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The initial idea for this book arose from the experience of living in different countries and languages. Living "in translation' can produce a strange liberation by alienation. Speaking in a second language creates a sense of freedom and discovery whereby new ways of expressing the world are opened up, which also opens up new worlds. Accompanying this is a sense of being able to discover oneself through these new experiences, as though the light of what is "foreign' or other can illuminate hidden recesses of oneself. Perhaps this is because there is an impression of escaping the shackles of what is expected of oneself in one's "home culture' or "mother tongue'. "Tromper la surveillance,' Jacques Derrida terms it: "eluding the watchful eye of some monitor, in order to tell the truth.' Words in a second language which seem to reveal something "new' in the world can thus seem more "true'. We often don't notice our "own' language, the strange idioms where history's ghost can live, whereas idioms of a second tongue can seem to resound with truth and wonder. Maurice Blanchot, in discussing translation, describes this as the sensation that "words need a certain ignorance to keep their power of revelation.' Yet there is also, paradoxically, a sense of fiction that seems to permeate this experience, as though the words of a second language are both more "true' while at the same time not being "real'. Words in another language seem to apply to the other or second country and not to one's home. There can be a feeling of living in a state of suspension when one lives in another country, as if "real life' were paused and would begin again on the return home.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-57758-0_1

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