Presentation
The title of this symposium is borrowed from that of a fine recent book, D'autres vies que la mienne. Writing in a language other than one's mother tongue is an act fraught with significance. A writer can choose a language other than his or her own, as many poets and novelists have done, from the Middle Ages to the present day; or he or she can be forced to do so. But in many civilizations and eras, intellectual life and literature have had recourse to a foreign or learned language with a kind of natural ease: Greek for the Romans, Chinese for the Japanese, Latin for the medieval West. To write in another language is to tear oneself away from oneself, but it is also to be led to situate oneself more precisely in relation to the questions that arise for every writer, if, as Proust writes, "beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language".
