The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas

Vera M. Kutzinski

tet 2012 · Cornell University Press

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The poet Langston Hughes was a tireless world traveler and a prolific translator, editor, and marketer. Translations of his own writings traveled even more widely than he did, earning him adulation throughout Europe, Asia, and especially the Americas. In The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Vera Kutzinski contends that, for writers who are part of the African diaspora, translation is more than just a literary practice: it is a fact of life and a way of thinking. Focusing on Hughes’s autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his own translations, and the political lyrics that brought him to the attention of the infamous McCarthy Committee, she shows that translating and being translated—and often mistranslated—are as vital to Hughes’s own poetics as they are to understanding the historical network of cultural relations known as literary modernism.

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.

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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.