AustLit

'Utilizando el género epistolar, una carta a mi madre, reflexiono sobre mi nueva vida e identidad como emigrante en Australia explorando mis percepciones sobre la diferencia cultural y lingüística. Lejos de mis hijas y nietos en México, en esta carta, tardíamente escrita, relato mis recuerdos, nostalgias y vivencias en el nuevo ambiente, y sobre todo, hablo de mis dificultades para manejar emocionalmente mi miedo a la ausencia en los momentos importantes del ciclo de vida, la enfermedad y la muerte.' -- Author's abstract

[Translation: Utilising the epistolary genre, in a letter to my mother I reflect on my new life and identity as a migrant in Australia, relating my perceptions of the cultural and linguistic differences. Far from my children and grandchildren, in this letter, written too late, I relate my memories and experiences in a new environment. Above all I speak of the difficulties of managing the fear I have of being absent during the most important moments in the cycle of life, illness and death.]

Written by Didier Coste, a French essayist, translator and academic who worked for some years in Australia, Days in Sydney is a unique bilingual novel. Instead of the accepted custom of the original text printed on the opposite page of its translation Days in Sydney contains no translation. It alternates French and English in a seamless fashion that is the antithesis of the conventions of bilingual texts, resulting in a truly heteroglossic text, elliptical in its construction as it meanders between two languages and two main characters. In the publication announcement Didier Coste stated that this unusual book was the result of an 'necessite esthetique et une certaine idee de la bi-culture' aimed at 'le petit cercle des bilingues d'Australie'. Alongside his creative output Coste has published scholarly works since the late 1980s up to 2004. In English. By examining the principles and practice of heteroglossia and by drawing on one of Coste's recent academic article[s], this paper explores the twin notions of 'nécessité esthétique', and 'bi-cultural' readership to account for the (not so global) space between two languages and cultures Days in Sydney occupies. [Abstract from Portal]