Alphabet Soup: The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva as Recorded by Their Father by Eugene Ostashevsky

“A marvelous book! Language is itself a poet: this is something that children know (as do some poets).“ – Yoko Tawada, author of Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue.

Alphabet Soup collects the sayings of two multilingual girls as written down by their poet father. As their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York to Berlin, the girls communicate in a witty and colourful language of their own, effortlessly mixing words of different origin. Does who we are determine the way we speak – or is it the other way around? Alphabet Soup shows us the girls’ language as it changes, letting us witness their metamorphoses from toddlers to teenagers. 

With an essay and poems by the author. 

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Paperback