BETWEEN LANGUAGES

Michael Schmidt - literary critic, anthologist, poet, translator, novelist, publisher

PNR 283, May-June 2025

The PN Review 281 edit­orial occa­sioned many responses. Its themes have informed PN Review from early on – how writers exist between as well as within lan­guages and dia­lects. The activity of trans­la­tion from one lan­guage to another, from a given to an acquired dialect, can appear ana­logous to the initial process of gen­er­ating exper­i­ence itself in and as lan­guage. Many of us are dif­fer­ently, some­times con­flictedly, alive in a variety of lan­guages. Alive even in dead lan­guages, one might say, proving those lan­guages any­thing but mortal.

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