¿Qué es Literatura Translingual?

Tongue depressors are those wooden implements used by physicians to examine the throat. However, the term tongue depressor could also describe those who feel so threatened by the ambient Babel that they elevate monolingualism into a religious principle. Texas Governor James “Pa” Ferguson was one such tongue depressor, and in 1917, opposing funds for instruction in foreign languages, he is alleged to have said: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for the schoolchildren of Texas.” Yet, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world;” tongue depressors condemn themselves to a constricted universe.

Most people in the world are at least bilingual. Some nations (e.g., Belgium, Canada, India, South Africa, Switzerland) grant official status to more than one language, but regardless of official linguistic policy, people in Luxembourg, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, and Taiwan find it a practical necessity to be conversant in two or more tongues, so it is probably safe to assume that, even if most people are not writers, most writers speak more than a single language. However, because writing well in one language is difficult enough (“All you do,” wrote Red Smith, “is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein”), most writers stick to the language they know best, the one learned from their mother’s lips. According to George Santayana, it is impossible to write great poetry except in the language of your mother’s lullabies. Writing in an adopted language is adding another additional handicap to a task that is already arduous. Robert Frost quipped that writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net, but writing in an adopted tongue is like trying to serve with a racquet weighing thirty pounds.

Thus, it is common for writers—like everyone else—to speak many languages, but it is extraordinary for them to choose to write in more than one language or a language other than their primary one. Nevertheless, more than a few outstanding authors have been translingual, defying the admonition of Johann Wolfang von Goethe, who had himself studied French, Greek, Italian, and Latin by age eight, that no one can ever achieve anything of significance in a foreign language. To accept that claim is to condemn to insignificance much ancient Latin literature (by non-Roman outsiders such as Apuleius, Quintilian, and Seneca) and all of medieval and Renaissance Latin. Thomas Jefferson claimed proficiency in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish. However, he insisted that: “No instance exists of a person’s writing two languages perfectly.” It is reasonable to claim that no instance exists of a person’s writing one language perfectly, but it would be hard to deny that Petrarch wrote passably, if not perfectly, in both Italian and Latin, Mendele Mokher Sforim in Yiddish and Hebrew, and André Brink in Afrikaans and English.

The most eminent translingual authors of the twentieth century, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov, each represent a different version of switching literary languages. Born into a Polish–speaking family in what is now the Ukraine, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski also became fluent in French. After two decades at sea, he retired to England, where, under the name Joseph Conrad and with only a shaky command of the local tongue, he pursued a literary career, exclusively in English. By contrast, Beckett began his career by publishing brilliant poetry and prose in his native English before switching to meticulous, adopted French. Nabokov, who was tutored in English and French within a wealthy Russian household, became a major figure in both Russian and American literatures.

Examples of writers who, like Conrad, switched to another language and wrote exclusively in that language include: Tristan Tzara (Romanian to French), Wole Soyinka (Yoruba to English), and Elias Canetti (Ladino to German). Examples of writers who, like Nabokov, excelled in more than one language include Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese and English), Muhammad Iqbal (Urdu and Persian), and Munshi Premchand (Urdu and Hindi).

Translinguals are among the most prominent contemporary writers in the United States—an abbreviated list might include André Aciman, Rabih Alameddine, Daniel Alarcón, Julia Álvarez, Louis Begley...