cover image Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity

Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity

Isabelle De Courtivron. Palgrave MacMillan, $22.95 (192pp) ISBN 978-1-4039-6066-5

Language, writes Ariel Dorfman,""contains the seeds of immigrants' most intimate identity."" Thus, living in two languages presents a challenge to that identity. How does a writer, whose medium is language, confront such a challenge? De Courtivron, herself an immigrant to the U.S. from France and a professor at MIT, has gathered essays from more than a dozen authors exploring these issues. They come from all over the world and speak a multitude of tongues: Anton Shammas, an Israeli Arab, wryly relates his fumbling effort as a boy to buy sunflower seeds in Hebrew; Sylvia Molloy, raised bilingual in Argentina, writes of""shuttling between languages,"" which she finds""liberating"" but also""laborious""; Yoko Tawada, a Japanese writer who lived for years in Germany, considers how words determine perception and describes her""multilingual web."" Readers need not be bilingual to appreciate these fine essays; anyone fascinated by the mysteries of language and the art of writing will find much to admire here.