Description
Book SynopsisEllen Jones offers a new framework for understanding literary multilingualism, emphasizing how authors and translators can use its defamiliarizing and disruptive potential. She examines the connection between translation and multilingualism and considers its significance for the theory, practice, and publishing of literature in translation.
Trade ReviewLiterature in Motion is a landmark work on translation, multilingualism and writing, by a seasoned and brilliant scholar and translator. Ellen Jones provides an invaluable assessment of literary writing in various spaces of linguistic contact and friction across the Americas. -- Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of
Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World LiteratureLiterature in Motion offers a bold and compelling argument for why multilingual writers and translators should be at the center of our debates about contemporary literature in the Americas. Skillfully combining close readings of literary texts with a broad mapping of the hemispheric literary terrain, Jones shows how recent writer-translator collaborations have produced a series of novel linguistic and narrative effects. This book is an important contribution to the fields of comparative literature, translation studies, Latinx literary studies, and hemispheric studies. -- Jeffrey Lawrence, author of
Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to BolañoJones writes with admirable clarity, elegantly navigating areas of conceptual difficulty and drawing out points of textual detail.
Literature in Motion builds on recent scholarship in translation studies and world literature, opening out and exploring themes such as the ‘untranslatable’ and the potential conflict between multilingualism and translation. -- Laura Lonsdale, author of
Multilingualism and Modernity: Barbarisms in Spanish and American LiteratureJones makes a compelling argument that not only is the relationship between multilingual writing and translating fluid, but it is ever-expanding and generative. -- Tess O’Dwyer * World Literature Today *
A powerful monograph brimming with rich theoretical discussions. -- Lúcia Collischonn * Oxford Comparative Criticism & Translation Review *
A groundbreaking study of multilingual writing in the Americas and its use of translation. -- Sarah Booker * Translation Studies *
Highly recommended. * Choice *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
A Note on Translations
Introduction: Translation and Multilingualism in Contemporary American Literature
1. “Mi lengua es un palimpsesto”: Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Palimpsestuous Writing
2. Censorship and (Pseudo-)Translation in Junot Díaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao3. “I Want My Closet Back”: Queering and Unqueering Language in Giannina Braschi’s
Yo-Yo Boing!4. Fluid Trajectories in Two Versions of Wilson Bueno’s
Mar ParaguayoCoda: Beyond America: Multilingualism, Translation, and
AsymptoteNotes
Bibliography
Index
