Exophony

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Exophonie describes the writing of fiction in a language that is not your own mother tongue . Famous examples are works by Samuel Beckett , Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov . The reasons for exophonic writing are diverse, frequent causes are migration or exile , combined with a lack of publication opportunities in the mother tongue at the new place of residence. But also the joy of experimentation or the attempt to reach readers outside the narrow confines of their own mother tongue without going through a translation are among the reasons. Exophonic literature is part of transnational literature, the use of language in it may include elements of translingualism .

In the case of writers who grew up bilingually or who emigrated at a young age, it may be questionable whether the language of writing is their mother tongue or a second language . The vast majority of exophonic writers live in the culture of their second language after emigration or exile. Some writers have already published in their mother tongue before switching to the second language, while others only begin their writing career after switching. Some exophonic writers continue to speak and write in their native language, others lose active use, especially if the migration occurred at a young age. This difference can be seen in her work, literary theory speaks of the palimpsest .

If a work originally written in the mother tongue is later translated into a second language by the author, this does not fall under exophony but is considered a self-translation .

Russian mother tongue

For Russia and the Soviet Union, emigration, the largest source of exophony, is divided into four phases: first wave in the tsarist empire (approx. 1870 to 1916), second wave during revolution and civil war (1917 to 1922), third wave in the Soviet Union (1922 until 1991, sometimes shared with Stalin's death in 1953), and the Fourth Wave in the post-Soviet period (since 1991). In all of these waves people emigrated who had already published or who started to do so after they emigrated. Many of these emigrants fled persecution, either as members of a “ class ” or because of their Jewish affiliation .

Vladimir Nabokov belongs to the second wave. His family fled with him to Germany from the October Revolution in 1917 when Nabokov was 18 years old. In 1937 he went to France with his Jewish wife, and in 1940 they moved to the USA.

A well-known exophonic Third Wave writer is Joseph Brodsky , who left the Soviet Union in 1972 at the age of 32 and later received the Nobel Prize for Literature in the United States for his work in English. Ayn Rand left the Soviet Union in 1926 at the age of 21.

The fourth wave also includes writers such as Gary Shteyngart , although the von Shteyngart family left the Soviet Union in 1979. But he was only seven years old at the time of immigration to the USA, so that his autobiographical work is shaped by the Russian diaspora on the east coast and belongs to the post-Soviet phase. After the end of the Soviet Union, emigration to Germany became easier for people of Jewish origin. Wladimir Kaminer , who emigrated to Germany in 1990 at the age of 23, belongs to this group .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karen Ryan: Writing Russianness: Code Switching, Translation, and Definition in Russian-American Literature . In: Revue du Center Européen d'Études Slaves , No. 3 (6 June 2013). Ryan has been teaching at Merrimack College since 2018 , see there .