[virtual]

Eugene Ostashevsky on Translingualism: A Poetics of Dislocation and Language Mixing
September 19, 2021, 3:00 pm
at The Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley

Translingualism in literature refers primarily to the employment of multiple languages within one text, and sometimes also to the estrangement or decentering of the norms of vocabulary, syntax, and performance within a single language. Translingual writing tends to emphasize untranslatability, cross borders between languages, admit nonnative speech patterns, and focus on the social and political aspects of linguistic norms. Translingual practices such as code-switching, multilingual punning, and foreignizing translation, bring out the divergences in how different cultures and languages model the world and act in it. Talking about his personal experience with writing “between languages,” Ostashevsky will situate translingual practices within other, more familiar poetic techniques and issues.

Register for this event here, and attend the lecture here.