The Struggles of the Multilingual Subject and His Identity Search in Literature: Ilan Stavans’s On Borrowed Words—A Memoir of Language

Abstract

This article focuses on the autobiography On Borrowed Words. A Memoir of Language (Penguin Books, New York, 2001) by Stavans. Spanish, English, Yiddish and Hebrew are the languages present in this memoir about multiple transnational displacements. The identity of the autobiographical subject depends on language as can be observed in the multiple metalinguistic references in which the author reflects upon the linguistic tensions both thematically and affectively. Stavans uses different strategies to reflect this multilingual reality while at the same time he problematizes the dichotomy of familiar versus foreign, and home versus abroad. The complex relation between language and space leads to feelings of alienation and uprooting. The desire to belong to a place runs parallel with the desire to make ‘borrowed words’ his own. The second part of the article then focuses on the numerous intertextual references to other authors. In his struggle to find a place between all these languages, it seems literature will be his compass. In his memoir Stavans doesn’t see himself exactly as a Latino writer, but more as a Diaspora Jew, which apparently determines his search for a place of his own in literature and defines his identity as a writer.