Previous Issue

Living in Languages

Volume 2 · 2022

Volume 2 brings together essays, translations, and poetry that approach translation as movement across communities, languages, media, histories, and ideological formations. From Harlem vernacular and bilingual popular music to postcolonial ethics, Chinese translations of Gaskell, Proust, Althusser, and contemporary poetry, the issue examines how language carries belonging, cultural capital, aesthetic form, and power across contexts.

Contents

Introduction

Introduction to Living in Languages: Volume 2

Andrew Brooks

Andrew Brooks opens Volume 2 and situates the issue within Living in Languages’ interdisciplinary approach to translation across languages, literary forms, cultural contexts, and critical practices.

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Essay · Literature · Translation

Belonging to Harlem: Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Story in Slang

Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang,” Coller-Takahashi examines how Harlem vernacular structures belonging, displacement, and border-crossing. The essay argues that Hurston’s language registers both a desire to belong to Harlem and a simultaneous attachment to what remains outside it.

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Essay · Music · Translation

“Foreign Soundingness” and Code-Switching Instead of Translation: An Examination of a Marketing Strategy in Contemporary Latino/a Music

Nerisha De Nil Padilla Cruz

Padilla Cruz examines English-Spanish code-switching in contemporary Latino/a popular music through David Bellos’s concept of “foreign soundingness.” Focusing on multilingual collaborations, the essay considers how artists can address diverse audiences without translating songs into a single target language.

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Poetry · Translation

Five Poems by Chase Twichell, translated by Claire Gacioch

Claire Gacioch, Yolande G. Schutter, and Chase Twichell

A translation portfolio presenting five poems by Chase Twichell in translation by Claire Gacioch, published with Yolande G. Schutter and Twichell.

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Essay · Aesthetics · Translation

Babel Blackness: The Aesth-ethical Turn in Post-colonial Translation

Emanuela Maltese

Beginning from the unauthorized Italian translation of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Maltese asks how translation might be practiced aesthetically and ethically. Drawing on Fred Moten and Denise Ferreira da Silva, the essay proposes a Black aesth-ethical approach to postcolonial translation.

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Essay · Translation History

A study of Cranf 1927: Woo Kwang Kien and Translation-cultural Capital

Lisu Wang

Wang examines Woo Kwang Kien’s 1927 translation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford within the early Chinese reception of Gaskell. The essay considers translation, cultural capital, linguistic change, and the cultural compromises through which Western literature was domesticated and received in China.

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Essay · Literature · Translation

Confessing the Self through Translation: The Evolution of Proust’s Young Girl

Nicole A. Cosentino

Cosentino turns to Proust to examine translation through the changing figure of the young girl, bringing questions of literary selfhood and transformation into relation with translation.

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Essay · Philosophy · Translation

Retranslation and Interpellation

Andrew Brooks

Brooks revisits the English translation of Louis Althusser’s interpellation as “hailing,” asking how translation, criticism, and teaching participate in ideological formation. The essay proposes documentary retranslation as a way of keeping historical translations, competing meanings, and the translator’s own positionality visibly in play.

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