Library Displays

Many great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find elsewhere.  My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue, from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language.  

"Bilingual Legacies is a book about fatherhood in the work of four canonical Spanish authors born in Barcelona and raised during Franco's dictatorship. The author contends that through their presentation of father figures, these authors subvert static ideas surrounding fatherhood and she argues that this diversity is key to opening the door to revised gender models in Spain during the democratic period. Bilingual Legacies thus emphasizes the importance of biological fatherhood --particularly by focusing on the Catalan context, engaging with autobiography studies and offering a timely reconsideration of the until-now predominant tendency in Hispanic literary and cultural studies to read fathers as part of the shadow of the paternal figure of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Bilingual Legacies is the first book to revisit the theme of fatherhood in the Spanish contemporary context in English and to offer a Catalan bilingual counterpart."-- Provided by publisher.

Linguists estimate that there are around 7,000 languages in the world, but many are under threat. Translingualism, Translation and Caribbean Poetry is a multi-language poetry collection comprising over fifty translations of Curaçao poet Hilda de Windt Ayoubi's 'Lenga di mama' ('Mother Tongue'), alongside three additional poems each providing a different perspective on the mother tongue. De Windt Ayoubi's sharp and socially charged poetry has inspired translations from across the world; collected here for the first time, they serve to protect the native languages and cultures - particularly the minority languages - of their translators, who range from expert linguists to speakers of underrepresented languages. In his accompanying essay, Pieter Muysken considers the role of translation in addressing this urgent cultural concern, discussing language loss and revitalization, bilingual translations and mass translations. Complete with maps, language profiles, and the poet's personal interviews, this collection explores the emotional, cultural and intellectual importance of language conservation through poetry.

"This book offers a path-breaking and meticulously detailed analysis of historical code-switching in written-origin and spoken-origin formats. Particularly effective is the recourse to original manuscripts to resolve issues of textual interpretation. Researchers in the historical linguistics field will appreciate its authoritative presentation of code-switching frameworks and how they shed light on multilingualism in earlier times." -- Richard Ingham, University of Westminster, UK "This well-written book is essential reading for anyone interested in historical and modern code-switching, but also for historical linguists and medievalists in general, combining linguistic theory and philological analysis. The author convincingly argues that the Matrix Language Frame model, developed for modern code-switching, is fully applicable to the analysis of earlier multilingual data and that the general principles of code-switching have remained stable over the centuries." -- Herbert Schendl, University of Vienna, Austria This book systematically discusses the link between bilingual language production and its manifestation in historical documents, drawing together two branches of linguistics which have much in common but are traditionally dealt with separately. By combining the study of historical mixed texts with the principles of modern code-switching and bilingualism research, the author argues that the cognitive processes underpinning the human capacity to produce mixed utterances have remained unchanged throughout history, even as the languages themselves are constantly changing. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, syntactic theory (particularly generative grammar), language variation and change. Mareike L. Keller is Junior Lecturer at Mannheim University, Germany. Her research focuses on historical bilingualism and code-switching patterns. .

"Margaret Noodin explains in the preface of her new poetry collection, What the Chickadee Knows (Gijigijigaaneshiinh Gikendaan), "Whether we hear giji-giji-gaane-shii-shii or chick-a-dee-dee-dee depends on how we have been taught to listen. Our world is shaped by the sounds around us and the filter we use to turn thoughts into words. The lines and images here were conceived first in Anishinaabemowin and then in English. They are an attempt to hear and describe the world according to an Anishinaabe paradigm." The book is concerned with nature, history, tradition, and relationships, and these poems illuminate the vital place of the author's tribe both in the past and within the contemporary world. What the Chickadee Knows is a gesture toward a future that includes Anishinaabemowin and other indigenous languages seeing growth and revitalization. This bilingual collection includes Anishinaabemowin and English, with the poems mirroring one another on facing pages. In the first part, "What We Notice" (E-Maaminonendamang), Noodin introduces a series of seasonal poems that invoke Anishinaabe science and philosophy. The second part, "History" (Gaa Ezhiwebag), offers nuanced contemporary views of Anishinaabe history. The poems build in urgency, from observations of the natural world and human connection to poems centered in powerful grief and remembrance for events spanning from the Sandy Lake Tragedy of 1850, which resulted in the deaths of more than four hundred Ojibwe people, to the Standing Rock water crisis of 2016, which resulted in the prosecution of Native protesters and, ultimately, the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred land. The intent of What the Chickadee Knows is to create a record of the contemporary Anishinaabe worldview as it is situated between the traditions of the past and as it contributes to the innovation needed for survival into the future. Readers of poetry with an interest in world languages and indigenous voices will need this book"-- Provided by publisher.

Lifeways in Southwest Alaska today remains inextricably bound to the seasonal cycles of sea and land. Community members continue to hunt, fish, and make products from the life found in the rivers and sea. Based on a wealth of oral histories collected over decades of research, this book explores the ancestral relationship between Yup'ik people and the natural world of Southwest Alaska. Nunakun-gguq Ciutengqertut studies the overlapping lives of the Yup'ik with native plants, animals, and birds, and traces how these relationships transform as more Yup'ik people relocate to urban areas and with the changing environment. The book will be hailed as a milestone work in the anthropological study of contemporary Alaska.