ABSTRACT
This chapter was first read at the 2015 American Comparative Literature Association’s symposium as part of the ‘Writing between worlds: Multilingualism as a Creative Force’ panel. For the self-proclaimed étudiant de langues schizophrénique Louis Wolfson, multilingualism is not only a creative force but also and primarily a necessary force. Wolfson, who cannot bear to hear or read his mother tongue, developed a complex system of immediate translation by homophony of all English words, into a combination of French, German, Russian and Hebrew. The extraordinary account of his linguistic gymnastics and survival techniques is written in French, and published under the title Le Schizo et les Langues ou la Phonétique chez le Psychotique. Deemed untranslatable by many and never translated to this date, the book is to some extent already a work of translation, comparable to what Jacques Derrida in Le monolinguisme de l’autre calls an ‘absolute translation,’ from a source language which does not exist – or in Wolfson’s case has ceased to exist – to a new destination language of his own. This chapter shows how Wolfson’s thorough descriptions of his bodily sensations of excess contribute to the erasure and reforming of the author’s speaking body in his newly adopted language.
