Tongues untied: Metaphors of multilingualism in the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, Jose Donoso, and Augusto Roa Bastos (Russia, Chile, Paraguay)

Close reading the major novels of polyglot writers Vladimir Nabokov (Russian), Jose Donoso (Chilean) and Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguayan) alongside evidence that multilingualism irrevocably affects the writer's linguistic strategy and that self-translation drives the multilingual writer to "desperation," this study develops a strategy for reading the work of the polyglot author. Studies in neurology and linguistics have shown that polyglotism enhances the creative potential of a writer; this analysis contends that regardless of whether or not they have "switched" languages for their writing, the author's languages are always present in the text and their detection is crucial for interpretation.; Surveys of dozens of multilingual writers show that most are unable to address their multilingual experience "straight on." Instead, polyglots rely principally on metaphor both in their fiction and to convey their "desperation" at their linguistic predicament. "Metaphor," similar to "translation" in that it joins two distinct discursive fields but (from "trans-lation") not strictly "horizontally," is the alternative to the "straight across" self-translation that causes despair when the polyglot cannot find authentic approximations to his meaning in one language or another.; The metaphors of bilingualism that I explore in the work of Nabokov, Donoso, and Roa Bastos are key for understanding these writers' ability to escape silence, which, after Kafka, is the dreaded fate of the bilingual writer. Broaching multilingualism obliquely, through metaphor, the authors' strategy is the material of their imagery. This is the knight's move in Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and the intimation that all languages are akin and undead, like the ghostly polyglots that populate Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. In Donoso's Casa de campo, the linguistically exiled are driven to cannibalism, repairing the loss of their own tongue by eating someone else's. Exile and tyranny also inform Roa Bastos' Yo el Supremo's effort to revise official history by revising its language. All these writers manage to write texts that are, at least, metaphorically bilingual, proving that to write multilingually is the sign of their transcendence of their linguistic crisis. To learn to read multilingually is our challenge.