摘要：Adrian Wanner’s study of seven Russian poets—Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrey Gritsman, Katia Kapovich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, and Elizaveta Kul’man—who translated their own work into English, French, German, or Italian, is a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of translingualism studies. While the concept and practice of writing in an acquired language are neither recent nor rare, it’s only in the last decade or two that scholars of various stripes and persuasions have started studying it. Much of the hitherto neglect can be ascribed to the entrenched belief that literature of the highest order can only be composed in one’s first language, and in that sense the example of Joseph Conrad or Samuel Beckett or Nancy Hurst will always be viewed as an incongruity. Among other culprits none stands out more than the monolingual foundation of almost any literary culture, with its rigid system of classifying authors and their works. Because translingual authors straddle multiple traditions, linguistic and cultural systems, etc., they cannot be easily pigeonholed, even in a country as multilingual and multiethnic as Russia, which often leads to their outright rejection.
