Description
Translingual Worlds: Diaspora, Translation and the Greeks
Writers such as Vladimir Nabokov or Yoko Tawada who are born in one language and publish in another, show us that Diaspora literature gets much of its creative energy from importing foreign languages and displaying the effort of translation as the stuff of literature. Diaspora literature impresses upon national literatures the importance of translingualism, infusing them with a linguistic materiality that gives them the ability to conjure using all five senses. The experience of moving from one place to another place triggers a multisensory and synesthetic response. Migrants are aware of everything because everything is information for survival. Diaspora literature exhibits this urgency offering translators ways of working between languages in their translations. The rich tradition of literature about and by the Greeks of the Diaspora over the past two centuries shows how the impasse of untranslatability expressed in the popular expression “It’s all Greek to me!” can also be an invitation to rethink the cultural translation of migration through the nitty-gritty practices of linguistic translation.
