As Kutzinski maps the trajectory of Hughes’s writings across Europe and the Americas, we see the remarkable extent to which the translations of his poetry were in conversation with the work of other modernist writers. Kutzinski spotlights cities whose role as meeting places for modernists from all over the world has yet to be fully explored: Madrid, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and of course Harlem. The result is a fresh look at Hughes, not as a solitary author who wrote in a single language, but as an international figure at the heart of a global intellectual and artistic formation.
Vera M. Kutzinski is The Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Alexander von Humboldt in English (HiE) Project at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright and Nicolás Guillén and Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism.