This presentation brings together the vocabulary of translation and performance studies to examine the transcultural aesthetics of literary works that transcribe linguistic mixtures into polyglot literary experiments. Multilingual writers (such as Christine Brooke-Rose or Susana Chávez-Silverman) switch among several languages within one text or blend them into syncretic linguistic forms even when these experiments defy the “common sense” and literary aesthetic standards and earn their writings the dismissive name of macaronics.

Beginning with the observation that the etymology of translation in the Sanskrit word “anuvad”– “telling in turn”– moves us away from the idea of “carrying across” towards an understanding of translation as an act of retelling which creates new meaning in its every staging, I read multilingual experiments as a literary performance of transcultural identities. If performance is defined as reiterated or “twice-behaved” behavior (Richard Schechner), then texts that play with repetition of foreign languages perform both the transnational identity of their authors and the very act of translation. As an ultimate form of foreignization (Lawrence Venuti), such texts make the workings of translation visible in order to resist the monolingual and mono-national literary canons, positing transcultural aesthetics in their stead.