Writing the Sea, the Sea Is Writing: Meersprachigkeit in the Translingual Poetry of Uljana Wolf

This chapter will investigate how Uljana Wolf’s writing draws on seascapes to position transformative fluidity as essential to translingual poetry. Its sections are built around Wolf’s wordplay on the German homophones Meer (sea) and mehr (multi-, more), whose echoes resound in Mehrsprachigkeit (multilingualism) and Meersprachigkeit (sea-lingualism). The goal is to unite a reading of her island poem “Babeltrack”, her translation of Erín Moure’s rewriting of Galician troubadour poetry O Cadoiro, and the lyric intervention “CAMP CORINTH, MEDEAted” under three aspects of the translingual writing of the sea: coming into language, poetry as a perpetual mode of becoming and being in translation, and the permeability of words and borders. In doing so, the intention of this chapter is to track something ontologically, aesthetically, and politically peculiar in her sea poetry that challenges accepted patterns of language, identity, nationhood, and power.