Speaking in Tongues
  • Published: 27 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787305137
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

Speaking in Tongues

Formats & editions
Hardback
27 May 2025
EBook
22 May 2025
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A book about how language shapes us, from the Nobel and Booker-prizewinning author and his Spanish translator,

This is a book about languages, what languages can and what they cannot do.

In this dialogue between a Nobel Laureate and a leading translator, provocative ideas emerge about the evolution of language and the challenge of translation.

Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe: which one is true, or are both false? Speaking in Tongues - taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel-Laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimópulos - explores questions that have constantly plagued writers and translators, now more than ever. Among them:


  • How can a translator liberate meanings imprisoned in the language of a text?
  • Why is the masculine form dominant in gendered languages while the feminine is treated as a deviation?
  • How should we counter the spread of monolingualism?
  • Should a translator censor racist or misogynistic language?
  • Does mathematics tell the truth about everything?
In the tradition of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay 'The Task of the Translator', Speaking in Tongues emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.
  • Published: 27 May 2025
  • ISBN: 9781787305137
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

J. M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee's work includes Waiting For the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

Also by J. M. Coetzee

Elizabeth Costello
The Good Story
Here and Now
The Childhood of Jesus
Waiting for the Barbarians
In the Heart of the Country
Stranger Shores
See all

Praise for Speaking in Tongues

Anything J.M. Coetzee writes deserves our full attention

Evening Standard, on The Death of Jesus

One of the world's greatest novelists

Financial Times

So enjoyable and stimulating, and it made me probe more deeply, or differently, my own relationship with the languages I grew up speaking

Sunjeev Sahota, Booker-shortlisted author of THE CHINA ROOM

Translation is treated here not as a mechanical process but a creative act fraught with philosophical complications...stimulating and occasionally surprising

Wall Street Journal

Thought-provoking

4Columns

Cerebral, far-reaching . . . Coetzee and Dimópulos engage comfortably and earnestly, imbuing the erudite conversation with a natural rhythm . . . littered with pearls of insight . . . a rewarding rumination on translation, language, and power

Publishers Weekly

You could read this book in an hour. You could think about it for the rest of your life

Kirkus Reviews

[Speaking in Tongues] enhance[s] our appreciation of what’s actually involved in turning one language into another… a spry exchange… in absorbing detail

Observer

A mithril-blend of scholarship and artistry that will transform your ideas of language, translation, identity and possibly the universe.

Junot Diaz

What happens when we consider translation not as a solitary act of perception but as a negotiation —one shaped by institutional constraints imposed from without or even by unequal relationships of global power? Speaking in Tongues, a dialogue between J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, repeatedly shifts the focus from individual choices to the structural forces that shape translation.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Review of Books 
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