In this episode, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics at SOAS University of London, speaks with University of Puerto Rico professor Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera about the intersections of writing, travel, bilingualism, translation, defamiliarization, and the power of language. Drawing on Gould’s Strangers: Stories (Serving House Books, 2025), they examine how language shapes identity, perception, and the experience of crossing borders.

Quotes, books, places, and scholars mentioned in this conversation:

• • • • • • • Gabriel García Márquez, Doce cuentos peregrinos.

            • Misremembering Chekhov

            • Roberto Bolaño, Cuentos completos.

            • “Mi patria son mis hijos.” -Roberto Bolaño

            • Writing as a defamiliarization process

            • “Writing as a way to see things differently.”  -Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • How languages influence experience

            • Limitations to writing in English

            • A translation mindset

            • Distance as a creative resource

            • “The moment when you switch from the formal to the informal [in languages that have that distinction]. Those are moments I remember.” -Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • “The meanings that words describe that are nonlinguistic.” -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera

            • “Words no one else knew or could understand, even if they had been told their meanings” (Strangers 54).

            • “Words as beloved objects, heirlooms that are passed through generations” -Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • “Words that do not map onto single meanings It’s more like the kind of the constellation of relationships and associations that they have, and that really can’t be rendered outside of its own context.” -Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • “Inhabiting the language of other people, you don’t become them, but your self changes” -Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • “[One can] live within the associations the word has.” -Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • Cityscapes, Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • William Carlos Williams

            • Gloria Anzaldúa

            • Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus, Rebecca Ruth Gould

            • “The legacy of literary experience asks us to go beyond the text.” -Rebecca Ruth Gould