Translingualism in the light of semiotics (“Maybe Esther” by Katja Petrowskaja)

Translingualism emerged during the 2000s as a new concept, alongside polylingualism and metrolingualism, that is clearly distinct from the guiding concept of multilingualism. The concept relativizes rigid connections between language, people and territory on the one hand, whilst also calling into question the notion of languages as closed and clearly distinguishable units. It is predicated upon “dynamic bilingualism”, whereby the languages involved each represent their own respective system. Trans-lingualism thus brings a new aspect of linguistic reflexion into play. Thus understood, translingualism will be explicated in relation to Katja Petrowskaja’s novel. The German author of Ukrainian extraction was awarded the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Prize in 2014 for her debut work “Maybe Esther” in which she describes, in a language that is foreign to her, the story of her family during the World War II, in the course of which a number of her Jewish relatives were murdered. For the purposes of the current paper, the prime interest is not the content of this quite typical 20th century story, but its linguistic conception. Petrowskaja is a professional philologist who graduated from the University of Tartu and its renowned semiotic school led by Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij. Her text is deliberately constructed according to semiotic principles and can be read as a literary demonstration of Lotman and Uspenskij’s academic concepts. Behind the linguistic peculiarities, a hidden semiotic approach to language is evident, which regards language as a system of symbols. Translingualism in Petrowskaja’s writing, which purports to transcend linguistic boundaries by mixing languages and crossing over associatively from one language to the other, does not in fact dissolve linguistic boundaries. Rather, it activated reflexive processes across such boundaries. In the light of Lotman’s work on culture and cultural memory, Petrowskaja’s novel appears not only as a linguistic experiment but also, above all, as an experiment in engaging with diverse cultural codes. The translingual aspect illustrates the reflexion across apparently different and historically unconnected languages and cultures. On the other hand, the concept also contains a conscious denial of power structure associated with to the monolingualism of a national language.