Rabourdin, Caroline ORCID: 0000-0002-9694-0384 (2014) Making sense of Caroline Bergvall’s multilingual poetry: The space between 'les langues' and Lecercle’s 'Philosophy of Nonsense'. In: Art in Translation Biennale Conference, University of Iceland, 18-20 September 2014, Reykjavik. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Caroline Bergvall is a French-Norwegian writer and artist who works across media and languages. She has an acute awareness of the physicality of language and her works of multilingual poetry often involve spatial and/or audio installations.

Linguist Jean Jacques Lecercle has written extensively about the physicality and practice of language. When most linguists see language as an empirical object of study, Lecercle calls for the study of language that speaks us as well as language that we speak, and gives parole its rightful place in linguistics. He writes of ‘inhabiting’ language, in the phenomenological tradition. He also writes about Louis Wolfson, “who could not bear to hear or read his maternal tongue, English, and developed an intricate technique of instant translation according to sound”¹

In this paper, I will show that the space in between, for the multilingual, is where he/she no longer inhabits one langue or the other, where words become simple marks on a page, sounds in your ear, devoid of motivation and meaning. Using Lecercle’s Philosophy of Nonsense² the bilingual space in between is the space of non-sense, and that poetry can show us the way to get there.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	poetry, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Caroline Bergvall, embodied language, nonsense, phenomenology, multilingualism, translation
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Design (DES)
Related URLs:	Author
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 18:41
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/27633

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