Poetry Anthologists as Translingual Mediators: The Example of Adolphe van Bever's Les poetes du terroir

Abstract

This article considers Adolphe van Bever's poetry anthology Les poètes du terroir to demonstrate the importance of anthologists as cultural mediators, curators of the literary canon, and key to ensuring its constant revision and renewal. By adopting a hierarchy-deprived translingual-writing approach, it illustrates how van Bever's anthology offers an exciting platform for thinking back to nineteenth-century poetry by authors from areas where regional languages had been suppressed by the imposition of the standard national language. This article ultimately shows that translingualism is a useful prism only if it rejects linguistic prejudices to consider all languages, including regional ones, as proper languages.