Description
Book SynopsisNimble Tongues is a collection of essays that continues Steven G. Kellman's work in the fertile field of translingualism, focusing on the phenomenon of switching languages. A series of investigations and reflections rather than a single thesis, the collection is perhaps more akin in its aims—if not accomplishment—to George Steiner’s
Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution or Umberto Eco’s
Travels in Hyperreality.
Topics covered include the significance of translingualism; translation and its challenges; immigrant memoirs; the autobiographies that Ariel Dorfman wrote in English and Spanish, respectively; the only feature film ever made in Esperanto; Francesca Marciano, an Italian who writes in English; Jhumpa Lahiri, who has abandoned English for Italian; Ilan Stavans, a prominent translingual author and scholar; Hugo Hamilton, a writer who grew up torn among Irish, German, and English; Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, a Mexican who writes in English; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a multilingual text.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Does Translingualism Matter?
- Writer Speaks with Forked Tongue: Interlingual Predicaments
- Promiscuous Tongues: Erotics of Translingualism and Translation
- Writing South and North: Ariel Dorfman's Linguistic Ambidexterity
- Alien Autographs: How Translators Make Their Marks
- Translingual Memoirs of the New: American Immigration
-
Incubus and the Esperanto Movie Industry
- An Italian in English: The Translingual Case of Francesca Marciano
- Hugo Hamilton's Language War
- Jhumpa Lahiri Goes Italian
- Linguaphobia and Its Resistance in America
- Omnilingual Aspirations: The Case of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Glossary
- Works Cited
- Index
