Polyphonic Arrangements, Rhythmic Reading: Swiss and Cypriot Multilingual Journals

Both multilingual states negotiating their places among the alliances of power that produce and maintain European borders (EU, NATO, Schengen), Cyprus and Switzerland stand at the “edge and center” of Europe yet are rarely brought into conversation. Our article takes up the multilingual Cypriot literary and arts journal Cadences (2004–2020) and the Swiss journal Zwischen den Zeilen (1992–2011), to argue that multilingual journals and their translation practices attune readers to vernacular rhythms, navigating between and beyond the national narratives and aesthetic paradigms that produce dualisms of belonging and exclusion. By looking at spaces that have long been multilingual, yet in which national languages are not always experienced together in the day-to-day lives of many, we read these multilingual journals – a form marked by edges, fractures, and contact zones – as “sites of orchestrated multilingualism,” to borrow from Annemari de Silva, where the work of editors brings into generative contact various languages and genres that reimagine state-imposed linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. We argue that bringing these multilingual journals into conversation allows us to move towards a broader methodology we term “rhythmic reading.”