June 30, 2000
'The Translingual Imagination'
What does a writer lose or maybe gain by abandoning the mother tongue, the Muttersprache, the mama loshen, the langue maternelle?
Shaw was characteristically blunt: "No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another." Santayana, raised in Spanish, subscribed to the lullaby theory of language, declaring that poets could not be great unless they wrote in the same language their mothers sang. Ironically, he slighted his own English verse in quite beautiful phrasing: "Of
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