“Le fransè ke chparl ègzist”: Translanguaging in the Work of Katalin Molnár

Abstract

Abstract The works of Franco-Hungarian Katalin Molnár (1951–) stand in stark contrast to most modern-day translingual writing in France. Inspired by her avant-garde aesthetics and migration experience, Molnár radically defamiliarizes French through Hungarian syntax, phonetic orthography, and visual modalities. This article examines her work through the critical lens of translanguaging—a practice that draws on the speaker’s internal linguistic inventory without differentiating between external, socio-politically defined individual languages (Otheguy et al.). Through translanguaging, Molnár subverts a common translingual practice of thematizing a language-learning path into French. Instead of witnessing her linguistic journey from a safe distance, francophone readers are placed into a language experience of their own, which invites empathy and a change of perspective. Molnár’s visual and linguistic defamiliarization of French moves her texts beyond the dichotomous native/foreign paradigm, inducing readers to participate in the co-creation of a multimodal language that melds the author’s ethical and aesthetic concerns.