“Who am I?” Nigoghos Sarafian asks repeatedly in his seminal 1947 poetic novella The Bois de Vincennes. For Sarafian this basic ontological question was intimately linked to the question of language. Born in Varna during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, Sarafian—like many of his Armenian contemporaries—settled in Paris where he lived as a political and intellectual refugee. He was educated in French schools and explains that when he wrote in Western Armenian as an adult, the language was already foreign to him. Sarafian’s writing is important in part because it attempts to incorporate the notion of exile into language itself. As a third generation descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors, I was fascinated by Sarafian’s fate. Born in New York City, I attended French school, learned English after French, and Armenian after nine other languages. My project attempts to examine the role that language plays in identity. By randomly projecting excerpts of The Bois de Vincennes in the original Western Armenian and in English (translation mine), I attempt ask whether the questions that faced an exiled Armenian diasporan in the late 1940’s are still relevant to the increasingly transglobal modern world of multi-linguistic and polyphonous transnations. I’d also like to suggest that language perhaps erects as many borders as it destroys, that it can be intensely revelatory but isolating as well. Sarafian after all was doubly invisible—to other Armenians who no longer read their own language and to the world-at-large, which remains largely ignorant to this day of Armenian literature. What Babel has unleashed can perhaps never be put back together again. But as technology accelerates and pushes us towards either a future of peace or one of destruction, we should understand the role that language plays in creating and undermining identity.