Foreign Words
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Much of Alexakis’s fiction, though not strictly autobiographical, employs elements of his life to explore the relationship between identity and language, memory and the self, and exile, loss, love, and death. After the death of his father in 1995, he began learning Sango, the main language of the Central African Republic.From this autobiographical “fact” emerges a stunning work of imagination, Les mots étrangers, whose narrator also undertakes to learn Sango on the death of his father.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Alyson
Waters
Alyson Waters has translated books by Vassilis Alexakis, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Réda Bensmaia, Albert Cossery, and Tzvetan Todorov. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund Grand, a residency grant from the Centre national du livre, and was twice a translator in residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyon, France. She teaches literary translation in the French Department of Yale University, is the managing editor of Yale French Studies, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Alyson Waters has translated books by Vassilis Alexakis, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Réda Bensmaia, Albert Cossery, and Tzvetan Todorov. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund Grand, a residency grant from the Centre national du livre, and was twice a translator in residence at the Villa Gillet in Lyon, France. She teaches literary translation in the French Department of Yale University, is the managing editor of Yale French Studies, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Words, as a way of expression of our thoughts and feelings, were and are the traditional way of the peoples’ communication, regardless of the different culture and day-to-day life.