Recorded conversations between the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant and the medievalist Alexandre Leupin, translated by Kate M. Cooper for the Glissant Translation Project. Glissant works through the vocabulary that organises his late writing: identity as something continually remade by exchange with others, creolization as the unpredictable mixing that follows contact between cultures, and a totality that stays open and all-inclusive. Much of the exchange turns on medieval Europe, which Glissant reads as proof that no universal claim ever secured a universal tongue, since learned Latin gave way to vernaculars and the reach of the church bred its own heretics. Leupin presses back, pointing out that Latin survived for centuries as the language of power and theology. From that friction the two build a case for setting the Popol Vuh beside the Aeneid, and for treating poetry as a form of thinking that philosophical prose cannot replace.