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Reading and Writing (In-)Between Languages in the English-Speaking World

Écrire entre les langues : L’émotion d’une rencontre entre souvenir, existence et création

Laure-Hélène ANTHONY-GERROLDT

Résumés

Les questions posées par l'étude du plurilinguisme nous invitent à aborder les liens qui unissent recherche et création. De quelle manière l'artiste peut-elle se nourrir non seulement de l'expérience vécue et de l'art, mais aussi de la recherche en plurilinguisme ? L'emploi de plusieurs langues, ou l'écriture en langue étrangère, peuvent constituer à la fois une mise en pratique d'idées rencontrées en recherche, et une recherche à part entière : quête des frontières qui séparent les langues et les cultures, recouvrement-découvrement de la langue maternelle oubliée, appropriation de la langue apprise, recherche de la voix propre qui ne s'exprime parfois tout à fait que dans l'hétérolinguisme, quête de sens qui a souvent des vertus thérapeutiques. Par le travail créatif, la langue devient en effet familière alors qu’elle était étrangère, et l'étranger devient parfois refuge et reconquête, comme dans les poèmes de Safia Elhillo et Kimiko Hahn. De ces recherches entre les langues émergent une dimension inclusive et thérapeutique, mais aussi une dimension intime.
Le texte proposé ici mêle des vers et de la prose en anglais, français et russe, afin d’explorer la rencontre avec l'héritage passé comme quête d'une voix propre, initiée par l'étrangeté de la langue maternelle qui ne permet pas une expression entière, et qui ne prend de sens véritable que lorsqu'elle se mélange, s'allie, entre en contact avec la langue choisie d'une part et d’autre part avec la langue du passé, oubliée, jamais apprise, peut-être enfin reconquise.

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  • 1 The study day was organised by Tracy Bloor at the INSPE of the University of Franche-Comté, Besanço (...)
  • 2 Émotion et sensation : atelier d’écriture créative. JE INSPE Besançon: Exploring creative writing p (...)

1I first began to think about this plurilingual poetic project after hearing Sara Greaves present her research on the connections between emotions, foreign language learning, creative writing, and the Mother tongue during a study day on creative writing and language acquisition at the University of Franche-Comté, “Exploring Creative Writing Practices in Second/foreign Language Learning”1. Sara’s remarks about embodied learning and the necessity to develop a more intimate relationship to foreign languages deeply resonated with the creative writing workshop that I conducted that day.2

  • 3 Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt, Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne, thèse de doctorat.
  • 4 See for instance Anthony-Gerroldt, “Connecting with the world: poetic synaesthesia, sensory metapho (...)
  • 5 An example is the poem “Persephone” which was published in e-Rea in 2022 and focuses on the sensati (...)
  • 6 Écrire entre les langues : littérature, enseignement, traduction, 14-15 juin 2021, organised by: IN (...)

2Sara Greaves’s lecture also echoed my own experience of second language learning and of creative writing as well as my academic research on poetry, sensations, and empathy, which I explored in my doctoral thesis, Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne dans l’oeuvre de Wilfred Owen3, and certain articles (Anthony-Gerroldt, “Connecting with the world”)4. As a poet (Anthony-Gerroldt, “Persephone”)5, the questions raised by the “Reading and Writing Between Languages” symposiums held in 2021 and 20236 inspired me to further develop these ideas in poetry and to seek a plurilingual voice. How could I use experience, emotion and academic work to nourish the creative process?

3The poetic texts that you are about to read are a creative answer to these questions. They investigate the connections between different types of language: between the language of academic speech and the language of poetry, between English, Russian and French, but also between the written word and the spoken word. Because they explore the ways in which research and creation can influence or cross-pollinate each other, each poetic section is introduced by a quotation from research on plurilingualism. These poetic pieces are allowed to stand on their own without the conceptual/creative trajectories being made explicit. However, they were intended for performance at the 2023 LEEL conference (Aix-en-Provence 2023 Anthony-Gerroldt) and the patterns of sound illustrate the recurrent theme of embodied language.

Langue mat-rangère or (M)other tongue

she provides an account of the hybrid nature of the mother tongue, analyses the social and linguistic tensions experienced by children caught between the interior language (the Mother tongue is already divided) of their family circle and the exterior language spoken at school, beyond the bounds of the mother. (Greaves and De Mattia-Viviès 4)

4Cette histoire commence dans un village
Où les maisons sont décorées de roses
Les murets ploient sous le chèvrefeuille
Et les lieux abandonnés reposent
Au milieu du bois dont le feuillage
Filtre la lumière.

5–NO no no!–

6THIS doesn’t sound right:
Everything always begins in language–
Stories, voices, and memories,
Even the streets of the village
Embaument le chèvrefeuille
(The smell is too heady in the heat)
Honeysuckle sounds perfect for the bees
Though the word in French makes little sense
The flowers do not look like goats
They rather seem like fairy ghosts
–le spectre-feuille, ou l’elfe-feuille–
Neither does the foliage
Another trick of language
Everything is divided!
I cannot see the words for the mother tongue
Gets in the way
Une langue mat-rangère
Qui grave son empreinte par-delà les frontiers
Au dépens des mots

7Some days, it was easier being around grams
She spoke a language that wasn’t mine
And that no one would teach me, not even dad
My grandmother tongue was forbidden
My grandfather tongue–forsaken
They still are.
Soon granny’s voice will fade, so will
The language and the words that she spoke
No trace will remain
Of the voice unwritten
Even now their existence feels illusory
Memory
Of a sound in a dream
No trace will remain
Of the songs once sung.

8Yet sometimes being around granny was easier
No speaking expected
I could pick up the words
We used the ones we thought we heard
Even if we couldn’t say them right
“Nun ti fou de nor emol”
That’s the best I can do
It belongs in orality
I think it means
Mais qu’est-ce que t’as fait bon dieu?
What have you done, good gracious god?

9Si tu oublies cette langue que tu ne parles pas
Mais qui est inscrite dans les divisions qui te composent
Dont seuls les sons te sont famille
Sauras-tu encore qui tu es?

(S)Mother tongue

[…] allows him to live in exile within exile, to set up the conditions of nostalgia by putting the distance of the foreign language to the service of a risky regression to infancy in search of the body, in search of sensory perception and archaic aggressivity, a language beyond the verb. (Greaves and De Mattia-Viviès 11)

10[...] allows us to love in exile within exile
One cannot escape one’s mother tongue
A longuage: a tongue that longs to belong.
Un voyage sur place au cœur des mots–
Or maybe within my core-self
               Within my Coeur-self
Between today and tomorrow
Attends-moi se transforme
En–Entends-moi je déforme
Tout ce que je touche
Je n’ose plus taper sur les touches
Brisées, overused, usées
De mon petit clavier
It must have happened in another world
Between tomorrow and today
Trying to find a way
Out of the (s)Mother tongue
Je n’ose plus taper sur les touches
Toutes décollées de mon clavier
Je déforme
                 Tout ce que je touche
Se transforme
                    Attends-moi
                    Wait
                    
Подожди
Ta voix résonne encore parfois
Ta voix résonne parfois en moi
One cannot escape the (s)Mother tongue
The amniotic pool of words
The semiotic beyond

11Entends-moi
Tu joues avec les mots sans effort
Tu joues, mais tu n’écoutes pas
You play but you do not listen
In my imagination
He stands at the table
With a large spoon in his left hand
Raised like a glass of champagne
Reciting
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers
L’autre mime, boitant
L’infirme qui volait
Ses ailes de géant
L’empêchent de marcher
I
picture him saying
Настала ночь; за ярким, знойным,
О сердце! за тревожным днем—
Когда же ты заснешь спокойным,
Пожалуй, хоть последним сном.
The night began, after a bright, hot,
O heart, after a disturbing day
Will you ever enjoy the peace of sleep
–Perhaps only in your last sleep.

12It happened in another world
Between tomorrow and yesterday.

13He may have never read these words–though chances are he did. He was a well-read man, with bookshelves rising to the ceiling of the old mansion I barely recall. Russian was forbidden and the language that should have been my mother’s mother tongue became a myth, a strange calling passed on to me.

14There was the core
J’ai mal au corps
Voyage sur place au cœur des mots
Motionless pictures float about
Burning within
It was planted here–it was supposed to grow
             And out from the coeurself something did flow
             A breath of the mind
             Une largeur d’esprit
             Patience et longueur de temps
Keep both extension leaves out–
Expand the table and your breath
As the paper spreads out, out, out
Of sight, reach, touch
Do we even pass anything on?

15Мамочка дочка дедушки, которого никогда не видела, который умер задолго до моего рождения
Мама, дочь человека без дома, без языка и без страны
Кто ты? А где твое сердце?
А где голос?

16Мамочка
You must have been born in exile
You must have been born with rejection ingrained
In some hidden corner of your brain
You were never told how
To process it, and now,
I am looking for meaning in languages
I do not speak
Deciphering foreign alphabets
I let them speak
To me
Symbols I do not understand are gentler
Than the coarse rasp of the mother
Tongue
Where a qualifier always had to come between
The verb and the compliment
I was obsessed
With being
Good enough to hold a special place
Inside your heart, so very busy that I
Forgot to make room for myself
So disconnectedly absorbed that I
Excelled
At being out of place
At misunderstanding
At making mine whatever was not
Image ridicule d’une brute épaisse enlisée dans la semoule
Some thick brutish joke of a man trudging couscous
The colour of
quicksand and the texture of sour cream
Only the image ridicules the violence
Like a villain in a cartoon
Like a slant
A slur
An insult
Un mot de travers
Une remarque qui ne paie pas de mine
Et pourtant et pourtant vous mine
Le moral
La confiance
Il n’y a pas de douceur dans cette langue
Ou si peu
Comment rencontrer le souvenir d’une chaleur
Humaine, aimante, sacrée peut-être
Les mots volent en éclats
De verre et de colère
Pour si peu
Comment rendre vie à cette douceur
Que lon ta volée
Мама
дочь человека без дома, без языка и без страны
Кто ты? А где твое сердце?
А где голос?

17Revert to English to finally come home to myself
A language that’s never been used to bully me.

Creation not imitation

Creative writing, and bilingual workshops especially, are a rare opportunity for breaking the natural form/meaning, monolingual habits, for playing out the dynamics of subject and object–of language that one speaks and language that one is spoken by–, growing roots backwards into the soil of childhood and reinforcing emotional and aesthetic approaches to language, as a means to explore the ‘self’ and question the notion of identity/ies (Greaves and Schultze, “Dissociating Form and Meaning…”).

18I am a collection of pieces of broken glass and dead flowers laced with butterfly wings and fairy dust.

19Poussière d’étoiles,
Je suis
poussière de fée,
Je suis
Potion de la sorcière qui fait s’éteindre la voix.
Под лампою зеленой,
С улыбкой неживой,
Друг шепчет: «Сандрильона,
Как странен голос твой…»
I am a key without a lock and the moon shines inside me.
I change and pain – the sorrow of my mother
and the fight of the people, the Slavs and the Jews
that she carries within her
has been passed on to me
like a burden, like a treasure.
I read the book of another woman and she tells me that her story is my story
Is my mother’s story
The name is the same
In another language
Anne–with an E, with an A–Anna
She
said:
«
 Моя последняя, мир больше не чудесен,
Не разрывай мне сердца, не звени.
 »
My mother also knows, my mother also says there can be
No miracles
I need to find my voice.
A voice that speaks in language strange
In sanctified interludes
En prières païennes faites à la terre
Тихая молитва
В последний день жизни, которая свята, может быть, кто-то поймёт — ты или я — и увидит, как цветы расцветут и станут звездами.
В последнюю ночь последнего дня жизни, возможно, кто-то поймет и увидит, как расцветут цветы и станут звездами.

20I am reading the book of another woman who is telling me about my pain, about the pain of a million ancestors before, about stories, about languages that leave no trace in the sand
Perhaps this is the heritage of my people
I need to find my voice, but I am estranged
I cannot find it in the mother tongue
I must
Write in a foreign language within my mother tongue

21But what if the roots that we tried to grow back
Ne prennent jamais racine?
What if we can only ever exist
Somewhere in-between?

Mother Tongue

While the experience of existing between languages may involve a loss of identity (Wismann) or an “aporia of transmission,” it brings with it the possibility of a certain freedom–of a transcultural rebirth, one could suggest, where transculture is a way for each individual to overcome the determinations of their own culture. (Greaves, “Transports of Translation…”)

22I reached for the words of my Mother Tongue
Est-ce que tu peux m’aider?
I don’t think it was a May day
Perhaps an October day
July was in January,
August–February
And just like that, you became my language
The words I learnt to speak taste too strange on my tongue
They stand impervious on the tip
Tu n’as pas de maison–you don’t belong
Home was always out of reach
У тебя нет еврейского дома
Ты–рассеянная–безродная
My mother unrooted the words of her father
From the catacombs and scattered them
Further
Deeper
My father spoke the words of his father
Kind–shatzy–nacht nacht
Until he didn’t
Their tongues were never meant to meet
I should not have been
And perhaps I was missing from the Mother tongue
Because the rift was a fault-line
Breaking open
My identity and I had to find–Another
I chose you
Though I still strive to dive into the world of Baba Yaga
The black cat that looks at me in the street knows
Where I belong.

23The voice asks: where is the border?
You are already somewhere else, perhaps dreaming of a world you could have been–
Voyage sur place, voyage au coeur des mots
–or maybe within my core-self
               my coeurself

24A contre-courant
Le sommeil qui ne vient pas
Les étoiles s’estompent dans un ciel inconnu
La rose trop ouverte se fane
It must have been a balancing act
This body could never move in waves
It moves in squares and breaks
Into pixelated bits and bites
Easing its way into existence doesn’t come natural
This body could never move in waves
It moves in squares and breaks
Finding your way, taking a chance
Across the mounds of discarded falderal
A contre-courant sur la grève
A sailing boat aground on the shingle
Every stone rocking beneath the feet cracks
Open the flesh–Another break
In the line
That we sent adrift into thin air
Les roses envolées
S’en sont toutes allées
Fioritures à la mer:
The art of mixing flowers with rot

25У тебя нет еврейского дома
No sacred home and no Jewish home
Left without a religion or a culture
We are left treading muck
Should we build a new Jerusalem?
Should we build Jerusalem anew?
A small town for the witch, the peasant and the Jew?
When I was little, I kept getting syllables mixed up

26Je pensais que partir en cavale
Se disait partir en kabbale

27J’étais déjà destinée à m'enivrer
De cette tradition orale
And destined to search for my own voice
Chercher et chercher encore
У меня нет своего голоса, у меня нет ничего, что было бы только моим.

28So I look for it in languages I do not speak
I let the symbols I cannot read speak to me
Speak through me
And move me to tears
As if an ancient soul had lost its way
Within
Потерянная душа пробуждается
In the olive undertones of my skin
In my narrow oriental feet
And large hips with an inverted smile
For a belly button
If I look at it par-dessus
Il me sourit
J’ai dû conclure de cette association
La cavale qui devient kabbale
Que le mysticisme accompagne la fuite
Il faut être fou pour croire
You gotta be crazy to believe
Il faut être fou pour vivre
You gotta be crazy to live
Il faut être fou pour fuir
Et pourtant cette nuit encore
Le chien s’endort paisible
Le chat se blottit contre l’oreiller
L’amante sommeille
Dans la maison
La poète veille
У меня нет своего голоса, у меня нет ничего, что было бы только моим.

29I find it everywhere but in my mother tongue
Whose words do not seem to belong
To me, unless I let them be bracketed
By something actually foreign, something strange
Different and yet the same
Is it because my mother’s voice resonates too loudly in the mother tongue?
It eclipses all other sounds
Langue maternelle
Langue de la mère
Mots qui enchaînent
        qui éclipsent
        qui assènent
They eclipsed me and I became
A moon child, shining only in reflexion of –
So I sought to find my own light source
Поэтому я должна найти свой голос и источник света.
Words that belong to me because I chose them
So I could embrace the moon child
Tsuki
Learn to grow moon flowers
Learn the art of hiding from the moon
And the art of sharing from the sun
A language for the sky
A language for the earth
A poetry tongue for dreams
Une langue policée par la vie
Et des fragments qui s’envolent
Ou s’enfilent au cordon du souvenir

30Saudade de ti
Will you remember me?
Te souviens-tu?
Где ты?

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Bibliographie

ANTHONY-GERROLDT, Laure-Hélène. Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne dans l’œuvre de Wilfred Owen. Thèse de doctorat. Université de Bourgogne, 2020.

ANTHONY-GERROLDT, Laure-Hélène. “Persephone”, e-Rea [En ligne], 20.1 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 23 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/15538.

ANTHONY-GERROLDT, Laure-Hélène. “Connecting with the world: poetic synaesthesia, sensory metaphors and empathy.” Journal of Literary Semantics, 52(2), 2023: 233-248.

ANTHONY-GERROLDT, Laure-Hélène and Tracy BLOOR. “Émotion et sensation : atelier d’écriture créative.” JE INSPE Besançon: Exploring creative writing practices in second/foreign language learning, 5 October 2022, Besançon, France.

GREAVES, Sara and Marie-Laure SCHULTZE. “Dissociating Form and Meaning in Bilingual Creative Writing and Creative Translation Workshops.” E-rea, 9.2, 2012, journals.openedition.org/erea/2601. Accessed 23 June 2024.

GREAVES, Sara and Monique DE MATTIA-VIVIÈS, eds. “Introduction.” Language Learning and the Mother Tongue. Cambridge University Press, 2022 : 1- 12.

GREAVES, Sara. “Transports of Translation: Creativity and Healing.” E-rea, 20.1, 2022, journals.openedition.org/erea/15417. Accessed 17 May 2024.

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Notes

1 The study day was organised by Tracy Bloor at the INSPE of the University of Franche-Comté, Besançon, 5 October 2022.

2 Émotion et sensation : atelier d’écriture créative. JE INSPE Besançon: Exploring creative writing practices in second/foreign language learning, 5 October 2022, Besançon, France.

3 Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt, Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne, thèse de doctorat.

4 See for instance Anthony-Gerroldt, “Connecting with the world: poetic synaesthesia, sensory metaphors and empathy” published in the Journal of Literary Semantics in 2023.

5 An example is the poem “Persephone” which was published in e-Rea in 2022 and focuses on the sensations and experience of the goddess.

6 Écrire entre les langues : littérature, enseignement, traduction, 14-15 juin 2021, organised by: INALCO (PLIDAM-EA 4514), Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, (DILTEC-EA 2288 & THALIM-UMR 7172), Aix-Marseille University (LPL-UMR 7309 and SUFLE), University of Angers (CIRPALL - EA7457), en ligne.

Lire et Écrire entre les Langues littérature, enseignement et traduction, 14, 15 and 16 June 2023, organised by the research convention LÉEL (2022-2027) at Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence.

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Référence électronique

Laure-Hélène ANTHONY-GERROLDT, « Écrire entre les langues : L’émotion d’une rencontre entre souvenir, existence et création »e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 20 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/20034 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144qx

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Auteur

Laure-Hélène ANTHONY-GERROLDT

Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt has taught translation and poetry at the Université de Bourgogne, creative writing at the INSPE in Besançon and currently teaches English in a secondary school. Her doctoral thesis, Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne dans l’oeuvre de Wilfred Owen, focused on the use of sensations and synaesthesia in the works of John Keats and on their influence on Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. Her research now focuses on creative writing and sensation, as well as on ecology and empathy in poetry. She published the articles “Making Sense of Wilfred Owen’s Keatsian Heritage: “Exposure” and “Ode to a Nightingale” in Études Anglaises (2020), “Over “the last hill”: Wilfred Owen’s “Spring Offensive”” for Arts of War and Peace (2021) and “Connecting with the World” in the Journal of Literary Semantics (2023). Her poem “Persephone” was published in e-Rea.
Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt a enseigné la traduction et la poésie à l’université de Bourgogne, l’écriture créative à l’INSPE de Besançon et enseigne à présent au lycée. Sa thèse, Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne dans l’œuvre de Wilfred Owen, porte sur l’utilisation des sensations et de la synesthésie dans les œuvres de Keats, ainsi que sur leur influence sur la poésie de guerre de Wilfred Owen. Sa recherche se concentre à présent sur l’écriture créative et la sensation, ainsi que sur le rapport entre écologie et empathie dans en poésie. Elle a publié les articles “Making Sense of Wilfred Owen’s Keatsian Heritage: “Exposure” and “Ode to a Nightingale” dans Études Anglaises (2020), “Over “the last hill”: Wilfred Owen’s “Spring Offensive”” pour Arts of War and Peace (2021) et “Connecting with the World” dans le Journal of Literary Semantics (2023). Son poème “Persephone” a été publié par la revue e-Rea.

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