Trans-‐lingual Writing and Self-‐translation: The Space Among ...

languages and to which we lay claim and by which are constituted as individuals. These could
be i.e. the language and the inherent ideologies of our profession, of our age group, of the
times, of the nation and the social class we belong to, of the geographical region and family.
Polyphony refers to the collective quality of an individual utterance, to the capacity of one’s
own utterance to embody someone else's utterance, which thereby and therefore creates a
dialogic relationship between two voices:
The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain
independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in
homophony. If one is to talk about individual will, then it is precisely in
polyphony that a combination of several individual wills takes place, that the
boundaries of the individual will can be in principle indeed. One could put it
this way: the artistic will of polyphony is a will to combine many wills, a will to
the event.
The Novel
Upstream is a dark comedy, a parody on actions movies and crime fiction. It is set in the
present time and in the somewhere in the Balkans along the Danube river. The geographical
area is referred to by using ancient Roman (mostly) and pre-­‐Slavic toponyms though. I use
this device for the English-­‐speaking world perceives Eastern Europe and the Eastern
Europeans as remote, somewhat alien if not outright barbaric:
It has become common to use the term Balkan as a synonym for
backwardness and bigotry. The most widely read and influential account of
the region written during the 1990s portrays it as a repository of sadism and
violence, haunted by the ‘ghosts’ of implacable enmity.
Nation, 2003.
While the turmoil of the Nineties forged new perceptions of individual Balkan
nationalities, these frequently grew out of the archetypal representations of
the region which were first established in the 19th century and then
transmitted and transformed by successive generations of writers.
Stereotypes derived from popular literature remain common currency in
many discussions of the Balkans. While few political commentators cite Rider
Haggard in accounts of contemporary Africa, Hope’s Ruritania or Stoker’s
Transylvania – two of the most powerful products in the history of
entertainment in our era – are regularly invoked in assessments of present-­day
Balkan crises.
Goldsworthy, 1998.
Therefore, setting this story in the context of modern Eastern Europe would carry a
significant ideological charge and compromise the reading of the text (English version at
least) reducing its universality and relevance as per Bakhtin’s (1981) assertion that “The
‘formal markers of language’ (manners and styles) in a novel are symbols of sets of social
beliefs,” and that “the influence of the century-­‐old hidden linguistic dogmatism on human
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