The New Citizenship

Abstract

While dusting off my personal library some weeks ago, I found some long-forgotten books—masterworks of world literature. Those books bear the secret memory of the depth and breadth of the work of translators in Europe’s former eastern bloc, which has been forgotten due to hegemonies within the practices of science and art. In this chapter, I will describe what happens with such treasures during the migration of their owners; and also, what the experiences of the journey, the loss of homeland, coping with the loss of one’s primary language and the loss of such books reveal of the person. This journey might not only be a journey of loss, but also becomes the beginning of a multilingual voyage. The stages of migration are here shown in the initial loss of books (at the beginning of the journey), before coping with the loss of language. In the middle of the journey, the migrants can be observed collecting new books and expressing one’s newfound life through a new language (as a new possibility for multilingual enrichment). The final return (in reality or figuratively in memory) to the old homeland is then shown as rediscovering one’s own identity (both the old and the new one). The dissemination of (formerly forgotten) books might thus help in understanding the dissemination and the new creation of the self in migration.