Gestes Transculturels, Interlinguistiques et Écosystémiques De Quelques Romanciers Dits Bilingues: Milan Kundera, Vassilis Alexakis, Velibor Čolić et Rachid Mimouni

This article is an invitation to an ecosystem-type meditation on a model, if not a particular one, at least quantitatively a minority of literary creation: one where writing is based on/depends on/refers to more than one language. This fact, both linguistic and intrinsically literary, circumscribes its societal, cultural and heuristic specificity around a universe that could be called bilingual literature (or “bi-language”). The author focuses on writers (novelists) who: i) write in one language, firstly, then undertakes, secondly, to write in another language, and never return to the first language (Milan Kundera); ii) write in one of the two languages, then translate themselves into the other language (Vassilis Alexakis); iii) write in a single language, while allowing themselves to be strongly influenced by another language-culture (Rachid Mimouni); iv) “lately” discover another language, begin a literary work in that language, then (re)start writing also in the initial writer’s language, without ever translating themselves (Velibor Čolić), etc. A single denominator is common to all: a French-speaking mental and verbal gesture subject to a vision of the world that cannot be reduced to the singular, original in its complexity and complementarity.