Christopher Larkosh
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, USA
Christopher Larkosh, teaches in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Connecticut (USA). His present research interests include Italian diaspora studies, South/South transcultural studies, and cultures of translation and multilingualism in the Americas. Recent articles include: ‘Levinas, Latin American Thought and the Possibilities of Translational Ethics’, appearing in the latest issue of the Canadian translation studies journal TTR; ‘On Gramsci, Epistemic Interference and the Possibilities of Sud-Alternity’, appearing in Annali d’italianistica 24 (2006): and ‘Writing in the Foreign’: Migrant Sexuality and Translation of the Self in Manuel Puig’s Later Work,’ forthcoming in the UK translation studies journal The Translator. He is also currently editing a special issue of TTR entitled “Sexualities in Translation,” due to appear next year.
Articles of Christopher Larkosh
Translating Multilingual Life
This essay reexamines the cultural implications of the act of translation through three quotations from Portuguese into English from Vilém Flusser’s 1992 philosophical autobiography Bodenlos. In retranslating this multilingual life, this act once again displaces preconceived notions not only of philosophical “groundedness,” as Flusser has called it, but also of the very possibility of cultural centrality, to say nothing of authenticity. Moreover, through the continued recirculation of such textual fragments beyond the strictly perceived boundaries of ‘the language in which they were written,’ such transcultural acts may well provoke yet another series of divergent interpretations, especially when read against the backdrop of a New Coast: a geographical zone mapped out by way of a new set of interconnected cultural experiences and markings of multilingual life.
