Nabokov, Canetti e Djebar: tre diversi casi di translinguismo letterario

This essay aims to trace guidelines within the broad phenomenon of literary translinguism. In recent years the question increasingly became the object of investigation by critics. One of the most interesting studies on the subject is The Translingual Imagination (2000) by the American comparatist Steven G. Kellman. He reflected on the innumerable reasons that drive an author to compose narratives in a language different from his own and noted how this phenomenon occurred massively in the transition from the first to the second half of the last century. Here – after a generic introduction – I have decided to focus on three specific authors: Vladimir Nabokov, a bilingual writer, who has been able to fit skilfully into two distinct literary traditions (the Russian and the Anglo-American one); Elias Canetti who lived a life under the banner of multiculturalism, learning various languages, but decided to use only German for his own works (Kellman spoke in this case of monolingual translinguism); and finally the case of Assia Djebar, Algerian writer, who made use of the colonizer’s language, a question that gives us the opportunity to deal with concepts of such as the Deleuzian «minor literature».