Lives in Translation : Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity

by Isabelle de Courtivron

• ISBN13: 9781403960665
• ISBN10: 1403960666
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2003-07-18
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

What does it mean to live in two languages, between two languages, or in the overlap of two languages? What is it like to write in a language that is not the language in which one was raised? To create in words other than those of one's earliest memories, so far from the words of home and child-hood and origin? Does one constantly translate, constantly switch, shift, alternate, not just vocabulary and syntax but consciousness and feelings? In a series of original essays, writers reflect on questions of identity, choice, and the difficult search for self and place. Products of the postwar global reality, they interrogate the individual, explore the intimate experience, and ponder the strange itineraries that have led them from a childhood in one language to a writing life in another. Authors include Anita Desai, Eva Hoffman, Ariel Dorfman, Sylvia Molloy, Yoko Tawada, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Anton Shammas, and Assia Djebar.

Author Biography

Isabelle de Courtivron moved from France to the U.S. at the age of ten. She teaches French at MIT, where she is one of the coordinators of an international literary program. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Beyond French Feminisms.

Table of Contents

Various Lives

Writing on the Language of the Other

The Wandering Bigamists of Language

The Im Possibility of Life Writing in Two Languages

The Mask and the Pen

Bilingualism, Writing, and the Feeling of Not Quite Being There

Linguistic Ecology: Preventing a Great Loss

To Write and Eye Words

Arabic: The Silenced Father

The Drowned Library (Personal Reflections on Found, Lost, and Translated Books and Languages)

My Love Affair with Spanglish

Writing in the Web of Words

Memoirs of a Bilingual Daughter

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