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  • 1 Cf. Bhabha, Nancy and Zarate et. al.
  • 2 Heaney, xxiv, quoted in Elizabeth Pearce, infra.

1What makes in-betweenness such an alluring, captivating concept in linguistics, literature and translation studies, particularly since the emergence of the multicultural paradigm at the close of the last century?1 What is it that makes in-betweenness an inspiring horizon, an “elsewhere of potential”2 as Seamus Heaney puts it, an operative critical concept or a rich empirical experience?

  • 3 LÉEL (Reading and Writing Between Languages) is a Collaborative Research Convention launched in 202 (...)
  • 4 Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (National Institute of Oriental Languages (...)

2One indication of the increasing interest in processes of creation and interpretation in-between languages, in literary creation and criticism, in translation and translation studies, in linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics) and in language learning, is the success of the two international LÉEL symposiums.3 Under the heading Lire et Écrire Entre les Langues : littérature, enseignement, traduction, creation, the first was held in 2021 at Inalco,4 with over 200 on-line participants, the second in 2023 at Aix-Marseille Université, with over 50 events including keynotes, academic papers, creative workshops, performances, and posters. The present publication stems from the latter event, four of its five contributions having been delivered as oral presentations, and should ideally be read alongside two other forthcoming collective works that have likewise grown out of the second LÉEL conference, a publication entitled Recherche-création, médiation scientifique, plurilinguisme, écriture numérique : recueil d’œuvres à la croisée de la pratique artistique (littéraire, poétique, traductive, graphique, etc.) et de la recherche, edited by Isabelle Cros and Jean-Marc Quaranta (Aix-Marseille Université), and Plurilinguisme et création : littérature, traduction, didactique des langues, edited by Marielle Anselmo (Inalco) and Amélie Leconte (Aix-Marseille Université). While the LÉEL partners, academic and non-academic, are interested in multilingualism and linguistic in-betweenness worldwide with a particular focus on French-based multilingualism, the present publication focuses on cases examined in Anglophone studies.

  • 5 This space undermines “the binary thought and essentialist identities produced by colonial knowledg (...)

3In-betweenness is a slippery concept, and its pendulum swing of connotations ranges from positive—the creative promise of Homi K. Bhabha’s “third space” (276)5—to negative: existential angst, the loss of identity (Wissman), a manhole without handholds... For the language learner, whether a recent migrant or a language student aspiring to excellence, “language insecurity” can feel uncomfortable, embarrassing, even dangerous. Once flipped, however, to the other side of the coin, it converts into fecund versions of in-betweenness such as “intercomprehension,” a language learning method to nurture the capacity in people who don’t speak the same language nevertheless to converse within the same linguistic family. Romance languages, for example, or North European languages, lend themselves to intercomprehension (Caddéo and Jamet). Similarly, in geographical regions where languages are in contact, while perfect bilingualism does not necessarily arise, neither is communication rendered impossible and linguistic phenomena such as code-switching or creolisation are observed, or the development of hybrid varieties dubbed in the English-speaking world with portmanteau words like “Punglish”, “Spanglish”, or “Chinglish” (Jenkins), attesting to linguistic creativity between languages.

  • 6 Exophonic writing is literary writing in a language that is not the writer’s Mother tongue.
  • 7 Bergvall, quoted in Elise Angioi, infra.

4Transposed to the realm of literary reading, writing, and translating, which is our focus here, the creative potential of liminality, of transitional times, spaces or states, has long been acknowledged by poets: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” writes John Keats. “Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?” (460) Likewise, in the field of translation studies in-betweenness continues to inspire translators and nourish debate: should translation establish clear boundaries around its languages and keep each to its own (the strategy known as domestication), or can a translator allow the creative potential of that in-between space to come into play, perhaps producing an “in-between” language of translation? Literary phenomena such as heterolingualism or exophonic writing6 also speak to a yearning to move beyond ontological binarities and essentialising boundaries, to explore experiences of obstruction and fluidity between languages and cultures, thereby challenging perhaps the authority of monolingualism and its assignations of social, regional, ethnic or gendered identity with an inclusive plurality. In some cases, foreign languages appear untranslated in the literary text, or the foreignness of linguistic in-betweenness within English creates a hybrid, heterolingual textuality, such as this extract cited by Elise Angioi: “’tis a rich scrambljumbl of heavily bitching tongues, folded like shells in tymologick tension, so is ma usage a happy combimess, simpel”.7 In other cases, another language seems to infuse the text as in exophonic writing or Seamus Heaney’s “dual” English, discussed below by Elizabeth Pearce, where the ineffable, immaterial presence of the Mother tongue haunts the second language without leaving easily identifiable traces.

5The following contributions explore lines of enquiry such as these in French-Norwegian poet Caroline Bergvall’s heterolingual aesthetic, Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt’s plurilingual poetry informed by research, Irish Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney’s contradictory worlds, Tracy Bloor’s empirical-theoretical study of creative writing and clinical didactics, and American poet-translator Ezra Pound’s conception of the interrelations of poetry and translation.

6The first contribution is a critical study of Caroline Bergvall’s medieval trilogy, “The temporal in-betweenness of Caroline Bergvall’s heterolingual poetics in Meddle English, Drift, and Alisoun Sings.” It sets out to interpret the poet’s “heterolingual aesthetic” as developed in these works dated 2011, 2015 and 2019, described as “an aesthetic composite of diachronic and synchronic variations of English”, situated between contrasting temporalities. Elise Angioi’s careful analysis of the material characteristics of this aesthetic shows how, while celebrating the sediments and strata, and the social and spatial trajectories of language, this aesthetic challenges the monolingual norm and reveals—or performs—its unacknowledged foreignness, “prob[ing] the past of the English language to reveal its latent foreignness, and estrange it”. In so doing, Bergvall’s heterolingual poetics opposes the authority of standardized English “and ‘irritates’ the ‘edges of language’ that the monolingual paradigm produces”. The author pays attention to the satirical, dystopian thrust in Meddle English, and what she defines as a utopian dynamic as it gains momentum throughout the trilogy, illustrating how Bergvall’s jubilatory in-between language lends itself now ironically, to satirise an international economic lingua franca, now compassionately, in her rewriting of The Seafarer, to draw a parallel between migrating linguistic materiality and the migration crisis, now optimistically, to imagine a more inclusive society in Alisoun Sings.

7Imagining another future also means uncovering and recovering the past to Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt, whose poetry contribution, “Écrire entre les langues : L’émotion d’une rencontre entre souvenir, existence et creation”, shows how finding a voice for a poet can mean taking their cue from research, their own and that of others, allowing it to illuminate experience in and between languages. A poetic quest ensues, a long reflective poem in English, French and Russian with a dash of German, divided into four parts: “Langue mat-rangère or (M)other tongue”, “(S)Mother tongue”, “Creation not imitation”, and “Mother tongue”. This quest involves rejecting the blandishments of sentimental picture-painting and straying from the safe but stifling confines of the (S)Mother tongue, to sound out the affective dimension in the half-remembered tones of a forgotten language. The poem also renders visible the valuable role of a rescue language, a language of refuge, in this case English, but only the sounds of the divisions that compose the self are family, writes Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt.

8As a reader, attuning one’s ear to the sounds of the divisions that compose the self is crucial to an understanding of Seamus Heaney’s poetry. Heaney, one might say, was a paragon of in-betweenness, caught as he was between Irish roots and English heights: “I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder /That you would neither cajole nor ignore” (“Act of Union”, North). Here, in-betweenness proves at once a source of rich creativity and incapacitating pain: “The famous Northern reticence, the tight gag of place /And times: yes, yes. Of the “wee six” I sing /Where to be saved you only must save face /And whatever you say, say nothing.” (“Whatever you say, say nothing”, North). Elizabeth Pearce chooses to study a poem from 1991 that approaches the theme of dual belonging with delicate discretion and perhaps a dose of sublimation. Her contribution, “‘Transportation’ between contradictory worlds in Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Lightenings viii’ and its translation into French”, convokes P. L. Paddington’s “single word heteroglossia” and focuses on the Irish toponym Clonmacnoise as a point of entrance into the dual worlds, temporalities, mythologies…, of the poem; for here the language duality remains largely immaterial, rendered by other means. As such, the challenge to the translator, in this case Patrick Hersant, is nonetheless demanding: “How might this in-betweenness and subtle sense of heteroglossia be translated into French?”

9The following contribution focuses on self-translation—as in Salman Rushdie’s conception of the migrant’s process of self-translation into the host language and culture (Rushdie 29)—through an experience of exophonic creative writing. In “Écriture créative, enjeux identitaires et plurilingues en langue seconde : une réflexion exploratoire, conceptuelle et empirique”, Tracy Bloor draws on clinical didactics, the philosophy of language and, in particular, George Herbert Mead’s theorization of the self to illuminate how issues of identity and plurilingualism play out in creative writing between languages. This theoretical, empirical, self-reflective approach presents some of the literary texts she wrote during a D.U. (University Diploma) in Facilitating Creative Writing Workshops at Aix-Marseille University, along with the feedback received from her native French-speaking course-mates. She notes her responses to their comments, sometimes deciding to renounce the more French-sounding (or “domesticating”) option in favour of her own foreignness: “la question s’est posée de savoir si ma lectrice avait une vision de l’esprit plus cartésienne que la mienne”. By confronting theory and practice, this contribution makes a strong case for the use of creative writing in second language teaching to help learners negotiate plurilingual identities.

10The final example of (in)-between language liminality is the creative literary potential of at once writing and translating poetry. In “De la poésie comme traduction : Pound traducteur d’Arnaut Daniel” Francesca Manzari begins by recalling Ezra Pound’s youthful vision for a poetry of the present time based on the study of languages, classical, medieval and modern. Pound’s conception of the intimacy of poetic action and translation should be seen, Francesca Manzari suggests, through the lens of Derrida’s notion of enhancement, and in relation to Walter Benjamin’s exaltation of translation as the survival of poetry, as the possible futures of a poem. With this approach, in-betweenness pervades literary reading and writing since it is “as if to compose a poem were always already to translate-adapt a previously existing literary and linguistic form”, and as if a poem were a form of becoming, preparing the way for its own afterlife in translation. Understanding poetry as a living form and translation as its continuation in other idiomatic contexts, Francesca Manzari reads the Troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel through the prism of Vorticism, by way of Pound’s poem “Game of Chess”, which she translates, as she does the other poems discussed here. “Game of Chess” is read as a sort of poetic manifesto, where the rules of chess are compared with the constraints of poetry composition, both seen as originating in a conflict between the passion for order and the passion for chaos, between the passion of erotic love and the passion for shaping it within language that the Troubadour code requires. Within this ‘life-enhancing’ process, in which the critic reads and translates in one same creative breath, Francesca Manzari claims thinking in-between languages as the supreme method of the comparatist and the poet alike.

  • 8 I am indebted for this image to Hawad, and to anthropologist Hélène Claudot-Hawad, CNRS Research Di (...)

11As a conclusion, I would like to end on what to me is a new “elsewhere of potential”, discovered as I read and translate the poetry of Tuareg poet Hawad, translated from Tamajaght into French by Hélène Claudot-Hawad and the author. I refer to a nimble in-betweenness embodied by the figure of the tikruru, who weaves trajectories between languages and cultures, between desert nomadism and urban sedentary living, moving between worlds without belonging to any – like a needle passing over and under coloured threads, without the colours ever rubbing off on it.8

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Bibliographie

BERGVALL, Caroline. Alisoun Sings. Nightboat Books, 2019.

BHABHA, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

CADDEO, Sandrine and Marie-Christine Jamet. L'intercompréhension : une autre approche pour l'enseignement des langues. Hachette, 2013.

HAWAD. Sahara. Visions atomiques. Translated by Hélène Claudot-Hawad. Paris-Méditerranée, 2003.

HEANEY, Seamus. North. Faber and Faber, 1975.

HEANEY, Seamus. Beowulf: A New Translation. Faber and Faber, 1999.

KEATS, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” [1819] Edited by Jeffrey N. Cox, Norton 2009.

JENKINS, Jennifer. World Englishes. Routledge, 2009.

NANCY, Jean-Luc. Être singulier pluriel. Galilée, 1996.

RUSHDIE, Salman. Shame. Vintage, 1995.

WISMANN, Heinz. Penser entre les langues. Albin Michel, 2012.

ZARATE, Geneviève, Danielle LEVY and Claire KRAMSCH. Précis du plurilinguisme et du pluriculturalisme. Éditions archives contemporaines, 2008.

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Notes

1 Cf. Bhabha, Nancy and Zarate et. al.

2 Heaney, xxiv, quoted in Elizabeth Pearce, infra.

3 LÉEL (Reading and Writing Between Languages) is a Collaborative Research Convention launched in 2022 by ten French and Swiss research centres, building on the momentum of the INALCO conference in 2021: DILTEC, THALIM, PLIDAM, LPL, SUPFLES, LERMA, CIRPALL, LITT&ARTS, ELL2 and LPIC.

4 Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations, Paris)

5 This space undermines “the binary thought and essentialist identities produced by colonial knowledge,” (Bhabha 276).

6 Exophonic writing is literary writing in a language that is not the writer’s Mother tongue.

7 Bergvall, quoted in Elise Angioi, infra.

8 I am indebted for this image to Hawad, and to anthropologist Hélène Claudot-Hawad, CNRS Research Director, who took part in an online seminar, “Deserting Talks series 5”, held on 10/04/2025 and chaired by Brahim El Guabli, Associate Professor of Arabic Studies at Williams College, USA, and Co-founder and Co-Editor of Tamazgha Studies Journal.

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Sara GREAVES, « Introduction »e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 19 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/19892 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144qv

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Auteur

Sara GREAVES

Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France
Sara Greaves est Professeure de poésie, de traduction et de traductologie à l’Université d’Aix-Marseille. Elle est membre du LERMA, responsable de la sous-équipe Systèmes, Styles, Alterlinguistique. Elle est titulaire du DU à l’animation d’ateliers d’écriture d’AMU, membre de LEEL, et co-fondatrice de La Société Etc (Écrire, Traduire, Créer). Elle mène des recherches interdisciplinaires (traductologie, poétique, poïétique, plurilinguisme...) sur la traduction créative et l’écriture plurilingue, en lien avec le soin et l’apprentissage des langues. Avec Monique De Mattia-Viviès, elle a co-édité Language Learning and the Mother Tongue: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2022), ouvrage collectif qu’elle a également traduit, et elle est aussi autrice de Côté guerre côté jardin : excursions dans la poésie de James Fenton (Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2016).
Sara Greaves is Professor of poetry, translation and translation studies at Aix-Marseille University. She is a member of the LERMA research centre, head of the research group Systems, Styles, Alterlinguistics. She is an alumna of the DU in facilitating creative writing workshops at AMU, a member of LEEL, and co-founder of La Société Etc. (Écrire, Traduire, Créer). Her research is interdisciplinary (translation studies, poetics, creative processes, plurilingualism...), and focuses on poetry, creative translation and plurilingual literary writing, in connection with health care and language learning. She is co-editor and translator of the collective publication Language Learning and the Mother Tongue: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2022), with Monique De Mattia-Viviès, and author of Côté guerre côté jardin : excursions dans la poésie de James Fenton (Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2016).

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