On the Frontier: Eugene Jolas and Multilingual Modernism

Abstract

Multilingual writing challenges our perceptions of “national” languagesin relation to cultural identity; it often challenges what Yasemin Yildiz defines as “the monolingual paradigm.” The modernist writer, editor, and translator Eugene Jolas consistently explored and sought to transcend the borders of languages and national identity in his translational and multilingual editorial and poetic practice. Jolas is wellknown as the cofounder of the modernist magazine transition, but his poetic work has been relatively neglected, partly because it combines and switches between languages in odd and unsettling ways. Focusing on his multilingual poetry as it appears in transition 23 (1935), this article argues that this work is important precisely because it is unsettling. Jolas’s poetry centers on interlingual and intercultural difference, involving the reader in processes of movement, migration, and transition between languages;it thus pushes us to explore and challenge our own linguistic “frontiers.”