Foreign Words

Crossing countries and continents, this narrative follows a son lost for words over the death of his father. Unable to write the phrase "My father is dead" in either his native Greek or his adopted French, he heads for Africa to undertake the learning of Sango. Traveling across both borders and time, he examines his past, his family history, and the colonial and political ties of his homelands. While at first he does not know why learning a new and uncommon language has become vital to him, he comes to discover that the new language enables him to easily write of his father's passing. But as he truly experiences Sangomeets its speakers, travels where it emerged and has struggled to survivehis intimacy with it grows, and he is once again unable to utter the telling phrase. Meditating on language, loss, and the power of words to express or constrain human emotion, this tale of speaking, living, and letting go is filled with delicate suspense, humor, and honesty.

Vassilis Alexakis was born in Athens in 1943 and spent his childhood on the island of Santorini. In 1961 he received a scholarship to study abroad and went to France. He enrolled in journalism school in Lille with the intent of somehow making his living as a writer. In 1964 he returned to Greece to do his military service. Three years later, the coup d'Ttat and the installation of the military regime forced him into exile. He returned to France, this time to Paris.

His first novel, Le sandwich, was written in French and published in 1974. In 1982 he wrote is first novel in Greek, Talgo, and translated it himself into French. His novel La langue maternelle was awarded the prestigious MTdicis Prize; his collection of short stories, Papa was awarded the AcadTmie frantaise Prize for Best Short Story Collection, and his novel Avant was awarded the Albert Camus Prize.

Les mots Ttrangers [Foreign Words] appeared in 2002 and was voted one of the twenty best books in any genre of that year by the editors of the literary magazine Lire. It was short-listed for two major French literary awards, the Renaudaut Prize and the InteralliT Prize.

Much of Alexakis's fiction, though not strictly autobiographical, employs elements of his life to explore the relationship between identity and language, memory and the self, and exile, loss, love, and death. After the death of his father in 1995, he began learning Sango, the main language of the Central African Republic. From this autobiographical "fact" emerges a stunning work of imagination, *Foreign Words*, whose narrator also undertakes to learn Sango on the death of his father.

Alexakis now lives in Paris, Athens, and on the Greek island Tinos. He has also made four films and published a collection of drawings.

About the translator

Alyson Waters's translations include Louis Aragon's Treatise on Style (1991), Tzvetan Todorov's The Morals of History (1995) and, most recently, RTda Bensmana's Experimental Nations, Or: The Invention of the Maghreb (2003). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter. This translation was facilitated by a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.