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Ellen Jones offers a new framework for understanding literary multilingualism, emphasizing how authors and translators can use its defamiliarizing and disruptive potential. She examines the connection between translation and multilingualism and considers its significance for the theory, practice, and publishing of literature in translation.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translations
Introduction: Translation and Multilingualism in Contemporary American Literature
1. “Mi lengua es un palimpsesto”: Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Palimpsestuous Writing
2. Censorship and (Pseudo-)Translation in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
3. “I Want My Closet Back”: Queering and Unqueering Language in Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing!
4. Fluid Trajectories in Two Versions of Wilson Bueno’s Mar Paraguayo
Coda: Beyond America: Multilingualism, Translation, and Asymptote
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Ellen Jones holds a doctorate from Queen Mary University of London. Her recent literary translations from Spanish include Ave Barrera’s The Forgery (2022, co-translated with Robin Myers), Bruno Lloret’s Nancy (2020) and Rodrigo Fuentes’s Trout, Belly Up (2019). Her critical writing has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
Summary
Literature is often assumed to be monolingual: publishing rights are sold on the basis of linguistic territories and translated books are assumed to move from one “original” language to another. Yet a wide range of contemporary literary works mix and meld two or more languages, incorporating translation into their composition. How are these multilingual works translated, and what are the cultural and political implications of doing so?
In Literature in Motion, Ellen Jones offers a new framework for understanding literary multilingualism, emphasizing how authors and translators can use its defamiliarizing and disruptive potential to resist conventions of form and dominant narratives about language and gender. Examining the connection between translation and multilingualism in contemporary literature, she considers its significance for the theory, practice, and publishing of literature in translation. Jones argues that translation does not conflict with multilingual writing’s subversive potential. Instead, we can understand multilingualism and translation as closely intertwined creative strategies through which other forms of textual and conceptual hybridity, fluidity, and disruption are explored.
Jones addresses both well-known and understudied writers from across the American hemisphere who explore the spaces between languages as well as genders, genres, and textual versions, reading their work alongside their translations. She focuses on U.S. Latinx authors Susana Chávez-Silverman, Junot Díaz, and Giannina Braschi, who write in different forms of “Spanglish,” as well as the Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno, who combines Portuguese and Spanish, or “Portunhol,” with the indigenous language Guarani, and whose writing is rendered into “Frenglish” by Canadian translator Erín Moure.
Additional text
Jones writes with admirable clarity, elegantly navigating areas of conceptual difficulty and drawing out points of textual detail. Literature in Motion builds on recent scholarship in translation studies and world literature, opening out and exploring themes such as the ‘untranslatable’ and the potential conflict between multilingualism and translation.
