2021-06-15
33 分钟Do you remember the first time you used “Google” as a verb? Or a time before there were “selfies”? Language is constantly evolving, and as a result provides limitless opportunities to change how we see the world. Juli Delgado Lopera is the author of the acclaimed novel “Fiebre Tropical” (Feminist Press 2020), which was recently awarded the LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. A Colombian now living in the U.S., Juli breaks down boundaries of English and Spanish in their work by de-stabilizing our notions of language, gender, and geography. In today’s episode, they explain the benefits of bending the rigid structures that language upholds and suggest exercises that can help us appreciate and find joy in words. “Fiebre Tropical” was a finalist of the 2020 Kirkus Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Juli is also the author of “¡Cuéntamelo!” (Aunt Lute 2017), an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in places such as Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, The White Review, LALT, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag. They are the former executive director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco.
TED audio collective.
I am Chris Duffy, and this is how to be a better human.
So on today's episode, we're going to be talking about communicating across and between languages.
I love learning languages.
It's one of my favorite things.
One of my favorite parts about learning a new language is getting to know the idioms and the proverbs.
They make me so happy.
For example, in Senegalese, wolof, if you want to say good things, take time.
You say in danka, danka, moijap, golo chin nyai, which literally means slowly, slowly, one catches the monkey in the forest.
Or in Swedish, if they want to say that someone is born wealthy, instead of saying he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, they say he slid in on a shrimp sandwich.
And oh, my God, I love that.
That is absolutely, absolutely incredible imagery and a dream way of entering a room.
And look, my point here is less about shellfish based transportation methods and more about the idea that there are almost limitless potentials to language.
And it can be so joyful to experiment and creatively play around with how we describe the world around us, the way that we use language.
It can change the way that we understand ourselves.
And by breaking down some of these rigid structures that we've put up around language, we can find freedom and liberation.
Todays guest is an author and speaker who beautifully breaks down boundaries in their work and challenges their readers to think more deeply about language, gender, and location.
Julie Delgado Lopera just won the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian fiction for their fantastic novel Fiebre tropical, which is written in both English and Spanish.
And here is Julie at TEDx Soma talking about the way that they see language and the reason they reject the idea of writing work only in English or only in Spanish.
We tend to think of language, in this case English, as a closed circle where all of us english speakers exist.