Thursday, June 4, 2009

Literary language choice

In her article "French: the language of freedom", published Friday April 10th 2009 in the Guardian Weekly, Florence Noville discusses why so many writers decide to write in French, although it is not their mother tongue. Noville names several authors like Beckett, Kundera, Alexakis, Weber and claims that they all have abandoned their mother tongue to write in French. Well, this is just not true. Although all these writers have indeed chosen to write in French, they did not abandon their mother tongue, or as I prefer to say, their first language, as literay language. Instead they decided to write in both languages, many of them even decided to self-translate their works. It is really unfortunate that bilingual literature is still being ignored.

No comments:

Panel discussion: Translating a self-translation: Epic Annette 8th February

Epic Annette: Podium Discussion with Anne Weber (German-French self-translator) and Tess Lewis (translator of the novel into English),  orga...