The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.
RESUMEN: El estudio del multilingüismo literario medieval se suele centrar en una concepción utilitaria de las lenguas, elegidas en función del género o el público, y con escaso valor de identificación de una comunidad política. En Al-Ándalus, en cambio, la coexistencia de musulmanes, judíos y cristianos provocó que la cuestión de la lengua de escritura adquiriera un importante valor identitario. La lealtad a las lenguas sagradas de cada religión se tradujo en un discurso teórico y unas prácticas literarias muy diferentes del resto de Europa y marcadas por el exilio: un lamento elegíaco de la pérdida del latín, inquietud ante el riesgo de corrupción del árabe lejos de las grandes capitales de Oriente Medio y un esfuerzo por recuperar el hebreo bíblico como lengua poética.
José F. A. Oliver between Politics and Literature: of Houses, Mothers and Mother Tongues. Born in the Black Forest to Andalusian parents, the poet José F. A. Oliver has developed in recent decades a complex oeuvre in which multiple languages (German, Spanish, Alemannic and Andalusian) and plural kinships play a chief role. The present paper analyses the prose works of José F. A. Oliver as a fragmentary “language memoir” (Kaplan/Kramsch) while at the same time trying to reconstruct his nomadic identity between and across regions and languages. Special attention will be paid to José F. A. Oliver’s use of the metaphors of multiple mothers and the two-storey house when referring to his own multilingual upbringing and literary habitus. In stark contrast to conceptual models of monolingualism which posit the mother tongue as the unique and irreplaceable buttress of national loyalties and literary creativity, José F. A. Oliver’s work pleads for an alternative affective relationship to a multiplicity of mother tongues (in plural). In so doing, the present paper underscores the political dimension of José F. A. Oliver’s metaphors for multilingualism. His alternative vision allowing the peaceful coexistence of multiple affective loci expressed in very different mother tongues questions the rigid exclusivity of German citizenship politics while simultaneously bringing to light the emancipatory and democratic potential of transregional and multilingual (e.g. Black Forest – Andalusia / Alemannic – Andalusian) identities beyond a national monolingual rationale.
Las obras memorísticas de Ariel Dorfman se centran en gran medida en los procesos de adquisición, pérdida y recuperación de lenguas por parte del autor a lo largo de sus varios exilios. De este modo, estos textos se pueden entender como “language memoirs” o “escrituras del yo translingüe”. La figura que preside estas narraciones en y acerca de dos lenguas es la del doble. En efecto, las descripciones de diferentes identidades según el idioma utilizado, así como las distintas estrategias de desdoble lingüístico en la autotraducción y dentro del propio texto, dominan las memorias en varios niveles. El presente trabajo, partiendo de los estudios acerca de la personalidad bilingüe de Grosjean, Klosty Beaujour y Pavlenko, tratará de investigar cómo la figura del doble lingüístico en el exilio vertebra las memorias de Ariel Dorfman.
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