Translingual delirium: Aleksandra Lun’s Los palimpsestos

• Published in: Orbis Litterarum
• Main Author: Kellman, Steven G.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2021
• Subjects: Antarctic; Liège; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/oli.12298; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/oli.12298; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full-xml/10.1111/oli.12298

Though literary translingualism—the phenomenon of writing in an adopted language—has a long history, it is only within the past three decades that it has received focused scholarly attention. Translingual writers have begun to see themselves as part of a tradition. More than isolinguals, they tend to be acutely and explicitly conscious of language as not only their medium but also their matter. Los palimpsestos , a comic novel by Aleksandra Lun, a native Polish speaker who writes in Spanish but lives in Belgium, interrogates the translingual tradition. Narrated in Spanish by a Pole confined to a psychiatric ward in Liège, where he undergoes “la terapia bartlebiana” (“Bartlebyan therapy”) designed to cure him of exophony, it is a screwball account of his unhappy career writing novels in the fictional language Antarctic. With cameo appearances by Samuel Beckett, Karen Blixen, E. M. Cioran, Joseph Conrad, Jerzy Kosiński, Ágota Kristóf, and Vladimir Nabokov, the novel situates its protagonist within the community of modern literary language‐switchers. It interrogates their varied motivations, their relations with their readers, and the complicated connections among language, nationality, and identity. It extends the tradition of literary translingualism by constituting metacommentary on a phenomenon that is already self‐conscious about language.