Document Type
Essays, Studies, and Works
Abstract
I am an Iowan, a child of the prairie, an American, and so as the joke goes obviously I'm a monoglot. One might ask, "Why the fascination with languages you clearly don't speak, and have no ambition of learning?" The truth is I don't know. It just is.
My family didn't start out speaking English. They were mostly farmers and small business owners who wrested the prairie into productive farmland who lost their polyglottism during WWII. In the same way Arab-Americans seem to always be suspect today, Germans, Norwegians, and Swiss, made it their business to find ways to show patriotism, to blend in, and to keep a low profile in those days. If they had accents, the burden to prove social validity was on them. Maybe the madness would pass. Maybe it didn't. Maybe it was atmospherics, the times, the geography, or some inescapable hazard immigrants must navigate.
Publication Date
Spring 2006
Journal Title
UNIversitas
Volume
2
Issue
1
First Page
1
Last Page
4
Copyright
©2006 Ron Sandvik
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Sandvik, Ron
(2006)
"Translitic Poems,"
UNIversitas: Journal of Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity: Vol. 2:
No.
1, Article 4.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/universitas/vol2/iss1/4
