This colloquium was held on May 10 and 11, 2012 as part of Professor Michel Zink's seminar, the research program funded by his 2007 Balzan Award and the activities of the Institut d'études littéraires du Collège de France.
Presentation
The title of this symposium is borrowed from that of a fine recent book, D'autres vies que la mienne. Writing in a language other than one's mother tongue is an act fraught with significance. A writer can choose to write in a language other than his or her own, as many poets and novelists have done, from the Middle Ages to the present ; or he or she can be forced to do so. But in many civilizations and eras, intellectual life and literature have had recourse to a foreign or learned language with a kind of natural ease : Greek for the Romans, Chinese for the Japanese, Latin for the medieval West. To write in another language is to tear oneself away from oneself, but it is also to be led to situate oneself more precisely in relation to the questions that arise for each writer, if, as Proust writes, " beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language ".
Abstract
This symposium focused on writers who, by choice or necessity, write in a language that is not their mother tongue.
After underlining the resonance of this colloquium with its predecessor in the same program, explaining the reference in its title to Emmanuel Carrère's novel D'autres vies que la mienne, and showing how the papers to be delivered covered the various aspects of the question, Michel Zink, in his opening address, emphasized, on the basis of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, the sense of freedom enjoyed by the medieval writer in his choice of language.