Subversive Translation and Lexical Empathy: Pedagogies of Cortesia and Transnational Multilingual Poetics

Abstract

Drawing on George Steiner’s concept of ‘lexical cortesia’ or ‘tact of heart’, this chapter offers an example of innovative embodied and embedded critical practice in which transnational author Merlinda Bobis combines her own complex perspectives as a multilingual writer, reader, teacher, translator and scholar. When facing linguistic and cultural difference in a predominantly monolingual hegemonic context, as is the case of the Australian literary landscape and the university classroom, subversive strategies are especially necessary so as not to mute artistic expression in other languages. Monolingual here does not stand for the person speaking only one language, but for the monolithic sensibility that hears and cares for only one tongue.