Metaglossia: The Translation World

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize and other accolades and an abiding figure in literary culture, Jhumpa Lahiri wears various hats: novelist, story writer, critic, translator. This last role has fired her imagination over the past decade, after a 2011 move to Rome, where she immersed herself in the lavish music of the Italian language. Now a professor at Princeton, she’s turned to arguably her most ambitious project: a years-long English rendering of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the magisterial Latin poem from the first century CE. She’s collaborating with Yelena Baraz, a scholar in Princeton’s classics department. In an exclusive, Oprah Daily excerpts “Translating Translation,” the afterword from Translating Myself and Others, out next month from Princeton University Press.

Lahiri’s early days with Ovid overlapped with a wave of Covid shutdowns and her mother’s final illness. With her internal compass off-kilter, Lahiri and Baraz pored over Ovid’s epic in the university’s classics library, a sanctuary where the requisite masks and social distancing no longer seemed nuisances. “I felt protected not only by the beautiful, spartan, and ghostly room, but by the beauty of the poem itself,” she notes. Amid grief and a world in flux, she found her way back to what the Greeks and Romans knew: the interconnectedness of the cosmos, its wheels and gears grinding in cycles of renewal. Our bodies are stardust—no energy is lost, no molecules vanish. They transform. —Hamilton Cain, contributing editor at Oprah Daily

Translating Transformation

OVID

In January 2021, I traveled from Princeton to Rhode Island to visit my mother. I had not seen her other than on Zoom since the previous August. I was concerned for her health; she complained of less and less energy and sounded out of breath on the phone. When I entered the house, she wasn’t in the kitchen excitedly putting finishing touches on the food she planned to serve as soon as my family and I arrived. Instead, she was sitting quietly in her armchair and did not stand up to greet us when we stood before her. In the five days I spent with her, she barely entered the kitchen. When we sat down to play Scrabble, her hands kept shifting the tiles previously arranged on the board. Her voice, once supple and expressive, had drained to a murmur.

The following week, in Princeton, I took a walk with Yelena Baraz, my colleague in the Classics Department. I told Yelena that my mother was in considerable decline; that in certain fundamental ways, she no longer resembled the woman who had raised me. We spoke about the difficulty of watching loved ones age and alter. As we were about to part ways, Yelena changed the topic, and proposed translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, together. It would be a new translation published by Modern Library, the first English version of the poem translated by two women.

Yelena knew of my reverence for the text. The previous semester, we’d co-taught sections of the Metamorphoses, in English, in a Humanities Capstone seminar we’d conceived together called “Ancient Plots, Modern Twists.” It had been a lifeline for both of us during the long Pandemic Fall of 2020. She knew that I’d looked to Ovid—to the myth of Apollo and Daphne—to describe the process of becoming a writer in Italian in In Other Words. Ever since I’d begun teaching at Princeton, the Metamorphoses had been an increasingly pertinent point of reference for my translation workshops, and my reflections based on those workshops generated the essay on Echo and Narcissus that appears earlier in this volume, as well as additional essays and lectures building on the theme of translation. For years I had been telling students that the Metamorphoses, governed by ambiguity, instability, and acts of becoming, was a trenchant metaphor for the process of converting literary texts from one language to another. In keeping with the plot of my creative journey, translating Ovid’s masterpiece was the next logical twist.

That said, I had not read Latin with facility since my undergraduate years. It was one thing to pull out my Latin dictionary and look closely, now and then, at a few lines of the Metamorphoses in its original form. Translating all 15 books—11,995 lines, to be precise—would be another. Mount Everest came immediately to mind. And at the same time, a shiver of destiny. As daunting as the task felt, I knew that Yelena would be accompanying me, and on that cold January day, my heart heavy with the knowledge that my mother was transforming, I said yes.

We began by preparing a sample section for the editor, choosing the myth of Io in book 1—a double metamorphosis in which a girl is turned into a cow and back again. Yelena kindly arranged for me to use the Classics Graduate Study Room at Firestone Library. There I sat, alone, at a beautiful large wooden table, behind a partly frosted glass wall, before three Roman epitaphs from the second century BCE. In that room, removed from everyday reality, every edition of Ovid, every commentary, and every dictionary I might possibly need was at arm’s reach. Something about the silence there, and the three Roman epitaphs, and the red Eames armchair where I would take breaks, grounded me. As in my study in Rome, there was a single window facing east. Only Ovid kept me company in that room, and I was able to keep most other thoughts at bay. I was scarcely aware of the hours that passed, and was always sad to pack up and go.

Though Yelena was providing literal translations of the text, I was determined to reengage directly with the Latin on my own terms. I therefore transformed from a 53-year-old professor into my undergraduate self: Once again I grew used to looking up countless words in the big two-volume Oxford Latin dictionary, studying their dense, ample definitions, and stopping to ponder and unpack the syntax line by line. A small notebook of words—an arbitrary handwritten dictionary of terms that required further reflection, another practice of my undergraduate years—began to fill up.

As is the case in Ovid’s poem, the transformed individual is never free of the former consciousness. And so I was constantly reminded of the degree to which my Latin had faded. Like Ovid’s poem, which insists on hybridity, Latin was both old and new, in turns familiar and confounding. I’d forgotten entirely about deponent verbs and future participles. But I soon realized that something had changed, and that I was reading Latin differently compared to my college years. Now, more often than consulting an English-Latin dictionary, I turned to an Italian-Latin one. In my notebook, the definitions I jotted down were all in Italian, a language which is of course a direct metamorphosis of Latin itself. For, though the objective was to translate Ovid into English, I now had a new linguistic point of entry that positioned me closer to Latin than ever before. The itinerary of my translation was no longer point-to-point but triangulated, given that I was now reading him, instinctively, with an Italian brain. The process felt richer, more intimate, more revelatory, and even more satisfying.

Though I read slowly and haltingly, I also fell headlong into the poem, as if swept up myself in the current of the River Peneus that boldly opens the Io episode: “churning with frothy waves and tossing up clouds / as it cascades down, releasing a faint mist / that showers the treetops with spray / and assails distant regions with its thunder.”1 I remembered the excitement, decades ago, of encountering Ovid’s figurative language, his textual playfulness, his descriptions of nature. I marveled at all the words that defined the sea and the sky. I was struck by descriptions of aching states of separation between parents and children.

Once a week, usually on Friday afternoons, Yelena and I would meet and discuss the lines we’d prepared, masked at opposite ends of a table in the Classics Library in East Pyne Hall. This, too, felt both old and new, and it also felt mildly transgressive; with only a handful of professors on campus, all of us rigorously abiding to testing protocols and social distancing rules, it was the only consistent in-person contact I’d had with a colleague in a year. We questioned and discussed and corrected and adjusted the translation-in-progress, flagging troubling bits to return to. We talked about how to resolve Ovid’s penchant for using multiple names or epithets to identify characters, how to translate acts of sexual violence. We talked about how to reproduce the alliteration that runs rampant in the poem, how to honor golden lines. We looked at ancient atlases to trace the coordinates of Ovid’s inventive geography.

By early March, we had made it to the myth of Apollo and Daphne, which resonated with me in particular. As I’ve said earlier, I had drawn on that myth, in which a nymph is turned into a laurel tree to maintain her freedom, to describe the process of shifting from writing in English to Italian. One day, sitting in the armchair and peering through the grille of the heating unit, a small yellow label caught my eye. Examining it closely, I realized it covered an on-off lever, and was stunned to discover that there was a word written on it: Apollo. It was the name of the company that fabricated the heater. The healing god.

I felt protected not only by the beautiful, spartan, and ghostly room, but by the beauty of the poem itself. The Latin contained me like Peneus’s penetralia, his innermost chamber, even though, as a translator, I had to swim away from it. It occurred to me that the letters in Ovid, rearranged, spell void.

I started visiting the Classics Graduate Study Room nearly every day of the week, and often on weekends. The more I intuited my mother’s end, the more galvanizing it felt to be at the start of a long translation, a project that would take several years and the conclusion of which was far beyond my sight. And the more I feared my mother was slipping away, the more I felt comforted by those three gray inscribed tablets looking over my shoulder, honoring four souls—two male, two female—dedicated to the spirits of the dead, dis manibus: Primus Apollinaris (who lived 22 years, eight months), Venustus (who lived eight years, four months, 15 days), Aurelia Iusta, and Artellia Myrtale. All three tablets were dedicated by Roman family members: by a mother, a sister, a husband, an unspecified relative. It struck me that Aurelia Iusta’s epitaph, at the center, was made by herself while still alive: Se biva fecit2 (“while still alive . . . [she] made this”), to commemorate herself, her husband, and her son.

One day as I was translating in that room, my mother called me. It was a FaceTime call; for several weeks, she could only communicate if she could see my face, perhaps because she was aided by my image and expressions. As we were speaking that day, my father turned on the microwave in their kitchen, and because a space heater was also running, all the lights temporarily went out in their apartment. As my father went down to the basement, guided by a flashlight, to flip the switches on the fuse box, I looked at my mother’s face on my cellphone screen, floating in a pool of darkness. It was one of many premonitions I was to feel in the final weeks of my mother’s life, including a perfect hole that mysteriously formed in the middle of a bar of white hand soap in my bathroom, and a violent wind that flattened the peonies and shook the petals off the rosebushes in our garden. By then I was so ensconced inside the Metamorphoses that everything seemed Ovidian. The wind that coursed through Princeton evoked “horrifer [chilling] Boreas”; the unsettling dark hole in the white bar of soap summoned Callisto and Arcas snatched up “in a wind-born void,” and paradoxically suggested even a microscopic version of the primordial chaos described in the Creation: “a rough, unprocessed mass, nothing but an inert clump heaped together in one spot.”3

By the middle of March, more and more people I knew were getting vaccinated against the coronavirus, and the snow that had covered Princeton for nearly a month was finally beginning to melt. The emerging crocuses did not console me, nor did that collective, growing sense of hope. Only Ovid did. Only a poem in which humans, or human-like beings, were transforming page after page into stone, stars, animals, plants, water, and other elements, made sense. Only those myths and legends that Ovid translated and transformed in his own right, from previous incarnations, contained meaning. Only that liminal zone where identity is reshaped and redefined. Translating the Metamorphoses was not only resurrecting my Latin, but reminding me that there is no plot without change.

In late March, I traveled to Rhode Island to visit my mother in the hospital—the same hospital in which she gave birth to my sister in 1974 and became a mother for the second time. She had been admitted a few days earlier, when her doctor, after observing her at home during a telehealth appointment, wanted to rule out the possibility of a stroke. She had not had a stroke. Instead, tests revealed that there was too much carbon dioxide in her blood, and we were told that her life was ending. I both accepted and did not accept this fact. For though I knew that her time was limited, I kept thinking to myself, she’s not dying as much as becoming something else. In the face of death, the Metamorphoses had completely altered my perspective. Every transformation in the poem now assumed a new shade of meaning. Though certain beings do die in Ovid, the vast majority cease to be one thing but become something else. I was convinced that it was the inevitable passage from life to death that Ovid was recounting and representing again and again in order to enable us, his readers, to bear the inevitable loss of others.

nec quidquam nisi pondus iners congestaque eodem” (1.7–8).

We were told, in my mother’s final days, to read a booklet that would help us to interpret the signs of her bodily transformation. We studied the color of her nails, the temperature of her skin, her insatiable thirst, her voice, which had dwindled to a whisper. Each alteration felt astonishing in its own way. I kept thinking of Ovid, and how charged each moment of transition is; charged due to its very precision. The narrative slows down and verb tense often changes from past to present as the metamorphosis, bristling with specificity, commands the reader’s attention. As my mother’s penmanship became inscrutable, as her already compromised speech dwindled from brief sentences to words to near silence, I thought of the many characters in the poem—more often than not women—who are deprived of language. I wanted to pray for her but knew no prayers. The first line of the Metamorphoses, which I’d write on the blackboard the first day of my translation workshops, which I’ve cited earlier in writing about Domenico Starnone, became one. I memorized it and kept saying it in my head, hoping it would accompany her: “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora.”4

On the day we brought my mother home from the hospital, four days before she died, I followed her in the ambulance by car, stopping off to buy two potted plants—a hydrangea and a daffodil—to keep her company.5 My mother loved plants, and they always thrived under her care. After arranging them on her dressing table, I asked her if she liked them. She immediately replied, pointing, that she would continue to dwell inside them. She said this with a calm conviction. It was as if she had intuited the force of Ovid’s poetry that was flowing like an antidote through my veins. Her words to me that day turned her, too, into a version of Daphne, reinforcing our bond, and they enable me to translate her unalterable absence into everything that is green and rooted under the sun.

ROME, 2021

• 1 “spumosis uoluitur undis / deiectuque graui tenues agitantia fumos / nubila conducit summisque aspergine siluis / impluit et sonitu plus quam uicina fatigat” (Met. 1.570–73).
• 2 Both the spelling (biva for viva) and the non-standard grammar of the inscription seem to offer clues about the dedicant's social class or ethnic background.
• 3 “raptos per inania uento” (2.506); “rudis indigestaque moles /
• 4 “My soul stirs to speak of forms changed into new bodies.”
• 5 Only now, as I write this, does it occur to me that the daffodil, belonging to the genus Narcissus, was embedded in Ovid: “croceum pro corpore florem / inueniunt foliis medium cingentibus albis” (“in the body’s place was a golden-yellow flower, / and they found white petals girding its center”), (Met. 3.509-10).
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APPEL À COMMUNICATION 

(scroll down for the English version)

Journée d'Étude :  

Collège Doctoral Européen - 10 Juin 2022

Évolution des contacts de langues et de cultures : une réflexion sur l’identité nationale au sein d’une Europe multiculturelle 

L’Europe est caractérisée aujourd’hui par un échange ainsi qu’un brassage de population, qui implique des contacts de langues et de cultures. Ce brassage a conduit à une réflexion concernant de nombreuses notions, dont celle de l’identité. Souvent vulgarisé par les médias, aujourd’hui le concept d’identité est usité abusivement ce qui a rendu sa définition ambiguë. Lorsqu’on parle d’identité, nous faisons généralement référence à la fois à ce sentiment d’appartenance individuelle, mais également collective ( Ferréol et Jucquois, 2003 ). De plus, l’identité se façonne selon un processus à triple polarité se basant sur l’Autre : identifier l’Autre, s’identifier à l’Autre, et être identifié par rapport à l’Autre ( p. 19 ). En d’autres termes, quelle que soit la manière dont nous nous identifions, que ce soit par similarité ou par opposition, ce processus se fait toujours par rapport à l’Autre. 

Face à l’émergence de l’identité nationale et au développement d’une Europe de plus en plus multiculturelle, on s'interroge également sur la place de l’identité européenne. Selon Hugues Lagrange, sociologue et directeur de recherche du CNRS, le multiculturalisme est inévitable. Toutefois, il met en lumière les contradictions européennes notamment dans la sphère religieuse. Cela concerne notamment la tendance de l’Europe récente à rejeter les pays de confession musulmane ainsi que nombreux pays slaves à cause de divergences idéologiques. De fait, il semblerait que l’Europe fonctionne sur un principe de monoculturalisme. En revanche, les frontières existantes de l’Europe pourraient être amenées à évoluer comme nous l’observons à travers le conflit entre l’Ukraine et la Russie. 

Le sentiment d’identité ne reste pas figé dans le temps ou dans l’espace. Par exemple, Lauret, P. ( 2009, p. 20 ) explique comment le terme national concrétise à la fois politiquement, culturellement et historiquement cette notion. Toutefois, l’identité peut également évoquer la question du territoire, comme dans le cas des États-Nation (_Belhedi, A. 2006 ). Martiniello, M. ( 2011 ) insiste sur le fait que le nationalisme est un phénomène complexe et divers dans ses définitions, provoquant souvent une image dans laquelle la nation possède son propre État et que ce dernier n'abriterait qu'une seule nation ( p. 15 ). En revanche, les définitions d’ « État » et de « nation » ne sont pas à sens unique. Certains chercheurs proposent de séparer la nation sur deux conceptions : civique et ethnique. La première évoque l’égalité de droits et devoirs des citoyens à travers leurs relations avec l’État, la deuxième s’accentue sur les caractéristiques communes héritées par un ensemble d'individus : le sang, la culture ou la langue. 

Cependant, la situation contemporaine suggère une toute autre réalité. Nous vivons désormais dans un monde connecté, où les échanges de biens et de personnes ont évolué tout comme la construction identitaire. Si les cultures sont multiples, il en est tout autant pour les identités. Férréol, G., & Jucquois G., (2003) avancent l’idée commune selon laquelle les individus s'orientent naturellement vers le nationalisme en raison d’une oppression linguistique. En effet, ces derniers refuseraient de se voir imposer de nouvelles langues et se dressaient ainsi dans une position défensive de la langue. D’autres spécialistes pensent que le nationalisme serait issu des relations interculturelles. Cette hétérogénéité idéologique, nous conduit aujourd’hui à nous interroger sur l’identité nationale au sein d’une Europe multiculturelle : l’Europe s’apprête-t-elle ainsi à retracer ses frontières ? Existe-t-il une identité européenne? Pourrait-on parler d’identité multiple voire multiculturelle, ou encore limiter celle-ci à un espace géographique et social ? Puisque l’identité comporte encore aujourd’hui des enjeux politiques et sociaux, comment peut-on la construire de manière à apaiser les conflits causés par les contacts de langues et de cultures, au lieu de les nourrir ? Comment peut-on définir le nationalisme, ou encore l’identité nationale aujourd’hui ? 

Cette journée d’étude propose ainsi trois axes de réflexion :

1er axe - Identité(s) et Nation : notion d’(es) identité(s), notion d’altérité et de l’Autre, Nation/États-Nation, nationalisme, identité(s) nationale(s), communautarisme, identité(s) multiculturelle(s), identité(s) européenne(s), imaginaire géographique, représentation sociale, revendication identitaire, analyse du discours politique, analyse des narratives nationales, construction identitaire, multiculturalisme vs. monoculturalisme, appartenances conflictuelles, etc.
2e axe - Contacts de cultures : mondialisation, métissage culturel, question migratoire, néocolonialisme vs. post-colonialisme, cosmopolitisme, relations internationales, créolisation, activisme, relation entre l’espace européen et extra-européen, transfert(s) culturel(s), etc.
3e axe - Contacts de langues : représentation linguistique, contacts de langues, minoration/majoration, politiques linguistiques, statut de langues, revendication linguistique, langues régionales, diglossie, etc. 

Cette journée sous l’enseigne de l’interdisciplinarité aura vocation à accueillir des communications adoptant une variété d’approches partagées entre sciences sociales et humaines (histoire, ethnologie, anthropologie, littérature, sociolinguistique, science politique, art, etc.). Elle est ouverte à tout.e chercheur.e, enseignant.e-chercheur.e, et doctorant.e ayant une appétence pour les questions susmentionnées. 

Cette journée s’inscrit dans l’exercice annuel des étudiants de deuxième année de Master Plurilinguisme et Interculturalité de l’Université de Strasbourg. Les étudiants de la promotion du Master Plurilinguisme et Interculturalité 2021/2022 invitent tout.e chercheur.e et doctorant.e intéressé.e, à envoyer une proposition de communication (en français ou en anglais) avant le 05 mai 2022. Chaque proposition devra être composée d’un résumé de 300 mots environ, ainsi que d’une courte biobibliographie d'environ 5 lignes. 

Les propositions devront être envoyées aux adresses électroniques suivantes : sponziano@unistra.fr et rihal.dridi@gmail.com. Ultérieurement et dans la mesure du possible, les communications pourront faire l’objet d’une publication dans les Cahiers du GEPE (Université de Strasbourg).

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Belhedi, A. (2006). Territoires, appartenance et identification. Quelques réflexions à partir du cas tunisien. L’Espace géographique, 35, 310-316. 

Blanchet, P. (2005). Essai de théorisation d'un processus complexe. Cahiers de sociolinguistique, 10, 17-47. 

Ferréol et Jucquois (2003), Dictionnaire de l’altérité et des relations interculturelles, Armand Colin, Paris.

Krewer, B. (1994), « Soi et culture : des rencontres empiriques, scientifiques et épistémologiques », in BLOMAR Jeannine et KREWER Bernd (sous la dir. De), Perspectives de l’interculturel, Paris, ENS/L’Harmattan, p 162-189.

Lagrange, H. (2014), Le multiculturalisme est incontournable, Le Monde: https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2014/05/13/le-multiculturalisme-est-incontournable_4416004_3232.html 

Lauret, P. (2009). Identité nationale, communauté, appartenance. L'identité nationale à l'épreuve des étrangers. Rue Descartes, 66, 20-31. https://doi.org/10.3917/rdes.066.0020

Léglise, I. (2021). Contacts de langues. Langage et société, p. 61-64. https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.hs01.0062 

Martiniello, M. (2011). Chapitre 1. La problématisation de la diversité culturelle et identitaire. Dans : La démocratie multiculturelle: Citoyenneté, diversité, justice sociale (pp. 13-40). Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Mucchielli, A. (1986), L’identité, Paris, PUF, cité dans : Féréol Gilles et Jucquois Guy (2003), Dictionnaire de l'altérité et des relations interculturelles, Paris. 

Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 9e édition 2010. 





***


CALL FOR PROPOSALS

One-day Seminar

Collège Doctoral Européen - June 10th 2022

Evolution of language and culture contacts: a reflection on national identity in a multicultural Europe

Today, Europe is characterized by the exchange and the melting of people, which implied contacts of languages and cultures. This mixing led to a reflection on many notions, including the notion of identity. Popularized by the media over the years, the concept of identity is often misused. This phenomenon has made its definition ambiguous. When we talk about identity, we generally refer to an individual but also a collective sense of belonging (Ferréol and Jucquois, 2003). Moreover, identity is shaped according to a triple polarity process based on the Other: identifying the Other, identifying itself to the Other, and being identified in relation to the Other (p. 19). In other words, no matter how we identify ourselves, whether by similarity or by the opposition, this process is always done in relation to the Other.

Faced with the emergence of national identity and the development of an increasingly multicultural Europe, the place of European identity is also being questioned. According to Hugues Lagrange, sociologist and director of research at the CNRS, multiculturalism is inevitable. However, he highlights several European contradictions, especially in the religious sphere. This includes the recent tendency in Europe to reject Muslim countries as well as many Slavic countries because of ideological differences. Accordingly, it would seem that Europe functions on a principle of monoculturalism. On the other hand, Europe’s existing borders could evolve as we see it through the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

The sense of identity does not remain fixed in time or space. For example, Lauret, P. ( 2009, p. 20 ) explains how this notion is concretized politically, culturally, and historically by the term « national ». However, identity can also allude to the question of territory, as in the case of nation-states ( Belhedi, A. 2006 ). Martiniello, M. ( 2011 ) insists that nationalism is a complex phenomenon, diverse in its definitions, often creating an image in which the Nation possesses its own State and that the State is home to only one nation ( p. 15 ). However, the definitions of “State” and “Nation” do not have. For example, some researchers propose to separate the nation into two concepts: civic and ethnic. The first one evokes the equality in rights and duties of citizens through their relations with the State, the second one emphasizes the common characteristics inherited by a group of individuals: blood, culture, or language.

However, the current situation suggests a very different reality. Living in a connected world, where the exchange of goods and people has evolved just as the construction of identity. The plurality of cultures puts forward the common idea that individuals naturally turn to nationalism because of linguistic oppression. Indeed, these individuals would refuse to have new languages imposed on them and thus would stand in a defensive position in regard to their own langage ? Other experts believe that nationalism is the product of intercultural relations.

This ideological heterogeneity leads us to question the national identity within a multicultural Europe: Is Europe preparing to redefine its borders? Is there a European identity? Could we talk about multiple identities or even a multicultural identity, or could we limit it to a geographical and social space? Since identity still involves political and social issues today, how could we build the identity in a way to calm the conflicts caused by language contact and contacts of cultures, instead of feeding tensions? How could we define nationalism, or national identity today?

Three axes of research are proposed for this one-day seminar  :

First approach – Identity(ies) and Nation: the notion of identity(ies), the notion of otherness and the Other, Nation/Nation-States, nationalism, national identity(ies), communitarianism, multicultural identity(ies), European identity(ies), geographical imagination, social representation, identity claims, analysis of political discourse, analysis of national narratives, identity building, multiculturalism vs. monoculturalism, conflicting affiliations, etc.
Second approach – Cultural contacts: globalization, cultural mixing, migration issues, neocolonialism vs. postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, international relations, creolization, activism, the relationship between European and extra-European space, cultural transfer(s), etc.
Third approach - Language contacts: language representation and representation on language, language contacts, language factor, language policies, language status, language claim, regional languages, diglossia, etc.
This seminar under the banner of interdisciplinarity will be the occasion to host communications adopting a variety of approaches between social and human sciences (history, ethnology, anthropology, literature, sociolinguistics, political science, art, etc.). It is open to all researchers, teachers, and Ph.D. students with an appetite for the questions mentioned above.

Moreover, this one-day seminar is part of the annual exercise for Master’s students of the University of Strasbourg in Plurilingualism and Interculturality. The students of the 2022 promotion invite all researchers, teachers, and Ph.D. students interested, to submit a proposal (in English or French) by May 05, 2022. Each proposal should consist of a summary of approximately 300 words on the subject, as well as a short biography of approximately 5 lines.

Proposals should be sent to sponziano@unistra.fr and rihal.dridi@gmail.com. Afterward, communications might be submitted to the Cahiers du GEPE (University of Strasbourg) in order to be published. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belhedi, A. (2006). Territoires, appartenance et identification. Quelques réflexions à partir du cas tunisien. L’Espace géographique, 35, 310-316.

Blanchet, P. (2005). Essai de théorisation d'un processus complexe. Cahiers de sociolinguistique, 10, 17-47.

Ferréol et Jucquois (2003), Dictionnaire de l’altérité et des relations interculturelles,Armand Colin, Paris.

Krewer, B. (1994), « Soi et culture : des rencontres empiriques, scientifiques et épistémologiques », in BLOMAR Jeannine et KREWER Bernd (sous la dir. De),

Perspectives de l’interculturel, Paris, ENS/L’Harmattan, p 162-189.

 Lagrange, H. (2014), Le multiculturalisme est incontournable, Le Monde:

https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2014/05/13/le-multiculturalisme-est-incontournabl e_4416004_3232.html

Lauret, P. (2009). Identité nationale, communauté, appartenance. L'identité nationale à l'épreuve des étrangers. Rue Descartes, 66, 20-31. https://doi.org/10.3917/rdes.066.0020

 Léglise, I. (2021). Contacts de langues. Langage et société, p. 61-64.

https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.hs01.0062

Martiniello, M. (2011). Chapitre 1. La problématisation de la diversité culturelle et identitaire. Dans : La démocratie multiculturelle: Citoyenneté, diversité,justice sociale(pp. 13-40). Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Mucchielli, A. (1986), L’identité, Paris, PUF, cité dans : Féréol Gilles et Jucquois Guy (2003), Dictionnaire de l'altérité et des relations interculturelles, Paris.

Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in Contact: Findings And Problems, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 9e édition 2010.

autres appels

Michal Shomer (bottom left) shows examples of “multi-gender Hebrew,” a set of Hebrew characters she designed. (Screenshot by Lyna Bentahar/For The Diamondback)

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