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December 25, 2024

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By Joe Bruin

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Welcome to the Department of

European Languages & Transcultural Studies

The Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies is a new and innovative program that was established in 2020 and that brings together the former departments of French and Francophone Studies, Germanic Languages, Italian, and Scandinavian. The term “transcultural” in our name emphasizes our shared European roots, and our expanded focus on the perspectives of filmmakers, writers, and theorists from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America, and elsewhere, allows for a more pointed, rigorous, and comprehensive understanding of history and more accurate contextualization of the “European” experience in the world.

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“Bien sûr, ce n’est pas la Seine, / Ce n’est pas le bois de Vincennes, / Mais c’est bien joli tout de même, / A Göttingen, à Göttingen…”

Of course, it is not the Seine, / Nor the woods of Vincennes, / But it is lovely all the same, / In Göttingen, in Göttingen…

Barbara, Göttingen

“mein Körper kalt wie קפה בספל”

My body is as cold as coffee left in a cup.

Jehuda Amichai, fragment 42, 1453

“TRANSLATION […] An important word as it creates exchanges between the subconscious, emotions, rationality and cultures. / E.g., here you should feel the sensation of the sun and soft breeze touching gently your face translated through these few words.”

Laure Prouvost, Legsicon

“quella lingua- per esprimere quanto mi era caro- nel mondo di ciò che siamo, non esiste.”

That language—the one needed to express how dear it was to me—does not exist in the world of what we are.

Anna Maria Ortese, Il porto di Toledo. Ricordi della vita irreale

“I couldn’t speak a word that was said / When hearing the language / I was so inclined / To hit a few words in my head / […] But here is the total I picked up to date / Dankeschön Bitteschön / Wiedersehen”

Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle, I Wish I Could Sprechen Sie Deutsch

“Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.”

Thor Heyerdahl, The Kon-Tiki Man

“trans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix.”

Jack Halberstam, Trans*

“Die europäische Welt war meine Welt, nicht weil ich mich zwang, sie zu mögen oder sie zu akzeptieren; sie war von Natur aus meiner Welt. Ich konnte sie nicht mehr entbehren, so wie ich nicht auf meine Gliedmaßen hätte verzichten können.”

The European world was my world, not because I compelled myself to like or accept it, but because it was inherently mine. I could no more live without it than I could without my own limbs.

Frank Walter, Frank Walter: Eine Retrospektive

“Nos autem nunc oportet quam habemus rationem periclitari, cum inquirere intendamus de hiis in quibus nullius auctoritate fulcimur, hoc est de unius eiusdemque a principio ydiomatis variatione secuta.”

But now we must put to the test the reasoning we possess, since we intend to investigate matters in which we are supported by no authority: that is, the variation that has followed from one and the same language from its very beginning.

Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia

“What I do see is a new voice coming out of Africa, speaking of African experience in a world-wide language.”

Chinua Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language”

“Transculturation is a dynamic whereby different cultural matrices impact reciprocally – though not from equal positions – on each other, not to produce a single syncretic culture but rather a heterogeneous ensemble.”

George Yúdice, “We Are Not the World”

“…ce que je préfère c’est ni le doublage ni les sous-titres, c’est une espèce de commentaire dans la langue du pays, […] qui permet aux gens de suivre tout en se rendant compte que c’est un produit étranger…”

…what I prefer is neither dubbing nor subtitles, but a sort of commentary in the language of the country […] that allows people to follow along while still realizing that it’s a foreign product…

Jean-Luc Godard, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma et de la télévision

“Als ich nach Europa kam, hatte ich eine brennende Frage in meiner Reisetasche: Werde ich zu einem anderen Menschen, wenn ich eine andere Sprache spreche?”

When I came to Europe, I carried a burning question in my travel bag: Will I become a different person when I speak another language?

Yoko Tawada, “Schreiben im Netz der Sprachen”

“Si je n’ai pas Paris à portée de la main en ouvrant l’œil, j’ai envie de me rendormir.”

If Paris isn’t within reach when I wake up, I’d rather go back to sleep.

Gaby in Pépé le Moko

“[Transcultural is] a critical perspective that sees cultures as relational webs and acknowledges the transitory, confluential, and mutually transforming nature of cultures.”

Arianna Dagnino, “Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity”

“Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”

Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus

“wenn es ein guter Tag ist, fühle ich mich bereichert und denke, daß ich Glück habe, an drei Kulturen teilhaben zu können, und wenn es ein schlechter Tag ist, fühle ich mich zwischen allen Stühlen sitzend und verstehe gar nichts.”

On a good day I feel enriched and consider myself lucky to belong to three cultures; on a bad day I feel caught between them all and understand nothing whatsoever.

Barbara Honigmann, “Damals, Dann, und Danach”

“Bisogna dunque abolire nella lingua tutto ciò che essa contiene in fatto d’immagini stereotipate, di metafore scolorite, e cioè quasi tutto.”

We must therefore abolish from language everything it contains in the way of stereotyped images and faded metaphors — in other words, almost everything.

F. T. Marinetti, “Il manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista”

“When a German director like E.A. Dupont is based in England, and makes an Anglo-German coproduction simultaneously in English and German (Atlantic, 1929), can it usefully be called a British film?”

Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema”

“Je n’ai qu’une langue, et ce n’est pas la mienne.”

I have only one language; it is not mine.

Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou, La prothèse d’origine

“Calling into question the value and significance of authenticity, heritage, and originality is, of course, basic to transcultural processes themselves.”

Katharina Bieloch and Sharif Bitar, “Batman Goes Transnational”

“Wir also sehen vorweg ‘Kultur’ als Geisteskultur an, und wenn wir mit der amerikanischen Gestaltung des Lebens und den zivilisatorischen Formen in Amerika zu tun haben, dann haben wir eine gewisse Neigung dazu, eben jenes unselige Urteil, ‘die haben ja keine Kultur,’ auszusprechen”

We tend in advance to regard ‘culture’ as intellectual culture; and when we are confronted with the American organization of life and the forms of civilization in America, we have a certain inclination to pronounce that unfortunate judgment: ‘they have no culture.’

Theodor W. Adorno, “Kultur und Culture”