Event Type
Some writers adopt the language of their place of exile or refuge: the Polish writer Czesław Miłosz wrote in English, while the Irish writer Samuel Beckett wrote in French. The Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf, who also adopted French in her writing, explains in The Iliterate that this language gave her the necessary distance from the pain she felt for her homeland, Hungary. This is a poetry reading and a roundtable, an in-between for the sake of collective thinking about the phenomenon of literary exophony, defined as the general experience of existing outside one's mother tongue.
Mónica de la Torre (Mexico), Silvina López Medín (Argentina), Cristina Pérez Díaz (Puerto Rico), and Natasha Tiniacos (Venezuela) think together their inclinations toward exophony and what lies behind that freedom of choice. Is it the impulse of circumstance or of language? A poem, at moments, decenters its origin. Why? They will read some of their poems written in the language a-partir-de-la-materna: English, shaped by the multilingual and multiple experiences of New York.