Lives in Translation

by de Courtivron, Isabelle

• ISBN13: 9780230610705
• ISBN10: 0230610706
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Being bilingual. What does it mean? Living 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 you were raised? To create in words other than those of your earliest memories, so far from the words of home and childhood and origin? To speak and write in a language other than the one which you once believed held the seamless connection between words and things? Do you constantly translate yourself, 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, of choice, and of the difficult search for self and place. Products of the post-war global realities in which they have matured, they interrogate the individual, they explore the intimate experience, they 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, 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

A.Desai Writing on the Language of the Other

The Wandering Bigamists of Language

The Im/Possibility of LifeWriting 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

The Silenced FatherTongueL

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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