ABSTRACT
A writer who travels between languages is what George Steiner, who moves amongst English, French, and German, calls "extraterritorial". Studying the Ndembu of Zambia, Turner found three phases defining their initiation rituals: "separation, margin (or limen), and aggregation. Of course, languages and texts do not occupy physical space, except symbolically, but that symbolism is a commonplace in discussions of translingual experience. And, since there is no place like home, many translinguals refer to their language of choice as home. "Betwixt and Between" is the way Turner characterizes initiates in the liminal phase, and Marie Arana uses the same phrase to describe her own divided loyalties to the United States and Peru, English and Spanish. When the rhetoric about translingualism combines the connotations of peril and place, it often ends up invoking the image of no man's land, the term applied in the First World War to the area between the trenches of opposing armies that was not safe for anyone.
