Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803278071 ISBN 13: 9780803278073

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2003

Synopsis

Though it is difficult enough to write well in one’s native tongue, an extraordinary group of authors has written enduring poetry and prose in a second, third, or even fourth language. Switching Languages is the first anthology in which translingual authors from throughout the world examine their experiences writing in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one. Driven by factors as varied as migration, imperialism, a quest for verisimilitude, and a desire to assert artistic autonomy, translingualism has a long and brilliant history.

 

In Switching Languages, Steven G. Kellman brings together several notable authors from the past one hundred years who discuss their personal translingual experiences and their take on a general phenomenon that has not received the attention it deserves. Contributors to the book include Chinua Achebe, Julia Alvarez, Mary Antin, Elias Canetti, Rosario Ferré, Ha Jin, Salman Rushdie, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Ilan Stavans. They offer vivid testimony to the challenges and achievements of literary translingualism.

About this title

About the Author

Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the author of The Translingual Imagination (Nebraska 2000) and The Self-Begetting Novel, and is the co-editor of UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s Underworld.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803278071
• ISBN 13: 9780803278073
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 339
• Editor: Kellman Steven G.