Translingualism, Translation and Caribbean Poetry: Mother Tongue Has Crossed the Ocean

Hilda de Windt Ayoubi was born and raised in Curaçao. She was a secondary school teacher and a lecturer at the University of Curaçao. She writes in Dutch, French, English, Papiamento and Spanish. Her works include several translations, and (language-related) poetry books, Gedicht, illustrated with her paintings (2018), and the bilingual book Geef me je Taal (2019). For her Papiamento translation of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (2014), she was awarded the Kahlil Gibran Chair at the University of Maryland. In 2019, she received UNESCO’s Certificate of Merit for her work on Papiamento. Pieter C. Muysken († 2021) was born in Bolivia but grew up in the Netherlands. He was a Professor of Linguistics at the universities of Amsterdam, Leiden, Nijmegen, and Stellenbosch, South Africa. As the winner of the Bernhard Prize, Prix des Ambassadeurs, the Spinoza Prize, and many other awards, he is considered one of the greatest, most diverse linguists of the time. He has over 230 publications to his name and his life-long research on Ecuadorian Quechua culminated in the book El kichwa ecuatoriano: Orígenes, riqueza, contactos (2019).