Speaking in Tongues

This is a book about languages, what languages can and what they cannot do.

Speaking in Tongues is a brilliant treatise from Nobel-Laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee in collaboration with leading international translator Mariana Dimópulous. Presented as a dialogue, Coetzee and Dimópulous’s provocative work digs into questions that have plagued writers for centuries. They invite readers to grapple with the idea that language is actually culture’s unique reflection into words. The difference between cultures, and in turn langauges, leads to the almost impossible task of the to liberate the language imprisoned in a text and instill it into her recreation of that work.

Along the journey, the authors also delve into topics such as which languages are gendered, the threat of monolingualism, and the possibility that mathematics could tell the truth about everything in the universe. In the tradition of Walter Benjamin’s seminal The Task of the Translator, Speaking in Tongues, with its wide range of observations and propositions, emerges as a work of philosophy on its own, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.