Full Description
Many 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.
Contents
Translators' 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
