The article documents the reception of the literary work of Irena Brežná (b. 1950), a Slovak-Swiss writer, journalist, and active feminist who writes in the German language. It focuses on the perception of her work in the Slovak cultural milieu, discussing in particular the translations of her books and analysing the theatrical adaptations of her novels Najlepší zo všetkých svetov ([The best of all worlds] 2009) and Nevďačná cudzinka ([The Thankless Foreigner] 2014, 2016), as well as the dramatization of the text List môjmu čiernemu synovi ([Letter to my black son] 1988). In addition, it analyses the themes that the selected adaptations deal with and the levels of meaning that are implied in them in the context of the current social climate. Central here is the documentary Profesionálna cudzinka ([Professional stranger] 2016) by the director and theatre scholar Anna Grusková, which, through the interconnection of the private, professional and artistic life of I. Brežná paints a complex picture of her personality. Themes of physical and internal (e)migration, otherness, and the relationship to languages come to the fore.
The growing need for community interpreting as a consequence of globalization is reconfiguring the spaces of the interpreting act in which people with different cultural, social, and political-historical backgrounds come together. These places are characterized by Foucaultian liminality and heterotopia. Using the concept of linguistic biography, the sociolinguistic concept of the linguistic repertoire (John J. Gumperz), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the phenomenology of the body, it traces the way these spaces affect bodily and linguistic experiences of community interpreting participants as multilingual asylum seekers in their encounters with monolingual institutions in the novel The Thankless Foreigner by the German-Swiss author Irena Brežná (b. 1950). It also looks at interpreters subjected to the pressures of different existential situations that arise from the nature of these facilities. The article explores linguistic ideologies determining the behaviour of participants in these proceedings and the way language in a literary text expresses or reflects ideas, values or beliefs associated with a particular language or linguistic variant.
The author’s experience of emigration makes visible – in literary works and public speeches – one of the aspects of multilingualism as not only a consequence of migration and globalization, but also of the concept of meta-multilingualism which contributes to expanding of our understanding of linguistic dynamics in literary production. Through selected literary texts and interviews with the Slovak-Swiss author Irena Brežná, the paper outlines the concept of meta-multilingualism and literary multilingualism as one of the characteristics of the “new” world literature. Meta-multilingualism as a generator of literary multilingualism is presented through the definition by Elke Sturm-Trigonakis and through its realisation in the form of linguistic commentary. The paper also takes a look at the reflection of languages in I. Brežná’s writing as one of the frameworks of her work and a part of the literary process. At the same time, it looks at the concept of monolingualism as an artificial construct and multilingualism as a natural social condition as outlined in the theory of Yasemina Yildiz and Till Dembeck. In the analysis of the internal plane of the text, the article relies on the concept of manifest, latent, and excluded multilingualism, systematically elaborated by Natalia Blum-Barth, who, like Immacolata Amode, sees multilingualism as intra-textual.
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