“The tradition of literati who live and work in more than one language dates back to antiquity, but today we tend to think of 20th-century examples as most prominent: Joseph Conrad emigrating from Polish to English, Samuel Beckett morphing from English to French, Vladimir Nabokov ardently abandoning Russian for “Ada” (and “Lolita”) in English. More recently, Russian-born Andrei Makine, winner of many laurels for his fiction in French, and Ha Jin, the Chinese-born author who won the National Book Award for “Waiting”…