking of the
consequences” or “to have a loose tongue” (Yildiz 2012: 143). The hybrid layered set up of the bilin-
gual sentence is, thus, at the same time a literal translation of a Turkish expression oscillating between
success and possible failure. The boneless tongue is a twisted tongue, gedrehte Zunge (çevrilmiş dil), a
tongue turned around (ibid.: 143–144). The fact that it can be twisted (verdreht) but not completely
turned around (gedreht) suggests a certain awkwardness if not forcefulness in processes of translation,
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while at the same time highlighting the difficulties of the narrator who is forced to translate herself
into a new environment. However, in her acceptance speech of the Adelbert-von Chamisso-Award
that she was awarded in 1999, Özdamar emphasized the liberating aspect of translingualism. The
Turkish language, which had fallen sick because of the military dictatorship, had forced her to turn
her tongue (Zunge) into German (ins Deutsche drehen) and suddenly she was happy again. Germany
had given her a new tongue (Zunge), and within the new linguistic context, the Turkish words could
heal again as if they were in a sanatorium.
Another author who has made ample use of the metaphor of the tongue is Yoko Tawada.
Tawada was born in Japan in 1960. In 1979, she came to Germany for the first time and in 1982,
she began studying modern German literature at the University of Hamburg. Tawada writes
in both Japanese and German introducing single elements (graphic characters, words, or part
of sentences) from one language into the other in order to create a feeling of estrangement.
Contrary to Özdamar, these foreign elements are not partially hidden in the fabric of the text but
in plain view.
According to Tawada, the main problem with mother tongues is not so much that they have a
tendency to exclude non-native speakers but that they forcefully include native speakers by confining
them within a specific language. From this point of view, each mother tongue represents a prison
house of its own. However, acquiring a new language can turn this relationship of dependence and
submission around. The following quote from the collection of short texts Überseezungen (Tawada
2006) describes this process of inversion in terms of a body metaphor:
I was born into Japanese (hineingeboren), the way you are thrown into a sack (in einen Sack
hineingeworfen). Because of this, it became my outer skin (meine äußere Haut). … I swallowed
(hinuntergeschluckt) the German language and it has been sitting in my belly (in meinem
Bauch) ever since.
(ibid.: 103)
Überseezungen explores the physicality and corporeality of the tongue and its double role as an
organ of speech and a body part. Tongues do not only articulate sounds but also manipulate food
for mastication and are used in the act of swallowing. Conversely, they can be eaten and swallowed
like cooked or fried fish. Seezungen are common soles, literally, they are ‛tongues of the sea’, half-
animal and half-human creatures, hybrids between a fish and a tongue. In the metaphoric universe
of the tongue humidity and dryness signal creativity respectively curtailment. The female narrator
of “Zungentanz” (Dancing of the Tongue) (ibid: 9–14) feels that her sickness has lodged itself in her
tongue. Since her dentist hates tongues, because they disturb him during treatment, she consults a
language doctor who helps her in the process of learning the new language by re-educating the
tongue. She has difficulties reading the new alphabet, so he suggests she choose one specific word
to avoid anarchy in her mouth. However, during this training her tongue suddenly starts speaking
Japanese of its own will. The tongue expresses surprise at the reawakening of its Japanese side for
which however it does not feel responsible at all. The tongue, thus, is also an ambivalent many-
layered site of memory, a place where the different languages are stored like the different layers of
the text.
The next author I would like to discuss used the eye as a metaphor of translingual writing. Herta
Müller was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf (Romania), a peasant village in the Banat, a region inhabited
by a German minority called the Banater Schwaben, a group of German migrants that had arrived
to Romania in the eighteenth-century. She grew up with the local dialect and learned German in
the village school. When she was 15, she moved to Timişoara where she started learning Romanian,
at that time also the language of Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. Because of her political convictions, Müller
refused to collaborate with the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, and migrated to Germany in
1987. Müller’s linguistic universe is trilingual. According to Müller, each of these three languages—the
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local Swabian dialect, German, and Romanian—define a specific point of view, and each of them is
right in itself: jeder Blick hat Recht (Müller 2009a).
The metaphor of the eye is central to Müller’s work. Each language and each word possess eyes of
their own that look at the world and at each other at the same time. The truth of a language emerges
only in the mirror-like comparison with another. “Each language looks at the world differently …
In each language, there are different eyes in the words (andere Augen in den Wörtern)” (Müller 2001).
In Müller’s view—similarly to Yoko Tawada—any mother tongue is purely accidental, as one is born
into it without having the possibility of choice. It is unconditionally here for us like our own skin
(wie die eigene Haut) (Müller 2009b: 26).
Despite the predominance of German as her writing language, she uses both the local German
dialect and Romanian to introduce a different, conflicting point of view. Even if in her books she
has not written a single sentence in Romanian, this language is always nearby: “Of course, Romanian
is always co-writing … it has grown into my gaze (in den Blick hineingewachsen)” (Müller 2001).
Comparing words from two different languages leads to a stereoscopic vision of reality. The two
perspectives fuse in the head. By exposing the mother tongue to the eyes of two other languages, a
new more complex view is possible. “The perspective of the mother tongue has to face that which in
a foreign language looks different (dem anders Geschauten der fremden Sprache)” (ibid.).
To describe her multilingual writing strategy Müller makes use of combined spatial and visual
metaphors that emphasize duality: false bottom, double exposure and double optics. As in Özdamar’s
hybrid texts, single Romanian words or idiomatic expressions shine through the German fabric of
the text (Weissmann 2016). Some of the titles of her books are based on Romanian expressions and
figures of speech that are directly translated into German generating a new and surprising meaning
not directly accessible to a monolingual German reader. The title of the novel Herztier (literally,
Heartanimal), for instance, is based on inimal the combination of the two Romanian words animal
and inima (soul) which in order to be translated into German has to be separated again. Words from
the Swabian dialect are embedded particles that look German but point to the existence of another
parallel, submerged world, which, however, contrary to the Romanian elements, is more accessible to
a German reader because of the common origin of the two languages.
Müller tears at the mesh of her German sentences to create fractures and fissures that allow for
another, second view behind and beneath the German façade. She uses the same spatial metaphor
when describing her multilingual identity: The Banat dialect, German and Romanian are separated
by successive cumulating rifts (ibid.: 184). To describe this double take on the world Müller makes
use of corporeal metaphors that combine both genders. In Romanian, the rose is masculine, but in
German it is feminine. “Surely a masculine rose looks at you differently than a feminine one (schaut
die Rose einen anders an als der Rose). … The result is a surprising, astonishingly ambiguous poetry
(doppelbödige Poesie).” A rose is
a woman’s mouth in a man’s face; she is a toe-long woman’s dress, in which a man’s heart
is rolled up. She is a woman’s glove and male fist in one. … An ambiguous rose always says
more about itself and the world than the monolingual rose).
(ibid.)
Müller’s hybrid gender metaphor introduces the next group of metaphors, which revolves around
family ties.
According to Yasemin Yildiz (2012: 10–14), the monolingual paradigm associated with the notions
of native speaker and national language is based on a linguistic family romance that defines the
speaker’s relationship to her\his mother tongue in terms of fidelity and betrayal. The notion of a
unique mother tongue directly emanating from the body of the mother sanctions the first language of
childhood as the single and only possible locus of affection. Within this metaphoric context writing
in another language amounts to adultery. The insurgent metaphors questioning this view range from
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promiscuity, to bigamy, bisexualism and incest. In a recent essay, Steven Kellman questioned the per-
vasive use of the metaphors of perversion, adultery, and sexual betrayal in translingualism that “is
imagined through metaphors of sexual transgression, as if the act of taking up a foreign tongue is
tantamount to degrading one’s mother or one’s spouse” (Kellman 2013a: 39). Translingualism rather
than being an abnormality is becoming more and more a new global norm.
The first example I want to discuss is Ariel Dorfman, whose parents originally came from Eastern
Europe. In his translingual memoir Heading South, Looking North (1998), he retraces his life from the
point of view of his double allegiance to Spanish and English. Dorfman’s story begins in Buenos Aires
where he was born in 1942. In February 1945, he contracted pneumonia shortly after arriving in
New York and spent several weeks in hospital. This traumatizing experience led him to abandon his
Spanish language. He swore to himself never to speak the language again. He stayed in the United
States until he was twelve. During the McCarthy era, his family had to leave because of political
reasons. In 1955, they moved to Santiago in Chile and Dorfman had to get back to Spanish again. He
had not spoken the language for ten years but soon enough it started to speak in him again (Dorfman
2004: 213–5). After some time, and in a reversal of his previous resolution, he decided to stop using
English altogether. However, in 1973 after the military coup that toppled the government of Allende
and after a second near-death experience, this time at the hands of the military, he returned to the
United States and with this to the English language.
In the first part of his life, Dorfman experienced his bilinguality as a fundamental problem forcing
him to take sides, by picking one language and rejecting the other. He felt like a “hybrid mongrel of
language” (Dorfman 1998: 269). In conflicting situations, the two languages behaved as if they had
caught each other in “flagrante case of linguistic adultery.” He could not “venture one word in either
language without” a feeling of betrayal, because from the point of view of the other language, his
choice of one of them was just “a quick fling” (ibid.: 207). The struggle between the two languages
for the “command of his soul” (Kellman 2013b: 213), however reach a fruitful equilibrium leading
him from “perverse incessant doubleness” (Dorfman 2003: 31) to a new sense of hybridity. “Not the
victory of one tongue over the other one but rather a cohabitation, my two languages reaching a
truce … married to two tongues, inhabited by two languages in equal measure … in love with them
both … The distress of being double and somewhat homeless is overshadowed by the glory of being
hybrid and open … a fluid bigamist of language” (emphasis added) (Dorfman 2003: 33). Dorfman also
makes use of the metaphor of the tongue. He describes his bilingualism as a bifurcated tongue split
right in the middle where the two languages met and staged their rivalry. When speaking Spanish, he
could feel “an infinitude of English” at its end and edge (Dorfman 2004: 217 and 212). The tongue is
thus seen as a space that is controlled by one of the two languages, but only as long as it speaks that
particular language. As soon as the other language takes over it has to leave the stage. At the same time,
the other language is always on standby, so to speak at “one’s elbow.”
Dorfman generally describes his two writing languages in female terms.The role of the other lan-
guage as wife and a lover sometimes merge.This metaphoric discourse cannot do without unashamed
male fantasies of omnipotence which are hopefully to be taken as self-ironic. Spanish “treated me
not like a spurned mistress, but rather as a lover who had been patiently awaiting my torrid [sic] return”
and “English also knew how to wait for the wayward husband to come home” (emphasis added)
(Dorfman 2003: 32–33). The two languages are the back and call of the writer jealously fighting over
his attentions: “Like a sweetheart asking if she makes love better than the other one (sic!), the wife, the
legitimate spouse” (emphasis added) (Dorfman 2004: 216n13). However, he also plays with the different
gender roles. The two traumatic experiences of his life were “the mothers, las madres of his very lan-
guage. Or maybe the padres, maybe the Spanish words had inseminated an English child in my brain.
Whatever the gender …” (ibid.: 212n7) In the following passage legitimate and illegitimate love, male
and female gender are inverted in a sort of chiasmus. “Tired of being a husband with two squabbling
wives or a mistress with two lovers or maybe I was the bed where the two vocabulars coupled”
(Dorfman 2004: 206). Dorfman describes himself as a “grammatical philanderer” (2003: 34), “married
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to two tongues” and “inhabited by both English and Spanish in equal measures.” The equal import-
ance of the two languages is presented as a harmonious form of bigamy, in which the two idioms
enjoy the same rights, and are both legitimate spouses, even if this is not possible.
The second example is the bilingual writer Raymond Federman who describes the creative
freedom of the translingual writer in terms of a subconscious sexual transgression. Federman was
born into a Jewish family in Montrouge, a commune in the southern Parisian suburbs and grew
up in a bohemian atmosphere, in which many different languages were spoken: Polish, German,
Russian French and Yiddish. In a raid on July 16 and 17, 1942, his mother hid him from the Nazi
henchmen in a closet on the landing of their apartment. This saved his life but was also a traumatic
experience with far-reaching effects. Federman’s father, mother, and two sisters were arrested, and
deported to Auschwitz where they were killed. He spent the rest of the war in France working
on a farm and in 1947 migrated to the U.S.A., where he studied at Columbia University. In 1963,
he got a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a doctoral dissertation on the translingual writer
Samuel Beckett. Federman taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and The State
University of New York at Buffalo. He published poetry, essays, and several novels, both in English
and in French.
In his bilingual prose poem “The Bilingualist,” from the collection “Six Poems”—an undated
short text published on Federman’s personal website—the relationship of his two writing languages
is described in overtly sexual terms, but Federman deliberately avoids any specific gendering. Both
English and French can be either male or female, and their interactions either hetero-or homo-
sexual which allows for a whole series of possible pairings. Furthermore, contrary to Dorfman, who
defines the translingual writer as male and his languages as female, in Federman’s view the gender
and sexual orientation of the writer remain undefined. The short text stages the co-presence of two
different languages who compete with each other at times but ultimately love one another tenderly
and passionately. The situation of the translingual writer is not tragic but light-hearted and cre-
ative. Federman combines the indeterminate gender of the two languages with contradictory spatial
metaphors. Even if the two languages are attributed a personality of their own and their relationship is
seen in sexual terms, Federman avoids the dualistic simplifications of the meta-narrative preeminent
in the field, suggesting that the playful intercourse of the two languages is taking place outside the
writer’s conscious control and has a transgressive side to it. Perhaps this has to be understood as a sort
of incest taking place between siblings mostly behind the back of their parents. The two languages
want to merge … to come together [jouir ensemble] … to embrace one another [tendrement]
… to mesh one into the other [n’être qu’une] … to spoil and corrupt each other [autant
que possible] … I do not feel … that one tongue is vertical in me the other horizontal …
my tongues seem to be standing or lying always in the same direction [toujours penchées
l’une vers l’autre] Sometimes vertically [de haut en bas] Other times horizontally [d’un côté
à l’autre] Depending on their moods or their desires [elles sont très passionnées] Though
these two tongues in me occasionally compete with one another in some vague region of
my brain [normalement dans la partie supérieure de mon cerveau] More often they play
with one another [des jeux très étranges] Especially when I am not looking [quand je dors]
I believe that my two tongues love each other [cela ne m’étonnerait pas] And I have on
occasions caught them having intercourse behind my back [je les ai vues une fois par hasard]
but I cannot tell you which is feminine and which is masculine [on s’en fout] Perhaps they
are both androgynous [c’est très possible].
In this passage, the idea of fluidity is emphasized by a constant shift from one language to the other
and the absence of any punctuation. Federman’s translingual writing is bent on contaminating the
syntactical and semantic texture of the two languages. Instead of preserving their purity he uses them
to actively corrupt each other, like two children left alone in a playground, “two lovers (loose lovers)”
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(ibid.: 84), seducing each other to forbidden sexual games: two or more interlinked, overlapping and
mutually merging identities, cross-fertilizing each other.
This bisexual and bilingual playfulness can also be found in the work of the British writer Christine
Brooke-Rose. Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva and grew up in three languages: French, English,
and German. After the death of her father, she moved with her mother to Brussels and in 1936 to the
UK. She studied English at Oxford and London graduating in 1954. She then worked as a literary
critic and freelance journalist. From 1969, she was Lecturer in Linguistics and English Literature at
the University of Paris VIII in Vincennes and from 1975 professor of English and American Literature
and Literary Theory. Commenting on the fundamentally androgynous character of translingual cre-
ativity Brooke-Rose highlights the importance of reciprocity between the genders. “[O]ne of the
ways in which this delightful bisexualism should occur is in a more open and intelligent attitude to
experiment of all kinds” (Brooke-Rose 1989: 68).
The abolition of clear-cut boundaries between the genders is connected to the abolition of
borders between languages. This metaphorical connection is particularly important in her multilin-
gual novel Between (Brooke-Rose 2006) that uses sexual metaphors to describe the interrelationship
of languages. The main female character is half-German and half-French and works as a simultan-
eous translator in the world of international conventions. This introduces a sense of disorientation
in her rootless nomadic existence on an imaginary territory between French, German, and English.
The multi-linguistic passages of the novel reproduce this sense of loss for the reader who is forced
to move from language to language as the main character of the book. Like Federman in his poem,
Brooke-Roses does not arrange the different languages of Between in a recognizable hierarchical
pattern. In describing the erotic interconnectedness of the different languages in the narrator’s mind,
she employs—like Federman—the incestuous metaphor. The overabundance of free-floating signs
does not lead to vagueness or indistinctness but to a joyful playfulness in the midst of promiscuous
excess in which organs and words fraternize freely.
In one of the central scenes of the novel, at least from the point of view of translingual writing, the
meeting of the two languages, German and English, reflects the (sexual) encounter of the main char-
acter with her beloved Siegfried, a fellow translator and traveler, who will eventually marry someone
else. The narrator moves from her German to her British lover the way she moves from language
to language. As in Federman’s poem, the distribution of roles between the languages, the lovers, and
their bodies remains undefined. The meshing of languages is captured in the organic metaphor of
language, but contrary to the self-sufficient metaphor of the body of language from monolingual lin-
guistic ideologies, it finds its true existence in the very act of going beyond its constrictive borders.
The description shifts from the bodies of language to the bodies of the main character and her
German lover, both pleasurably intertwined. Languages fraternize and have sex with each other in a
mysterious and secluded place “behind” and “beneath” that are reminiscent of the ruffled windswept
surfaces of Özdamar’s and Müller’s palimpsestic translingual texts. The passage testifies to the excite-
ment of translingual writing, the polyglot’s lust.
As if languages loved each other behind their own façades … As if words fraternised silently
beneath the syntax, finding each other funny and delicious in a Misch-Masch of tender fornication
… eyes voice hands over limbs that find each other delicious on a creaking bed somewhere
along the Romantische Strasse in a Misch-Masch of swift fornication. (emphasis added).
(Brooke-Rose 2006: 447–448)
In the last section of this chapter, I would like to explore with territorial metaphors that question
the linguistic unity and homogeneity of national languages: the intermediate space of liminality and
the notion of edge, as well as the metaphors of the archipelago, the coral, and the ocean.
Natasha Lvovich and Steven G. Kellman have recently introduced the spatial notion of liminality
to describe the work and the existential condition of translingual writers and artists (2019). This
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concept had been borrowed from the folklorist Arnold Van Gennep and developed in relation to
cultural anthropology by Victor Turner in his seminal “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in
Rites de Passage” (1967). In her essay on Marc Chagall and the role of exile in translingual literature
and art, Lvovich points out that the “liminal sensation of being simultaneously inside and outside
of two lingua-cultural realms is often at the core of the growing literary phenomenon we now call
‛translingualism’” (2015: 117). A text created by a multilingual writer bears the “translingual features”
of “duality, ambivalence, and liminality, both in content and form” (ibid.: 119). This also applies to
his\her “liminal psyche defying gravity, in the ‘timeless’ and ‘ethereal’ state of being in the world”
(ibid.: 128). Kellman (2018) explores different forms of interlinguistic liminality in the work of a
series of contemporary translingual authors.The French-English Canadian translingual writer Nancy
Huston, for instance, describes her divided loyalties not as bi-lingual but as being twice mid-lingual
(ibid.: 22). For the Cuban-American writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat a life on the hyphen
amounts to a homelessness in two languages. The metaphor of the hyphen, argues Kellman, suggests
a “precarious perch.” Pérez Firmat “does not calibrate himself exactly ‛mi-lingue,’ but tilts more
towards North America than Latin America, towards English than Spanish” (ibid.: 22). Switching
languages can be a liberating experience but to be suspended in the space in-between two languages
can turn out to be uncomfortable. The liminal space can also be seen as a no-man’s-land occupying
a space that belongs to both languages or neither.
Similar to the metaphor of liminality, the conceptual metaphor of the edge introduced by Larissa
Aronin and Vasilis Polilitis (2015) focuses on intermediate spaces as the very site of language(s). Edges
are borders, boundaries, and margins. As liminal areas and thresholds, they are not only separating lines
but have a breadth and width of their own. They are both abrupt and gradual, sharp and blurring.
“Edges are paradoxical, for although they are transitional phases or entities, they are comparatively
stable” (ibid.: 45). Edges are sites of heightened activity and a habitat for greater diversity. “Where
edges meet, there is a meeting point for many species of plant and animal life” (ibid.: 34). The two
authors speak of an “edge effect” (ibid.: 32) that is tangible, as in the case of coastlines, which are gen-
erally places bustling with activity. Edges are transition territories that connect, divide, and isolate at
the same time, and have an impact on the areas they separate. Like membranes, they selectively allow
the passage of some elements and stop others, “allowing for one kind of transit, but not for another”
(ibid.: 40). Edges as boundaries can separate very similar areas and impart individuality and uniqueness
on two fields that are nearly identical, or, like the edge of a forest, they can separate areas that are rad-
ically different from each other.The metaphor of the edge can also be used to describe translingualism.
The following spatial metaphors question monolingual unity by emphasizing disintegration, open
borders, superimposition and constant mixing. Let me begin with the metaphor of the archipelago.
The writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic Édouard Glissant was born in 1928 in Martinique.
In 1946, he left for Paris where he studied ethnography, history, and philosophy. Glissant returned
in 1965. His translingualism oscillates between Martiniquan Creole and French. Glissant used the
difference between continent and archipelago to describe the linguistic and cultural model of creol-
ization, extending the metaphorical dimension of the archipelago to the concept of multilingualism.
Glissant interprets the difference between continent and archipelago in terms of two opposed ways
of thinking and conceiving the world, which are linked to monolingualism and multilingualism
respectively. Continental thinking is dense and heavy, pays homage to systematicity, and strives for a
stable synthesis. Archipelagic thinking, on the other hand, is ambiguous and plural and tends to pro-
liferate and reinforce the diversity of the world. If the continental point of view sees the world as
one single bulk, the point of view of the archipelago will disclose even the smallest rocks and rivulets
(Glissant 2009: 45). This also implies a different understanding of borders. “The border between
the places that have constituted themselves as archipelagos do not presuppose walls, but passages …
where the thoughts of the world … circulate” (Glissant 2009: 57–58). In the new geo-political con-
text envisaged by Glissant, boundaries are osmotic and membrane like, and national borders become
permeable and slowly dissolve.
389
Rainer Guldin
Another spatial metaphor emphasizing plurality is that of the coral. The poet and filmmaker Khal
Torabully was born in Port Louis on the island of Mauritius in 1956 but moved to Lyon in 1976
where he obtained a PhD in Semiology of Poetics. He spent his childhood and youth in a highly
multicultural and multilingual environment.
Like the archipelago, the coral is a manifold image of complexity, a sedimentation of innumer-
able (linguistic) layers traversed by the currents of the ocean. Corals are multicolored, iridescent,
and self-changing, polyp and root at the same time. Corals grow by agglutinating cohesion through
successive layers of sedimentation, densification and stratification. Corals are fixed but can travel, and
like Glissant’s processes of creolization and archipelization they are an open-ended project: “always
to be done, always in the making … a continuous process” (ibid.: 71). In Cale d’étoiles—Coolitude,
Torabully describes his writing practice in terms of a multilingual palimpsest similar to a coral
(Torabully 1999: 7). The translingual narrator is ‘chair corail’, flesh of coral (ibid.: 99). The coral exists
both above and below water. It is a metaphor of diversity, pliant and woven of watery material, but
also hardened into stone over time, a dual creature in many respects. Corals are hybrid beings, half
animal and half plant, oscillating between biology and geology, dynamism and multiplicity, animated
by a “desire of archipelization” (Torabully 2012: 70). Like the archipelago, the coral is a metaphor
for the diversity of creolization. The last territorial metaphor that questions the homogeneous unity
of national languages is the sea—and in a more general sense water as opposed to solid ground and
single rootedness.
In an essay on the metaphorics of polyglot poetry, Alfons Knauth (1991) describes the sea as a
translingual space. The protean nature of the ocean is a metaphor for Mischsprachigkeit—a dynamic
mingling of diverse languages—that Knauth opposes to the more static Mehrsprachigkeit, multi-
lingualism. The sea and by expansion the water are also leading metaphors in Tawada’s work. She
describes her writing as a literary sea-voyage between different languages, a swim in the sea of multi-
lingualism (im Meer der Mehrsprachigkeit) (Tawada 2012: 106). The homophony between Meer, sea, and
mehr, more, accentuates the shared notion of plurality. Tawada is not interested in the linear, regulated
course of rivers but in disorderly flow, and the ability of water to wash around (umspülen) and to
embrace (umfassen).
Water encircles and caresses words like a humid tongue. In fact, the water metaphor belongs to the
same cluster as the sea, the mouth, and the tongue. The cover illustration of Überseezungen shows a
delicate female water spirit holding her two hands in the form of a shell next to her ears. In German
the pavilion of the ear is called Ohrmuschel, literally ‛ear shell’, which accentuates the metaphoric
connection to the sea. The word ‛see’, sea, in the title, both separates and unites Über and Zungen. It is
like a small oceanic water hole. Similarly, the thumb and little finger of the female figure draw a small
circle through which the blue background becomes visible. The sea is not only a visual but also an
acoustic metaphor for linguistic plurality. The Meeresgeräusch, the sound of the sea, is a Mischgewebe a
mixed fabric, a tapestry of sound composed of overlapping and superimposed divergent voices, both
audible and inaudible, but present all the same. Übersee, overseas, is another word for foreign countries
and tongues (Zungen aus Übersee) and for trips across the multilingual ocean (die vielzüngige See) which
are metaphors of translingual writing seen as transformative processes based on the fundamental
liquidity of languages. The missing ‛t’ from Übersetzung which was substituted with an ‛e’ points to
the words Setzung, positing, and Satzung, statute, that is, the drawing of linguistic borders imposed by
national states, which (should) stop languages from flowing into each other.
The fundamental problem with insurgent metaphors remains the fact that the very moment they
question restrictive monolingual assumptions they also reconfirm their existence. Like Siamese twins,
monolingualism and multilingualism, and the opposition between linguistic singularity and plur-
ality, have the same origin and share a common terminological history (Holquist 2014). However,
there are metaphors that move beyond this duality. Canagarajah and Liyanage discuss a series of such
metaphors. Metaphors “like rainbow, symbiosis, osmosis, synergy and serendipity … describe a multi-
lingual reality that (still) lacks a suitable language in main stream linguistics” (2012: 61). The visual
390
metaphor of the rainbow represents a potential shift from ontological to epistemological metaphors,
which, rather than positing the unitary territory of national languages and the associated notions of
mother tongue and native speaker, puts the translingual speaker and writer and his/her manifold lin-
guistic resources at the center.
Other visual metaphors besides the rainbow are the metaphor of the kaleidoscope, the metaphor
of coloring, the light and mirror metaphors, as well as the metaphor of the eye discussed in the first
part of this chapter. Visual metaphors can be complemented by acoustic metaphors suggesting a
possible translingual synesthesia, understood here as a metaphor of complex processes of linguistic
overlapping and mixing. Other acoustic metaphors are the echo, the musical notation, the different
instruments to improvise and change, to mix and merge different sounds in order to create new
variations and tonalities.Visual and acoustic metaphors recast the borders between languages in fluid
terms. In the rainbow and the kaleidoscope metaphor, the single colors blend into each other. Colors
contradict the logic of the simple dividing line. They are related to blotches and stains as well as to
clouds because of their uncertain and unstable margins. Colors can be applied singularly, next to each
other, or blended together. They can be juxtaposed in such a way as to articulate permeable bound-
aries and the most subtle of transitions. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 95–97) discussed this osmotic
borderlessness in connection with “chromatic linguistics” that connects color with musical notation.
Chromatic languages suggest a continuous slippage from one sound to another. All these metaphors
move beyond ontological unity and centeredness by stressing disparity and constant exchange. In this
sense, they tend to eschew the entrapments of insurgent metaphors and are particularly appropriate to
the task of articulating the subtle complexities and shifting linguistic set ups of translingual identities,
translingual writing processes and translingual texts.1
Note
1 This text is a re-elaboration of some parts of my recently published book Metaphors of Multilingualism. Changing
Attitudes Towards Language Diversity in Literature, Linguistics and Philosophy (Guldin 2020).
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INDEX
Abramovitsch, S.Y. 133, 273 al-ʻUmānī 64

Abu Hamdan, Lawrence 236–237 Alvarez, Julia 4, 39
Abū Nuwās 64, 65, 261 ambilingual translingualism 33, 65, 101, 130–133, 179,
Abū Rayḥānal-Bīrūnī 261 181, 183, 185, 196, 201, 303
Abu Shmeiss, Ayat 279–280 American English 33, 38–39, 207
Abulafia, Ṭodros 91 Amerindian languages 355–366
accent 12, 35, 46, 115, 172, 203, 205, 296, 336–337 Amharic 154
Achebe, Chinua 144, 252, 318, 341 Amichai,Yehuda 277
Achieta, José de 359 Amiel, Irit 216, 219–220
Adams, James Noel 47, 52, 99 Amprimoz, Alexandre 20
Adnan, Etel 269 Anam, Tahmima 325
Adoum, Jorge Elías 265 Andalusian Jewish communities 87, 88, 89–90, 92,
Africa: Arabic in French North Africa 264, 266–268; 262
English-French translingualism 137; French 140, Andean language 356–357
142, 145, 147, 150; memoir 11; North African Anderson, Benedict 304, 340–341
Jewish communities 88; postcolonial literature 144; Andindilile, Michael 248, 252
South Africa 243–256 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 189
Afrikaans 11–12, 243, 244–250, 374 Andrić, Ivo 231, 237
Agnon, S.Y. 277 Anṣārī, Khwājā 66
Agosín, Marjorie 14 Anselmi, Simona 371, 372, 377
Ahad, Ali Mumin 152, 153–154, 160 Antin, Mary 135, 219
Ahmed, Leila 5, 8–9 Anzaldúa, Gloria 3, 13
Akkadian 61, 62 Apuleius 52–53, 97, 99
Alameddine, Rabih 36 Arabic: fiction 36; Francophone literary
Albanian 20, 229–231 translingualism 144; Italian literary translingualism
al-Bustī, Abū’l-Fatḥ 66 154, 157–158; Jewish communities 87–88, 89,
Alcalay, Ammiel 279 92–93, 278; as lingua franca 63; literary
Alexakis,Vassilis 143, 146 translingualism 259–271; memoir 8, 13; Persianate
Alexander the Great 47, 62, 85 world 63–67, 69; South Asia 306
Algeria 157, 266–268 Aramaic 47, 61, 62, 63, 85–90, 260
al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid 261 Arana, Marie 10–11
Alhadeff, Gini 5, 6 Aristophanes 46, 48
Al-Ḥarizi, Judah 90, 91 Armas, Augusto de 360
Ali, Monica 325 Aronin, Larissa 389
Alio, Danielle 41 Arslan, Emin 265
al-Jāḥiẓ 64, 87 Asayesh, Gelareh 12
Allony, Nehemiah 92 assimilation 68, 73, 79, 143, 144, 166, 195
al-Miṣrī, Ḥusayn Mujīb 66 Atiyah, Edward Selim 268
Alter, Robert 272, 273 Attar, Samar 373
393
Index
Augustine, Saint 3, 97, 98 Bhatta, Bommalapura Venkatarama 76

Auld, William 113, 117–118, 123 Bhattacharya, Bhabani 321
Aulus Gellius 50, 52, 99 Bhavabhūti 72
Ausländer, Rose 184 Bhawalkar,Vanamala 76
Ausoni, Alain 142, 143, 144, 146 Bialik, Chaim Nachman 274, 276
Ausonius 46–47 Biancotti, Hector 142, 143, 146, 147, 362
Australia 13, 291 Bible 47, 49, 78, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 262
Austria 182, 191 Biller, Maxim 193
autobiography: Arabic 270; autobiographical self biography 74, 119; see also memoir
294–295; Bengali 321, 324; Chinese 290, 293; Bisaya 328, 330, 333
English-French translingualism 132, 134; Esperanto Blanke, Detlev 113, 114
118–119; fiction 32, 35; Francophone literary Blau, Joshua 92
translingualism 143; German-English literary Blixen, Karen 168–169, 370
translingualism 184, 186; Latin America 361; Boehme, Julia 100
memoir 4, 13; Nordic literary translingualism 169, Boianjiu, Shani 280–281
170, 171; South Asia 323 Bonafed, Solomon 91
auto-ethnography 5 border-crossing 31–32, 33, 38–40, 149, 228, 341, 383
Avahatta, Apabhraṃśa 74 Bortolanza, João 105, 106
Awad,Youself 36 Bose, Buddhadev 321
‘Awfī, Muḥammad 66 Bosnian 227, 234, 264
Ayres, Alyssa 311 Boud’hors, Anne 47
Azeri 67, 68 Boujedra, Rachid 146, 267–268
Boulton, Marjorie 122
Bagongbanta, Fernando 330 Boyce, Mary 63
Bahār, Moḥammad-Taqī 67 Boym, Svetlana 228
Bakalar, A.M. 221 Bozia, Eleni 53, 54
Bakhtiari, Marjaneh 172 Brandstaetter, Roman 218
Balagtas, Francisco 331 Braschi, Giannina 40
Balkans 227–240 Brazil 104, 106, 182, 355–366
Balkhī, Abū Shakūr 66 Breytenbach, Breyten 251–252
Ballas, Shimon 269–270, 278 Bridges, E. Lucas 363
Balmori, Jesús 333–334 Brink, André 3, 245, 251–252, 374
Bannerjea, Krishna Mohan 318 Brodsky, Joseph 200, 202–203, 205
Baraheni, Reza 68–69 Brody, Robert 87
Barbery, Muriel 145, 146 “broken” language 38, 172, 207, 325
Barthes, Roland 18, 32, 169 Bronner,Yigal 74, 80
Bashevis Singer, Isaac 218, 219 Bronsky, Alina 193, 194, 195, 197
Batuman, Elif 5 Brooke-Rose, Christine 388
Baum,Vicky 183 Broome (contact language) 4–5
Bayly, C.A. 310 Bulgarian 7, 229–231
Beatie, Bruce 100 Burke, Peter 101
Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty 31, 40, 134, 202, 204, 372, Butewicz, Walery 14
375 Butterfield, Ardis 129, 130
Beckett, Samuel 22, 32, 33, 34–35, 133–134, 142, 370, Buyser, Fernando 334–335
371, 374 Byelarussian 213
Beckford, William 131
Becolco, Angelo 22 calques 91, 160, 201, 208
Ben Jelloun, Tahar 145, 266 Calvin, John 101
Ben Rahal, M’Hamed 267 Cameroon 137
Bengali 67, 73–74, 76, 155, 156, 311, 316–326 Campbell, Paul-Henri 185
Berber 144, 157, 159, 262, 266–267 Camus, Albert 267
Berg, Nancy 277, 278 Canada 13, 136–137, 147–148, 180, 206, 216, 221,
Berger, John 227 294
Bergvall, Caroline 172 Canagarajah, Suresh 390
Bers,Victor 48 Canetti, Elias 230–231
Besemeres, Mary 5, 6, 7, 215, 369 Capeller, Carl 79
Betances, Ramón Emeterio 360 Cappiello, Rosa 13
Bezmozgis, David 206 Caribbean French 140, 145, 150
Bhabha, Homi 41, 206 Carmina Burana 100
394
Index
Carpentier, Alejo 362 “coordinate” bilinguals 77, 81n4

Carrión, Santob de 90 Coptic 47, 260–261
Casanova, Pascale 129, 132, 133, 167, 196 Corbière, Tristan 22, 23–24
Cassin, Barbara 123n2 Cordingley, Anthony 369, 371, 372, 375–376
Catalan 9–10 Coroleu, Alejandro 103–104
Catherine II, Empress 188–189 Corsetti, Renato 115
Caudhari, Roma 76 cosmopolitanism 72, 75, 80, 93, 168, 177, 216,
Cebuano 334–335, 337 220–222, 303, 311–312
Celtiberian 46 Cotten, Ann 185
Celtic 46, 177 Couser, Thomas 3
Césaire, Aimé 144 Couturat, Louis 113
Chang, Eileen 293 Crete 46
Charney, Samuel 274 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de 131
Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra 318 Criveller, Gianni 293
Chaucer, Geoffrey 130 Croatian 119
Chaudhuri, Amit 322 Cronin, Michael 227
Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 321 Crystal, David 129
Chaver,Yael 274 Cuba 37–38, 360, 362
Chen Hsiu-hsi 289 cuneiform 61
Chen Jitong 291, 292 Cyrillic 33, 196, 200–210
Cheng, François 142, 143, 146, 147 Czech 34, 37, 142
Cheng Nien 293, 295
Chiang Yee 291–292 da Gama, Basílio 101, 107
Chihuailaf, Elicura 363 Dabashi, Hamid 67
Chikangana, Fredy 356 Dai Sijie 294
China Critic 291, 292 Dakhanī 306–308
Chinese 35–36, 39, 119, 287–300, 340, 346 Dalgarno, George 113
choral poetry 48–49, 106–107 Dāmodara 74
Chraïbi, Driss 266 Daṇḍin 72
Cicero 51, 54 Danish 165–176
Cisneros, Sandra 38 Danquah, Meri Nana-Ama 6
Clackson, James 49 Dante Alighieri 21–22, 100–101, 152, 161, 162
Clavijero, Francisco Javier 360 Dari 69
codeswitching: Chinese 297; German-English literary Darío, Rubén 360, 361
translingualism 178; Hispanofilipino literature Das, Kamala 32
331; Italian-English 160; Jewish communities Das, Kasiprasad 317–318
88; Persianate world 66, 68, 69; self-translation Dasilva, Xosé 376
377 Davidson, Cathy N. 5
Coetzee, Ampie 245 de Barros, Jorge 107
Coetzee, J.M. 11–12, 248, 251, 253 de Courtivron, Isabelle 6, 7
coins 62 de la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés 358
Coldiron, A.E.B. 131 de la Vega, Garcilaso 356–357
Cole, Isabel Fargo 185 De las Casas, Bartolomé 104–105
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 18 de los Reyes, Isabelo 331–332
colonialism: Arabic in French North Africa 266; de Matos, Gregório 357
Bengali 317–320; English-French translingualism De Mauro, Tullio 152
137; French 140; Hindi/Urdu 305, 309; De Oliveira,Vera Lucia 19
Hispanofilipino literature 330, 332–335; Italian de Resende, André 104
153, 162; memoir 4–5, 11, 12–13; neo-Latin 97; de Rosario, Don Antonio 78
Nordic 165, 166; poetry 26–27; South Africa 243, de Teive, Diogo 101, 104
249, 253; South Asia 301; Taiwanese 288 de Vaqueiras, Raimbaut 21
Columeau, Julien-Régis 312 Deleuze, Gilles 279, 391
comic books 68, 250 Deneire, Tom 102
Condé, Maryse 145 Derbyshire, Katy 195
Conrad, Joseph 7, 33–34, 133, 183, 212, 214–215, Derozio, Henry Louis Vivien 317
222 Derrida, Jacques 149, 344
Constancia, Paulina 336 Desai, Anita 186, 322
Contini, Gianfranco 22 Descartes, René 101
Cooper, James Fenimore 180 descort 21
395
Index
dialects: ancient Greek 45–46; Arabic 259; dialectic translingualism 166, 168, 172; Persianate world 67,
genre 78; Esperanto 120; German 186; Hindi/ 68, 69; Philippines 328; poetry 20; Polish-English
Urdu 304, 306; Italian 158, 162; Nordic literary translingualism 219, 220–222; Russian-English
translingualism 165; poetry 22 literary translingualism 200–210; Sanskrit 76, 77;
dialogues (colloquia) 102 self-translation 370; South Africa 243, 244–250;
diaries 14, 36, 171, 183, 276–277 South Asia 301–303, 312, 321–325
Díaz, Junot 39 Engwall, Gunnel 167
Dib, Mohammed 267 Ennius 49, 50, 97, 99
dictionaries 87, 102, 154, 261, 264 epigrams 18, 88, 90, 106, 107
diglossia 47, 144, 259, 310, 312, 361 epigraphs 55n1, 86, 147–148, 325, 329
Dinesen, Isak 168–169, 370 epistolary literature 50–51, 91, 172, 232
Diogenes 46 epistolography 51–52
Dionysius of Halicarnassus 46 epitaphs 18, 23, 107, 236
diplomacy 62, 141 epithalamia 86
diptychs 100, 102, 106, 107 Erasmus, Desiderius 101, 102, 106
direct speech 207, 311 Ernaux, Annie 6
Djabali, Leila 267 Esperanto 113–125, 170
Djebar, Assia 267 Espinosa Medrano, Juan de 357
Doloughan, Fiona 31 essays 6–7, 32, 37, 194, 202, 219
Dominican Republic 39 Ethnologue 114
Dorfman, Ariel 10, 362, 373, 386–387 Etruscan 49
Doric Greek 47 etymology 37
d’Orléans, Charles 130–131 eulogies 86
“double language” 24–25 Eusuf, Nausheen 324
Drewniak, Dagmara 216 Evans, Nicholas 244, 245, 249
Drory, Rina 92–93 exile: Arabic 265; Chinese 294; English-French
Drum 245–246 translingualism 131; fiction 36–40; French 142;
Du Bellay, Joachim 141 German-English literary translingualism 183–185;
Ducasse, Isidore 360–361 Japanese 341; Latin America 360; Nordic literary
Dumas, Finoozeh 12 translingualism 167, 171; Persianate world 68;
Dūnash ben Labrāṭ 88 poetry 23; self-translation 370; South Africa 252;
Dutch 7, 236, 244–245, 373 see also migration
Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 318 exilliteratur 183–185
Dutt family (Bengal) 319 exophonic writing xviii, 222, 341–343
Dutton, Jacqueline 41, 144, 150
Farah, Nuruddin 3
ecologizing actions 26–29 Farah, Ubax Cristina Ali 13
education, languages of: Bengali 317, 324; French Faroese 169–170
141; German-English literary translingualism 184; Farsi 12
Hispanofilipino literature 332; Latin 102; Poland Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman 305, 308
217; Polish 218; Sanskrit 77; South Africa 245, 249 Favorinus 54
Edwards, Natalie 141, 146 Fazıl, Enderûnlu 264
Egan, Caroline 358 Federman, Raymond 133, 134, 373, 375, 387
Ekman, Kerstin 165 Feldman,Yael 276
Elamite 61, 62 Feraoun, Mouloud 267
Eliot, T.S. 22–24, 133 Ferreira, Antonio 101
Ellis, Lizzie Marrkilyi 4 fiction 31–42
Ellmann, Richard 132 Fiedler, Sabine 115
Emecheta, Buchi 4 Filipino 328
endangerment, linguistic 162 film 171, 183
English: and Bengali 319; and Chinese 291, 292, Finkelstein, Miriam 195, 196, 208
293; English-French translingualism 129–139; Finnish 165–176
English-only versus English-plus 38; fiction 32, Firdawsī 64
33, 36; German-English literary translingualism Fløgstad, Kjartan 169
177–187; Hebrew translingualism 280–281; Florentine 152, 161
Hispanofilipino literature 332–335, 336; Italian Folengo, Teofilo 22
literary translingualism 159–160; Latin America folk tales 90
362–363; lingua franca 185, 205, 245, 248, 253, footnotes 107
254, 291; memoir 7–8, 9–12; Nordic literary forced translingualism 183–185
396
Index
Ford, Ford Madox 133 Ghermandi, Gabriella 154

Forsdick, Charles 142, 144, 146, 147 Ghose, Sudhin N. 321
Forster, Georg 179 Ghose brothers 319–320
Forster, Leonard 129, 131, 133, 178, 179, 182 Ghosh, Amitav 322
Fouto, Catarina 103–104 Ghosh, Joyjit 32
Francophonie 140, 141–142, 143–149 Gibran, Khalil 201, 265, 268
French: Balkans 230, 233; and Bengali 319; and Gĩkũyũ 11
Chinese 293, 296; English-French translingualism Gliński, Mikolaj 217
129–139; fiction 32, 34, 35, 37; Francophone Glissant, Édouard 389
literary translingualism 140–151; German-English globalization 141, 142, 150, 185, 236, 237, 294, 322,
literary translingualism 178–179, 180, 182; 325
Italian literary translingualism 158–159; Latin Gnessin, Uri Nissan 273
America 360, 361; lingua franca 142, 213–214, Gnisci, Armando 153
361, 370; memoir 6, 7, 8, 12–13; Nordic literary Goethe 131
translingualism 167, 168, 172; North Africa 267; Goldberg, Leah 276–277
Persianate world 67, 68, 69; poetry 20, 22–24, Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur 376
26–27; Poland 213–314; Russian-English literary Goldstein, Ann 155
translingualism 202, 204; Russian-German Goldsworthy,Vesna 229
translingual literature 189; self-translation 370, 373 Goll, Lorrainer Yvan 180
Frid, Johanna 166 Gomringer, Eugen 182, 185
Friis, Elisabeth 170 Gopnik, Adam 204
Fronto 51–52, 54 Goralik, Linor 205
Füchsl, Franziska 186 Gorelik, Lena 193, 194, 195
Furman,Yelena 206–207 Goswami, Rūpa 74
Fuzuli 263 Gould, Emily 205
Goulding, Gregory 306, 312
Gagnon, Daniel 136 Gower, John 130
Galang, Zoilo 333 graffiti 306
Galician 21 graphic literature 13, 68, 250
Galileo Galilei 101 Graves, Lucia 9–10
Gaṅgādevi 74, 77 Gray, Piers 24
Gao Xingjian 294 Great Attic 49
Gaponenko, Marianna 196 Greco-Roman worlds 45–59, 86
García de Mansilla, Eduarda 360 Greek: and Arabic 261; dialects 45–46, 47–48;
Gardini, Nicola 18 Greco-Roman worlds 37, 51–52, 53–54; Jewish
Garsoïan, Nina 62 communities 85, 86; lingua francas 47, 50;
Gary, Romain 142, 203–204, 205 Persianate world 62; poetry 102; and Sanskrit 79
Gascon 21 Green, Julien 132
Gauger, Soren 221, 222 Greenlandic 169–170
Gaulish 46 Gritsman, Andrey 209
gender: identity 194; metaphors for translingualism Grjasnowa, Olga 194, 195, 197
387–388; Polish 220–221; see also women Gröndahl, Satu 170
generic renewal 40 Grove, Frederick Philip 180
Genoese 21 Grutman, Rainier 371, 372, 373–374, 376
genre-crossing 32–33, 40, 74, 280 Guadeloupe 145
Gentes, Eva 370, 371, 372, 373–374, 375, 376 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe 357
George, Stefan 182 Guattari, Félix 279, 391
Geraldini, Alessandro 103 Gujarāti 72, 73, 306
German: court poets 131; German-English literary Guldin, Rainer 382, 383
translingualism 177–187; Japanese-German 340, Gumperz, John J. 304
342, 343; in Latin texts 100; memoir 11, 13; Nordic Gümüşay, Kübra 13
literary translingualism 166, 167–168, 169, 170, Guo, Xiaolu 7, 32, 33, 35–36, 39
173; poetry 25; Russian-German translingual
literature 188–199; and Sanskrit 79; in the USA Ha Jin 294, 296
178 Ḥāfeẓ 66
Gerrand,Vivian 13 Haines, Brigid 191
Ghali, Waguih 268 Hajdari, Gëzim 24–25, 230
‘Ġhālib,’ Asadullāh Ḳhān 303, 308 Halevi, Judah 89, 262
ghazals 66, 308, 309, 312 Halkin, Shimon 275–276
397
Index
Hamburger, Michael 184 Iberian 46

Hamilton, Hugo 4, 11, 186 Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ 64
Han Suyin 293, 295 ibn Ezra, Abraham 87, 89, 262
Hans, Bruder 178 ibn Ezra, Moses 89, 92, 262
Haq, Kaiser 317, 324 Ibn Gabirol, Solomon 89
Harmon, Maurice 134 Ibn Qutayba 87
Harshav, Benjamin 273 ibn Tibbon, Judah 87, 91
Hausbacher, Eva 191 ibn Tibbon, Samuel 91
Hayya Gaon 88 Ibsen, Henrik 166, 169
He Dong 294 Icelandic 165–176
Hebrew: Arabic translingualism 269–270; Jewish identity: gender 194; Hebrew 275, 279; and the
communities 85, 86, 87–93, 262; memoir 6; Holocaust 219–220; hybridity 206, 235; Korean
and Polish 211, 217, 218; translingual literature 342; memoir 9; migration 194; multiple identities
272–293 32, 204, 206, 218, 296, 346, 348; non-regional 79;
Hegi, Ursula 180, 186 Other 65, 149, 193; polysemic 161; transformation
Heinesen, Willaim 169 of the self 35
Helmsdal, Guðrið 170 idiolects 33, 335
Hemon, Aleksandar 227, 228, 233–235, 236, 237 idioms 86, 153, 207–208, 281, 290, 295, 296
Heredia, José-Maria de 360, 362 Idov, Michael 205
Herodotus 46, 48 Ijsewijn, Jozef 97, 103, 104
Hessler, Peter 5 illustrations 171; see also graphic literature
Hever, Hanan 279 Ilokano 331–332, 334, 336
Heym, Stefan 13, 181, 183, 184 immersion narratives 5–12
Himmelfarb, Jan 192 immigration see migration
Hindi 69, 73, 76, 77, 78, 301–315 Immortels 142–143
Hinds, Stephen 100, 102, 103 “imperial languages” 60; see also colonialism
Hirsch, Marianne 192 India 67, 71–82, 301–315
Hispanofilipino literature 327–339 Innu-Aiman 26–27
histories 49–50, 64, 220, 252 inscriptions 62
Hobbes, Thomas 101 integral literary bilingualism 133–135
Hobson, Charlotte 5 internationalism 135
Hochberg, Gil 279 Internet 115, 166
Høeg, Peter 170 intertextuality 7, 32, 206
Hoffman, Eva 3, 4, 6, 7, 135, 212, 216, 219, 382 intonation 9, 88
Hokenson, Jan 131, 132, 135, 369, 370, 371 Inuk, Lottie 170
Hokkein 7, 288 Ionesco, Eugène 143
Holdworth, Elizabeth 7 Ionic Greek 47, 48, 49
Holocaust (Shoah) 13, 134, 136, 181, 183, 192, ‘Iqbāl,’ Muḥammad 303–304
219–220, 269–270, 387 Iran 12, 60–63, 67, 68
home, concepts of 36–40 Iraq 62, 63
Homer 37, 46, 48, 53 Irish 4
homiletics 86 Irwin, Robert 263
Horace 50 isiXhosa 247, 250, 251
Horrocks, Geoffrey 48, 49 isiZulu 244, 246, 247, 250
Hosseini, Khaled 69 Islam 87–88, 259, 261–262, 305, 316–317, 320;
Hsiao Hsiang-wen 288, 289, 290 see also Quran
Hsiung, Dymia 293 Islam, Manzu (Syed Manzurul) 325
Hsiung Shih-I 291–292 isolingual translingualism 33, 65, 66, 67, 73, 77, 101,
Hudson, W.H. 362–363 232
Huidobro,Vicente 361 isomorphic translation 78
Hummel, Eleonora 192 Israel 85, 269–270, 276–278
Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq 261 Italian: fiction 32, 35; Italian literary translingualism
Huss, Markus 172 152–164; in Latin America 106; memoir 4, 6;
Hussain, Rokeya Sakhawat 320 memoirs in 13; poetry 19, 20, 21–22, 24–25, 102
Huston, Nancy 12–13, 133, 134–135, 143–144, 146,
372, 373, 374, 376, 377, 389 Janāḥ, Jonah ibn 88
Hutcheon, Linda 162n6 Jandl, Ernst 182, 185
Hyder, Qurratulain 375 Jänicke, Gisbert 167
hymns 76 JanMohamend, Abdul 341, 342
398
Index
Japanese 5, 7, 288, 289, 335, 340–351 Ḳhusrau, Amīr 305, 308

Jasieński, Bruno 217, 221 King, Daniel 47
Jayadeva 73 Kingston, Maxine Hong 3, 4
Jedrowski, Tomasz 221 kinship terms 12
Jenson, Carol Jóhan 169 Kippur, Sara 134, 371, 375
Jesuits 105–106, 359 Kirkpatrick, Iona 35–36
Jewish communities: Arabic 261, 262; German- Kivelä, Malin 172
English literary translingualism 181, 183–185; Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne 168
Hebrew 272–293; Medieval Jewish culture 85–96; Kjellberg, Ann 203
Palestine/Israel 269–270; Polish 212, 218, 219–220; Kleemann, Jessie 170
Russian-English literary translingualism 203–206, Kleveland, Anne Karine 169
207, 208; Russian-German translingual literature Klüger, Ruth 186
192, 195, 196, 197n8 Knauth, Alfons 390
Jha, Dinabandhu 74 Knight, Sarah 97
Jin Lian 289 Kochanowski, Jan 212
Johansson, Sten 116 Koestler, Arthur 183, 185
Johnson, D. Barton 201, 202 Kol,’ Liudmila 172
Jonathan of Beit Guvrin, Rabbi 86 Kolosowa, Wlada 195
Josephus 47 Korean 340, 342, 347–349
Jouanny, Robert 135, 143 Korneliussen, Ole 170
journalism 181 Kosiński, Jerzy 216
Joyce, James 22, 133, 182 Kosmalska, Joanna 216
Judeo-Arabic 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 262 Kourouma, Ahmadou 144
Krasikov, Sana 206, 207–208
Kabir, Humayun 320 Kreisel, Henry 183
Kadare, Ismail 230 Krishnadevarāya 74
Kager, Maria 35 Kristeva, Julia 230
Kallifatides, Theodor 171 Kristóf, Ágota 143, 146
Kamban 73 Kuncewiczowa, Maria 216
Kaminer, Wladimir 190, 193, 195, 197 Kundera, Milan 34, 37, 68, 142, 147
Kaminsky, Ilya 208–209 Kuo, Helena 293
Kanapé-Fontaine, Natasha 26–27 Kuruvilla, Gabriella 155
Kanbe, Bak 79 Kuryluk, Ewa 220–221
Kane, Cheikh Hamidou 142 Kven 170
Kannada 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 306 Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, Hryhoriy F. 375
Kanor, Fabienne 145
Kapitelman, Dmitrij 192 Ladino 230–231
Kaplan, Alice 4, 6 LaDousa, Chaise 302, 304
Kapovich, Katya 209 Laferrière, Dany 143
Kashua, Sayed 270, 278–279 Lafourgue, Jules 361
Kassabova, Kapka 230 Lahbabi, Mohammed-Aziz 266
kāvya 72, 78–79 Lahiri, Jhumpa 13, 32, 35, 40–41, 155–157, 158–159,
Kazin, Alfred 6 160, 323
Kellman, Steven 3, 6, 10, 13, 19, 20, 24, 31, 33, 41, 45, Lahlou, Nabyl 267
60, 65, 68, 80, 101, 102, 113, 130, 135, 137, 160, Laird, Andrew 105, 107, 358–359
178, 195, 211, 213, 221, 227, 228, 243, 248, 250, Lakhous, Amara 157–159
252, 253, 273, 303, 316, 327, 369, 376, 382, 386, Lalami, Laila 269
388–389 laments 21, 86
Kenner, Hugh 182 Lander, Jeannette 180
Kerouac, Jack 136–137 Landívar, Rafael 359–360
Kessel, Joseph 142 Language Analysis in the Determination of Origin
Khaïr-Eddine, Mohammed 266–267 (LADO) 237
Khalīfa, Ḥājjī 264 Langue d’Oil 21
Khan, Adib 325 Larbar, Sara 123n1
Kharī Bolī 311 Latin: ancient Rome 46; Augustine of Hippo 3;
Khayyām 66 English-French translingualism 130; Greco-Roman
Khemeri, Jonas Hassen 171–172 worlds 47, 49–54; Italian literary translingualism
Khorasan 67 152, 161; Latin America 97–110, 358–359; lingua
Khurasan 66, 307 franca 99, 212, 370; Nordic literary translingualism
399
Index
172; poetry 21, 22; and Polish 212–213; Lowry, Joseph E. 263
and Sanskrit 77–78 Lucan 46, 98
Latin America 10, 14, 97–110, 265, 355–366 Lucian 47, 53–54
Lavezzi, Gianfranca 21 ludicity 169
Le Bris, Michel 146 Lukkar, Rauni Magga 171
Leau, Leopold 113 Lun, Aleksandra 222
Lebanon 36, 268–269 Lundberg, Rhom 166
Lee, C.Y. 293 Lusitanian 46
Lee Hoesung 340, 347 Lux, Lana 194, 195, 196
Lee Yan Phou 290 Lvovich, Natasha 5–6, 10, 20, 31, 68, 113, 221, 327,
Lee Yangji 347–349 388–389
legal writing 86, 87, 89, 130 Lynge, Aqqaluk 170
Leggio, Francesco 157 Lynge, Hans 169–170
Leite, Leni Ribeiro 107
Leong Gor Yan 296 Mabini, Apolonario 333
Lerner, Gerda 13 macaronic texts 22, 65, 66, 100, 181–182, 261
Leśmian, Bolesław 217 Machet, M.P. 247
Lesser, Wendy 6 MacMullen, Ramsay 52
letters 51–52, 61–62, 74, 89, 131, 215 Maffeius, Iohannes Petrus 99–100
Levy Hideo 340, 341, 343, 345–346 Magona, Sindiwe 251
LGBTQ 33, 221 mahakāvya 77
Licsi, Federico Espino 336 Maher, John C. 60
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin 7 Mahjar literature 264–265, 268
liminality (spaces in-between languages) 19, 20, 147, Maimonides, Moses 88, 90, 262
235, 340–341, 388–389 Maithilī 74
limits of language 28–29 Majorcan 9–10
Lin, Hazel 293 Makine, Andreï 142, 143, 146, 147
Lin Hengtai 288, 289 Malay 4, 7
Lin Yutang 291–292, 293, 296–297 Malayalam 32, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77
Lind, Jakov 13, 183 Malinke 144
Lindén, Zinaida 172 Mallarmé, Stéphane 22, 24, 135
lingua francas: Afrikaans 244; English 185, 205, 245, Manciet, Bernard 373
248, 253, 254, 291; French 142, 213–214, 361, 370; Mandarin 5, 7, 287–300, 346
Greco-Roman worlds 47, 50; Hindi 305; Jewish Mānī 63
communities 85, 87; Latin 99, 212, 370; Latin Manichean Scriptures 63
America 358; Nordic 166; Persianate world 62, Maṅkha 72–73
63, 67 Mann, Erika 184
literary prizes: Balkans 230; Bengali 322, 324, 325; Mann, Klaus 184
Francophone literary translingualism 142, 145; Mann, Thomas 185
German-English literary translingualism 184, Mansour, Athallah 278
185–186; Japanese 346, 347; Russian-English Manuchehri 66
literary translingualism 208; Russian-German Mapudungan 363
translingual literature 190; see also Nobel Prizes Maratha courts 75
Lithuanian 213 Marathi 72, 76, 77, 306, 307, 312
Litman, Ellen 207, 208 Marazzini, Claudio 161, 162
Littell, Jonathan 136, 146 Marciano, Francesca 159–160
Livius Andronicus 49 Marcos, Ferdinand 335–336
Liyanage, Indika 390 Marcus Aurelius 51, 52
Llull, Ramon 369 Marnersdóttir, Malan 169
loanwords: Hindi 306; Hispanofilipino literature 335; Martial 46, 97, 98
Japanese-English 5, 289; Jewish communities 91; Martynova, Olga 194, 196
memoir 5; Muslim Persianate World 65; Persianate Marvell, Andrew 102
world 67; Russian-English literary translingualism Mask, Aḥmad Kamyābī 67–68
208 mastery/proficiency 39–41
“local ways of being” 80 Matvejević, Predrag 228, 232–233, 237
Lockyer, Betty 4–5 Maurer, Michael 177, 181
Loda, Alice 18, 25 Mazali, Rela 280
Loiseau, Georges 167 McDonald, Christie 150
Longinović, Tomislav 228, 229, 232, 235–236, 237 McKay, Givan 117
400
Index
Mda, Zakes 250–251, 253 Moreno-Fernández, Francisco 40

Meänkieli 170 more-than-human poetry 26–29
Mehmedinović, Semezdin 227, 228 Morgan, Naomi 250
memoir 3–17, 32, 35, 37, 169–170, 186, 219, 293, Mori, Kyoko 7
295; see also autobiography Moritz, Karl Philipp 181
Mendele the Book Peddler 133, 273 Moro, César 361
Menéndez, Ana 37–38 Morocco 266–268
Merlín, Condesa de 360 “mother tongue” 10, 46, 71, 115, 144, 156, 212, 228,
Merrill, Stuart 135 237, 249, 304, 310, 383
Meschonnic, Henri 18 Mpe, Phaswane 250
metalinguistic awareness 33, 34, 74 Mühlen, Hermynia zur 183
metaphor 35, 235, 275, 279, 344 Mukherjee, Neel 323
Metastasio, Pietro 102 Muktibodh, Gajānan Mādhav 312
meta-translatability of language 20, 26 Mullen, Alex 52, 61
Mexico 38, 105, 106, 362, 370, 371, 372, 373 Müller, Herta 382, 384–385
Meyer, Deon 251 multi-genre authors 32–33, 40, 74
Michie, Helga 184 multimodality 75, 172
Mickiewicz, Adam 212, 214 Muni, (Vasistha) Kavyakanta Ganapathi 75
Middle English 130 Munson, Marcella 132, 135, 369, 370, 371
migration: Arabic 259, 265, 268; Balkans 228, Mura, David 5, 6
232–233, 236–237; Chinese 290, 293–294, Muslim Persianate World 63–67
296–297; English-French translingualism 135–136; mutual intelligibility 166, 287
fiction 31, 36–40; French 147; German-English muwashshaḥ poetry 262
literary translingualism 185–186; Hebrew 274–276; Myburgh, Pieter-Louis 249
Italian 153, 154–155; Japanese 347; Latin America
103; memoir 4; Nordic literary translingualism Nabokov,Vladimir 7–8, 32, 33, 133, 135, 143, 200,
165, 171–172; Palestine/Israel 269–270, 276–278; 202, 205, 206, 228, 370, 371, 374
Persianate world 68; Polish 212, 214–219, 221; Nahuatl 358
Russian-English literary translingualism 200, Naidu, Sarojini 320
203–204; Russian-German translingual literature Najder, Zdzisław 215
190–191, 192–195; second-generation migrants 4, Namibia 178
5, 154–155; self-translation 370 naming practices 36, 38, 79, 148, 207
Miłosz, Czesław 215–216 Nanjundharadhya, M.G. 77
Milton, John 102, 181 Narayan Rao,V. 76
mimetic structure of language 28, 39 Narseh 62
Minnaja, Carlo 115, 116, 119 Nātiq, ʿAlī Akbar 310–311
minor literature 279 Native Americans 275–276
Miron, Dan 133, 135 Nazi Germany 119, 136, 157, 177, 183, 185, 202
Mīrzā, Iraj 67 Neo-Babylonian Akkadian 61
Mishnah 86 neo-Latin in Latin America 97–110
Moberg,Vilhelm 171 neologisms 19, 25, 53, 86, 91, 162
modernism 28, 34, 79 Nesimi, Imadaddin 263
Moeris 53 Neumann, Robert 184
Mohr, Tim 195 neurolinguistics 35
Moï, Anna 145, 149 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 5, 11, 144, 169, 318, 370
Molnár, Katalin 143, 146 Niemcewicz, Julian Ursyn 214
Monk, Ian 372 Niemi, Mikael 170–171
monocultural ideologies 19, 274 Nieva, Gregorio 333
monolingual ideologies: Balkans 237; English-French Nikolayev, Philip 208
translingualism 130; fiction 39, 40; French 141; Nilsson, Magnus 172
Greco-Roman worlds 53; Hebrew 281; Hindi Nimrod 149
and Urdu 303; Hispanofilipino literature 327; Nobel Prizes 117, 133, 231, 251, 294, 320, 370;
metaphors for translingualism 385–386; and poetry see also literary prizes
19; Russian-English literary translingualism 205 non-fiction 68, 181, 191, 194, 197, 252, 292
monolingual translinguals 113, 135, 182, 195–196, Nordic literary translingualism 165–176
303; see also isolingual translingualism Norwegian 165–176, 294
Mooney, Sinéad 133 nostalgia 3, 37, 38, 79, 81n15, 157, 254, 277, 363
Morace, Rosanna 157 Noubel, Filip 222
More, Thomas 101 Nuʿayma, Mīkhāʾīl 265
401
Index
Nykvist, Karin 173 Philippines 327–339

Nyul Nyul 5 Phrynichus 53–54
Pinpin, Tomás 330–331
Ocampo,Victoria 361–362 Pishorody, Attur (Krishna Chandra) 75
Odysseus 37, 46, 49 Pishorody, E.P Bharatha 76–77
official language status: Bengali 321–326, 328; Plaatje, Sol T. 250
French 141; Hindi and Urdu 301; Italian 152, planned languages 113–116
162; Nordic literary translingualism 165, 166, 170; Plato 48, 53
Persianate world 60; South Africa 248 Plautus 50, 97, 98
Ogulnick, Karen 5, 6 plays/drama: Bengali 318; Chinese 291–292;
Okura,Yamanoue no 343 English-French translingualism 132, 133–134; Latin
Old Bengali 73 America 106; Nordic literary translingualism 166;
Old English 173, 177 North Africa 267; Polish 216, 217; Sanskrit 75, 76;
Old French 100 self-translation 377; South Africa 251
Old Kosali 74 pluricentrality, linguistic 170–171
Old Norman 130 Plutarch 46
Old Norse 169, 172, 173 Polezzi, Loredana 227
Old Persian 61, 62 Polilitis,Vasilis 389
Old Tamil 72 Polish 14, 34, 211–226, 340
Oliveira, Manuel Botelho de 106–107 Poliziano, Angelo 103
Oliver, José F. 13 Pollock, Sheldon 80, 316, 323
oral traditions 33, 63, 251, 260 polysystems theory 92–93
Oria 72 Portugal 103–104
Orsini, Francesca 329 Portuguese 19, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 355–366
orthography see writing systems postcolonialism: Bengali 320–326; French 144,
Orzeszkowa, Eliza 214–215 145–149; Hindi and Urdu 309; Italian 153–155,
Oscan 50, 54, 99 161; memoir 4–5; Nordic literary translingualism
Ostashevsky, Eugene 208 169–170; South Africa 253; South Asia 303
O’Sullivan, Helen 6, 13 Potocki, Jan 213, 221
O’Sullivan, Michael 51 Potts, Daniel D. 61
Otoo, Sharon Dodua 185 Pound, Ezra 22, 27–29, 182
Oustinoff, Michaël 375–376 Prague group 116
Oyônô-Mbia, Guillaume 137 Prakrit 71–72, 73, 316
Özakin, Aysel 186 Prawer Jhabvala, Ruth 184
Özdamar, Emine Sevgi 13, 383 Preil, Gabriel 276, 371
primary language, difficulty in defining 10
Pahlavi script 65 printing 105, 310
Pakistan 301–315 Prix Goncourt 136, 142, 145
Palestine 86, 269–270, 276–278 profanity 207
Palma, Rafael 329, 333 pronunciation differences in text 158
Pandurangi, K.T. 77 prosody 9, 88
panegyrics 60, 64, 88, 90, 107, 178 Proust, Marcel 149
parallel lingualism 166 Provençal 21–22, 28
paratexts 107 Provence 91
Parks, Tim 4, 6 proverbs 75, 295
Parthasarathy, Adhiraj 304 Przybyszewski, Stanisław 217
Parthian Empire 62–63 publishing industry 104–105, 116, 134, 180, 183,
Pashto 69 190–191, 243–256, 324, 362, 372–373
pavan [Paduan] dialect 22 Pumhösel, Barbara 25–26
Pavlenko, Aneta 13, 81n4 Pung, Alice 4
Pavlova, Karolina 189 Punic 53, 54, 98
Penkov, Miroslav 230 Punjabi 67, 310–311
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo 228, 389 puns 169
Persen, Synnøve 171 purism, linguistic 50, 52, 87
Persepolis tablets 61 Puteanus 101
Persian 63–67, 86, 261, 263, 306, 309, 316–317
Persianate world 60–70, 260–261, 316–317 Qāʾāni, Ḥabibu’llāh 67
Petrarca, Francesco 152 Qājār, Muḥammad-Shāh 67
Petrowskaja, Katja 192, 197 Qallir, El‘azar 87
402
Index
Qiu Xiaolong 294, 297 Sacré, Dirk 100

Québec 136–137, 140, 148 Sadan, Joseph 93
Quechua 355, 357, 359, 361, 363 Saddiki, Tayeb 267
Quilis, Antonio 329, 335 Sa‘dī 66, 261
Quinn, Naomi 8 Said, Edward 269, 341, 342
Quintilian 46, 98 Salzmann, Sascha Marianna 194, 195, 196
Quran 8, 78, 87, 92, 259, 260, 264 Sámi 165, 166, 169, 170, 171
Samuel the Nagid 89
Rabelais, François 22, 101 San Agustín, Fr. Gaspar de 330
Rābiʿa bint Kaʿb al-Quzdārī 65 Sanskrit 64, 71–82, 303, 306, 311, 316
Rabinow, Paul 5 Sante, Luc 135
Rae Yang 293, 295 Santiago, Esmerelda 4
Raghavan,V. 76, 81n14 Santoyo, Julio-César 371, 373, 375
Rahimi, Atiq 69 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz 212, 213
Rahman, Zia Haider 325 Śarma, Gotur Venkatācala 76
Raimbaut de Vaqueiras 21 Śarma, Rāllapalli Anantakrishna 76
Ramanujan, A. K. 316 Sarraute, Nathalie 142
Rand, Ayn 200, 201–202, 205 Sasanian Empire 62, 63
Reclus, Onésime 144–145 Satrapi, Marjane 13, 68
refugees 10, 165, 171, 233, 237 Sattouf, Riad 13
register: ancient Greek 49; Arabic 259; Aramaic 85; Satyanarayana,Viswanatha 76
Greco-Roman worlds 47; Hindi/Urdu 306; Sāwīrūs ibn al-Muqaffaʿ 260
Jewish communities 86; Sanskrit 72, 74 Scego, Igiaba 13, 155
religion: Arabic 260; and education 105–106; Scheindlin, Raymond 93
Hispanofilipino literature 329–330; liturgical Schneider, Helga 157
documents 72, 85, 86, 87–88, 89, 91; medieval Schwarz-Bart, Simone 144
Jewish culture 85–96; mystic texts 90; Sanskrit 78; Scott, Clive 26
see also Islam; Jewish communities screenwriting 183, 184, 205
Remennick, Larissa 206 scribes 61, 62, 63, 64
Renaissance 131, 179, 212, 320 Sealsfield, Charles 179–180
Reṇu, Phaṇīśvaranāth 311, 312 Sebbar, Leïla 5, 7, 12–13
Reyn, Irina 207 Seeber, Monica 244, 245, 249
Reza,Yasmina 68 Sefriuoi, Ahmed 266
rhythm 19, 22, 24, 25, 33, 73, 178, 203 Segre, Cesare 22
Rihani, Amin 265 self-consciousness 34
Rilke, Rainer Maria 189 self-othering 193
Rinne, Cia 173 self-translation 369–381; Balkans 233, 234; English-
Rittner, Tadeusz 217 French translingualism 131, 132, 134, 135; fiction
Rivarol, Antoine de 142 32; German-English literary translingualism 181,
Rizal, José 329 184; Hebrew 273; Hispanofilipino literature
Rodriguez, Richard 3, 6 336–337; history of 369–370; Japanese 344, 346;
Roman world 45–69 Latin America 361; Mānī 63; memoir 6; Nordic
Romanes 170 literary translingualism 167, 169–170, 171; Polish
Romani 166, 170 211, 216, 217, 219, 220, 222; rejecting 372–373;
Romeo, Caterina 153 Russian-English literary translingualism 202–203,
Rosetta Stone 60, 100 209; Samuel Beckett 34–35; self-translation studies
Rouaud, Jean 146 371–372; South Africa 251
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 102 Seligman, Scott D. 290
Roy, Arundhati 322 Senderovich, Sasha 206–207
Roy, Ram Mohun 317 Seneca 46, 98
Rubins, Maria 204 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 141–142, 143, 144, 145
Rūmī, Jalālad-Dīn 66 Sepúlveda 104–105
Runblom, Harald 166 Serbo-Croatian 231–232, 234, 235
Rushdie, Salman 322, 325, 341 Seshagiri, Urmila 35
Russell Rich, Katherine 4 Setswana 247
Russian 5, 7–8, 168, 169, 172, 188–199, 200–210 Severo, Cristine Gorski 106
Sextus Empiricus 54
Sa‘adia Gaon 87, 93, 261 Shafak, Elif 32
Sabo, Oana 147 Shahīd Balkhī 65
403
Index
Shahji II 75 Sternberg, Meir 135

Shakespeare, William 68, 78–79, 179, 250 Stewart, Devin J. 263
Shammas, Anton 270, 278–279 Štimec, Spomenka 113, 118–119
Shan Sha 294, 296 Strindberg, August 167, 169
Sharma, Ram Karan 78 Stryjowski, Julian 218
Shem Ṭov Ardutiel 90 stylistics 33–34
Shlonsky, Avraham 276, 282 Suetonius 49, 50
Shmeruk, Chone 218 Sufi literature 66
Shoah 13, 134, 136, 181, 183, 192, 219–220, 269–270, Suhrawardy, Shahid 320
387 Suleiman, Susan 150
short stories 32, 118–120, 190, 221, 234, 266, 289, 336 Sumerian 61
Shteyngart, Gary 204–205, 207 Sumerian-Akkadian tomb inscriptions 3
Shulman, David 74, 80 Supervielle, Jules 361
Sibari, Mohamed 266 Sutton, Geoffrey 116, 117, 120
Sieroszewski, Wacław 217 Suvin, Darko 232, 233
Sijie, Dai 147 Swain, Simon 49, 53
Sim, Wei-chew 40 Swedish 165–176
Simon, Sherry 136 symbolic violence 39
Singarya, Jaggu 76 symbolist movement 22–24, 135
Singha, Sankar Prasad 32 Syriac 47, 53, 54, 260
Skelton, John 100 Szydłowska, Monika 221
slang 144, 172 Szymiel, Maurycy 218
Slote, Sam 35
Smith, Sidonie 294–295 Tacitus 46, 98
So, Richard Jean 297 Tagalog 328, 329, 330, 331, 334, 335
Socrates 48 Tagore, Rabindranath 320
Södergran, Edith 167–168 Taiwan 289–294
Solodow, Joseph B. 98 Tajik 67
Somalia 153–154, 155 Talmud 86, 262
Sommer, Doris 31, 40, 166 Tamil 72, 73, 75, 76
songs 75, 106, 178 Tanjavur Nayaka 75
Sophie-Auguste-Friederike, Princess 188–189 Targumim 86, 87
South Africa 243–256 Tarkalankara, Madhusudan 74
South Asia 71–82, 301–315, 316–326 Tawada Yoko 13, 340, 341, 342, 343–345, 370, 384, 390
Soviet Union 191, 192, 195, 197n8, 200, 201, Taylor-Batty, Juliette 166
205–206 Tchernikhovsky, Shaul 274
spaces in-between languages 19, 20, 147, 235, Telegu 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 306, 307
340–341, 388–389 Terence 50
Spain 103, 104–105, 261–262; see also Andalusian Themerson, Stefan 220
Jewish communities third spaces 41, 206
Spanglish 7, 39–40 Thisted, Kirsten 169, 170, 171
Spanish: Andalusian Jewish communities 90; fiction Thucydides 46, 48, 49
37–38; Hispanofilipino literature 327–339; Thúy, Kim 147–149
and Latin 355–366; Latin America 105–106, Tilg, Stefan 97
107; memoir 9–11, 13, 14; Nordic literary Todorov, Tzvetan 7, 230
translingualism 169, 173; North Africa 266; poetry Todorova, Maria 229
20; and Polish 222 Toledo, Camille de 146
specular border writers 341, 343 tongue metaphors 383–384
Spicehandler, Ezra 275, 276 Torabully, Khal 390
Spiel, Hilde 184 Torah 86
Śrīharṣa 72–73 transculturalism 53
Stachniak, Eva 220–221 transformation, translingual poetry as 24–26
standardization of languages 49, 98, 141 translation: Arabic 261; Balkans 227, 236–237;
Statius, Achilles 104 for the benefit of readers 39; Chinese 289,
Stavan, Ilan 6, 7, 39–40 296; English-French translingualism 131, 132,
Steele, Trevor 113, 119–123 134–135; Esperanto 115, 119, 121; fiction 34–36;
Stein, Lorin 234 Francophone literary translingualism 147–148;
Steiner, George 102 German-English literary translingualism 181;
Steinitz, Tamar 13 Hebrew 280; Hispanofilipino literature 329; Italian
404
Index
157–158; Italian-English 155; Jewish communities Vico, Giambattista 20

86, 87, 91; Latin America 357, 361; Muslim Vidyāpati 74
Persianate World 66; Nordic literary translingualism Vieira, Antonio 105–106
166, 167, 168; Persianate world 62, 67–68; Vietnamese 33, 147–149
Russian-English literary translingualism 202–203, vignettes 74
208, 209; Russian-German translingual literature Viman, Shyam 78
197; Sanskrit 75, 76, 78; significance of 344; South Vinterbo-Hohr, Aagot 171
Africa 244, 249–250, 253–254; untranslatability Viselli, Antonio 28
147, 148–149, 217; see also self-translation Viswanathan-Peterson, Indira 75
translingual reading 172–173 Vives, Juan Luis 101, 102, 103
translingual turn 41, 144 Vogel, Debora 218
transliteration 5 von Dassow, Eva 61
Transtömer, Tomas 172 von Humboldt, Alexander 179
Trantraal, André 250 Vorpsi, Ornela 20
travel narratives: Bengali 316–317; German-English Vuong, Ocean 32–33, 40
literary translingualism 179, 181, 184; Japanese 346;
Medieval Jewish culture 90; memoir 5–12; Polish Waliullah, Syed 324
213–214; Sanskrit 78 Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew 50
Triolet, Elsa 142 Walton, Emily 185
Tripathi, Radhavallabh 78, 79 Wandel, Amri 115
Tripathi, Rudra Dev 78 Wanner, Adrian 191, 193, 205, 206, 209, 373
Tsabari, Ayelet 280–281 Waterhouse, Peter 184
Tsiang, H.T. 291–292 Watson, Julia 294–295
Tsvetaeva, Marina 189 Weckherlin, Georg Rudolf 131, 178–179
Tswana 250 Weingrad, Michael 275
Tunisia 266–268 Weiss, Haim 282
Turkish 67, 186, 190, 263, 264, 384 Whitfield, Agnes 136
Turner, Merrill 23 Whitmarsh, Tim 49, 53
Whyte, Christopher 372
Uffelmann, Dirk 193 Wiebe, Rudy 4
Uhlmann, Fred 184–185 Wiener Gruppe 181–182
UK, migration to 184, 216, 220, 268, 291–292, 325 Wierzbicka, Anna 6
Ukrainian 14, 195, 213 Wilczek, Piotr 213
Ulinich, Anya 205, 206, 207 Wilde, Oscar 132
Umayyad Caliphate 63–65 Wilkins, John 113
universities 75, 77, 102, 105 Williams, Hannah 39
untranslatability 147, 148–149, 217 Wilson, Rita 31, 35
Urdu 67, 69, 301–315, 323, 375 Wilson-Wright, Aren 61
ur-language 20 Wimsatt, James 137n1
USA: German in 178; Hebraism 274–276; migration Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 169
to 135, 171–172, 179–180, 181, 184, 204–207, women 206, 293
233–235, 269, 290; in the Philippines 332–335 Wong Chin Foo 290
Uzbekh 5 Woods, Michelle 34
Wordsworth, William 182
Vachedin, Dmitrij 196 world literature 142, 143–149, 166, 167, 169, 197
Vajhī, Mullā 307–308 Wright, Richard 341, 342
Vakulabhushana, Jaggu 76 Wright, Roger 21
Van Bolderen, Trish 371, 376 writing systems: ancient Greek 46; Arabic 8, 65;
van den Hout, Michael P.J.M. 52 cuneiform 61; Cyrillic 33, 196, 200–210; fiction
Varnekar, Sridhar Bhaskar 77 33; Hindi and Urdu 301, 303, 305, 307, 310;
Vebæk, Mâliâraq 170 Hispanofilipino literature 330; Japanese 343–344,
Vedāntadeśikā 73–74 347; Judeo-Arabic 262; Modern Written Chinese
vehicular matching 135 287–288; Pahlavi script 65; Persianate world 61;
Velasco, Luisa Siega de 103 Sanskrit 72, 74
Verbeke, Demmy 101, 102, 107
Verdicchio, Pasquale 161 Yacine, Kateb 266, 267
Vergil 53 Yang Yi 340, 346–347
versification across languages 19–20, 28 Yankelevich, Matvei 208
Vertlib,Vladimir 190, 192, 196 Yanovsky,Vasily 203–204, 205
405
Index
Yazīd ibn Mufarrigh al-Ḥimyarī 64 zainichi Korean 340, 342, 343, 346, 347–349
Yeh Shih-tao 289 Zaman, Niaz 324
Yiddish 6, 170, 180, 195, 211, 214, 217, 218, 272, 275 Zamenhof, Ludwig Lazar 114
Yildiz,Yasemin 29n1, 228, 237, 342, 370, 383, 385–386 Zarrow, Peter 295, 296
Ying Chen 294, 297 Zell, Hans M. 243
Yiyun Li 4, 297 Zhan Bing 289, 290
Yugoslavia, former 191, 227–240 Žižek, Slavoj 229
Yung Wing 290 Zuchowski, Daniel 221
406

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

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For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Literature-​

Edited by Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich

2 Translingualism and Poetry 18

3 Literary Translingualism and Fiction 31

4 Literary Translingualism in the Greek and Roman Worlds 45

5 Literary Translingual Practices in the Persianate World: Past and Present 60

6 The Curious Case of Sanskrit Literary Translingualism 71

7 Translingualism in Medieval Jewish Culture 85

8 Literary Translingualism and Neo-​Latin: The Case of Latin America 97

9 Literary Translingualism in Esperanto 113

10 English-​French Translingualism across the Centuries 129

11 French in the World: Francophone Literary Translingualism 140

12 Literary Translingualism within the Italian Context: Toward New Debates

13 Nordic Literary Translingualism 165

14 German-​English Literary Translingualism 177

16 Russian-​English Literary Translingualism: Switching from Cyrillic to

17 Translingualism in Polish Literary Context 211

18 Literary Translingualism in the Balkans: The Post-​Yugoslav Case 227

19 Literary Translingualism in a Multilingual Society: South Africa’s

20 Arabic Literary Translingualism 259

22 Chinese Translingual Writing: In and Out 287

23 Literary Translingualism in Hindi and Urdu 301

24 Bengali Literary Translingualism 316

25 Literary Translingualism and the Politics of a National Language:

26 Translingual/​Transnational Writers of Japan 340

27 The Amerindian and European Switch: Translingual Writing and

29 Metaphors of Literary Translingualism 382

Thérèse Migraine-​George is a professor in the Department of Romance and Arabic Languages

Una Tanović is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts

Language Migrant Memoirs

Memoirs of Education in a Colonial Language

Immersion Narratives/​Memoirs of Language Travel

in Russian, so there is no question as to his memoir’s formal translingualism. However, perhaps in

Memoirs in Languages Other than English

Emecheta, Buchi. Head Above Water. London: Fontana, 1986.

Parks, Tim. Italian Neighbours. 1992. London:Vintage, 1996 [2001].

Introduction: What is (Translingual) Poetry?

The Translingual Poet: Versification Across Languages

Tradition: Translingual Poetry as a Relational and Disruptive Practice

Aï faus ris, pour quoi traï m’avez

On montrera mon cénotaphe

Faisant, d’un à-​peu-​près d’artiste,

Word: The Transformative Nature of Translingual Poetry

Bie shi vazhdimisht Piove sempre

World: Translingual Poetry and the More-​Than-​Human

Je dis: je suis la fille de ...

with two larks in contrappunto

Translingualism and Genre/​s

Language/​s and Style

The Role of Translation and the Figure of the Translator in

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Literature-

8 Literary Translingualism and Neo-Latin: The Case of Latin America 97

10 English-French Translingualism across the Centuries 129

14 German-English Literary Translingualism 177

16 Russian-English Literary Translingualism: Switching from Cyrillic to

18 Literary Translingualism in the Balkans: The Post-Yugoslav Case 227

26 Translingual/Transnational Writers of Japan 340

Thérèse Migraine-George is a professor in the Department of Romance and Arabic Languages

Immersion Narratives/Memoirs of Language Travel

Faisant, d’un à-peu-près d’artiste,

World: Translingual Poetry and the More-Than-Human

Translingualism and Genre/s

Language/s and Style

The Context for Greco-Roman Literary Translingualism

lammā hawā bayn ghiyāḍ al-usd-i /

Yarā meḥnatī thumma yakhfiḍu al-baṣarā /

Narayan Rao’s observation about Satyanarayana’s translingual oeuvre—maintaining a classical lexicon

Post-Classical Literary Translingualism

Translingualism—A Condition of Medieval Jewish Culture

DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-9 113

Laŭ gonoraloj, la milit’ necesas — According to the Gonorreals we need wars

[Australians of European descent—I am one of them—are increasingly becoming aware

DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-10 129

140 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-11

in Romania, Eugène Ionesco, a prominent figure of twentieth-century French avant-garde theater,

Non-French, Francophone writers born out of colonization are Madagascan, Maghrebian,

What is particularly interesting about twenty-first-century literature in French is the number

Even when he appears to write in a single language—French—Makine does not … locate

152 DOI: 10.4324/9780429298745-12

Lakhous’ decision to write in Italian, instead of French—the “colonial” language he studied at