ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with three interlinked metaphorical domains of literary translingualism: the body metaphors of the tongue and the eye, the metaphors of sexual promiscuity, bigamy, bisexualism and incest, and the spatial metaphors of liminality, the edge, the archipelago, the coral, and the ocean. These metaphors question monolinguistic assumptions based on an ontological conception of language and the notions of mother tongue and national language, but, at the same time, reconfirm their existence. Visual and acoustic metaphors represent a shift from an ontological to an epistemological perspective that puts the translingual writer and his/her manifold linguistic resources at the center.
