Translation and Polylanguaging: Sexuality and Novels from James Baldwin to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Abstract This article examines some conceptual and methodological issues that come up when approaching transcultural relations between sexuality and language in the contemporary world. Most of the examples come from novels. Language about sexuality is often filled with implicitness. To put it differently, it is highly indexical language. This poses problems both for understanding and for translation. How do you talk about sexuality when talking about different times and places in which different languages are spoken and different implicit structures of cultural concepts produce the social forms within which sex/gender and sexuality take place? Added to this is the problem of the coexistence of multiple sexual ideologies and sexual cultures, as well as of multiple languages, in the same social space. “Given that the novel is a fundamentally monolingual form,” Amitav Ghosh has written, “how does it deal with characters whose linguistic identities are complex and unsettled?” In this article, the author examines novelistic situations in which both linguistic and sexual identities are “complex and unsettled.” What are the limits of translation in such situations? What kind of linguistic anthropological work can novels do? Literary examples are drawn from works by James Baldwin, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdellah Taïa, and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.