Description
Book SynopsisMany great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find elsewhere.
My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue, from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language.
Trade Review“A wonderful semi-autobiographical book about thinking and writing in a second language, about embracing many languages without betraying one’s mother tongue. A thoughtful book about the languages in which global citizens think and write.” -- Graziella Parati * author of Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture *
"A masterful assemblage of intimate memories from the author and utterly persuasive arguments from fellow travelers, this book offers readers a multifaceted and nuanced portrait of what it means to live in and between languages. That it has now been admirably and creatively translated into a third language, beyond the author’s own Spanish and Italian, triangulates Bravi’s defense of linguistic relativity into an irrefutable work of realism."
-- Jim Hicks * Executive Editor of Massachusetts Review *
Table of ContentsTranslators’ Note
Preface
Introduction
- Childhood
- Displacements
- My Aunt’s Languages
- The Maternity of Language I
- The Language of Love
- The Hospitality of Language
- The Enemy Language
- The Possessiveness of Languages
- The Fluidity of Language
- Without Style
- The Scent of the Panther
- Prisoners of Our Own Language
- Two Short Stories: Landolfi and Kosztolányi
- Two Old Children
- Poetics of Chaos
- Exile
- Writing in Another Language
- False Friends
- Interference
- Every Foreigner Is in Their Own Way a Translator
- Some Cases of Self-Translation
- Identity and National Language
- The Language of Death
- Language as Property
- The Abandonment of Language
- The Difficulty of Abandoning One’s Own Language
- Language as a Line of Defense
- The Maternity of Language II
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
