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Impure Lines. Multilingualism,
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.. Hybridity, and Cosmopolitanism in
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.. MARINA CAMBONI
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.. Mental geographies at the turn of the century are greatly changed, for not only do
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.. we live in a globalized world, but we are also all too aware of the crisis that unites us
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.. in the cosmopolitanism of perpetual risk (Beck 2005: ch. 2), risk which affects the real
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.. and ideological role played by national and international borders. Moreover, epochal
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.. changes and general insecurity have generated in some individuals and communities
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.. a psychological desire for fundamental and permanent values, “a secular version of
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.. eternity” in E. J. Hobsbawm’s words (2000: 28). Challenging this search for eternity, the
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.. women whose poetry I have been reading in the past fifteen years have established their
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.. ground on that impermanent place where things change and gendered social, cultural,
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.. and political orders are redefined. The space of “all transformative impermanence
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.. (and impertinence),” Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls it in her Blue Studios (2006:
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.. 239). In addition, many of these poets either are, or have become, more and more
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.. multilingual and cosmopolitan. They testify to the fact that we live in a world where
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.. a significant portion of the population is at least partially bi- or multilingual. Moreover,
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.. lingering colonial engagements and migrations, travel and mass communication make
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.. multilingualism an ever-expanding phenomenon. In this context, cosmopolitanism as
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.. a word and as a concept has lost the aristocratic, idealized, philosophically universalist
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.. meaning of the enlightenment to become a “cosmopolitanism of reality” (Beck 2005:
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.. 31), which is not simply one, for it admits many versions, born of distinct experiences
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.. of displacement and of “travel,” in the sense James Clifford gives this term.
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.. 34 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007. doi:10.1093/cww/vpm013

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..
.. This is a time, I believe, that should see a distinct move towards a cosmopolitan
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.. and multilingual critical perspective in a new journal devoted to criticism and to
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.. women’s writing. With the second feminist wave, women have become increasingly
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.. wary of institutionalized languages, genres, and ideologies. Thus it is not surprising
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.. that a new crop of writers have considered that the very words they weave into their
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.. texts ground their resistance to nationalist, patriarchal, classist, and racist ideologies.
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.. From the cultural point of view, cosmopolitan multilingual criticism would not only
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.. address differences among its readers across nations, cultures and languages, but
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.. would also investigate: (1) the social, ideological and economic values of national
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.. languages and of language varieties in relation to one another and to the politics of
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.. power; (2) the personal and emotional attachments each speaker/writer establishes
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.. with individual languages or dialects; (3) the semiotic processes that govern linguistic
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.. and cultural translations within and among cultures. In its reading of literary texts,
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.. multilingual criticism would focus on the way writers respond to, criticize, or
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.. renovate each language’s lexical and structural systems, as well as its monolingual
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.. discursive and power practices, from a gendered perspective and in tune with a
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.. cosmopolitan world view.
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.. I see at least two important reasons for adopting such a critical attitude. First of all,
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.. my own experience has proven that critics can direct writers’ attention to their own
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.. multilingual and multicultural experiences and their expressive potential. As for the
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.. second reason, this is related to the extended anxiety generated by the hegemonic
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.. power of English as a lingua franca with a “language-killing potential” (Edwards 1) in a
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.. global language market, leading “to language monopolies, just like in the world
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.. economy” (Kettemann 33). For critics who use English as a first or national language,
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.. and even more for those who use it as a second language, critical cosmopolitan
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.. multilingualism would imply an enhanced awareness of the ways a language speaks us.
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.. Conscious of the hegemonic power of her English language, poet Rachel Blau
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.. DuPlessis recognizes that “to be an anglophone offers a political privilege to those
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.. who are its native speakers,” and she appreciates her status as a United States citizen
..
..
.. in this critical time as “a very painful and self-conscious fact” (“‘Lexicon’s Mixage’”
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.. 55). Yet it is exactly this awareness that nourishes her other languages, “because in
..
.. single language, the poem/could not be complete” “since it craves” “multi-lingualism”
..
..
.. (“‘Lexicon’s Mixage’” 58, cited from Drafts 39–57, Pledge 187). In one of her Drafts,
..
.. “Draft 36: Cento” (Drafts 1–38, Toll), she consolidates her search for a linguistic koiné.
..
..
.. “Cento” is a text in which islands of words and expressions in Yiddish (“in mitn
..
.. derinnenn”), Russian (“Samovity slova”), Hebrew (“shma”), together with the many
..
.. Italian words and quotations from the French translation of her “Draft 5: Gap,” bring
..
..
.. to the fore the many languages of a woman who declares herself “nomad” (Drafts
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.. 1–38, Toll, 90).
..
..
.. Education, travel, and the freedom and desire to learn more than one language
..
.. have contributed to the multilingualism of this American poet. But it is mostly writers
..
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.. coming from non-hegemonic countries, from minority groups or from diasporic
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.. communities, and who were often forced to learn, or to be educated in, a second or
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. 35 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007
M. Camboni r Multilingualism, Hybridity, and Cosmopolitanism
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.. third hegemonic language, who express the intricacies and the power politics of their
..
.. worlds in their multilingual texts. No one has better articulated the cosmopolitan
..
..
.. consciousness born out of colonization, exile, migration, diaspora, and war than Etel
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.. Adnan, the Lebanese-born writer, who studied philosophy in France and the United
..
.. States and now lives part of the year in each of these countries. In a key essay with
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.. the telling title, “To Write in a Foreign Language,” she asserts that though each of her
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.. languages grows like a plant from the land she is inhabiting, as a poet she is both
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.. “deeply rooted in language” and transcends language (2007: 7, 8). Her language as an
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.. exiled/migrant/traveling poet in today’s globalized world is then, to use Edouard
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.. Glissant’s words, “un langage d’un langage” (1996: 46), resulting from the interaction
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.. of languages, each rooted in a place and yet transcending individual places/languages.
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.. Words Migrate
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.. “Words migrate between seeds, also crossing torrents /. . ./ when they cross borders
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.. they’re in exile already,” Toni Maraini writes, (61). Like human beings, words cross
..
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.. borders, migrate as matter of factly as the dispersal of seeds. Their movement cannot
..
.. be contained or barred. Again, just like human beings, words, for Virginia Woolf range
..
..
.. “hither and thither, . . . falling in love, . . . mating together” (205, ellipses in original),
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.. moved by inner drives and/or outer forces. Words mostly mate and generate within a
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.. single national language, but they are apt do so also across languages, across, or even
..
..
.. on, linguistic borders, resisting confines.
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.. Woolf and Maraini envision an incarnated language, imbricating the individual and
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..
.. her words. Furthermore, Woolf’s metaphor makes it clear that there exists a strong
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.. cultural association between the exchange of language and sexual intercourse. When
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.. words relate across languages in a text or in speech, this is called code-switching or
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.. shifting by linguists, hybridization or creolization by cultural historians or by writers.
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.. Given this intertwining of language, sexuality, and the female body, it is not surprising
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.. that, just like the female body, language has been the place of taboo, appropriation,
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.. and conflict (Volosinov), and the object of centralized regulation. In this context,
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.. multilingualism, together with language experimentation, has been represented in
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.. sexual terms by DuPlessis, who in one of her Drafts states “I stick non-English/bits in
..
.. here and there—/neither affectation nor imitation/(Waste Land, etc.); just simply
..
..
.. foxing” (“‘Lexicon’s Mixage’” 55 cited from Drafts 39–57, Pledge 210). Foxing, she
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.. further explains, is a way of dirtying a language, of making it impure, to ruin its virginal
..
..
.. cleanness. The poets that have chosen to write across individual languages are very
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.. often the ones who also try to de-range lexicons, grammars, syntaxes, textualities
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.. and genres, moulding individual poems out of a will to “constitute the new continents
..
..
.. to be discovered” (Adnan “There”).
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.. Setting myself at the crossroads where poetry meets travel and migration, and
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.. where languages interact and interweave, I shall try to articulate here a criticism that
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.. cannot be monolingual. For even the language of criticism needs to be recast, with
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. 36 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007
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..
.. appropriate words and expressions coming from different languages when they are
..
.. needed. More specifically, I want to elaborate upon the sources, breadth, and
..
..
.. importance of multilingualism in contemporary women’s poetry. I hope this will also
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.. offer some insights into different contemporary cosmopolitanisms.
..
.. For the sake of clarity, and without assuming completeness, I shall call attention to
..
..
.. four major varieties of multilingual poetry and highlight the issues they raise, which I
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.. believe are relevant to an understanding of different women’s pleas in today’s world.
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.. To each variety I have assigned a distinctive name to better pinpoint its dominating
..
.. characteristic. I shall call them: nepantla or multicentric; exo or of the outsider; de
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.. l’irriducibilité or of the suffering visible body; and nomadic “otherhow.” Each variety
..
..
.. entails its own complexity. However, I would like to point out that there are at least
..
.. two elements that cross over these varieties to form a common core. One is the
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.. poets’ resistance to systemic order and constrictions (social, cultural, national,
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.. linguistic) wherever they are located. The second is their advocacy of plurality and
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.. complexity. This culminates in their rejection of the hierarchic “either/or”
..
.. oppositional logic, where everything is either inside or outside, belonging or not
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.. belonging, central or peripheral. They build in their poetry polycentric worlds, each
..
..
.. center a location in a network of localities, either dispersed or concentrated in space,
..
.. organized in smaller or larger systems. Each location/world is the site of multiple
..
..
.. relations, individually or collectively networked (see Camboni “Networking Women”
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.. 10–15). For each variety, I have selected at least one representative poet. These are
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.. Gloria Anzaldúa, Toni Maraini, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Anne Blonstein.
..
..
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Nepantla or, Multicentric Cosmopolitanism
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.. To militant, ideological, monolingual nationalists, foreign languages, that is the
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.. languages of bilingual minorities and/or immigrants, represent a threat. Foreign words
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.. were the nightmare of autarchic, fascist Italy, determined to keep its language pure.
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.. And they have been, and are, the nightmare of the French, who have always been
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.. zealous in “protecting their purity even among themselves” (Edwards 105). Though
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.. the British and the Americans have not been as protective of their language, in the
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.. USA for instance, there are organizations like US English, Inc. urging the
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.. establishment of English at all levels as the only language of the nation; they believe in
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.. its unifying force as a common language and in its assimilating and empowering role
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.. for immigrants. The monolingual state this organization projects, while ideologically
..
..
.. reproducing relations of domination and oppression, is as far from present-day reality
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.. as it could be. For though English, the dominating language, is spoken by the majority
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.. of the US citizens, it lives side by side with Spanish, the second most spoken, and with
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.. the many other languages of the country.
..
.. It is her awareness of being part of this multilingual and multicultural but also
..
..
.. patriarchal, classist, and racist country, that prompted Gloria Anzaldúa to move in the
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.. opposite direction from US English, Inc. In her influential Borderlands/La frontera, she
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. 37 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007
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..
.. shaped a hybrid ethnic identity and claimed for herself both the minority variety of her
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.. Chicano Spanish and the English she was educated in, together with other varieties
..
..
.. and dialects of Spanish origin spoken along the border between Mexico and Texas. For
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.. this borderland, however, over time she built two different frames of reference: a lo-
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.. cal/national one and, at the turn of the twentieth century, a cosmopolitan one. Originally
..
..
.. she represented this space in negative terms. In it political, economic, and linguistic hier-
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.. archies were in full play. And emblematically, when switching from English, she italicized
..
..
.. her Spanish and Chicano expressions, thus graphically rendering the matrix-embedded
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.. language power structure (Myers-Scotton), with hegemonic English discourse retaining
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.. its dominant status. As a space in-between, like Homi Bhabha’s interstitial spaces
..
..
.. (4), her “frontera” reproduced the hierarchies existing in America, thus projecting
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.. a static image of the power relations she meant to overthrow with her writing.
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..
.. But in her later works, Anzaldúa moved from this locally based multilingualism to a
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.. cosmopolitan one. And it is in this wider context that she renames her “frontera” with
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.. the Nahuatl word “nepantla,” meaning “tierra entre medio” (“(Un)natural Bridges”
..
.. 1), or more precisely, “the overlapping space between different perception and belief
..
.. systems,” where one becomes aware of the “changeability of racial, gender, sexual,
..
..
.. and other categories” (2002: 541). With the essays gathered in This Bridge We Call
..
.. Home, she tells us, she intended to move from victimhood “to a more extended level
..
..
.. of agency,” capable of questioning “what we are doing to each other, to those in
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.. distant countries, and to the earth’s environment” (“(Un)natural Bridges” 2).
..
.. In her latest vision, her borderland has ceased to be a line that, like the border
..
..
.. between English and Spanish, divides and unites to become a place with its own right
..
.. to exist, a land that stretches until it touches the margins of other centers.
..
..
.. Coherently, in her most recent writing, languages do not switch or shift but flow one
..
.. into the other with no italics to emphasize Spanish, native, or Chicano expressions.
..
.. They simply all belong in an undivided polylingual language that she creates, thus
..
..
.. transforming “nepantla” into a cosmopolitan space that is the space where self and
..
.. other, the local and the world, meet and frontiers recede. “Todas somos nos/otras”
..
..
.. (“(Un)natural Bridges” 3), her word-pun, condenses her thought and tells of how
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.. much the I–You, Self–Other relation in a cosmopolitan context can foster change and
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.. personal empowerment, beyond the national frame theorized by Ricoeur.
..
..
.. I like nepantla, this single word with a full sound that neither has an equivalent in
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.. English, Italian, or Spanish, nor nourishes the meaning/image of a border within itself.
..
..
.. And I have adopted it to define the type of cosmopolitanism that, though rooted in a
..
.. specific geographic location, conceives margins as new centers engaging in
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.. multicentric exchanges. As a final consideration, I must add that the changes in
..
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.. Anzaldúa’s writing confront us with the literary, linguistic, and stylistic relevance of a
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.. cosmopolitan frame of reference. Should we, then, introduce cosmopolitanism as a
..
..
.. heuristic category in our critical work?
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. 38 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007
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.. Exo or, the No-place/No-where
..
..
..
..
.. If Anzaldúa roots her cosmopolitanism in a specific location, Toni Maraini represents
..
.. the place she speaks from as exo (1987: 214). Exo is the non-place a woman has been
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.. made to occupy in a male-governed, war-ridden world. It is the place where she has
..
..
.. been kept out of cultural sight, made invisible. With Ursula K. LeGuin we could say
..
.. that it is the place of the dispossessed, which is not even marginal, for it does not
..
..
.. participate in the center–margin opposition of all self-centerd and confined states and
..
.. civilizations. But in the utmost cultural absence, freedom can begin, Maraini tells us,
..
..
.. and perpetual mental traveling. Exo, then, stands for the critical distance the enquiring
..
.. mind establishes from political, cultural, national, and linguistic allegiances. As such
..
.. Maraini’s cosmopolitanism comes close to that of the “outsider” imagined by Woolf
..
..
.. in Three Guineas. For what Woolf stressed was not so much the self-centered
..
.. cosmopolitanism of the British modernist intellectual criticized by Adrienne Rich in
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.. her influential “Notes Towards a Politics of Location,” as the freedom of the mind to
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.. enquire further, to question a woman’s position in the world in which she lives. And
..
.. Woolf’s inquiry started with her own Great Britain.
..
..
.. Born in Japan during World War II, brought up in Italy, educated in London and
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.. New York, married to a Moroccan painter, Maraini was one of the major activists of
..
..
.. the modernist movement in Morocco in the early 1970s. In her poetry, the four
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.. languages she has used in her life and travels—Italian, English, French, and
..
.. Arabic—intertwine and intermingle, building a dreamy, surreal world. Arabic brings in
..
..
.. women coming down the streets of North African towns. French and English
..
.. alternate with Italian, though French seems more suited for wordplay, puns,
..
..
.. alliterations, and anaphoras (see her Poema d’Oriente and Le porte del vento). But it is
..
.. the continuity and discontinuity of Maraini’s poetry with twentieth-century
..
.. modernism, especially her
..
..
.. debt to Gertrude Stein, that emphasizes how relevant experimenting with multiple
..
.. languages can be for the enquiring mind. Through her languages, this poet, influenced
..
..
.. by Sufi and Oriental mysticism, brings to the fore the underside of Western,
..
.. Middle-Eastern, and Eastern worlds. For Maraini reveals how much the colonial and
..
.. postcolonial dream of a peaceful oriental penetration by Eastern and Middle-Eastern
..
..
.. philosophies and artefacts that nourished western modernity has turned into a
..
.. nightmare of migrating persons and whole groups fleeing ethnic and religious
..
..
.. sectarianisms, violence, famine, and war. It is this nightmare, this cosmopolitan world
..
.. crisis that sees East and West, North and South equally implicated, if with different
..
..
.. power roles, and that calls for a new critical agency and linguistic agentivity in the
..
.. outsider woman. Taking sides with North African women, Maraini reminds us that
..
.. dispossession of women has not ceased. In fact we can say that it has increased, even
..
..
.. if not in the same ways, in different parts of the world. This single circumstance
..
.. requires women’s continued resistance to re-emerging patriarchies and, most of all, it
..
..
.. demands a new, and relational, agency different to the one feminists imagined and
..
.. built thirty years ago, one that is now as capable of criticizing the power privileges
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
. 39 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007
M. Camboni r Multilingualism, Hybridity, and Cosmopolitanism
..
.. women and feminists may have shared as of building relations rather than separations.
..
.. Contemporary criticism should contribute to the construction of this critical agency
..
..
.. and linguistic agentivity. For western women, it would mean increasing the desire to
..
.. really listen to and understand the languages, discourses, and points of view of other
..
.. women in the world, to engage in an intercultural dialogue beyond the local sphere
..
..
.. and local allegiances, renouncing even feminism when it becomes another hegemonic
..
.. and oppressive discourse.
..
..
..
..
.. De l’irriducibilité, or of the Visible, Suffering Body
..
..
..
..
.. The expression de l’irriducibilité conveys a third type of polylingual cosmopolitanism,
..
.. one born out of resistance to the overimpositions of imperialism and colonial power,
..
..
.. out of exile and forced linguistic acculturation. It finds its location in the visible,
..
.. suffering but resisting female body, and in an interior feeling of blockage and division.
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.. The artistic text is in this case both an incarnation of the body’s historical and
..
.. linguistic imprinting and a semiotic act of visible and audible testimony that requires,
..
.. to be completed, the contextual presence of a multiethnic and multilingual audience,
..
..
.. sharing its ethical and political stance. I shall here concentrate on what I consider a
..
.. paradigmatic work, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. But I would also like to call
..
..
.. attention to the colonial and postcolonial continuities—in this case the effects of
..
.. French colonization—that are manifest in the Arabic and Indo-Chinese diasporas, and
..
.. in particular the many, though different, similarities that connect Cha’s work to that of
..
..
.. Etel Adnan and Assia Djebar. I borrow the expression de l’irriducibilité from the latter,
..
.. an Algerian novelist and feminist critic (Djebar 2), who uses it to name her refusal to
..
..
.. be made invisible and silent both within her own culture and in the postcolonial
..
.. metropolis. But it is Adnan’s words that I find particularly suited to introduce Cha’s
..
.. Dictée. “Am I my body, and/or my soul,” she asks, to immediately consider, “But when
..
..
.. I carry pain whenever I’m awake and wherever I go, the question becomes serious.
..
.. An acute awareness of oneself is not always a blessing” (“Further on”).
..
..
.. This suffering body is the body we almost see when reading Dictée. Born in South
..
.. Korea, educated in a Catholic private school in San Francisco, an art and comparative
..
..
.. literature major at Berkeley, Cha was to become a representative of
..
.. late-twentieth-century Conceptual Art before a sudden and violent death put an end
..
.. to her promising career. In Dictée she conflates French and English to make the word
..
..
.. “language” stand both for the organ that inhabits the mouth, almost physically cut off
..
.. by and through imposed linguistic silence, and the discourse of power that silences all
..
..
.. “Others” (Friedman 2003). As an expatriate/emigrant/exile, Cha, like the heroine of
..
.. her poem, the “Diseuse,” builds for herself a critical agency and linguistic agentivity as
..
.. speaker and storyteller. The “Diseuse” is the woman who stumbles from a silence
..
..
.. hidden by echoed languages to “The delivery,” to the “Uttering. . . . The utter” (1995:
..
.. 5, ellipsis in original). In the French “dictée” that opens the poem, commas and full
..
..
.. stops are not so much sentence markers as framing visual devices exhibiting words as
..
.. discourse stills, blocking its flow, as if they were language images suddenly emerging
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
. 40 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007
M. Camboni r Multilingualism, Hybridity, and Cosmopolitanism
..
.. out of the blackness, out of the interior silencing and annihilation that Eva Hoffmann
..
.. has poignantly portrayed in her Lost in Translation. French and English, together with
..
..
.. Japanese and Chinese, in Dictée stand for the cultural monolingualism and hegemonic
..
.. discourses Cha’s epic altogether resists.
..
.. In the book, the image of white letters on a black background, coming before even
..
..
.. the title page, further directs our attention to calligraphic language, to the page as a
..
.. blank space and to the visual codes that are a great part of Cha’s Dictée. Reproducing
..
..
.. the message of desire for home and his mother written by a Korean miner forced to
..
.. work in a Japanese cave, those graphic signs, visually condense the nostalgia that
..
.. moves the “Diseuse” in her quest. Thus, interweaving visual and linguistic semiotic
..
..
.. codes and five different languages, Cha’s epic offers itself as a cosmopolitan cultural
..
.. model of resistance to imperial/colonial silencing and separation of self from self in
..
..
.. the colonized space, and to the separation of daughter from mother in a patriarchal
..
.. world. Integrating political, ethical, and aesthetic discourses, she weaves together
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.. different literary genres just as she integrates visual and graphic languages coherent
..
.. with our highly visualized world, as an alternative solution to the violence that
..
.. suffering and discrimination can generate.
..
..
.. Cha’s work—like much emerging work—can stimulate contemporary women’s
..
.. criticism to pay greater attention to exploring the emotional and affective resonance
..
..
.. of various artistic codes as well as different languages and their respective powers.
..
..
..
..
..
..
.. Nomadic “otherhow”
..
..
..
..
.. Cha shares with many writers, and many of the world’s people, the experience of
..
.. being a forced traveler, individuals who may be suffering from displacement or who
..
.. find themselves in a state of nowhere (the Exo, Mariani). Yet there is another kind of
..
..
.. traveler, a privileged Nomad of the kind described in Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects.
..
.. Braidotti has been justly criticized for the way she employs western philosophy to
..
..
.. generalize and universalize the nomad, in her “situated, postmodern, culturally
..
.. differentiated understanding of the subject in general and the feminist subject in
..
..
.. particular” (1994: 4). Now we have come to understand that what she is describing is
..
.. western women who share with her an experience of travel or transplantation and,
..
.. most of all, the freedom of mental and physical exploration that has led them to build
..
..
.. a cosmopolitan self. The name I have given to this final group melds Braidotti’s
..
.. conception of the subject, with DuPlessis’ term for a woman’s difference,
..
..
.. “otherhow,” (“Otherhow (and permission to continue)”). DuPlessis’ coinage in its
..
.. turn echoes How(ever), the title of Kathleen Fraser’s magazine, devoted to
..
.. contemporary experimental poetry and innovative criticism. Both DuPlessis and
..
..
.. Fraser speak Italian fluently and have long-lasting European connections with homes
..
.. in Italy. Their aim, as DuPlessis writes of herself, is to construe the dilemma of
..
..
.. themselves as women writers resisting “culture as constituted” (2006: 241). They
..
.. have chosen poetry as the literary genre through which to explore language as a mine
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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.. whose riches are still to be sounded, an engagement with language to which they feel
..
.. committed if they are to distance themselves from imperialistic or colonizing and
..
..
.. patriarchal discursive and literary habits. For this reason they focus on how poetry can
..
.. be made to convey the complexity of life, memory, history, and personal engagement
..
.. with the present. For as another poet I include in this group, Anne Blonstein, has
..
..
.. written to me, they feel an acute responsibility—an ethics—towards the ways in
..
.. which they cultivate and transmit words (letter 8 July 2007).
..
..
.. Blonstein is a British poet transplanted to Basel, Switzerland, and a biologist who
..
.. specialized in genetics before devoting herself to poetry. She belongs to a younger
..
.. generation of poets whose work is now starting to attract critical attention (see
..
..
.. Collecott, Camboni ‘“Timeturned images”’). Her words have the concrete, clear
..
.. quality of perfectly defined objects, while her terse, unusual images are the outcome
..
..
.. of an English language that, mated to the other idioms she lives with—German,
..
.. French, and Hebrew—shapes the transnational world of a language nomad. In her
..

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..
.. chapbook from eternity to personal pronoun, quotations from two different German
..
.. translations of the Torah are the starting point of her dialogue with her Jewish
..
.. tradition, its translations over the world and its transformations in history. In her
..
..
.. most recent work, Hebrew—like Korean in Cha’s writing—has become the place to
..
.. which she ties her English and the other languages she uses in her life through
..
..
.. graphic/visual and semantic associations. Its letters in her poetry work as a notarikon
..
.. “letting an alphabet//transfuse a requisite of /starcelled/haemoglobal//exceptors” (!
..
.. j[0]xrt al, Thou Shalt Not Kill).
..
..
.. If Anzaldúa sees a symbiotic relationship between human beings and all forms of
..
.. life, Blonstein finds it between humans and language. In this relationship “language
..
..
.. needs us for its survival and propagation as much as we need language for ours”
..
.. (letter 26 June 2007). For Blonstein languages, with their varieties and differences,
..
.. have become the endangered species of our globalized world. Through abuse and
..
..
.. misuse, she writes, “we can suffocate parts of language, again limiting the possibilities
..
.. and potential of our ways of living and continuing (to say nothing of planetary
..
..
.. survival).” She knows that simplification not only betrays actual experience but, allied
..
.. with power, can become mortal, and invites us critics to inquire further into the
..
.. power of languages.
..
..
..
..
.. University of Macerata, Italy
..
..
.. camboni@unimc.it
..
..
..
..
.. Works Cited
..
..
..
.. Adnan, Etel. “There.” 18 Jul. 2007. <http://www.epoetry.org/issues/issue1/alltext/
..
..
.. adnther.htm>.
..
.. —. “To Write in a Foreign Language.” 18 Jul. 2007. <http://www.epoetry.org/issues/
..
..
.. issue1/alltext/esadn.htm>.
..
.. —. “Further on.” 18 Jul. 2007. <http://www.archipelago.org/vol4-4/adnan.htm>.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
. 42 Contemporary Women’s Writing 1:1/2 December 2007
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.. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera. The New Mestiza. With an Introduction by
..
.. Sonia Salı̀var-Hull. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
..
..
.. —. “(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe spaces.”; “now let us shift . . . the path of
..
.. conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts.” This Bridge Called Home: Radical Visions for
..
.. Transformation. Ed. Gloria Anzaldùa and AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge,
..
..
.. 2002. 1–5, 540–78.
..
.. Beck, Ulrich. Der kosmopolitische Blick oder: Krieg ist Frieden. Frankfurt am Main:
..
..
.. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004. It. Translation Lo sguardo cosmopolita, transl. Carlo Sandrelli,
..
.. Roma: Carocci, 2005.
..
.. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
..
..
.. Blonstein, Anne. from eternity to personal pronoun. Spokane: Iris Gribble-Neal and Tom
..
.. Gribble Publishers, 2005.
..
..
.. —. Thou Shalt Not Kill. The Dusie Wee-Chap project, 2007.
..
.. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary
..

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.. Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
..
.. Camboni, Marina. “Networking Women: A Research Project and a Relational Model
..
.. of the Cultural Sphere.” Networking Women: Subjects, Places, Links Europe–America,
..
..
.. 1890–1939. Towards a Re-writing of Cultural History. Ed. M. Camboni. Rome: Edizioni
..
.. di Storia e Letteratura, Roma, 2004. 1–26.
..
..
.. —. “‘Timeturned images’. from eternity to personal pronoun reviewed by Marina
..
.. Camboni.” HOW2 3.1 (2007) <http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/
..
.. vol_3_no_1/alerts/camboni.html>.
..
..
.. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. DICTEE. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995.
..
.. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
..
..
.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
..
.. Collecott, Diana. “‘correspondence with nobody’: The Experimental Writings
..
.. of Anne Blonstein.” Incontri transnazionali: Modernità, poesia, sperimentazione.
..
..
.. Ed. M. Camboni and R. Morresi. Firenze: Le Monnier, 2005. 117–26.
..
.. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Otherhow (and permission to continue).” In Dwelling in Pos-
..
..
.. sibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry. Ed. Y. Prins and M. Schrieber. Ithaca, NY:
..
.. Cornell University Press, 1997. 327–37.
..
.. —. Drafts 1–38, Toll. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
..
..
.. —. “‘Lexicon’s Mixage’: On multi-lingual strategies in my poetry.” In Incontri transnazion-
..
.. ali: Modernità, poesia, sperimentazione. Ed. by M. Camboni and R. Morresi. Firenze:
..
..
.. Le Monnier, 2005. pp.
..
.. —. Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama
..
.. Press, 2006.
..
..
.. Edwards, John. Multilingualism. London: Routledge, 1994.
..
.. Fraser, Kathleen, Ed. HOW(ever), 1983–1991. From 1999 HOW2 <http://www.
..
..
.. how2journal.com>.
..
.. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Modernism in a Transnational Landscape: Spatial Poetics,
..
..
.. Postcolonialism, and Gender in Césaire’s Cahier/Notebook and Cha’s DICTÉE.”
..
.. Paideuma 32.1/2/3 (2003): 39–74.
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
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.. Glissant, Edouard. L’intention poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1969.
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.. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Intervista sul nuovo secolo. With Antonio Polito. Bari: Laterza,
..
..
.. 2000.
..
.. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Dutton, 1989.
..
.. Kettemann, Bernhard. “Aspects of plurilingualism.” In Living Together/Vivre ensemble.
..
..
.. Living together in Europe in the 21st Century: The Challenge of Plurilingual and Multicultural
..
.. Communication and Dialogue. Proceedings of the 3rd colloquy of the European centre
..
..
.. for Modern Languages Graz (Austria), 9–11 December, 1998. Strasbourg: Council
..
.. of Europe Publishing, 2001. 33–4.
..
.. LeGuin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. New York: Avon, 1975.
..
..
.. Maraini, Toni. “L’esotico e l’esilio. Dialogo con Marina Camboni.” L’esotismo nelle letter-
..
.. ature Moderne. Ed. E. Zolla. Napoli: Liguori, 1987. 208–27.
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..
.. —. Poema d’Oriente. Roma: Semar, 2000.
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.. —. Le porte del vento. San Cesario (Le): Manni Editori, 2003.
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.. Myers-Scotton, Carol. “The Matrix Language Frame Model: Development and Re-
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.. sponses.” Codeswitching Worldwide II. Ed. Rodolfo Jacobson. Berlin: Mouton de
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.. Gruyter, 2001 23–58.
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.. Rich, Adrienne. “Notes Towards a Politics of Location.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected
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.. Prose 1979–1985. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986. 210–31.
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..
.. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Transl. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: The University of
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.. Chicago Press, 1992.
..
.. Volosinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Transl. Ladislav Matejca and I.
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..
.. R. Titunik. New York: Seminar Press, 1973.
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.. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938.
..
..
.. —. “Craftsmanship.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt
..
.. Brace Jovanovich, 1942. 198–207.
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