Full Description
Nimble 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.
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
