My Language Is a Jealous Lover

✍ Scribed by Adrián N. Bravi; Victoria Offredi Poletto; Giovanna Bellesia Contuzzi; Shirin Ramzanali Fazel

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 194
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Many great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find elsewhere.

My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue, from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Translators’ Note: Some Challenges in Translating Exophonic Authors
Foreword: Living and Writing between and across Multiple Languages
Introduction
1 • Childhood
2 • Displacements
3 • My Aunt’s Languages
4 • The Maternity of Language I
5 • The Language of Love
6 • The Hospitality of Language
7 • The Enemy Language
8 • The Possessiveness of Languages
9 • The Fluidity of Language
10 • Without Style
11 • The Scent of the Panther
12 • Prisoners of Our Own Language
13 • Two Short Stories: Landolfi and Kosztolányi
14 • Two Old Children
15 • Poetics of Chaos
16 • Exile
17 • Writing in Another Language
18 • False Friends
19 • Interference
20 • Every Foreigner Is in Their Own Way a Translator
21 • Some Cases of Self-Translation
22 • Identity and National Language
23 • The Language of Death
24 • Language as Property
25 • The Abandonment of Language
26 • The Difficulty of Abandoning One’s Own Language
27 • Language as a Line of Defense
28 • The Maternity of Language II
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors