I recently had an interesting and enjoyable evening at Europe House, where bilingual Spanish/English writers Isabel del Rio and Susana Medina were discussing their work and promoting new books.
Both women seemed keen to advance the idea that by writing in two languages simultaneously they were evolving a new literary genre that was beyond simple translation. Although their argument was coherent and their experimental practice of writing in the space between different cultures perfectly commendable, I'm afraid I wasn't convinced that anything radically new was on offer.
In fact, I agree with Deleuze that great writers always and already inhabit their native languages like foreign agents and bring writing to a crisis in some manner by carving out a nonpreexistent language within their own tongue:
"This is not a situation of bilingualism or multilingualism. We can easily conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogeneous system in equilibrium, and their mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors proceed ... they do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language .... What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves ... They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make the language take flight ... ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium .... They make the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur."
- Gilles Deleuze, 'He Stuttered', Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael E. Greco, (Verso, 1998), pp. 109-10.
Great reminder of this Deleuze work/quote, who also wrote in this connection of how
ReplyDelete[w]e must be bilingual even in a single language, we must have a minor language inside our own language, we must create a minor use of our own language. Multilingualism is not merely the property of several systems each of which would be homogenous in itself: it is primarily the line of flight or of variation which affects each system by stopping it from being homogeneous. Not speaking like an Irishman or a Rumanian in a language other than one’s own, but on the contrary speaking in one’s own language like a foreigner’. See Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 4-5.