Write in someone else's language | Babelia

Recently two books have been translated into Spanish that analyze what it means to change language for those who have writing as their reason for being: Strange for me, by Eva Hoffman, and In other words, of Jhumpa Lahiri. The reasons for each are different: while the former was exiled for political reasons, the latter is faced with language change as an existential debate.

Babelia collects this week the experience of these two writers in a comprehensive report signed by Monika Zgustova that analyzes a tradition that has already been practiced by authors such as Nabokov, Némirovsky or Kundera and that is growing in the convulsive 21st century. "Not all exiles or language changes are due to external reasons, and there are those who respond to free decisions." The English writers generated an important wave of voluntary exile (James Joyce said that exile is one of the writer's weapons Also the bilingual or multilingual cities (Prague, Trieste, Barcelona) created in their writers a sense of uncertain identity and uprooting (Franz Kafka felt guilty for writing in German instead of in Czech, smaller language), "he writes. Zgustova

In the following pages the reader of Babelia will find an article about the figure of Lord Byron, about new editions of his diaries and his work The vision of the judgment, followed by the usual literary reviews of the week, among which the one dedicated to the new book by Michel Houellebecq, Submission.

In the art section Iván de la Nuez writes about recycling and garbage as an artistic raw material against the rise of the ideologies of purity.

The theatrical critic Marcos Ordóñez performs this week an imaginary tour of London's West End and selects the most interesting releases of the coming months, among which is the adaptation prepared by Ivo van Hove of the film Eva al desnudo.

The music section is occupied by an interview by Fernando Neira with the American singer-songwriter Steve Gunn.

And in the opinion pages, along with the usual columns of Antonio Muñoz Molina and Manuel Rodríguez Rivero, Damián Tabarovsky on the controversy that arose around the Spanish subtitles of the film Roma.