Breaking the Linguistic Minority Complex through Creative Writing and Self-Translation

Abstract

Generally speaking, a minority language is "one spoken by less than 50 per cent of a population in a given region, state or country" (Grenoble and Singerman, 2017, n.p.). In this article, I propose a more con tex tualized defi nition that applies to the realm of lit erary writing and (self-)translation. Thus, I define a minority language as any language which a bi lingual or plurilingual writer perceives as not being the dominant one in the sociocultural and linguistic context in which s/he is active as an author or as a (self-)translator. Assuming this alternative definition as a point of depar ture, I discuss the creative and selftranslational practice of the Canadian writer Antonio D'Alfonso. D'Alfonso is one of those rare pluri lingual writers who feel linguis ti cally defamiliarized, claiming that instead of having a proper mother tongue he has a mixed baggage of native Molisano dialect, French, English and Italian. Thus, he tends to write, think and (self-)translate immersed in a kind of 3D-(or even 4D-) linguistic landscape (Pivato, 2002). D'Alfonso's self-translations from French into English and/or vice ver sa are testimony to the author's experimental way of challenging the "crude sub ju gation" (Whyte, 2002, p. 69) of a language over another and of over coming any minority-language complex he might have developed on his path to becoming a lin guis tically uprooted writer.