On Saturday I was on a panel at the Association for Hispania Studies' annual conference, held at Doshisha U in Kyoto. The subject of the panel was multilingualism and literature, for which Tadashi Wakashima (translator of Nabokov's and Cabrera Infante's works in English) and myself.
Prof. Wakashima was a very nice guy exuding with intelligence. He has his B.A. in math and he then turned to the study of American lit after reading Richard Wright's Native Son. He's never been to the mainland US. AWESOME. His talk, largely autobiographical, was so interesting and full of fun. I talked on Edouard Glissant's second novel (1964), Le quatrieme siecle. There were various points that I didn't understand, but I put together ideas around the themes of landscape, naming, and language (including multilingualism).
Fumihiko Takemura (translator of Octavio Paz, among others) and Takaatsu Yanagihara (a specialist of Alejo Carpentier) joined us as commentators. The session was chaired by Kenji Matsumoto, and the conference was organized by Kenji Inamoto. My thanks to all.
