L2 Journal: An electronic refereed journal for foreign and second language educators

It is my great pleasure to introduce the two guest editors of this fourth Special Issue of L2 Journal Steven G. Kellman and Natasha Lvovich. I had known Steven’s work through his two path-breaking books on writers who write in multiple languages or in a language that is not their own: The Translingual Imagination (2000) and Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003). I knew Natasha’s beautiful autobiographical memoir The Multilingual Self (1997) in which she takes the reader through her experiences learning French, Italian, and English, and her experiences with synesthesia, i.e., seeing the sounds of her various languages in colored images of the mind. After the publication of my Multilingual Subject (2009), Natasha approached me with a paper on synesthesia that we then published in L2 Journal volume 4 issue 2 (2012). When in Fall 2013, she and Steven then offered to coordinate a special issue of the journal on Literary Translingualism: Multilingual Identity and Creativity, we were honored and delighted.

This issue, put together with the passion and the love for languages that characterize the work of the two guest editors, offers a unique collection of research papers, personal testimonies, review articles, and creative pieces as well as a rich bibliography on the topic of literary translingualism. Together they give us a glimpse of the multifaceted artistic productions of translingual poets, novelists, and playwrights, and their emotional and ideological resonances. For applied linguists, this special issue should be of particular relevance, as it brings together literary and linguistic perspectives on a multilingual literacy that has been studied up to now mainly on non-literary texts. By adding to the sensibility of the multilingual subject also the poetic and literary sensibility, the authors presented here add a humanistic dimension to the field of Applied Linguistics - a field that has been seen up to now as located mainly in the social sciences.