Melinda Nadj Abonji’s Prose from a Transcultural Perspective

This paper explores the ways in which transculturality manifests in the prose of Melinda Nadj Abonji. Besides Tauben fliegen auf [Fly Away, Pigeon] (2010), her well known and highly acclaimed novel translated into several languages, it also looks at her latest novel, Schildkrötensoldat [Tortoise Soldier] (2017). It is concerned with articulations of the experience of transculturality, closely related to the experience of territorial displacement. Tauben fliegen auf describes the life of a family of migrant workers in Switzerland whose background sets them apart from the milieu in which they live. Variations on national identity take on a key role. In the novel Schildkrötensoldat, a young man of modest intellectual abilities struggles to find his identity in the face of the threat of the Yugoslav Wars. In the language of her novels, Melinda Nadj Abonji recreates the transcultural interrelationships. Besides the sensitivity to metalinguistic issues, her novels make existence in a multicultural milieu tangible by incorporating multilingual text units. Multilingualism, however, not only characterizes the speech of the characters but also defines the discursive position of the narrator, which is the most distinctive and salient poetic feature of her prose. The possibilities of translating multilingual texts are also discussed in this paper.¹