Creating In Another language?

 I find myself strongly attracted to the ideas in Estranging English: Mandy-Suzanne Wong on Constructing New Literary Languages. For all I am too old, too inland to do the work or have the experiences I think should enable such an effort. Maybe you can do something with these ideas?

Writing as a foreigner in one’s own language doesn’t mean, for Antoine Volodine, writing stories of “the other” facing off against the familiarity of the homeland, the security of the native or the citizen, whatever you want to call the insider position whence “identities” are defined and bestowed (Antoine Volodine is a pseudonym). According to Volodine, creating in French a literature foreign to France, “écrire en français une littérature étrangère,” means writing as if in translation from the perspective of no particular culture but from a fantastical perspective wherein polyphony and defeat—subversive cosmopolitanism and defeat—have turned language into a post-nuclear landscape of tones. In the language of Volodine’s novels, the tones of what were once distinct cultures thicken the air with their particles like ashes of an explosion, infecting people with all their motley influences simultaneously, so that nothing is exotic because everything is: he told the Paris Review he writes “from nowhere to nowhere.” Characters with irreducibly foreign names, like Irina Echenguyen and Iakoub Khadjbakiro, think in “a language diverse [variée] and sometimes [pauvre] pitiful or impoverished, sometimes mutilated or, on the contrary, luxurious and baroque…not a national language but the transnational language of storytellers, outcasts, prisoners, madmen, and the dead.”

There is something deeply resonant for me in Volodine’s idea of estranging one’s native language from itself by writing it as if its secret core is somewhere else—and by resonance I mean an indeterminate affective touch. Reimagining his own tongue as a foreign “other,” Volodine hopes “to sabotage reality;” to undermine this world of ours in which us versus them remains the ruling logic. His objective in writing as if in translation is the opposite of a quest for self-affirmation, for elucidation of an “identity” (Antoine Volodine is also Manuela Draeger and Lutz Bassmann), or for a sense of “belonging.” Even within the Anglophone literary cosmopolis, wherever fiction functions as a provocateur, more Englishes are possible beyond the Englishes of conquerors and myriad dialects of the conquered. In such spirit, I’ve been experimenting: infecting my Englishes with foreignness by reading reams of translated literature and, in my novel The Box, writing as a menagerie of minor characters whose voices may mark them all as foreigners.

sch 9/19