One of George Steiner's many legacies is the concept of "extraterritoriality", coined to analyze the work of those writers whose literary language is not the mother tongue or who lack homeland as a result of exile, uprooting or multilingualism. Thus, in the central essay of his book Extraterritorial: essays on literature and the linguistic revolution (1971), Steiner reflected on the works of Samuel Beckett - who was born in English and wrote in French - Vladimir Nabokov - who was born in Russian and he wrote in English— and Jorge Luis Borges, who was born in Spanish and wrote in Spanish but through English. As it is not about discussing Steiner, but about being inspired by Steiner, we could settle this issue by comparing Borges's English education with the Latin education of Michel de Montaigne, who would also have been extraterritorial for the same reasons.
Actually, this wonderful essay by Steiner should help us to think if in Spanish we have extraterritorial authors who have chosen our language as a literary language, just as Polish Conrad chose English or Czech Kundera French. And the case is that the examples abound, starting with authors such as the German Máximo José Kahn, the Frenchman Max Aub and the Romanian Vintilă Horia, not to mention the Swiss Alejo Carpentier, the Italian Alejandro Rossi or the Frenchman Paul Groussac.
And wouldn't writers born in immigrant families who speak Spanish in society and a different language inside the home also be extraterritorial? I think of the extraterritorial infances of Roberto Arlt, Juan Gelman, Ernesto Sabato, José María Arguedas, José Watanabe or Alejandra Pizarnik, who built their literary identity while enriching the Spanish language. In fact, the number of authors who choose the language of Borges and Cervantes to write their poems, essays and narrations has not stopped growing, because in Spanish they write the Romanian Ioana Gruia, the Polish Aleksandra Lun, the American Lorraine Ladish, the Japanese Anna Kazumi Stahl, Italian Fabio Morábito, Hungarian Kalman Barsy, Czech Mirko Lauer, Moroccan Mohamed El Gheryb, Chinese Siu Kam Wen and French Elena Poniatowska, 2013 Cervantes Award.
The author of La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) is not the only one awarded with Cervantes within my hurried inventory of extraterritorial writers in Spanish, although at this point it would be convenient to emphasize that the Spanish language is a wonderful language of welcome for speakers from all over the world. Latin America, for example, has received so many families of Asian, African and European origin that that is why nobody is surprised that some of the great names of contemporary Latin American literature have “extraterritorial” marching, such as Samanta Schweblin, Valeria Luiselli, Liliana Colanzi, Andrea Jeftanovic, Lina Meruane, Andrés Neuman, Jorge Volpi, Carlos Yushimito, Maximiliano Matayoshi, Eduardo Halfon or Rodrigo Hasbún.
However, the most moving and interesting extraterritorial phenomenon is currently starring JM Coetzee, whose last work - Seven moral tales (2018) - was not only first published in Spanish, but the South African Nobel Prize has undertaken a resounding literary and linguistic immersion in Chile and Argentina.
Thanks to Steiner, Spanish speakers are able to read authors of our language and taste - like an epiphany - Babel's remote echo.