Margaret Mitsutani

Nov 13, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Yoko Tawada |Margaret Mitsutani |Susan Bernofsky |Adam Thirlwell

In the era​ of the cosmopolitan languages of power, like Arabic or Latin, it might have seemed obvious that someone would choose to write in a second language. It only became something to be thought about, to be argued over and interpreted, in the era when vernaculars became nationalist instruments, and a writer was bound to their first language not just pragmatically but politically. But still: was Adelbert von Chamisso anguished by his move from French to German after the French Revolution?