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A captivating journey into the intricate realms of language, identity, and translation: Talking in Tongues intertwines personal anecdotes with profound cultural insights and literary reflections.
In Talking in Tongues: Essays on Language and Literature, esteemed translator Peter Wortsman invites readers on an insightful exploration of what it means to navigate a multilingual world. This compelling collection blends memoir and literary analysis, offering a unique perspective on the transformative power of language and the nuances of cross-cultural communication. Drawing on his own life as the child of Viennese-Jewish refugees, Wortman delves into the complexities of identity shaped by diverse linguistic landscapes.
Set against the backdrop of varying cultural experiences, the essays delve into issues such as the immigrant experience and the profound impact of literature fostering connection and understanding among cultures. Wortsman’s reflections illuminate the challenges and triumphs of embracing multiple identities and communities grappling with cultural displacement.
Talking in Tongues is essential reading for anyone intrigued by the intersections of language, culture, and personal identity. It promises readers a richer understanding of how literature can bridge divides and celebrate diversity.
The German language has a great proverb for "dilemma": "Sitting between chairs." Peter Wortsman’s beautifully crafted essays on translation, as well as his introductions to his translations of German literature, demonstrate his mastery in dealing with this dilemma. He straddles his two native languages, German, and English, which he once described as a "Hybrid Anglo-Saxon-Norman language." To translate German the way he does, to write English the way he does, he needs a third chair: French, the "Norman" component of English. His works demonstrate that it is only through writing and translating between these three languages that his essays and translation are so rich and deep.
– Barbara Hahn, Max Cade Foundation Chair in German Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University
Peter Wortsman has spent his life in the uncharted territory between languages where “geographic borders are infinitely porous, and stories slip between the cracks.” It is the great good luck of his readers that he is a careful cartographer of that space. He tracks what happens when German metamorphoses into English or both into French, and the creatures born of those transformations populate his wondrous tales, which recall those of the Grimms and Kafka but add something special that is Wortsman’s own.
– Andrew S. Gross, Professor of North American Studies, University of Göttingen
Contents
Smuggling Secrets Across Time and Space, A Foreword
I. Talking in Tongues
- I Harbor a Stillborn Scribe of the German Tongue in Me
- Of Sublime Ecstasy and Guttural Disgust: My German Language
- I am a French Irregular Verb
- Meditation in Translation: Transcending Ego and Transmitting Voice
- Talking in Tongues: Translating Others and Myself
- The Converted Tongue
II Making Bones Sing
- Don’t Burn What You Don’t Understand!
- (German Humanist Johannes Reuchlin’s Defense of the Talmud)
- Making Bones Sing: Tales of the German Imagination
- Facing Fears and Furies: The Unexpurgated Brothers Grimm
- The Displaced Person’s Guide to Nowhere:
- The Forked Tongue and Divided Loyalties of Adelbert von Chamisso
- All Fall Down: The Collapsing House of Cards of Heinrich von Kleist
- Facing the Music: The Melodious Imaginings of E.T.A. Hoffmann
- Return to Sender: The Letters of Rahel Levin Varnhagen
- Hiking Through Heaven and Hell: Reflections on Heinrich Heine’s Travel Pictures
- To Make a Long Story Short: The Prose of Peter Altenberg
- In the Caves of the Unconscious: K is for Kafka
- Inverted Anonymity: The Mindful Farce of Mynona
- Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers Revisited
- Preserving the Imprint of the Ineffable in Musil’s Prose
- Orpheus Raising Hell: Memories of the late Aleksander Kulisiewicz
- Translating the Surreal (Or Doing the DADA dance): On Coming up
- with an English Take on Kurt Schwitters’ Verbal Collage “The Onion”
- Qui es-tu, Federman: An Intimate Reading of La fourure de ma tante Rachel
- Six Fragments in Pursuit of Fiction’s Roots and Fruits
- Small Wonder (a Reflection on the Short Form)
- Language Belongs to All its Practitioners (An Afterword)