Polylingual Fiction and Poetry
April 17, 2013 5:38 PM Subscribe
Would you happen to know of any poetry or fiction that uses a second language for a significant and continuous portion of the work? What about one besides those by Pound that contains any use of a second script?
What word would you use to describe the use of more than one script? Polyscript?
What word would you use to describe the use of more than one script? Polyscript?
Are you only looking for works that use a second alphabet? or a second language?
posted by Cold Lurkey at 6:04 PM on April 17, 2013
posted by Cold Lurkey at 6:04 PM on April 17, 2013
Best answer: In Borderlands/La frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa switches back and forth a lot between Spanish and English, and it includes poems. It's been a while since I read it, though, so my memory is kind of hazy on it.
Gustavo Pérez Firmat has a collection of poems called Bilingual Blues that might interest you. Here's an example.
posted by pitrified at 6:09 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
Gustavo Pérez Firmat has a collection of poems called Bilingual Blues that might interest you. Here's an example.
posted by pitrified at 6:09 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
Umberto Eco's works generally have lots of untranslated passages in other languages, but probably not as much as you're looking for. I'd also look at Borges and maybe Roberto Bolano's 2666, which I seem to half-remember having long passages in non-primary languages.
posted by The Michael The at 6:20 PM on April 17, 2013
posted by The Michael The at 6:20 PM on April 17, 2013
There is a great tradition in Latino poetry in the U.S. of bilingual/code-switching texts. To my mind, one of the most deft authors in this tradition is José Montoya. I haven't been able to find any full print texts of his poems on the web, but this is a delicious author's reading of his poem "El sol y los de abajo".
posted by drlith at 6:38 PM on April 17, 2013
posted by drlith at 6:38 PM on April 17, 2013
Best answer: What about poetry that contains English + a fictional language? See Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution.
Graham Greene's The Quiet American is a novel with long untranslated passages, and the novel is to some extent about the problem of communication.
posted by munyeca at 7:18 PM on April 17, 2013
Graham Greene's The Quiet American is a novel with long untranslated passages, and the novel is to some extent about the problem of communication.
posted by munyeca at 7:18 PM on April 17, 2013
Best answer: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain was originally written in German but has long sections in French. The protagonist, who speaks German, has an extended conversation with a woman in French, and that entire lengthy conversation is written in French in the book. FWIW my impression about what that was all about was (probably among other things), conveying the feeling of when you are speaking to another person, in this case in a romantic vein, in another language that you're not 100% at home in. There is a sort of a distancing effect, combined (in this case) with intimacy.
Regardless of the specifics, the use of the extended passages in French was definitely part of Mann's aesthetic conception of the novel.
Also note this related AskMe.
posted by flug at 7:19 PM on April 17, 2013
Regardless of the specifics, the use of the extended passages in French was definitely part of Mann's aesthetic conception of the novel.
Also note this related AskMe.
posted by flug at 7:19 PM on April 17, 2013
Best answer: The poetry term you are looking for is macaronic verse. It was a popular fad in the Middle Ages.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:40 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 7:40 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]
Wikipedia's page on Macaronic language contains references to several examples, including a poem from the 12th century.
posted by jacalata at 7:42 PM on April 17, 2013
posted by jacalata at 7:42 PM on April 17, 2013
Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames (Mother Goose Rhymes) is literally written in two languages at the same time. This is probably an overly literal interpretation of your question, and I apologize if you have no interest in this sort of humorous linguistic trickery at all.
Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames (Wikipedia)
I can be a bit more helpful though. I tried searching for the words 'bilingual novel' and found this page as the first hit. The comments name a few authors and works.
Bilingual novels
You should look at the other results too and try similar searches if you didn't already.
posted by tykky at 1:36 AM on April 18, 2013
Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames (Wikipedia)
I can be a bit more helpful though. I tried searching for the words 'bilingual novel' and found this page as the first hit. The comments name a few authors and works.
Bilingual novels
You should look at the other results too and try similar searches if you didn't already.
posted by tykky at 1:36 AM on April 18, 2013
Significant parts of War and Peace are in French which is the language that Russian aristocrats would have spoken to one another. It wouldn't surprise me if other Russian novels of that era also have French passages in them.
posted by atrazine at 1:44 AM on April 18, 2013
posted by atrazine at 1:44 AM on April 18, 2013
Jane Eyre has Adele's dialogue in untranslated French.
A Clockwork Orange has quite a bit of transliterated Russian.
posted by brujita at 3:15 AM on April 18, 2013 [1 favorite]
A Clockwork Orange has quite a bit of transliterated Russian.
posted by brujita at 3:15 AM on April 18, 2013 [1 favorite]
Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1968 novel Between apparently ‘describes a professional translator whose marriage is collapsing; the novel freely alternates between English, French, and German’ (source). Moreover, ‘Brooke-Rose does not use the verb “to be” anywhere in Between, having explained that it functions as an expression of the narrator’s disoriented sense of personal identity’ (source)!
posted by misteraitch at 6:18 AM on April 18, 2013
posted by misteraitch at 6:18 AM on April 18, 2013
Best answer: David Gordon's Rest: Part III of a Long Poem (Amazon) is very Pound-like (in fact, as I said in this LH post, where you can find out more about Gordon, "basically a ripoff of the Cantos"); it's full of Chinese characters, Greek, Devanagari, Old Norse, you name it. Here's a brief excerpt:
To navigate the thick of Ginnunga-gap,posted by languagehat at 10:14 AM on April 18, 2013 [1 favorite]
ΧΑΟΣ ΧΑΣΜΑ ἄπειρος, out of which
all comes, fog-gulped, sky without confines;
what good bearing-dial disk,
sólar-stein, no sun to see,
no ice blink, geese, driftwood, weed,
sound in void, out of magic gap comes being...
Response by poster: Macronic seems to be the word for combining languages that use Roman script. Is there a word to represent the following sentence?
I live in 美国.
posted by slowlikemolasses at 4:03 PM on April 18, 2013
I live in 美国.
posted by slowlikemolasses at 4:03 PM on April 18, 2013
Charlotte Bronte's Villette has some passages and conversations in French.
posted by kettleoffish at 7:27 PM on April 18, 2013
posted by kettleoffish at 7:27 PM on April 18, 2013
Best answer: It's possibly not as significant as you would like, but the question made me think of Gwyneth Lewis and her poems Welsh Espionage and Mother Tongue.
(Read by the author / some discussion.)
Thomas Kinsella has some interesting (if nationalist-tinged) thoughts on a literary tradition existing in more than one language in his essay The Dual Tradition.
posted by unless I'm very much mistaken at 6:23 AM on April 19, 2013
(Read by the author / some discussion.)
Thomas Kinsella has some interesting (if nationalist-tinged) thoughts on a literary tradition existing in more than one language in his essay The Dual Tradition.
posted by unless I'm very much mistaken at 6:23 AM on April 19, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by jacalata at 5:45 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]