The Translating Subject

A recent shift in women’s writing toward multilingual poetics opens the potential for such experimental texts to set up innovative terms of engagement that are queer, feminist, transnational, and decolonizing. The Translating Subject explores how queer women writers use multilingual strategies to create intimacy with the unknown and enable ethical engagement across social, cultural, and linguistic differences. Bringing together theories of the avant-garde with theories of translation, Melissa Tanti analyzes works by three of North America’s most important contemporary experimental writers: Erín Moure, Kathy Acker, and Nicole Brossard. Tanti confirms the radical potential of multilingual writing through close readings of Moure’s multilingual texts, Acker’s overlooked propensity to write in Farsi, and Brossard’s insistence on the importance of writing in languages that are not one’s own. The Translating Subject argues that multilingual writing challenges monolingual norms and what they uphold: limiting conceptions of subjectivity, community, and identity. Drawing on detailed archival research, this book highlights language rights, minoritized languages, and language use, demonstrating that language is full of life-giving possibilities. The Translating Subject proposes that multilingual writing encompasses both an ethos and practical strategies for navigating a life lived in language.

Melissa Tanti is a research fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University.