Abstract
Against the backdrop of the national and colonial era and the rise of the monolingual national literature, this article explores Samir Naqqash’s literary work as a case study of multilingual writing in a monolingual literary reality, where there is a sharp gap between the language of the text and the expectations of the readership and its language. Through an exploration of Naqqash’s literary work, the article focuses on questions of multilingualism, translation, and literature along the borderlands of the modern Hebrew and Arabic languages and literatures. It examines the ways in which Naqqash’s work defies and resists the dominant nationalistic and monolingual trend in both Arabic and Hebrew literature and represents a unique and subversive poetic and linguistic model that blends spoken and literary languages, transcending the religious and national divide while simultaneously intersecting the different literary traditions from a wide geographical and cultural context, facing both East and West.