75: Can Literature Keep an Indigenous Language Alive? – A Conversation with William Rose

William Wallace Rose is a writer, poet, actor, traveler, printmaker, educator, and translator. He’s taught drama in Switzerland, creative writing in the US, and English as a foreign language in the Czech Republic, and his work has been supported by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He now lives in France, where he’s immersed in the ancient regional language Occitan. In this episode, we discuss the current state of the language, its music, and its literature, contemporary as well as medieval, and William reads an excerpt from his English translation of a short story in Occitan, a comic crime drama by Florian Vernet.