UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles
Lost and Found in Black Translation: Langston Hughes's Translations of French- and
Spanish-Language Poetry, his Hispanic and Francophone Translators, and the Fashioning
of Radical Black Subjectivities
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in Comparative Literature
by
Ryan James Kernan
2007
The dissertation of Ryan James Kernan is approved
__________________________________________
Michael Henry Heim
______________________________________________
Michelle Clayton
__________________________________________
Richard Yarborough, Committee Co-Chair
_____________________________________________
Efraín Kristal, Committee Co-Chair
University of California, Los Angeles
2007
ii
To Late Night TFC,
In the hope that all of you are still alive…
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
p. 1
Chapter 1: Reborn in Translation: Inter-American Dialogue, Complementary
Conversation, and Locating Langston Hughes in
Leftist Latin America
p. 46
Chapter 2: Radical (Re)Actions: Mayakovsky, Aragon, Assimilation,
and Me
p. 156
Chapter 3: Langston and Lorca: Pan-Africanism, Translation, and the Ethics of
the Other
p. 233
Chapter 4: Négritude What ?: Anthologies and the Consecration of
Langston Hughes in the U.S. and the Hispanic and
Francophone Worlds
p. 327
Conclusion:
p. 488
Appendix: A Chronology of Hughes’s Translations into and from Spanish and
French
p. 498
Bibliography
p. 542
iv
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Mall, T. “HALLO AMERICA!.” Nueva Cultura, January, 1936.
p. 46
Figure 2: Fernandez de Castro, José Antonio. “Yo También....” Social,
September, 1928.
p. 59
Figure 3: Hughes, Langston. “I, Too.” Alain Locke’s The New Negro, 1925.
p. 60
Figure 4: Villarutia, Xavier. “Yo También.” Contemporaneos,
July-December, 1931.
p. 61
Figure 5: Borges, Jorge Luis. “Yo También....” Sur, No. 2, 1931.
v
p. 62
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project would not be possible were it not for the financial generosity of the
University of California and the intellectual guidance and support of Efraín Kristal,
Richard Yarborough, Michael Heim, Michelle Clayton, Hanay Geiogamah, Beverly
Robinson, Arnold Rampersad, Michel and Genevieve Fabre, Kelly Austin, Keith Kernan,
Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia Leafa Kernan, Carole Viers, Magdalena Edwards, Jim
Turner, Jon Dillon, Suzanne Jill Levine, Kathy Komar, Ross Shideler, Lois Parkinson
Zamora and Brent Hayes Edwards.
vi
VITA
March 13, 1975
Born, Los Angeles, California
1995:
Frances Biddle Sophomore Prize in English Literature,
Princeton University, awarded for the best essay written on
English Literature by a sophomore
1995-1998
Mellon Minority Fellowship in the Humanities, Princeton University
1997
Class of 1879 Prize, Princeton University, awarded to the junior
in the English Department with the highest grade point average
1998
Phi Beta Kappa; Summa Cum Laude, English Literature and Theatre,
Princeton University
2000-2001
University of California Graduate Opportunity Fellowship
2001-2003
UCLA Eugene Cota Robles Fellowship
2003
Honorable Mention: Ford Pre-doctoral Fellowship for Minorities
2002
Teaching Assistant for “Survey of Literature: Antiquity to Middle Ages”
Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA
2003
Teaching Assistant for “Survey of Literature: Age of Enlightenment to the
Twentieth Century” Department of Comparative Literature,
UCLA
2003
Teaching Assistant for “Survey of Literature: Age of Enlightenment to the
Twentieth Century” Department of Comparative Literature,
UCLA
2003-2004
President of the Babel Study Group for Translation Studies at UCLA
2004
UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, with Professor
Michelle Clayton
vii
2004
Chief Organizer of the UCLA International Conference for Graduate
Student Literary Translators, UCLA, Jan 23-25
2005
Summer Instructor, “Great Books from the World at Large,”
Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA
2005-2006
UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship, with Professor Michael Heim
2006-2007
University of California President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship
2007
Seminar co-chair “The Typesetters Handmaiden,” ACLA
Conference: Trans, Pan, Intra: Cultures in Contact,
Puebla, Mexico, April 19-22
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Kernan, Ryan. (2002) "Subjects Born in Captivity," paper for the annual conference of
the American Comparative Literature Association, Panel: Narrative
Translations of Identity. San Juan, Puerto Rico, April 11-14.
--, (2003) "The Influence of Jorge Luis Borges on the Theatre of August Wilson," paper
for the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature
Association: Crossing Over, UC San Diego/ CSU San Marcos, April 4-6.
--, (2004) "The Blue of Noon in Pantagruel's Mouth: Reading Bataille through
Auerbach," paper for the annual conference for the American Comparative
Literature Association: Global Ethnic Networks, Old and New, Ann
Arbor, University Michigan, April 16-18.
--. (2005) “Tom-Toms Turned the Tide: Langston Hughes’s Drum Circle Translations of
Nicolás Guillén and Jacques Roumain,” paper for the annual conference of
the Northeastern Modern Language Association, Panel: Modernists
Citizens, Boston, MA., March 31-April 2.
--. (2005) Bibliography and Index (with Kelly Austin) for The Cambridge companion to
the Latin American novel, edited by Efraín Kristal, Cambridge; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
--. (2005) “Don’t Call Me Yanqui White Man: Nícolas Guillén’s Harlem Renaissance/
Langston Hughes’s Poesía Negra,” paper for the annual conference for the
American Comparative Literature Association: Imperialisms—Temporal,
viii
Spatial, Formal, Panel: Conquest and Counterconquest: Transcultural
Encounters in the Americas, Pennsylvania State University, March 11-13.
--. (2006) “Langston Hughes’s Latin American Debut,” paper for the annual conference
for the American Comparative Literature Association: The Human and Its
Others, Panel: “Translation and Metamorphosis,” Princeton University,
March 23-26.
--. (2006) “El hermano oscuro/The Darker Brother: José Antonio Fernández de Castro’s
translation of Langston Hughes,” invited paper for the Symposium on
Translation in Colonial and Ethnic Studies: An Interdisciplinary
Symposium, University of Chicago, February 15.
--. (2007) “Langston Hughes’s Picasso Period: Recontextualizing Aesthetic Regimes
paper for the annual American Comparative Literature Association
Conference: Trans, Pan, Intra: Cultures in Contact, Panel: “The
Typesetters Handmaiden: Visual and Literary Cultures in Contact,”
Puebla, Mexico, April 19-22
ix
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Lost and Found in Black Translation: Langston Hughes's Translations of French- and
Spanish-Language Poetry, his Hispanic and Francophone Translators, and the Fashioning
of Radical Black Subjectivities.
by
Ryan James Kernan
Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature
University of California, Los Angeles, 2007
Professor Efraín Kristal, Committee Co-Chair
Professor Richard Yarborough, Committee Co-Chair
The role of translation in Langston Hughes’s creative processes, literary
production, aesthetic growth, and international influence provides a new and fruitful
vantage-point for a reinterpretation of Hughes’s oeuvre. Hughes’s translations of Regino
Pedroso, Nicolás Guillén, Jacques Roumain, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Louis Aragon,
Federico García Lorca, Gabriella Mistral, Léon G. Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor
demonstrate that the aesthetic failures and contradictions attributed to Hughes’s radicalsocialist poetry actually reflect engagements with the literary palettes of foreign-language
x
poets that he integrated into his own lyrical vision. Hughes’s status as a world class poet
was also affected by his encounters with translators who created visions of Hughes that
are often times not compatible with each other, and that often reflect their own agendas—
political and otherwise. These divergent visions, in turn, allowed multiple versions of
Hughes to serve as a celebrated literary forefather to several black poetic movements
including négritude and poesía negra throughout the Hispanic and Francophone worlds
of the twentieth century, to be conceptualized within a framework of cultural exchange
shaped, in part, by Hughes’s translating and translators.
The dissertation’s methodology draws upon recent trends in the fields of
Translation Studies, Literature of the Americas, and Literature of the African Dispora. It
reflects a commitment to interrogate the individual creative processes of reading, writing,
and re-writing that are part and parcel of an exploration of both Hughes’s practices of
translation and those of his translators. At the same time, it underscores the extent to
which these processes and practices are embedded in the evolving ideological and
historical contexts that surround literary production and translation in the Hispanic,
Francophone, and African American literary worlds. The dissertation draws upon
extensive archival material from Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile to make arguments about translation in
relation to literary practices, production, and institutions—from the impact of
correspondence between authors, translators, and publishers on literary production to the
impact of heretofore uncovered translations, manuscripts, drafts and abortive literary
efforts on Hughes’s subsequent publications and literary relationships.
xi
xii
Introduction
Langston Hughes arguably occupies the most prominent place in the African-American
literary pantheon. He was a poet, dramatist, novelist, lyricist, librettist, reporter, columnist,
author of short fiction, gifted orator, and the first black American to earn his living as a writer.1
Indeed, he is often referred to, in both the U.S. and abroad, as the “Dean of Black Letters.”
However, it is increasingly seldom that U.S. readers hear him referred to as a radical-socialist
poet, and his status as a prolific African-American translator is still less unknown. Literary
critics generally see the poet’s radical-socialist poetry as an unfortunate phase is his career
marred by clumsy agit-prop verse, and his work as a translator has been in the painstakingly slow
process of being unearthed for some thirty years. Nevertheless, at the end of his life, he was, in
fact, the most widely translated living author in the U.S., and celebrated by fans and scholars
throughout the world as: a precursor to the poesía negra movement in Latin America, a
forefather of the négritude movement in French poetics, an ardent anti-fascist writer, and a
committed radical-socialist.2
The central focus of this dissertation is two-fold. First, my intent is to address these
seeming contradictions by positing that translation—succinctly defined by Efraín Kristal as “a
1
Hughes was fond of noting that he was the first Negro writer in America to make his living solely by writing. His
claim is in large part true, but before achieving acclaim as a poet he also worked as a sailor on the Atlantic rim and
as a busboy in New York and Paris. He also enjoyed patronage from Charlotte Osgood Mason and from Carl Van
Vechten in the 20s and 30s as well as a healthy allowance and free rent from his fried Noël Sullivan in Carmel at
various points throughout his literary career.
2
Hughes was celebrated by a forefather to the négritudemovement in French poetics not only by scores of critics
like Lilyan Kesteloot, but also by the movement’s prominent figures including Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé
Césaire, and Léon Gontran-Damas. Likewise, Hughes was celebrated as a forefather to the poesía negra movement
in Spanish American poetics by critics like Emilio Ballagas and Ramón Guirao and by participants (poets and
novelists) such as Pilar Barrios, Manuel Zapata Olivella, and Nicomedes Santa Cruz.
1
process whereby a writer remodels one sequence of words into another”—provides a new and
fruitful ground for the interpretation of Hughes’s oft-labeled “radical poetry” that offers a richer
account of its aesthetic accomplishments, its ethical import, and its enduring international
influence in the Spanish American and Francophone worlds. Second, this dissertation provides
close readings of Hughes’s archival correspondence and his translations of Regino Pedroso,
Nicolás Guillén, Jacques Roumain, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Louis Aragon, Federico García
Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Léon G. Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. These readings reveal
that what some critics have considered aesthetic contradictions in Hughes’s “radical” poetic
production actually reflect a thoughtful process of literary engagement with the work of writers
he was integrating into his own lyrical vision.3 They also illuminate his evolving conception of
the role of translation in the project of world literature in order to demonstrate how this evolution
affected his own translation techne.4 Indeed, given the extent to which Hughes’s work as a
translator affected his writing and the degree to which he attempted to forge multiple poetic
personae in translation to suit the tastes and socio-political climates of diverse reading and
linguistic communities, it is impossible to know Hughes completely without knowing him in
translation.5
4
I am using the term techne in an Aristotelian manner. In the fourth chapter of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
defined techne as the "trained ability of rationally producing." In other words, techne refers the ability to produce
something reliably under a variety of conditions, on the basis of some reasoning.
5
Hughes began his study of French in high school and completed his French-language course-work during his
freshman year at Columbia, earning B’s and C’s and was a lifetime admirer of Maupassant and Damas. With
regards to his command of Spanish, Hughes was certainly more comfortable speaking in Mexico City than he was in
Paris. In fact, it can be said that Hughes—during his trips to Mexico to visit his father—learned how to speak
Spanish before he learned how to write poetry. However, Hughes’s hatred for his task-master father—a man who
would sometimes awaken the boy be demanding that he conjugate the verb estar [to be]—retarded this growth, and
it was not until a lengthy stay in 1935 Mexico City that Hughes’s spoken Spanish became somewhat second-nature
2
Always Radical?: Langston Hughes’s Revolutionary Poetic Career
Langston Hughes’s poetic growth is generally subdivided into four stages which are
succinctly labeled by critic and biographer Arnold Rampersad. These periods overlap but are
nevertheless distinct, and are comprised of Hughes’s “music-inflected verse” (dating from the
1920s), his poems emphasizing “the need for radical political action” (written during the 1930s),
his poetic return to “Negroes, nature, and love” (or his verse of the 40s), and his response to the
historical evolution of African-American culture and music that took place during the 1950s and
60s as embodied in his Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and Ask Your Mama (1961)
(Rampersad, Collected, 3-4). Each of these stages can be characterized as attempts “to create a
body of work that epitomized the beauty and variety of the African American experience,” but
differ with respect to their aesthetic achievement, political commitment, and perceived
investment—in the eyes of both contemporary critics and those of Hughes’s day—in radical and
radical-socialist politics (Rampersad, Collected, 5).
Hughes’s early poetry was self-professedly indebted to the work of Walt Whitman, Paul
Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay. Hughes’s lengthy catalogues, his
carefully constructed poetic sequences, his use of “black English,” and his investment in “blues
verse” or “jazz-poetry” which mark his first two volumes of poetry—The Weary Blues (1926)
and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)—not only testify to these influences, but are also intertwined
to the determined polyglot (Hughes would also add smatterings of Russian and Chinese to his repertoire during the
early 1930s). Hughes was also, from an early age, an admirer of the Spanish novelist Blasco Ibañez and the French
story-writer Guy de Maupassant.
3
with the projects of articulating African-American artistic experience and experiments. It is for
this reason that Hughes was, from the outset of his career, labeled by his harshest critics, his
champions, and himself not only a race-poet, but also a race-radical, as a proud member of the
1920s New Negro Movement dedicated to African-American social-uplift.
The widespread critical characterization of his poetic production dating from the 1930s as
“radical” or “revolutionary” is therefore somewhat of a misnomer, as Hughes’s association with
radicalism well precedes his association with radial-socialism or Communism. Indeed, Hughes
was raised to be a revolutionary. Rocked to sleep each night by his grandmother in the bulletriddled shawl of his ancestor Lewis Sheridan Leary (a participant in John Brown’s raid on
Harper’s Ferry), Hughes was literally cradled in revolt. Nevertheless, it is precisely Hughes’s
engagement with Marxist politics, both poetically and politically, that has assigned his literary
production of the 1930s a preeminent place in what might be labeled Hughes’s radical poetic
pantheon.6
Although Hughes was assiduously careful to avoid associating himself with a single
political party, his attraction and distancing from Communism and radical-socialism during the
1930s parallels that of many African-Americans.7 Encouraged by both foreign interest and
Communist support for the Scottsboro Nine during the early 1930s, Hughes was more than
willing to add a pen tinged in red ink to the socio-political fray. However, atheism (including
Hughes’s) found no purchase in the largely religious African-American community, and with the
7
For more on the popularity of communism amongst African-Americans in the 1930s see Kate A. Baldwin’s
Beyond the Color Line (2002).
4
Comintern’s response to the advent of WWII—a response considered by many AfricanAmericans to be an abandonment of peoples of African descent in favor of an increased focus on
exploited European brethren closer to home—Communism and radical-socialism fell largely out
of favor with Hughes’s domestic audiences. Moreover, the advent of the Cold War and Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s decision to subpoena Hughes before the House Un-American Activities
Committee in 1953 caused the poet to bury his leftist affinities further underground and to
embrace the less “radical” Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. Nevertheless, racial
uplift and class-struggle (in the Marxist sense of the term) never ceased to be intertwined in the
poet’s thoughts concerning U.S. racism and the spread of worldwide Communism after 1930.
Despite his public vacillations, Hughes was not a political opportunist. Rather, he was an astute
observer of global political and literary climates who tailored his poetic production and his
translations for a free-market. His association with and distancing from the radical-left can
therefore be characterized as a matter of convenience and conviction, of naiveté and international
savvy.
Hughes, Translation, and Heterogeneous Black Internationalisms
Since no single volume could hope to address the sum total of Langston Hughes’s
translations and his work as a translator in great detail, the present study is divided into four parts
that seek to illuminate many of the important impacts that translation had on Hughes’s literary
career and legacy. These four parts, as a whole, provide a portrait of Hughes’s evolving
conception of the task of the translator, and, on their own, offer four axes of critical intervention
into the relationship among translation, black radicalism, black internationalism, black identity,
5
hemispheric cultural exchange in the Americas, and pan-Africanism. The first of these four axes
consists of inward influence, or determining the impact that Langston Hughes’s career as a
translator had on his evolving praxis as a translator and on his own poetic production. The
second can be labeled outward influence, or comparing the impact made by Langston Hughes’s
poetry in translation in the Hispanic and Francophone worlds paying heed to the multiple sociopolitical factors that made for divergent and conjoined receptions of his poetry in arenas
possessed with unique visions of radicalism. Ethical impact, or exploring how Hughes’s ethics
of translation informed his vision of black international identity and pan-Africanism, comprises
the third axis of critical intervention. And the impact of fracture, or gauging the extent to which
Hughes’s active involvement in the translation of his poetry and the forging of his multiple
international personae allowed him to serve as forefather to multiple literary movements in a
black international community, constitutes the fourth.
To study Langston Hughes’s poetry translated into Spanish and French by both politically
driven translators and literary admirers reveals the hybridity and heterogeneity of seemingly
monolithic notions like black internationalism, black radicalism, and pan-Africanism.8 This is
the case not only because the Hispanic and Francophone literary worlds possess divergent
aesthetic criteria for what constitutes radical poetry and differing conceptions of and investments
in the role played by poetry in fomenting black internationalism, but also because Hughes
himself was deeply invested in articulating visions of these concepts that eschewed notions of
racial essentialism and embraced difference. For example, Hughes’s racially-themed radicalsocialist poetry in many Spanish American arenas—where race-relations differed markedly from
those in the U.S., France, and the Francophone world—was conceived not solely as advocacy for
6
leftist black internationalism, but also as part of a larger commitment to Marxism and the
worldwide proletariat. However, in a Martinique under the colonial control of the French Fourth
Republic, it was Hughes’s race-proud and primitivist verse—and not his radical-socialist or
popular front poetics—that caused pro-independence poets and thinkers alike to considered him
an anti-assimilative radical (or revolutionary), a champion of the colonized black world, and a
Marxist brother to all the earth’s oppressed. Each global arena held black radicalism in a
different sphere, and various parts of Hughes’s oeuvre spoke to each of them, allowing the poet’s
verse—as translated and interpreted differently in divergent literary discourses—to serve as
inspirational exemplars for what prove to be heterogeneous visions of black internationalism.
Points of Departure, Methodology, and Theoretical Framework
The exploration of the role of translation in the propagation of black internationalism is a
project that necessarily takes guidance from Brent Hayes Edwards. His ideas concerning the
African Diaspora’s constitutive need for “difference in unity”—despite the fact that the bulk of
Hughes’s career as a translator preceded the notion of the African Diaspora which was developed
in the late 1950’s—closely mirror those of Hughes as he struggled to come to terms with his
status as a representative of an international black community whose boundaries and fidelities
had always been in flux. As does Hughes’s radical poetry, Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora
grapples compellingly with the problem of creating a discourse and identity for black
internationalism by speaking to one of its constitutive paradoxes: namely, how does one
articulate a notion of a global, cohesive black community and still acknowledge the difference
that creates the need for such cohesion? Edwards answers this vexing question by articulating
7
his own notion of décalage, which he defines, briefly, as either a movement in space or time and,
more extensively as:
[D]écalage is the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred
or exchanged, the received biases that refuse to pass over when one crosses
the water. It is a changing core of difference; it is the work of “differences
within unity,” an unidentifiable point that is incessantly touched and fingered
and pressed.
Is it possible to rethink the workings of “race” in the cultures of black internationalism
through a model of décalage? Any articulation of diaspora in such a model would be inherently
décalé, or disjointed, by a host of factors. Like a table with legs of different lengths, or a tilted
bookcase, diaspora can be discursively propped up (calé) into an artificially “even” or
“balanced” state of “racial” belonging. But such props, of rhetoric, of strategy, or organizations,
are always articulations of unity or globalism, one that can be “mobilized” for a variety of
purposes but can never be definitive: they are always prosthetic. In this sense décalage is proper
to the structure of diasporic “racial” formation, and its return in the form of disarticulation—the
points of misunderstanding, bad faith, unhappy translation—must be considered a necessary
haunting. (14)
For Edwards, it is precisely that which cannot be translated, transferred, or exchanged
that constitutes the difference in diaspora, which disrupts the homogeneity of “diasporic racial
formation” with the return of disarticulation.9 It is only when thinkers concerned with the
8
concept of diapora heed this disarticulation and approach the matter through décalage—without
an “artificially ‘even’ or ‘balanced’ state of ‘racial belonging’”—that diasporic difference in
unity can be allowed to exist. However, these “props” are also a precondition for a “unity or
globalism” that may indeed be “mobilized” but is nevertheless always “prosthetic.” This is what
constitutes the almost insurmountable paradox that Edwards wishes to highlight. The unity and
mobilization of black internationalism depend on ignoring décalage, but also depend on ignoring
that this unity is the somewhat illusory byproduct of “props” constructed to eschew difference.
Moreover, since Edwards sees the practice of diaspora (and of any form of black
internationalism) as existing first and foremost in translation, a culture’s untranslatable fabric or
“disarticulation” constitutes what cannot be subsumed into a “mobilized” collective identity,
qualities lost not simply in translations, but rather in community building that is decidedly calé.
Hughes’s career as a translator and poet was marked by a similar concern over the
preservation and recognition of “unity in difference” within a mobilized, black international
community whose birth could be facilitated not only by the cross-cultural exchange inherent in
literary translation, but also—as his career progressed—by an ethics of translation that placed a
paramount importance on approaching texts as Others (if we are to draw from the ethical
language of Emanuel Lévinas) which should be translated as one would bear witness to an event.
Likewise, the diverse reception of Hughes’s verse in French and Spanish translation testifies to a
plethora of disarticulations in a nascent international black community and a worldwide Marxist
community that struggled to know themselves better while simultaneously forging international
9
Here, I am employing Edwards’s use of the lower case “diaspora,” which differs from Diaspora insofar as the
former allows for multiple diasporas and the latter allows only for one.
9
allegiances. However, the “the points of misunderstanding, bad faith, [and] unhappy translation”
that Edwards frames as a “necessary haunting” of black internationalism are also the very
occurrences and materials that allow for an understanding of how and why Hughes’s literary
reception and poetic personae differed dramatically in the U.S. and abroad. In other words, the
disarticulations arising from Hughes’s poetry in translation are precisely the reasons why
multiple versions of Langston Hughes came into being around the world throughout the course
of the poet’s life. Hughes’s verse in translation was interpreted (or misinterpreted) differently in
diverse literary, discursive and socio-political regimes, and these differing incarnations, in turn,
not only testify to the heterogeneity of the international black community, but also afforded
Hughes several poetic personae through which he could address (and vicariously champion) the
diverse groups constituting the black international. In short, Hughes—in collaboration with his
translators—created several versions of himself designed to appeal to different members of his
international, heterogeneous community.
In addition, the ways in which Hughes was discursively framed as perhaps the black poet
of his era bear witness to the multiple ways that communities around the world conceived of
racial belonging, racial difference, black internationalism, colonialism, and the spread of
worldwide Communism. Indeed, in their attempts to forge a geographically, politically, and
culturally appropriate Hughes, translators often times had to act in a brand of bad faith to suit
certain strategic ends with transgressive translations that speak to their unique places, conditions,
and agendas. Likewise, “points of misunderstanding” were often points of different and
differently inflected understanding, as translators often “mistook” the thematic content of
Hughes’s poetry as both a manifestation of local sentiment embodied in foreign poetry and as
10
foreign poetry that embodied local sentiment. In short, the “necessary haunting” that
accompanies black internationalism, translation, décalage, and “disarticulation” constitutes a
large part not simply of what is lost in translation (what doesn’t carry across the sea), but also of
what is gained in translation. Potential poetic meanings not present in the source-text (the
“original”) may incarnate in translation. This newfound meaning may be a function of
transgressive translation, of an error in translation, of a word whose connotations or denotations
multiply or diminish in translation, or simply of a different cultural context affixing new
meaning in the target-text (the translation).
In making recourse to terms such as “source-text” and “target-text,” I am drawing from
the contemporary vocabulary of translation theory; and while my thinking about translation is
certainly informed (both consciously and unconsciously) by the works of thinkers like Susan
Bassnet, George Steiner, Lawrence Venuti, José Ortega y Gasset, and Jorge Luis Borges, this
dissertation is not a work of translation theory. Rather, it is a contribution to the field of
Translation Studies, a field revitalized in England in the mid-seventies that has been marked in
recent years by extraordinary growth and that stems, simply put, from the examination of
translations as literary artifacts rather than as second-order derivatives. It draws upon the study
of linguistics, politics, history, sociology, and national literatures in order to highlight the extent
to which all of these realms are informed and formed by translation. While it is beyond the
scope of this dissertation to offer a panorama of Translation Studies and its objectives, it
nevertheless proves useful to locate the present argument vis-à-vis the field, the scholars working
in it who have informed my work, and my methodology.
11
The methodology of the dissertation draws upon recent trends in the fields of Translation
Studies, Literature of the Americas, and Literature of the African Diaspora exemplified in the
work of Efraín Kristal, Suzanne Jill Levine, Richard Jackson, Doris Sommer, Martha Cobb,
Edward Mullen, Lilyan Kesteloot, and Brent Hayes Edwards. It reflects a commitment to
interrogate the individual creative processes of reading, writing, and re-writing that are part and
parcel of an exploration of both Hughes’s practices of translation and those of his translators. At
the same time, it underscores the extent to which these processes and practices are embedded in
the evolving ideological and historical contexts that surround literary production and translation
in the Hispanic, Francophone, and African American literary worlds. I draw upon extensive
archival material from Yale’s Beinecke Library, the in order to make arguments about translation
in relation to literary practices, production, and institutions—from the impact of correspondence
between authors, translators, and publishers on literary production to the impact of heretofore
uncovered translations, manuscripts, drafts and abortive literary efforts on Hughes’s subsequent
publications and literary relationships.
The overwhelming majority of the missives, drafts, and financial records that both pertain
to this dissertation and to Hughes’s career as a translator are to be found in the James Weldon
Johnson collection in the Langston Hughes Papers at Yale. Hughes’s letters have proven to be of
incalculable import to the present arguments not only because they help to provide evidence—
previously proffered solely in confidence—that testifies to his evolving conception of translation
and its relation to cultural exchange and black internationalism, but also because they provide a
nearly comprehensive record of Hughes’s interactions with his translators and the living authors
he translated. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find an instance where missives did not play
12
decisive roles in Hughes’s translations. The James Weldon Johnson archive also affords the
present study a window on Hughes’s thoughts about the writers with whom he admired,
interacted and translated, as Hughes’s annotated editions and essays concerning these authors
often betray his (often unspoken) views about them. Finally, access to Hughes’s manuscripts not
only allows the argument to trace Hughes’s translation techne as it transformed over time (and
over the course of multiple drafts) while simultaneously highlighting the elements that proved
difficult (or important) for Hughes to translate, but also uncovers intriguing unpublished
translations that affected his poetic development.
Evidence collected from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Biblioteca
Nacional de Chile has afforded the dissertation a large amount (in some cases unprecedented) of
access to materials concerning Hughes’s reputation and critical reception abroad which cannot be
found in libraries in the United States. Moreover, these institutions have allowed for the
“discovery” of heretofore un-catalogued translations of Hughes’s poetry throughout the research
process. This access is largely the byproduct of two factors; that poetry and poetic criticism
(during the period that concerns us) traveled often and easily in periodicals, and that these
periodicals are seldom housed outside their respective nation of origin. This is particularly true
in the Parisian archives where over fifty percent of French (and, for that matter, Francophone)
critical responses to Hughes’s poetry in translation are housed. In the case on the Biblioteca
Nacional de Chile, nationalism plays less of a role vis-à-vis access since much of the material
gathered for the dissertation was published by presses throughout Latin America. Nevertheless,
several Spanish-language translations of Hughes’s work and articles about his literary legacy—
despite his enormous continental popularity—may only be found in Santiago.
13
This dissertation is also a case study of a mode of inquiry into translation. It
demonstrates that an elucidation of the contemporary events, literary developments, and world
visions that impact translators and their decisions is of central importance to the project of
accounting for the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of translation and its place in world
literature. Just as translations testify to their particular moments in time and space by betraying
the cultural contacts and collisions that engender them, so too does the work of individual
translators speak to their respective experiences, to their aesthetic sensibilities, to their intents,
and to their places—temporally, spatially, and politically—both inside and outside the literary
world. Hence, a study of translation that avoids ascribing the practice a secondary status reveals
much more than a history of bungled nuance and phrases lost in translation. It reveals history
itself, and the manner in which history affects literature, translation, and the knowledge
structures we come to know through translation. Moreover, the translator’s ideological and
aesthetic objectives made manifest in the target-text do not simply serve to locate the poem, but
ultimately create a different poem in translation, one that is often times self-consciously crafted
by the translator to subvert or bolster the intent and themes of the original. In the case of
Hughes and his translators, ideologically driven translation—given their competing and
overlapping visions of black internationalism, black radicalism, and Communism—was indeed
the prominent mode.
While ideologically driven translation may certainly also be literal translation—where
“literal” denotes the always asymptotic quest for a word-for-word translation—the majority of
Hughes’s translators shied away from word-for-word equivalence. Rather, they tended to favor
inventive and domesticating strategies—where “domesticating” refers to the process of altering a
14
source-text so as to make it more easily readable for its target audience according to conventions
and literary standards contemporaneous with the times—for their, often times, transgressive
translations. In other words, Hughes’s poetry was continually reinvented in diverse contexts to
fulfill multiple agendas.
It is for this reason that the treatise on translation most relevant to my argument is one of
the oldest in existence—Horace’s Ars Poetica. Indeed, Horace’s advice to the translator to
forsake word-for-word translation in order to write distinctive poetry helps to ground a number
of my observations concerning Hughes’s translations and translators. Horace’s argument not
only characterizes translation as a process wherein translators necessarily reposition elements of
source-texts, but also speaks to the heart of exactly how one poet—once translated the world
over—is afforded multiple personae engendered by multiple translations:
Either follow tradition, or invent consistently.
If you happen to portray Achilles, honoured,
Pen him as energetic, irascible, ruthless,
Fierce, above the law, never downing weapons.
Make Medea wild, untamable, Ino tearful,
Ixion treacherous, Io wandering, Orestes sad.
If you’re staging something untried, and dare
To attempt fresh characters, keep them as first
Introduced, from start to end self-consistent.
It’s hard to make the universal specific:
It’s better to weave a play from the poem of Troy,
15
Than be first to offer something unknown, unsung.
You’ll win private rights to public themes, if you
Don’t keep slowly circling the broad beaten track,
Or, pedantic translator, render them word for word,
Or following an idea, leap like the goat into the well
From which shame, or the work’s logic, denies escape. (Horace Ars Poetica
119-152)
To “follow tradition” or invent consistently—which can be taken as constant production,
consistent production of one’s invention along strict lines, or as a combination of the two—in its
very dichotomy is also a call to intermixture and perpetual invention that resounds with the drive
of Hughes and his translators both to reinvent poets for incorporation into different literary
arenas and to introduce new poetic forms, such as Hughes’s jazz or blues poetry, into their
respective target cultures. Horace’s notion that the success of new forms—“the staging of
something untried”—demands a self-consistency that mirrors that of fidelity to tradition
(whether the new forms be experimental or simply translations) and not only speaks to the
translator’s capacity to translate with an eye to conforming to target-language literary
conventions, but also illuminates two paradoxes: translations are texts that both stand on their
own and yet also comprise new versions of older texts, and the successful introduction of new
forms (a difficult project indeed) into a target language creates yet another demand for
perpetuation of tradition via variations on a theme. This last aspect speaks to the importance of
first impressions in poetic translations. If an author’s verse (particularly verse that constitutes a
new form in the literary realm of the target language) is successfully translated, then the
16
translations of that verse which follow in its wake (if they are to afford themselves the best
chance at “universal” success) must “follow tradition” and be chosen and composed in like
fashion. Hence, the first translations of an author’s verse play a large role—as they did in
Hughes’s case in the Hispanic and Francophone worlds—in determining both the choice of his
texts to be subsequently translated and, in turn, his literary reputations in translation. Insofar as
translations constitute new versions of old tales—tales that strive “to weave a play from the
poem of Troy”—they generally out-perform offerings of “something unknown, unsung”
according to Horace because, for him, it is “hard to make the universal specific.” In this sense,
translation becomes a tool of the global literary community that provides access to the shared
literary inheritance of world literature (incarnate, in this case, in Hughes’s verse), an inheritance
re-read and reworked across temporal, national, and linguistic boundaries.
Horace’s poet slyly becomes “pedantic translator,” suggesting a near equivalency
between the two, when he indulges in word-for-word translation. Horace not only rejects such a
“pedantic” approach—recognizing, in the very invocation of the evaluative term, a hierarchy
among translators wherein those who engage in new (and yet traditional) poetic production will
forever outdo those obsessed with semantic equivalency—but also goes so far as to suggest that
translations which proceed along this line risk trapping the “work’s logic” inside a target and
source language from which it cannot escape. In other words, it is only via reinvention that the
important aspects of a work, “its logic,” survive and succeed in translation. Reinvention in the
praxis of translation is not a choice. It is the name of the game. The multiple instantiations of
Hughes in foreign language translation are as much a function of the practice of translation itself
17
as it is a function of the desire, on the part of his translators, to create him anew in the service of
a given agenda.
We may draw from our reading of Horace several additional tenets that inform the
present argument. First and foremost is that the stature and methodology of the translator are of
importance and constitute the difference between new poetic production (and resonance) and the
loss of poetic meaning, or of the “logic” of a work, forever to the void. In a somewhat similar
vein, Horace’s time- and genre-crossing exhortation to “weave a poem from the play from Troy”
highlights the degree to which translators (consciously or unconsciously) manipulate the logic of
the source-text, inscribe their historical moment in the target-text, and, potentially, infuse their
translations with political or aesthetic agendas not present in their respective originals. This
malleability, in turn, is not to be bemoaned since the loss of word-for-word fidelity in translation
is the cost of the work’s survival in an arena of consistent invention where strict adherence to
stock guidelines is neither sought nor possible, as the cultural components that accompany interlinguistic exchange necessarily thwart the imposition of any such demand. For example, stock
musical forms—as we repeatedly see in translations of Hughes’s “blues verse”—prove to be
difficult tasks for the translator. If the meaning afforded to the word by the musical form is to
survive, then either the poem’s semantic or musical dimensions need to be altered, created anew
so that they may function in a similar manner in a different context. The goal of translating stock
forms (to be refashioned and retold) from one culture and language to another culture and
language and the constant invention of translation are thus both driven by a perpetual desire to
encourage invention without devaluing tradition and its revisions. Finally, we may glean from
18
Horace that the composition and reading of every translation are unique to their positions,
“private right[s]” claimed on the public grounds of world literature.
In regard to the additional theoretical or philosophical underpinnings that guide the
Translation Studies aspect of this dissertation—particularly in regards to how the study assesses
influence—one needs only to invest in two principal claims. Borrowing a page from Efraín
Kristal’s Invisible Work, the dissertation shall re-assert Richard Wollheim’s claim that “the kind
of order that is sought by the artist depends on historical precedents,” that “[the artist] will
assemble […] in ways that self consciously react against, or overtly presuppose, arrangements
that have already been tried out in the tradition” (Kristal xvii). Moreover, we shall echo Kristal’s
suggestion that Wollheim’s argument is well complemented by Gombrich’s assertion that “the
study of art should pay as much attention to the repertoire of the artist as to the finished product”
(Kristal xvii). Gombrich’s notion of a “repertoire” and Wollheim’s focus on artistic historical
precedent resonates profoundly with both Yves Michaud’s and Theodor Adorno’s articulations
of the concept of an artist’s palette. This is the case because each philosopher is heavily invested
in scrutinizing—vis-à-vis the production, classification, and interpretation of works of art—the
role played by the accessibility of the concrete materials with which an artist works (for example,
the pigments in painting or the wood or stone in sculpture) and also in the range of what is
available to artists, what they have inherited, and how these factors commingle to determine
what stands before them. In other words, the dissertation grounds its observations concerning
the influence of the act of translation on Langston Hughes’s oeuvre by examining how his poetic
palette was enriched by his career as a translator in ways that evidenced his ample understanding
19
of both foreign and domestic aesthetic criteria and exemplars which allowed him to reinvent the
poetic traditions that informed his early verse.
An Overview of the Criticism
In his essay “Future Scholarly Projects on Langston Hughes” (1987), Arnold Rampersad
bemoaned the fact that little literary criticism has been written about Hughes’s career as a
translator. In the twenty years that followed, the critical terrain shifted, as numerous critics have
examined Hughes’s translations of black Caribbean authors, positing, in large part, that Hughes
inspired his Caribbean counterparts or vice versa. Nevertheless, the lion’s share of Hughes’s
translations has received little or no attention, and even less has been paid to the work of his
translators. Given the plethora of critical works devoted to Langston Hughes and the Hispanic
and Francophone authors of note whose works he translated and who translated his works, this
paucity of criticism is indeed surprising. Few critical works address either his influence on and
perception among Hispanic and Francophone writers or the impact of his translations on his
poetic production.
While the significant works of literary criticism that speak to these issues are indeed
scant, there are several shining examples of inter-American and trans-Atlantic literary criticism
that help to inform the present study. Edward J. Mullen’s The Literary Reputation of Langston
Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti (1977) remains the best study of Langston Hughes’s
literary reception and undertakings in Latin America, and is the first work to recognize the
crucial role that translation played in Hughes’s Latin American dissemination, offering this
dissertation a nearly comprehensive list of Hughes’s Latin America translators. However, this
20
dissertation departs from Mullen’s study insofar as it is deeply invested in the variety of literary,
political, and cultural factors that shaped this reception, and is ever-mindful of the role that
ideologically driven translators (and their transgressive translations) played in the process.
Alain Locke’s “The Negro in Three Americas” (1944) is among the first works to argue
that an understanding of the black experience in America necessitates coming to terms with the
diverse experiences of blacks in North, Central, and South America. In so doing, it launched a
specifically black brand of Pan-Americanism which Hughes, in turn, sought to bolster in his
work as a translator. Locke’s observation also highlights the degree to which Hughes’s work as
a translator, the work of his translators in the Americas, and the present study all constitute
contributions to Literature of the Americas. His insight not only draws our attention to the often
overlooked African-American contributions to the canon of this burgeoning field of study, but
also begs the scholar to grapple with the role played by black translators like Hughes—whose
efforts to link communities of color in the Americas were facilitated by the cultural exchange
afforded by translation—in adumbrating the notion of a shared hemispheric literary arena and
heritage.
Richard Jackson’s “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Black Hispanic Writers”
(1981) is the first work to illuminate Hughes’s role as a literary forefather to a generation of
Spanish American poets and novelists including Nicolás Guillén, Candelario Obeso, Virginia
Brindis de Salas, Nelson Estupinán Bass, Adalberto Ortiz, Nicomedes Santa Cruz, Pilar Barrios,
and Manuel Zapata Olivella. Jackson figures this influence as a function of Hughes’s
groundbreaking interweaving of local, black popular music forms with the poetry of so-called
high culture. The present argument does not discount the role of this interweaving in Hughes’s
21
hemispheric influence. However, it does ascribe an equal (if not greater) amount of weight—in
regard to influence on black Spanish American writers—to Hughes’s revered status as a radicalsocialist poet in Latin American literary circles. In short, both the poet’s politics and his poetics
were part and parcel of his inspirational Spanish American persona.
The first and second volumes of Arnold Rampersad’s The Life of Langston Hughes—a
meticulously researched biography of Hughes’s life and literary career—offer a remarkably
detailed history of the factors that informed or surrounded Hughes’s poetic production. The lifehistory allows the present argument to scrutinize and to situate Hughes’s translation decisions, as
well as those of many of his translators, in light of personal and global historical developments.
Rampersad’s volumes are also among the first works to intimate that Hughes’s career as a
translator was motivated by a desire to construct a politically potent black internationalism. This
intimation informs and is echoed by this dissertation, but it is also augmented by the present
study’s claim that Hughes’s interest in translation was driven by desires to articulate a black
international citizen in non-essentialist terms, to mold the instantiations of his personae abroad,
and to forge an ethics for black internationalism that valued the preservation of Edwards’s
“difference in unity.”
Martha
Cobbs’s Harlem, Haiti, and Havana: A Comparative Study of
Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and Nicolás Guillén (1979) lives up to its name and is
becoming an increasingly seminal work as critics recognize the interdependence of these three
authors and life-long friends. However, this dissertation departs from Cobbs’s analysis insofar
as it posits translation—instead of shared world visions, poetics, and racial inheritances—as the
constitutive tie that binds these authors together. In other words, the dissertation does not
discount Cobbs’s observations, but insists that the critical grouping of these three authors and the
22
subsequent comparisons of their respective oeuvres is largely a function of Hughes’s decision to
translate Roumain and Guillén into English and to publish his work beside theirs. This decision
produced one of the earliest incarnations of black international poetry as well as one of its
longest enduring, fostering comparisons, like Cobbs’s, that in all likelihood would not exist were
it not for Hughes’s strategic work as a translator.
Lilyan Kesteloot’s seminal Les écrivains noirs de langue française: naissance d’une
littérature [Black Writers in French] (1963) provides the present study with an enormous amount
of information on négritude. Arguably the piece of literary criticism responsible for cementing
Langston Hughes’s identity as a forefather to the négritude poets, it documents both his personal
contacts with key figures in the movement as well as their professed admiration for the U.S.
poet. Kesteloot’s work also illuminates the dimensions and evolution of revolutionary and
revolutionary French poetics.10 This, in turn, affords the dissertation a detailed map of the
critical climate that greeted Hughes’s early verse in French translation as a Marxist breath of
fresh air. In short, Kesteloot’s study provides an overview of Francophone poetics, from
surrealism to négritude, which allows this dissertation to gauge the literary and political impact
of Hughes’s verse in French translation over the course of his career.
A small amount of the body of criticism on Langston Hughes’s work as a translator is
dedicated to assessing his prowess. John F. Mateus’s “Langston Hughes as Translator” (1968)
and Alfred J. Guillame’s “And Bid Him Translate: Langston Hughes Translations of Poetry from
the French” (1985) catalogue Hughes’s translations of Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral,
Nicolás Guillén, Jacques Roumain, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon-Gontran Damas, Jean Joseph
Rabéarivelo, David Diop, Birago Diop, Armand Lanusse, Pierre Dalcour, and Louis Aragon.
23
However, both Mateus and Guillame analyze these translations in terms that speak largely to the
so called “literal” quality—where literal refers to the asymptotic quest for a perfect word-forword translation—of Hughes’s translation decisions, paying heed to what is lost in translation
and ignoring what is gained, transformed, reworked, or made anew.
Michel Fabre’s French Critical Reception of African-American Literature (1970)
provides this dissertation with a nearly comprehensive annotated bibliography of both French
translations of Hughes’s poetry and articles about him in French publications. It has proven to
be an invaluable resource insofar as it provides a roadmap for the translation, dissemination, and
critical reception of Langston Hughes’s poetry in France and the Francophone world. Lastly,
essays by Francine Masiello, Guido A. Podestá, Monika Kaup, Lesley Feracho, Carolyn Fowler,
Vera Kutzinski, Marilyn Miller, Kate A. Baldwin, and Peter Russell address several themes and
literary figures in this dissertation and have no doubt indirectly influenced its scope, direction,
and intent.
A Brief Summary of the Chapters:
The dissertation’s first chapter, “Reborn in Translation: Inter-American Dialogue,
Complementary Conversation, and Locating Langston Hughes in Leftist Latin America,”
highlights the central role played by the Cuban translator and critic José Antonio Fernández de
Castro—Hughes’s first Spanish language translator—in locating (and, indeed, entrenching)
Langston Hughes and his poetry in Spanish American leftist circles. The chapter further
explores how Hughes, largely at the impetus of Fernández de Castro, took up the task of the
translator in 1930. This decision both enriched Hughes’s poetic palette and regenerated his
24
poetic voice, infusing his literary production with a newfound commitment to radical-socialism
and the agit-prop or Popular Front aesthetics associated with its worldwide poetic propagation.
The chapter augments the common conception of the relationship between translation and
literary influence (or inward and outward impact) by positing that the back and forth embodied
in Hughes’s translations of Cuban poetry and in Cuban translations of Hughes’s poetry is
fruitfully conceptualized as a matter of complementary conversation and inter-American
dialogue. In other words, it argues that translations and their respective originals can be read in a
fashion that allows each to be interpreted in light of the other. To close read a Cuban poem in
light of its U.S. translation, one inevitably affected by cultural difference, is to reveal
commonality and difference between two communities and to allow different versions, visions,
and worldviews to complement and inform one another. In a similar vein, the chapter argues that
Langston Hughes’s engagement with the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Regino Pedroso did not
simply afford the poet new sources of inspiration, but rather led him to compose poetry that was
intended to complement the verse he translated.
The complementary relationships fomented by Fernández de Castro were intended to
foster inter-American dialogue, inter-American cultural exchange, and the, at times, overlapping
agendas of Pan-Africanism and Communism. For example, while Hughes saw translation as a
means to forge closer ties between communities of color in the Americas, Fernández de Castro
translated Hughes to use his international stature to mobilize Cuba’s black community in the
service of communist revolt. This mobilization was, for Fernández de Castro, a prerequisite for a
communist revolution that would free the nation from the shackles of U.S. imperialism. Hence,
even before Hughes was radicalized by his work as a translator and his travels abroad, his
25
international stature was a commodity in high demand, a quality that could be positioned or coopted to serve multiple agendas in translation. Indeed, Fernández de Castro’s transgressive
translation of Hughes’s poetry lays bare an agenda that seeks to reposition his race-proud verse
so that it might serve the political interests of the Cuban translator and critic. In this sense,
Hughes’s radical-socialist, black internationalism was not only informed by Hughes’s work as a
translator, but was actually born in Spanish translation.
The chapter also explicates how Hughes’s commitment to pan-Africanism not only
informed the selection of authors and texts he chose to translate, but also played a large role in
how he first conceptualized the work of translation. In 1930, Hughes saw writing and translating
as intertwined. This is because Hughes saw his role as a black author as one which called upon
him to mine (or, in his words, to “translate”) the shared cultural inheritance of the U.S. AfricanAmerican community in order to produce poetry that would allow the community to see itself
reflected in his verse.11 This, in turn, was part and parcel of Hughes’s professed desire to be “el
poeta de los negros” [the poet of black people], a status that Hughes would pursue in decidedly
different manners throughout the course of his life.
While the majority of criticism concerning Hughes and his Cuban contacts—written both
in the U.S. and in Cuba—is dedicated to explicating the extent of Hughes’s influence (or lack
thereof) on the poetic production of Nicolás Guillén, this chapter takes up neither side of the
11
The terms Afro-American and African-American are mistakenly thought to refer only to persons of African
descent living in the U.S. This, of course, is not the case because people of African descent inhabit all of the
Americas. Hence, the classification U.S. African-American, while perhaps foreign to a U.S. ear, more accurately
describes the population in question, and (when appropriate) shall be used in this fashion throughout the dissertation.
This is not to say, however, that the U.S. African-American community can be construed as homogeneous.
26
debate.12 Rather, it seeks to illuminate Fernández de Castro’s role in fomenting the contentious
and ongoing discussion. In the course of his efforts to import Hughes’s poetry into Cuba and to
export Cuban poetry, with the aid of Hughes’s translations, to the U.S., Fernández de Castro
strategically took up both sides of the debate. He convinced Hughes that his poetry had proven
inspirational for Cuba’s best black poets, and he convinced the Cuban literary community that
Hughes’s poetic production reflected Cuban influence. In so doing, he played upon Hughes’s
ego and sense of reciprocity to stimulate the translation of Cuban poets while simultaneously
manipulating Cuba’s literati in like fashion in order to inspire further translations of Hughes.
Hence, the chapter demonstrates that it was a desire to fuel black radicalism on an international
scale that actually gave rise to the Hughes-Guillén influence debate.
The chapter is indicative of the dissertation as a whole insofar as it offers nuanced
readings of translation decisions by situating them against the historical and political backdrops
which helped to inform them, and highlights the multiple factors and agendas that engendered
the cross-cultural pollination that would later constitute the building blocks of Diasporic literary
production and of Literature of the Americas. Moreover, it accounts for the sometimes
unexpected role played by translation in Hughes’s conceptions of radical-socialism and black
internationalism. Lastly, it provides a detailed map of the translation and dissemination of
Hughes’s poetry in the Hispanic world from 1928-1937.
The dissertation’s second chapter, “Radical (Re)Actions: Mayakovsky, Aragon,
Assimilation, and Me,” juxtaposes two divergent visions of what is called Hughes’s radical
poetic production—the first common in the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the second common
in the Francophone world—to illuminate how the interplay among politics, aesthetics, and
27
translation in these two arenas both informed the evaluation of Langston Hughes’s radicalsocialist poetry and determined, in different fashions, exactly what portions of his oeuvre
constituted radical-socialist verse. Making use of extensive archival materials, the chapter
explores the impact made by Hughes’s translations of the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky (the
oft-labeled poet of the October Revolution) and Louis Aragon (the famous French surrealist poet
and communist) on the poetry he wrote while living in Moscow and Carmel from 1932 to 1934.
It argues for an aesthetic reevaluation of Hughes’s radical-socialist poetry which, in large part,
was dismissed in the U.S. as political propaganda devoid of artistic merit, asserting that
Hughes’s deft manipulation of intertexts in his agit-prop verse made for a unique brand of poetry
and a contribution to world literature. The chapter then examines Hughes’s early dissemination
in French translation (1929-1937) and demonstrates how the racial politics of French colonialism
led to a reception of Hughes’s race-proud and primitivist verse that conceived of both as
manifestations of radical-socialist and anti-assimilative sentiment. This, in turn, illustrates how
quickly multiple and multiply inflected instantiations of Hughes’s Marxist personae were created
in translation—politics and aesthetics repeatedly collided to create different visions of Hughes’s
Marxism and of his “radical” verse.
Taking into account the extent to which Hughes was increasingly seen and celebrated by
an Internationale reading audience as the poet of either the so-called Negro race or the Negro
proletariat, the chapter is also deeply invested in how Hughes used his position at the forefront of
radical black internationalisms to undermine notions of racial essentialism.13 Hughes resisted the
28
Comintern’s attempts to position him as the first poet of the Negro proletariat, in large part,
because the Comintern conceived of all Africans and people of African descent as one
hegemonic collective. In response to this notion and the variation of the appellation he so
craved, Hughes wrote poetry that stakes the ground for a black international subjectivity on an
intertextual plane where his poetic personae play with and against those he forged in translation
and with international intertexts ranging from the Classical to the Post-Symbolist. These
attempts, when taking Hughes’s essentialist Soviet and Francophone reception into account, may
appear to run somewhat against the radical-socialist grain. Nevertheless, they demonstrate that
Hughes’s desire to be “el poeta de los negros” [the black poet] had its ethical limits. He would
not speak for a collective whose internal difference went unacknowledged.
Hughes’s evolving conception of translation also comprises a key element of the chapter.
His translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Syphilis” and “Black and White” and Louis
Aragon’s “Magnitogorsk”—projects aided by Aragon and Lidiia Filatova—mark a radical shift
in Hughes’s techne as a translator of poetry. This shift bears witness to Hughes’s new vision of
the task of the translator, a vision that placed less of an emphasis on strategic invention for the
sake of community building and increasing importance on what can be labeled literal translation.
Moreover, Hughes’s production of literal (and yet eminently readable) translations—translations
that, oft times, forsake the rhythm and rhyme of the source text in order to, somewhat
paradoxically, clearly convey poetic meaning—had an often overlooked impact on Hughes’s
13
By invoking the term “racial essentialism,” I am straying from Hughes’s vocabulary in order to provide a term
that will serve as a short-hand for beliefs that, in Hughes’s view (an in others’), tend to consider all peoples of
African descent as a homogenous community endowed with (nearly) identical traits, aspirations, behaviors, and
capacities.
29
own poetic production during his radical (and domestically denigrated) years as a poet. This
impact derives precisely from the disarticulations that Hughes could not translate and led to the
integration of elements of Russian prosody—forsaken in Hughes’s literal translations of
Mayakovsky—into his own radical-socialist verse.
The reception of Hughes’s poetry in French translation by French-Antillean and FrenchAfrican critics, poets, and students living abroad and in Paris provides the chapter with two lines
of argument that not only speak to the fomentation of anti-colonial sentiment and of black
internationalism, but also provide a partial explanation of how and why Hughes came to be seen
as a forefather to the négritude movement. Although Hughes’s early race-proud verse was
originally intended to speak specifically to a U.S. black audience suffering under the legal and de
facto weight of Jim Crow, it was warmly received in the Parisian salons of René Maran, Mercer
Cook, and Paulette and Jane Nardal. This reception was also afforded to other prominent figures
of the Harlem Renaissance, and—in the eyes of critics like Michel Fabre and Brent Hayes
Edwards—constitute a cultural exchange that represents a key element in the rise of transAtlantic black internationalism. It also constitutes the point of contact between Hughes and the
famous Big Three of the négritude movement—Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and
Léon-Gontran Damas—as all three men were introduced to the poet and his rousing verse in
these Parisian contexts. Moreover, the inspirational anti-assimilative cultural pride that these
poets found in Hughes’s early verse was emblematic of the cultural autonomy that early
articulations of négritude sought to engender in the Francophone world. And as the négritude
movement gained momentum over the course of the next thirty years, Hughes’s poetic identity in
the Francophone world was cemented accordingly. Hughes’s early verse (which in the
30
Francophone context became his Marxist verse) would shape his poetic personae and literary
influence in the Francophone world for the rest of his life. For his part, Hughes was quite aware
of his Marxist Francophone personae, and he wrote poems, like “Cubes” (1934), which criticized
French colonialism by acknowledging and manipulating the French aesthetic criteria against
which his work was measured and celebrated. Hughes’s work thus came to be seen differently
around the world, and he responded by incorporating these divergent visions of him into his
poetic production.
The dissertation’s third chapter is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and
is titled “Langston and Lorca: Pan-Africanism, Translation, and the Ethics of the Other.” It
argues that Hughes’s tenure at the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas [Alliance of Anti-Fascist
Intellectuals], his translation of Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano [Gypsy Ballads] and
his desire to create and compose a poetry of Revolution all forced him to grapple with issues of
prosody and formal rejuvenation that led him to a new conception of the ideal task and techne of
the translator. This techne informed and was informed by Hughes’s vision of pan-Africanism,
one that placed a premium on acknowledging the “difference in unity” of the black international
community. It also placed a paramount importance on authority of voice, including such issues
as the capacity to speak for one’s own community, for someone else’s, or, via translation, for
another text.
Hughes’s arrival in Spain as a war correspondent in 1937 presented him with a vexing
dual mandate that forced him to grapple with his fidelity to W.E.B. Du Bois’s vision of PanAfricanism and his own radical-socialist commitment to a worker’s world. This was the case
because Hughes was charged with the responsibility of reporting on colored involvement in the
31
war which, for him, meant reporting on Franco’s Moroccan conscripts as well as the black
volunteers in the International Brigades. This stark reality amply demonstrated the difference
within the world’s colored community, a quality that paradoxically engendered the need for a
pan-Africanism and, at the same time, necessitated a certain amount of sublimation, in the
interests of unity, to maintain it.
Hughes’s war correspondence reveals an ethics of representation which lays bare his
belief that writing about the Other necessitates an approach that forefronts curiosity and wonder.
This approach constituted, for Hughes, a way to write about “Franco’s Moors” without speaking
for them. This last point is of paramount importance, as Hughes—with the rise of fascism in
Europe—became increasingly involved in articulating malleable visions of race. It was only
when race was treated as a type of X factor—where a multiplicity of writing served, as it were, to
fill in the gaps of racial identity (a Sisyphean endeavor in Hughes’s eyes)—that race became a
concept which fascist interests could not manipulate to serve their own ends.
Hughes’s reticence to speak for a heterogeneous black international had an impact on his
vision of the task of the translator insofar as he became similarly wary of speaking for
(an)Other’s text. Indeed, Hughes’s translation of Romancero gitano represents a significant
departure from his earlier translations. He forsook his former penchant for play and became
almost maniacally obsessed with producing a literal translation of García Lorca’s collection of
romanceros (a collection considered to be amongst the greatest works of Spanish poetry
published in the twentieth century). This techne of literal (and collaborative) translation was, for
Hughes, the best way to let a text speak for itself in translation. If a translator could avoid
imposing his own vision of a text onto his translation (even though this process is an asymptotic
32
quest), he could avoid limiting the polyvalence of his source texts as well as the ethical pitfalls
that this limitation presents. Hence, we see an overlap in Hughes’s visions of blackinternationalism and translation, as both manifest an ethical drive to avoid speaking for others.
Despite the fact that Hughes remained reticent to serve as the spokesman for a worldwide
Negro proletariat, he was nevertheless positioned as such by the acclaimed poet and ardent
Loyalist Rafael Alberti. Having met Hughes in Mexico City in 1935, Alberti, like Fernández de
Castro, saw Hughes’s international stature as a valuable commodity for the propagation of leftist
politics. He published numerous transgressive translations of Hughes’s poetry to foment the
creation of a radical Spanish persona for the poet, one which was in full bloom by the time
Hughes arrived in Spain. For his part, Hughes was not unaware of these efforts and—with the
help of the maverick publisher and heiress Nancy Cunard as well as with that of Pablo Neruda—
published poems that augmented Alberti’s efforts. As a result, when Hughes arrived in Spain he
was warmly greeted as a radical-socialist poet by the members of the Alianza, many of whom
assisted Hughes in his translations.
Hughes’s residence at the Alianza not only exposed him to García Lorca’s verse, but also
allowed him to witness the publication explosion of romanceros de la guerra [war romances], a
popular and Popular Front brand of poetry that nevertheless had a five-hundred years history in
Spanish poetics. These romanceros were a far cry from García Lorca’s, as they generally
offered linear, straightforward accounts of Spanish martial heroism. Nevertheless, they were
attractive to Hughes because the poet—along with García Lorca, Mayakovsky, and several of his
other avant-garde contemporaries—had become increasingly convinced that popular, and not
experimental, forms were the best vehicle for the poetry of Revolution he sought to create. The
33
chapter explores how Hughes combined the aesthetic innovations of García Lorca’s romanceros
with the traditional and popular aspects of the romanceros de la guerra to create a new version
of the English folk-ballad. The first articulations of this form were written in Spain and offer the
reader a poetic portrayal of the inherent difficulties involved in the project of Pan-Africanism.
However, Hughes continued to pen these hybrid ballads in the years to come, publishing several
of them in his Shakespeare in Harlem (1942). Lastly, the chapter explores Hughes’s Spanishlanguage dissemination during and immediately after the war, arguing that his involvement with
the Spanish Republican cause was responsible—more than any other factor—for cementing his
leftist persona in the Hispanic world.
The dissertation’s final chapter—titled “Négritude What?: Anthologies and the
Consecration of Langston Hughes in the U.S. and the Hispanic and Francophone Worlds”—
finishes much of the work undertaken in the previous chapters by completing the dissertation’s
catalog of the translation and dissemination of Hughes’s poetry in the Hispanic and Francophone
worlds. Moreover, it provides a detailed comparison of both the divergent reception that his
poetry received in these literary arenas and of the multiple personae engendered by these
receptions by examining the anthologization of Hughes’s poetry in the U.S. as well as in French
and Spanish translation from 1940 to 1968. Positing that the process of anthologizing represents
a form of literary consecration, the chapter explores the numerous socio-political factors that
caused Hughes to be consecrated differently in multiple literary pantheons and, in turn, to serve
as forefather to multiple literary movements.
Hughes collaborated on all but one of the anthologies of his work (in Spanish and
French) and was acutely aware of his foreign-language personae. By the time the Haitian critic
34
René Piquion published the first foreign-language anthology dedicated exclusively to Hughes’s
verse in 1940, the poet knew himself to be considered a radical-socialist in several Spanish
American literary arenas and as an anti-assimilative, race-proud Marxist in the Francophone
literary world. Indeed, the early dissemination of Hughes’s poetry in translation created
adamantine discursive regimes that would surround his poetic production, in large part, for the
rest of his life. Owing to domestic persecution, Hughes had done much work to distance himself
from the radical-left after his return to the U.S. in 1938, but he was nevertheless more than happy
to foment his politically contentious personae abroad. He encouraged and helped to shape
multiple and multiply inflected instantiations of his voice and personae on a global scale in order
to realize his desire to become “el poeta de los negros” in a heterogeneous world where “los
negros” could not be represented by a single voice.
The advent of the Cold War and the collapse of French colonial empire, however,
changed matters dramatically. After his terrifying experience before the McCarthy committee in
1953, Hughes turned his back to the U.S. radical-left for over ten years. He dedicated himself
anew to writing poetry that spoke either to the race problem or to the Civil Rights Movement,
and his radical-socialist verse began to vanish from the U.S. literary map. Hughes’s selfanthology, Selected Poems (1958), helped to encourage this disappearance as it contained none
of his radical poems and was, more than any other single volume, responsible for consecrating
Hughes and his poetic production inside a frame of racial struggle and uplift. The outbreak of
the Algerian Revolution also affected how his work was anthologized, as the anti-assimilative
Hughes held little purchase for the reading public of a France that was losing its status as an
imperial power. Nevertheless, in the Francophone world and in Spanish America, these events
35
had little impact on the interpretive discursive regimes surrounding his poetic production,
allowing Hughes’s various radical personae to endure in translation.
Hughes’s collaborations with his anthologists, his work compiling anthologies of his own
verse, of Nicolás Guillén’s, and of Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral’s, as well as the experience of
seeing his own work translated several times over dramatically changed Hughes’s vision of
translation. He came to see translation as an ongoing (and potentially never-ending) process
wherein imperfect translations served to stimulate other translators to produce still more
translations of the same poems. No single translation or translator could afford a reading public
(be it English, French, Spanish, etc.) a definitive view or version of a poet’s verse. His belief in
perfect translations—as exemplified in his quest for an error-free translation of Romancero
gitano—gave way to a new vision that figured translation as an integral component of world
literature in general, as the means by which deserving authors and their works are (multiply)
consecrated.
The chapter concludes by exploring how Hughes’s early Francophone personae endured
not in anthologies, but in the propagation, achievements, and criticism of the poetics of
négritude. For the majority of his later life, Hughes was extremely reticent to address the
concept of négritude, refusing to do so until 1965. Although he did not distance himself from
the movement, he repeatedly declined to help give it shape or to locate his position in it.
Négritude was, for him, either a dangerous manifestation of racial essentialism or a FrenchAfrican poetic movement of which he was not a part. However, as his verse increasingly came
to be seen as a precursor to and exemplar of négritude poetics, the poet revised his vision of
négritude. He came to see the concept as one that—like the anthologies of his verse—referred to
36
multiple (and individual) instantiations of black international culture. Hence, the essentialism
that he had once associated with the movement gave way to a vision of négritude that figured it
as something akin to the practice of translation, as an on-going process of re-distilling artistic
production. Moreover, since this ongoing process served to foment a heterogeneous brand of
black internationalism that sought to preserve the “difference in unity,” Hughes came to see
literature in translation not simply as a vehicle through which one could express what had not
been expressed in the maternal tongue, but also—in so far as each instantiation of négritude
redistilled yet another separated by time and space—as an exchange of identity in the pursuit of
communal understanding.
Disciplinary Contributions
“Black Radicalism in Translation: Langston Hughes’s Translations and Translators in the
Hispanic and Francophone Worlds” makes significant contributions to the fields of Comparative
Literature, Literature of the Americas, Translation Studies, and to the study of the literature of
the African Diaspora. The work of Hughes and his translators constitutes a stream of literary
interventions intended to facilitate the agendas of multiple, oft-times competing,
internationalisms that placed a high value on the role of literary exchange in fostering ties
between communities that lacked a common language but shared a common cause. By
providing an expansive account of these literary exchanges, the dissertation contributes to the
larger projects of mapping the diversity of inter-American literary traffic and tracing the origins
and practice(s) of Diaspora. Moreover, insofar as the present study provides a comparative
reading of the translation and dissemination of Langston Hughes’s poetry in the Hispanic and
37
Francophone worlds by juxtaposing two histories of translation shaped by two distinct cultures
of literary production that, nevertheless, both figure the oeuvre of a single author as their topic of
inquiry, the dissertation offers both a new vantage point from which to view Hughes’s literary
career, and a new method of inquiry for the field of Translation Studies.
As a case study, the dissertation—in addition to its two-fold methodological contribution
to Translation Studies discussed above—makes further contributions to the disciplines of
Comparative Literature, to Literature of the Americas, and to the study of the literature of the
African Diaspora. This is the case, in part, because although Hughes’s contributions as a black
translator are unparalleled (despite the fact that his efforts went largely unpublished), he was by
no means the only translator among his Harlem Renaissance counterparts. In fact, several key
figures in the internationally influential movement—like James Weldon Johnson (who translated
from Spanish), Jessie Redmon Fauset (who translated from French), and Countee Cullen (who
translated from Ancient Greek)—also enriched both the U.S. literary landscape and their own
literary voices by taking up the task of the translator. Hence, this dissertation is, in a sense, but
one portrait among (a potential) many of the roles played by Harlem Renaissance authors in
adumbrating Literature of the Americans, in fomenting the rise of literary exchange in the
African Diaspora, and in propagating internationalisms intended to combat perilous and
xenophobic incarnations of closed-border consciousness. This fact is of seminal importance
because it helps to draw into relief the contours of an internationally influential Harlem
Renaissance and also because it highlights the often overlooked fact that the literature written by
Harlem Renaissance authors was not the sui generis product of a cadre of African-American
artists reflecting on (or reincarnating) their shared cultural inheritance. Rather, it represents a
38
body of literature whose influences were both local and international and stretched across
boundaries both racial and linguistic, a collective oeuvre that was, as was Hughes’s, molded by
translation.
The work of Hughes and his translators also provides a case example of how black
radicalism traveled in translation during the first half of the twentieth century in unanticipated
ways. For example, the somewhat surprising interpretation in the Francophone literary world of
Hughes’s early race-proud poetry as a type of Marxist verse helped to foment a brand of socialist
black internationalism incarnate in négritude, which, in turn, served as a foundational ethos for
newly independent African nations. In fact, a history of Hughes’s career as a translator reveals
that a whole host of black internationalisms were informed and transformed by instantiations of
various radicalisms in translation. In this sense, the dissertation also provides a case example for
scholars of Political Science and History that illustrates how literary exchange affects global
historical developments and political movements. In short, exploring how Langston Hughes’s
poetry and brand of black internationalism traveled and transformed in translation paints an
illustrative portrait in miniature of how literary black radicalism traveled in translation and
transformed the world from 1930 to 1967.14
39
Works Cited and Consulted in the Introduction
T.W. Adorno. Aesthetic theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. Ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedmann.:
London and Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/
Library of Liberal Arts, 1999.
Baldwin, Kate. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2002.
Cobb, Martha K. “Redefining the Definitions in Afro-Hispanic Literature.” College Language
Association Journal. No. 23, December, 1979: 148.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise
of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Fabre, Michel. The French critical reception of African-American literature: from the
beginnings to 1970: an annotated bibliography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood
Press, 1995.
Fowler, Carolyn. “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Jacques Roumain.” Black
American Literature Forum. Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn, 1981: 84-88.
Guillame, Alfred J. Jr. “And Bid Him Translate: Langston Hughes’ Translations of Poetry from
French. Vol. IV, No. 3, Fall, 1985: 1-22.
Horace. Ars Poetica. London: Macmillan, 1939.
Jackson, Richard. “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Black Hispanic Writers.” Black
Literature Forum. Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn, 1981: 89-92.
40
Kaup, Monika. “‘Our America’ That Is Not One: Transnational Black Atlantic Disclosures in
Nicolás Guillén and Langston Hughes.” Discourse Vol. 22, No. 3: 87-103.
Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Trans.
Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991.
Kutzisnski, Vera. “Yo también soy América: Langston Hughes Translated.” American Literary
History 2006 18(3): 550-578.
Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2002.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, Saint Paul,
Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 1991.
Locke, Alain L. “The Negro in the Three Americas.” Journal of Negro Education. Vol. 13, No.
1, Winter, 1944: 7-18.
Masiello, Francine. “Rethinking Neocolonial Esthetics: Literature, Politics, and Intellectual
Community in Cuba’s Revista de Avance.” Latin American Research Review. Vol. 28,
No. 2, 1993: 3-31.
Matheus, John F. “Langston Hughes as Translator.” CLA Journal. Vol. XI, 4, June, 1968: 319329.
Michaud, Yves. L’art à l’état gazeux: Essai sur le triomphe de l’esthétique. Paris: Bussière
Camedan Imprimeries, 2003.
--. Critères esthétiques et jugement de gout. Paris: Éditions Jacqueline Chambon, 1999.
Mullen, Edward J. Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti. Hamden, CT: Archon
Books, 1977.
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Podesta, Guido A. “An Ethnographic Reproach to the Theory of the Avant-Garde: Modernism in
Latin America and the Harlem Renaissance.” MLN. Vol. 106, No. 2, March, 1991: 395422.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
--. The Life of Langston Hughes Volume II:1941-1967 I Dream a World. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
--. “Future Scholarly Projects on Langston Hughes.” Black American Literature Forum. Vol.
21, No. 3, Autumn, 1987: 305-316.
Risset, Jacqueline. Traduction et mémoire poétique. Paris: Herman, 2007.
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University
Press, 1975.
Venuti, Lawrence, Ed. The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.
Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
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Chapter 1: Reborn in Translation: Inter-American Dialogue, Complementary Conversation,
and Locating Langston Hughes in Leftist Latin America
43
Introduction Part I: Reborn Radical
Some eighteen months prior to Langston Hughes’s arrival in Spain as a war
correspondent and some six weeks before the Popular Front triumphed in the Spanish national
elections on February 16, 1936, Nueva Cultura, one of the two chief organs of the Spanish
Republican cause, displayed on its cover a challenge, a query, a long-distance greeting:
“HALLO! AMERICA…?” Placed alongside this invocation of a bad connection are two
images that indict the greatest hypocrisy of the world’s greatest democracy: the fraternal hail of
Lady Liberty and the fratricidal noose of a U.S. lynch mob placed around the neck of a profile
reminiscent of Paul Robeson. Red letters emerge from the confusion, calling for and heralding
the arrival of a New Culture. In the pages that follow, the issue’s longest article is dedicated to
Langston Hughes, the second exemplar in an anthology of proletarian poets. A photo of Hughes
leads the article and its caption, in terms quite foreign to his U.S. readers, celebrates him as “el
poeta negro de la Revolución” [the black poet of the Revolution] and concludes with Spanish
language translations of his “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” and “Good Morning
Revolution,” poems that, in turn, send out their own announcements and revisionist, messianic
greetings.
The January edition of Nueva Cultura brings to the fore five key components that form
the backdrop of this chapter: the context dependent receptions of Langston Hughes’s so-called
“revolutionary” or “radical phase,” his dissemination and translation in Hispanic literary arenas,
the so-called world-wide negro vogue; the first attempts to articulate a black international; and
international Communism. This study shifts the terrain of Hughes analysis to enrich
contemporary conceptions of these components by offering an initial reading of how Hughes
44
came into his “radical phase” and explicating José Antonio Fernández de Castro’s (1897-1951)
essential role in situating and promoting Hughes in Spanish and Latin American contexts.
Moreover, it seeks to relocate the origin and influences of this phase, often conceived as the
outgrowth of his sojourn in the Soviet Union in 1932, by figuring it as part and parcel of a
process that is best described as Hughes’s rebirth in translation. Having secretly confided he felt
himself a poet abandoned by his muse, Hughes arrived in Cuba in February of 1930 and, in large
part at the impetus of Fernández de Castro, took up the task of the translator, a task that
multiplied his political and poetical fronts and founts, and enriched and regenerated his poetic
voice. Upon arriving in Cuba, he had stepped into a revolutionary cauldron of which,
unbeknownst to him, he was already a part, a cauldron that Fernández de Castro had been stirring
for quite some time.
Introduction Part II: Influence or Complementary Conversation
It has long been a matter of contentious debate between Cuban (Vasconcelos, Ballagas,
and Guirao) and American literary critics (Rampersad, Jackson, Cobb), as noted in the
introduction, as to whether or not Nicolás Guillén received the idea for his son poemas, first
exhibited in his Motivos de son (1930), from Langston Hughes. The argument from Hughes’s
camp is simple enough. As is well documented, the two men met upon Hughes’s arrival in Cuba
in 1930. Hughes convinced Guillén to look to son and rumba to shape his poetic voice just as he
had looked to jazz and blues to create a new poetry in the United States, one capable of
celebrating his cultural identity and reflecting his culture’s popular forms. The ephebe, as the
argument runs, heeded Hughes’s advice and imitated his style, producing his own revolutionary
45
compositions with these very same aspirations in mind. However, the only documentary
evidence of this lies in Hughes’s correspondence with Hoffman Reynolds Hays dated July 13,
1942. Therein, Hughes responds to Hay’s request for information on Jacques Roumain and
Nellie Campobello by first suggesting that he seek information from Fernández de Castro and the
Haitian poet, Felix Morisseau-Leroy, and then relates:
Both he [Jacques Roumain] and Guillén say they've been influenced by my
work, but Roumain toward the free verse-race matter side, and Guillén toward
the use of folk forms and idioms, the Cuban equivalent of my blues. Guillén
was writing Spanish free verse when I first met him around 1930 and hadn't
yet touched the dialect-folk idiom that made him famous. I pointed out to him
then the music of the Cuban son [sic], I mean the word-music and rhythm
aside from the melodies. And a year or two later he sent me his early son [sic]
poems.
When considered in light of his correspondence with Guillén and Gustavo Urrutia—a
correspondence that documents that Hughes received and praised Motivos de son just a few
months after the two men met—the truth of the claim that Hughes guided Guillén towards the
use of folk forms becomes as cloudy as Hughes’s memory. Moreover, Nicolás Guillén and his
critics tell quite a different set of stories, narratives that range from an insistence on Guillén’s
radical originality to arguments that detail a long line of Cuban influences, from Guillén’s
declarations that the poems represented months of labor to remarks he made in his later life
which attributed his inspiration to an odd dream and a bad night’s sleep. In fact, Fernández de
46
Castro himself would suggest in his Tema negro (1934) that Hughes—along with García-Lorca
and Mayakovsky—had been greatly influenced politically and poetically by Cuban literati.15
This chapter does not lend a hand to either side of the influence debate. Rather, it figures
Fernández de Castro as the fulcrum, or active axis, which gave rise to the dispute. In an effort to
foment inter-American literary exchange, the historical record proves that he alternately lent
credence to what has become an either/or debate with articles printed in Revista de la Habana,
Diario de la Marina, and Urbe, assertions in private correspondence with Hughes, Guillén, and
Gustavo Urrutia, and—perhaps most intriguingly—with his conception and praxis of the task of
the translator. His translation praxis embodies several key facets of Horace’s advice to the
translator (explored in our introduction), and also reflects his vision of translation as a process of
complementary conversation. This process is one wherein ideal translations shed light on their
respective originals and vice versa, and allow the bilingual reader a window into both the source
and target cultures. In other words, to close read a Cuban poem that takes race as its theme in
English translation, and vice versa, is to reveal the similarities and differences in how race is
conceived in each arena.
Fernández de Castro’s 1928 translation of Hughes’s “I, Too”—a poem from Hughes first
volume of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926), that speaks both to the exclusion of blacks from U.S.
mainstream society and to a future when that exclusion ends—provides an acute example of how
both his status among left-wing Cubans and his conception of translation provided Spanish
language readers with a new version and vision of both Hughes and his poem. (which assigns).
15 This assertion of influence is explored in detail throughout the dissertation’s first chapter.
47
These new incarnations reflect an ideologically driven (and oft times transgressive) manipulation
of the poem’s logic that not only inscribes Fernández de Castro’s historical moment and his
unique position, but also lays bare his vision of the task of the translator, one that assigns the
translator the responsibility of producing a complement to the target-language original. He
surreptitiously infuses the poem with his own agenda to encouragee both the collectivization of
black Cuban workers and, concomitantly, communist revolution in Cuba. As a result, his
complementary creation not only allowed Hughes’s poem to survive in Spanish, but also helped
to create and cement a vision of Hughes and his work that firmly embedded both inside a leftist
context of interpretation that endured throughout the Hispanic world well past the poet’s death.
Given that Hughes’s engagement with revolutionary or radical poetry is seen as but a phase in
most arenas, Fernández de Castro can thus be credited with creating a distinctly Latin American
Hughes, a Hughes whose entire oeuvre is conceptualized as variations on a revolutionary
theme.16
Fernández de Castro’s work as translator and fulcrum and his successful attempts to
prompt Hughes to translate Cuban poets had a profound impact on Hughes’s poetic production,
on Hughes’s conceptions of race and class struggle, and on the poets that Hughes helped to
consecrate on the international stage with his own translations. In this sense, Fernández de
Castro’s relationship with Hughes can be seen as one that sought to use Hughes’s poetry, in
transgressive translation, as an exemplar of Cuban ideology. It can also be seen as a
relationship—insofar as Fernández de Castro repeatedly urged Hughes to translate Cuban
poetry—that capitalized on Hughes’s literary fame in order to broadcast the voice of Cuban poets
into foreign literary arenas. In short, Fernández de Castro imported Hughes to serve uniquely
48
Cuban agendas, and prevailed upon Hughes’s sense of reciprocity to publicize the voices of
Cuban poets to the English-reading world.
This accomplishment necessitated that Fernández de Castro take up both sides of the
influence debate with equal fervor, and—in so doing—aided both overlapping internationalisms
(Communism and Pan-Africanism) with which Hughes had to contend. By convincing Hughes
that he was an influential figure in Cuba, Fernández de Castro gained greater access to Hughes’s
oeuvre. This, in turn, fed Hughes’s desire to foster an intellectual rapprochement among people
of color in the Americas (to begin the work of black internationalism). He allowed his work to
be translated and, also at the impetus of Fernández de Castro, translated the work of Cuban
authors, serving the interests of black internationalism, the mobilization of black workers in
Cuba, and communist revolt. And by convincing Cuban literati that they had influenced
Hughes’s writing and therefore had a stake in it, Fernández de Castro affected how these figures
came to conceptualize their global import. He imbued them with the idea that they could indeed
undermine the imperialist U.S. from within by influencing its literary arena. Hence, the
exclusive preoccupation with whether or not Hughes influenced Guillén proves to be a
distraction that might avert the reader’s gaze from a larger issue: the importance of an
intellectual exchange facilitated by translation and intended to influence poets and readers the
world over.
Fernández de Castro, Los Minoristas, and “El tema negro”
Some two years prior to Hughes’s arrival in Cuba in 1930, Fernández de Castro wrote the
first Spanish-language translation of a Langston Hughes poem—namely, of Hughes’s widely
49
anthologized “I, Too.” In so doing, he inaugurated a translation deluge of Hughes’s poetry in the
Hispanic world that continued unabated throughout the course of the poet’s life. Titled “Yo,
También…,” Fernández de Castro’s translation appeared in the September edition of the journal
Social, Cuba’s premiere organ (alongside Revista de Avance) for the dissemination of both
foreign and domestic avant-garde art. It constituted somewhat of a departure for the translator
who, at the ripe age of thirty-one, had already established his reputation as Havana’s most
prolific translators of Soviet authors. Fernández de Castro was also a prominent leftist agitator
with aristocratic roots, a journalist of note, and the editor of scores of Cuba’s most important
literary and political journals, including Diario de la Marina, Cuba’s periodical of record
founded in 1832. Although white, he was among Cuba’s leading literary authorities on black
themes and black writers in Cuban literature and a central member of the Minorista group, a
cadre of Cuban leftist literati driven somewhat underground by the intermittent censorship of
Machado’s regime, which held a virtual monopoly on Cuba’s literary (and publishing) world in
1928. These well-placed and influential figures constituted a circle that provided numerous
forums for the dissemination of politically charged literature and cultural criticism. The group’s
manifesto, signed on May 7, 1927, provides the clearest account of their political orientation. It
calls for new poetic forms, strident opposition to U.S. economic exploitation (chiefly manifest in
the exploitation of Cuba’s sugar rich provinces), and a commitment to the financial and political
enfranchisement of Cuban colonos, or cane-field sharecroppers, who were mostly the
descendants of former slaves.
The Minoristas were among the first Cubans to propagate the heterogeneous literary
movement of the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s that is now referred to as Afrocrilloismo. Afrocriollismo
50
was developed both by white writers who wrote what has come to be called negrista poetry
(poetry based on black folk forms or themes) and by black writers who wrote what can be called
negritud, or authentic black, poetry (Jackson, Black Literature and Humanism, 20-23). The
Minoristas, who recognized no such distinction, participated in each component of the
movement as both poets and publishers. In fact, José Z. Tallet’s negrista “La rumba”—
published in 1928 a few months before Fernández de Castro’s translation of Hughes appeared—
was long credited for the advent of both Afrocriollismo and poesía negra [black-themed poetry]
in Cuba. The most promising poets of African descent in 1928 Cuba, namely Nicolás Guillén
and Regino Pedroso, were yet to be associated with the Afrocriollo movement. The former—two
years away from penning his Motivos de son—was seen mostly as a neo-modernist (one of the
numerous heirs of José Martí and Rubén Darío). And Pedroso—having two years previously
forsaken his own Parnassian preoccupations—was now celebrated, by Fernández de Castro and
countless others, as Cuba’s poet of the proletariat.
In its earliest Cuban manifestations, Afrocriollismo (negrismo in particular) generated, at
its best, a dilettante image because of its close similarity to the worldwide negro vogue—the
scholarly and aesthetic interest shown in the black by Leo Frobenius, Pablo Picasso, André Gide,
Igor Stravinsky, and countless others fascinated with jazz, black art, and the literature of the
Harlem Renaissance. At its worst, Afrocriollismo disseminated stereotypes born of a black
phobia fed by the aftermath of a recent Cuban race war, or black revolt, which resulted in the
massacre of thousands of blacks in May of 1912 (Jackson, Black Literature and Humanism, 2122).
51
For Fernández de Castro, the 1928 emergence of the Afrocriollo movement in Cuba
represented both a chance to refocus the attention of the Cuban population onto its race
problem—the struggle to integrate the large and impoverished black population, the backbone of
the sugar industry, into the political, social, and cultural mainstream—and an opportunity to
revitalize the tema negro [black thematic] in Cuban belles lettres. The revitalization of this
theme—whose conspicuous twenty-five-year absence Fernández de Castro directly linked to the
U.S. imperial presence on the island—was for him a necessary ingredient for the resurgence of
Cuba’s revolutionary zeal. It was nothing short of a prerequisite for the mobilization of black
workers, and represented Cuba’s best chance to throw off the shackles of U.S. imperialism and
the Machado regime—to bring about a more “complete set of liberties” that would dwarf “that of
the famous French postulate” which was “no longer sufficient” (Fernández de Castro, Tema
negro, 9-10). The 1912 revolution, or race revolt, led by “los coroneles de la Guerra de
Independencia de origen africano—Estenoz e Ivonet” [The Colonels of the War of Independence
of African descent] had provided a spark (Férnadez de Castro, Tema negro, 66-67). The capacity
of Cuba’s literati to combine the energy of this spark with the vigor of the newly imported
worldwide negro vogue would prove a determining factor both in the liberation of Cuba and in
Cuba’s ability to recognize the heterogeneity of its culture. A Cuban literature devoid of black
themes, Fernández de Castro argued, was tantamount to a hypothetical Mexican national
literature devoid of pre-Columbian themes. And while efforts like Tallet’s provided a good start,
the absence of any black Cuban poet “worthy of mention” in this respect served as a strong
impetus for the importation of Langston Hughes (Fernández de Castro, Tema negro, 64).
52
The Perfect Poem in the Perfect Places: “I, Too” and the Problem of the 20th
Century in the U.S. and Cuba.
In a 1945 essay titled “Greetings, Good Neighbors,” Hughes called for an increase in
cultural exchange between the U.S. and Latin America that would exceed its current musical
horizons (touring jazz and rumba groups) by including intellectual, political and poetic traffic.
With regards to the matter of race relations, he noted that his Latin American neighbors often
times “know better than we do,” but that the U.S. had nevertheless learned surprisingly little
from Latin American cultures (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 251-253). In contrast, Hughes’s growing
number of clippings from Latin American newspapers—which contained translations of a
“certain little poem of mine” published “almost twenty years ago in the Crisis” called “I, Too”—
testified to the facts that his Latin America neighbors were receptive and adept learners who,
because of this fact, had much to give “all Americans” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 251-253).17 Hughes
ends the essay by imbedding “I, Too,” and, via his earlier reference to “all Americans,”
implicitly suggests that its inter-American resonance is the reason for its popularity throughout
the hemisphere. However, the motives behind Fernández de Castro’s decision to translate “I,
Too” are not so transparent.
“Yo, Tambien…” occupies a singular status among Spanish-language translations of
Hughes’s poetry not simply because it was first, but because Fernández de Castro’s translation is
radically unique. The translation displays a remarkable disregard of fidelity to the original in
favor of a fidelity of a different sort, one that reflects Fernández de Castro’s commitment to a
17 “I, Too” was in fact (and remains today) Hughes’s most translated poem.
53
local (or Cuban) solution to the problem posed by what W.E.B. Du Bois labeled—the
“worldwide” color line, “the problem of the twentieth century” (Du Bois 30).18 Its five most
distinctive translation choices are by no means fortuitous. They reflect ideological motives that
distinguish his “Yo mbién…” from both Hughes’s original (as anthologized by Alain Locke in
1925) and the plethora of its Spanish-language translations—represented here by Xavier
Villarrutia’s translation in Contemporáneos (1931) and Jorge Luis Borges’s in Sur (1931).
José Antonio de Fernández de Castro
54
Langston Hughes
Jorge Luis Borges
55
Xavier Villarutia
Fernández de Castro’s choice of honrar [to honor] over the more literal cantar [to
sing] in the phrase “honro a América” erases Hughes’s allusion to Whitman’s “I celebrate
myself, and sing myself,” an allusion that could hardly have escaped him given the lengthy Latin
American tradition of translations, revisions, and criticism of Whitman. Hence, “honro a”
suggests either a poetic persona paying homage to America (not a far cry from one of the
valences of Hughes’s “I, too, sing America”) or, more to the point, a poetic persona who is
56
himself an honor to América. Moreover, in Spanish language translation the term “America” or
América does not ordinarily possess the national/continental ambiguity that it does in English.
Rather, it tends to refer solely to the continent(s) as a whole. Hence, Fernández de Castro’s
translation begs a hemispheric reading of the poem’s social and political implications in Spanish
American contexts.
The idea that the Cuban black was an honor to his American nation resonates with
Fernández de Castro’s view, expressed in his Tema negro, that Cuba’s literary and national
identity were inextricably linked to the omnipresent participation of Cuba’s black population in
Cuba’s revolutionary struggles, conflicts which fostered and were fostered by the presence of
black themes in Cuban literature. It also reflects a vision of Cuba’s racial dynamic in terms quite
similar to those that Fernando Ortiz would use to articulate his famous notion of transculturación
a decade later. In other words, Fernández de Castro believed that an independent Cuba seen in
its proper light would constitute a mulato nation; and if Cuba derived its national character from
its adamantine independence and revolutionary zeal, then its black population served to honor
this character as much as any other segment of the population. As Fernández de Castro was fond
of writing, authentic Cuban independence and the complete emancipation and integration of
black Cubans would go hand in hand.
The racial and political dynamics of Mexico City and Buenos Aires were quite different
from Havana’s, and prompted both Villarrutia and Borges—both of whom were not political
radicals—to approach and to translate “I, Too” in divergent manners.19 These approaches speak
57
to their respective cultural contexts and, in so doing, highlight the degree to which Fernández de
Castro’s translation is well complemented by a reading that suggests his effort was informed
by—or, at the very least, resonated with—a Marxist Cuban agenda. Sur began publication in
1931 when the Argentine nation was suffering under the weight of the Década Infame [Infamous
Decade] and long after Argentina’s black population had been decimated.20 As John King points
out, the journal’s editors saw themselves as part of the “Great Tradition of Argentine Liberalism”
and, as a result, opposed the regime while remaining politically aloof (King 7). This mixture of
commitment and withdrawal led the journal to see itself as a civilizing force that could infuse
Buenos Aires with high culture by importing foreign ideas and literary works in translation (King
199-200). Jorge Luis Borges was both at the forefront of this effort and an astute reader and
translator of Whitman’s verse. As Efrain Kristal points out in Invisible Work: Borges and
Translation, Borges—after abandoning a conception of Whitman’s verse as autobiographical—
came to see Whitman, Whitman’s poetic persona, and the reader as all part of a complex
relationship which he described as a “trinity” (Kristal 50). In other words, Whitman created a
version of himself who inhabits his poetry, and he also thought of the reader as the “hero of the
book” (Kristal 50). Hence, it comes as no surprise that Borges picked up on Hughes’s reference
to Whitman and translated the opening line of Hughes’s poem according: “Yo también canto
América” [I too sing America]. Borges even went so far as to infuse his own vision of Whitman
into Hughes’s poem. As if it had been written twice, his translation tellingly concludes with two
19 Although Villarrutia held close ties to many Mexican radicals in the literary circle surrounding the journal Contemporáneos, he was ultimately excluded from Mexico’s most
militant (figures like Diego Rivera) because of his homosexuality.
20 The Década Infame [Infamous Decade] in |Argentina began in |1930 with the |coup d'état against |President |Hipólito Yrigoyen by |José Félix Uriburu. This period was
characterized by |electoral fraud, persecution of the |political opposition, and generalized government corruption.
58
periods, and suggests that either that the poet and his persona wrote the poem or that—owing to
the fact that Whitman does not use punctuation in this fashion—the poet, persona, and his
translator are responsible for the work at hand.
The exhilarating atmosphere of post-revolutionary Mexico City was a far cry from the
relatively conservative environs of Buenos Aires in 1931. Its artistic community placed a high
premium on both originality and on the project of articulating the new Mexico. John King points
out that the task of artist and intellectual alike in this environment was “to proclaim the new
nation of Mexico, to assert the spirit of revolution in, say, the bold brush strokes of the muralists”
(King 18). Xavier Villarrutia’s homosexuality isolated him from the Mexican muralists but he
nevertheless proves no exception to this rule, as he and his chief influence, Ramón López
Velarde, both dedicated a large portion of their artistic production to the, implicitly nationalistic,
portrayal of the Mexican landscape (in the broadest sense of the term). It therefore comes as no
surprise that Villarrutia, forsaking the Whitmanesque resonance of Borges’s translation, chose to
separate Mexico from (and link it to) “América” by translating Hughes’s lines as “Yo también
canto a América” [I too sing to America].
Fernández de Castro’s choice to employ “honro” instead of “canto” does not simply erase
an allusion to Whitman, but also loses the potential for his text to resonate with Rubén Darío’s
seminal Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905). This is significant in several respects. Given that
Darío’s literary critics throughout Spanish-America traditionally figure his poetry as the first
instantiation of truly American verse, Fernández de Castro’s decision serves to separate Hughes
from a nascent tradition of Spanish American poetry and the solidarity associated with such a
notion. Hughes’s verse is relegated to an interstitial space. It neither resonates with that of the
59
hemisphere’s most prominent Spanish American poetic voice nor sings along with Whitman.
Moreover, since Cantos de vida y esperanza represents an attempt (on Darío’s part) to become
more politically engaged and contains poems with anti-U.S. sentiment like “A Roosevelt” [To
Roosevelt], Fernández de Castro’s decision subverts his own agenda by denying Hughes a tie to
the anti-imperialist sentiment he seeks to propagate in Cuba. This loss, in turn, assigns all the
more weight to his transgressive translation. It resonates with neither Whitman nor Darío,
setting forth instead a translation whose sentiments can be said to mirror Fernández de Castro’s
vision of a mulatto nation.
Fernández de Castro’s second significant departure from Hughes’s poem is his decision
to translate “darker” as “negro” [black]. By forsaking the more common “oscuro” [dark]
employed by Borges and Villarrutia, he erases the Du Boisian play that permeates Hughes’s
original, as “darker” alludes to the binary Du Bois constructs between the European, or white,
colonial and imperial powers of the world and the “darker races” subjugated by them.21 Hence,
Fernández de Castro’s “negro” narrows the inclusive connotations of Hughes’s “darker,” limiting
its chief referent to people of specifically African descent. Nevertheless, given the history of
racial terminology in Cuba, this decision paradoxically encompasses as it excludes. Since the
1840’s, Cuba’s racial system had included whites and a raza de color [race of color] or clase de
color [class of color] encompassing blacks and mulattoes (Helg 3). In 1928, it had no parallel in
Latin America, and provided a unique context for the continuing Cuban use—unquestioned until
the 1959 socialist revolution—of the collective los negros or negro to qualify both pardos
60
[mulattoes] and morenos [blacks] (Helg 3).22 Hence, Fernández de Castro’s use of the term
“negro” does indeed gesture towards a type of inclusion or collectivization, albeit on a smaller
scale than that of Du Bois’s “darker.” And this inclusion also serves as grounds for race and
class solidarity in a uniquely Cuban context in 1928.23 In a somewhat similar vein, Fernández
de Castro’s choice of “negro” allows the poem to be read as a statement from a black American
to either the U.S. or to his América—a possibility not allowed by either Borges’s or Villarrutia’s
translation—and suggests both a distance and solidarity between American blacks and
Americans as a whole. This translation decision successfully side-steps a pitfall to which other
translations may fall victim, as “hermano oscuro” throughout the Hispanic world carries an
idiomatic weight somewhat akin to the English language idiom “black sheep.” Moreover, it
speaks directly to yet another allusion inherent in Hughes’s original phrasing: namely, to the
story of the mark of Cain and its employment, throughout the hemisphere, as a Christian
justification for the institution of slavery. Thus, Fernández de Castro’s translation not only
successfully alludes to the Biblical trope but also manages to suggest that both the persona and
those who would exclude him all occupy a place in either the same political arena or in the same,
perhaps human, family.
The invocation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness enacted by
Hughes’s “I, Too” appears, at first glace, an element doomed to be lost in translation. Neither
22 The tri-tier system employed from Haiti to Venezuela did have subtle, and not so subtle, manifestations in Cuba, as lighter blacks were routinely given preference over their
“darker brothers” in both economic and social milieus.
23 The word “moreno”—in terms racial—was an accepted translation for “dark” in Cuba. In his 1956 autobiography I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes asserts—in detailing his clubhopping experiences with Fernández de Castro in the largely black section of Havana known as Mariano—that mujer morena, on Cuban soil, translates as “dark girl” and mujer
negra as “black girl.”
61
también [also, as well, too] nor any of its synonyms is capable of producing the phonic slippage
necessary to reproduce Hughes’s allusion. However, one need only to look at Borges’s
translation (albeit in a new light) to realize that this is not the case. Through its clever use of
punctuation (namely its aforementioned two periods), it presents its reader with a split, or
doubled, persona who has, in a sense, not only written, but translated the poem twice. Du Bois’s
articulation of black self-consciousness and Borges’s division of author and persona both serve
to highlight a split identity that nevertheless must also be seen as a single entity. The interplay
Du Bois’s two-selves (one black and one American) and the elements of Borges’s Whitman
trinity serve to create an identity whose very existence is a function of the cohesive union of its
constitutive components.
Both Fernández de Castro’s enjambment of Hughes’s “Besides” and its curious
translation as “al mismo tiempo” [at the same time] imply that the persona’s inclusion in
society—represented in the poem by a seat at the table—is a function of his beauty being
recognized by (white) others. This constitutes his third unique and transgressive translation, as
Hughes’s original and the translations of Borges and Villarrutia narrate quite a different
sequence of events. In these cases, the persona gains his seat at the table by nurturing the very
fortitude that allows him, despite his exclusion, to laugh (perhaps defiantly), to eat, and to grow
strong. And it is only after (and because of) the acquisition of this additional strength, marked
temporally by “Then” in the original and “Entonces” in the translations of Borges and
Villarrutia, that the persona acquires social acceptance. The recognition of the persona’s beauty,
in fact, is more of an aside than anything else, a “Besides” or “Además” that tangentially comes
to pass as a result of the pariah’s successful self-betterment. By erasing the aside and collapsing
62
the temporality of the original with the phrase “al mismo tiempo,” Fernández de Castro’s “Yo
También…” adds potentially radical weight to Hughes’s original (as the sequence of events can
now be read as straightforwardly causal) and reassigns the agency behind the persona’s
inclusion, distributing it equally between the persona and the shamed. This, in turn, brings us
back to the central importance that the presence of the tema negro in Cuban art holds for
Fernández de Castro. As he insinuates repeatedly in both his unpublished introduction to
Hughes’ 1935 “Troubled Lands” manuscript—a collection of Hughes’s English translations of
Cuban and Mexican short stories—and in his own 1935 volume of criticism titled Tema negro en
las letras de Cuba (1608-1935), Cuba’s emancipation from the various powers who have sought
to subjugate her and her inclusion at the table of independent and free nations has gone and will
go hand in hand, “al mismo tiempo,” with the inclusion (or the recognition of the beauty) of the
tema negro in Cuban art.
Fernández de Castro’s title “Yo, También…” further effaces the Du Boisian play at work
in Hughes’s original. For most of Hughes’s informed readers at the time, “I, Too” would have
been a clear invocation of Du Bois’s theory of double-consciousness as articulated in his The
Souls of Black Folk (1901), a book that Hughes repeatedly put on a par with the Bible both in
print and in his letters to Du Bois. Despite the loss of allusions to Du Bois’s “darker races” and
theory of double-consciousness, “Yo, También…” does much work to recuperate the expansive
family effaced with the loss of Hughes’s “darker brothers” particularly through its clever use of
ellipsis. It suggests that a vast multitude of speakers, perhaps the whole of Latin America, also
yearns to stake the claim: “I, too, am America.” This powerful sentiment not only links the Latin
American struggle against yanqui domination to the struggle of U.S. blacks in their own
63
homeland, but also reminds his Cuban audience that those who sing America bear complexions
of all shades.
Despite this suggestion of solidarity and common cause, any reading of Fernández de
Castro’s importation of Langston Hughes that takes into account the geo-political complexities
inherent in this engagement must keep in mind that the differences between the U.S. and Cuban
visions of the “race problem” and its relation to artistic production were just as numerous if not
more plentiful than the commonalities. On the U.S. front, the vigorous debate over the existence
of a uniquely “black art” or “black sensibility” between prominent figures like George Schuyler
(who denounced such notions as “Hokum” and was well respected among Cuban literati both
white and black) and personages like Alain Locke and Langston Hughes (who championed the
idea of a black of Negro art) had decidedly tipped in favor of the latter. This was, in no small
part, due to Hughes’s rebuttal of Schuyler’s skepticism presented in his famous 1926 essay “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Therein, Hughes asserts that the “common people”—
differentiated from assimilative upper- and middle-class blacks—“[f]urnish a wealth of colorful,
distinctive material for any artist [precisely] because they still hold onto their own individuality
in the face of American standardization” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 31-36). In turn, the world’s first
“truly great Negro artist” would find in the culture of these “common people” not only
“sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work,” but also a means
(presented in the form of a “duty”) “to change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I
want to be white,’ hidden in the aspiration of his people, to ‘Why should I want to be white? I
am Negro—and beautiful!’” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 31-36). Moreover, Hughes declared the intent
“of younger Negro artists” to express “our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or
64
shame;” and espousing what might be termed a proto-black nationalism, he announced “If white
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter [....] We build the temples for
tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves”
(Rampersad, Vol. 9, 35-36). Hence, the beauty celebrated in both Hughes’s manifesto and in “I,
Too” is one born of and borne by a people apart. These “common people” possess a unique
culture that endows them with the capacity both to preserve their “individuality in the face of
American standardization” and for the Negro to produce an art of his own. This art is imbued
with the power to solidify and celebrate, and not only aids in this project of preservation, but
raises the effort to new heights.
To the contrary, the Cuban art celebrated by Fernández de Castro and, later, by Guillén’s
formulation of mulatez—a vision that, as Richard Jackson Points out, saw the terms “mulatto”
and “Cuban” as synonymous—was neither black nor white (Jackson, Black Writers in Latin
America, 82-83).24 It was a product of Cuban nationalism, an art that reflected (and could only
be seen properly in light of) its ethnic mixture. As Fernández de Castro would assert time and
time again, the first instantiations of Cuban poetry valorized racial cooperation as the island’s
best means of defense. In fact, Cuban poetry’s inaugural work—Silvestre de Balboa’s poem “El
Espejo de Paciencia” (1608) narrates the principal participation of “el negro Salvador” [the black
man Salvador] in the rescue of Archbishop Fray Juan de las Cabesas from the clutches of
marauding pirates (Fernández de Castro, Tema negro, 21-22). Hence, for Fernández de Castro,
el tema negro is not a theme centered solely on blacks and their invaluable role in every
successful Cuban liberation movement. Rather, it is a thematic that stresses and facilitates
cooperation across caste divides, one that associates ethnic division with colonialism and multi-
65
racial unity with a uniquely independent Cuban spirit. In fact, as Fernández de Castro
conceptualizes matters in his Tema negro, the relative success of every Cuban liberation war—
the 1868-1878 Ten Year War (or Yawa war), the 1879-1880 Small War ended by the Peace of
Zanjón, and the culmination of these efforts in the 1895-1898 War of Independence—depended,
in no small part, on the mobilization and cooperation of Cuba’s clase negra. The degree of this
mobilization, in turn, depended on the presence of the tema negro in Cuban art. For example,
both Domingo del Monte’s publication of Manzano’s autobiography (Cuba’s first, and arguably
only, slave narrative) and the supposed role played by Plácido and his poetry in the Conspiración
de la Escalera (1840-1844)—conceptualized by Fernández de Castro as an unsuccessful attempt
to intimidate Cuban blacks from revolutionary participation—had helped to facilitate the Yawa
war. Moreover, the comparative failure of the Small War was, in turn, linked to a decline of the
tema negro in Cuban art. Lastly, the success of the War of Independence was linked to both
Martín Morúa Delgado’s and anti-slavery novel Sofia (1891) and to José Martí’s condemnation
of slavery in poems like “XXX” from Versos Sencillos (1891).25
25 Martí’s condemnation of slavery in “XXX” is proffered in a visceral description of a slave-ship at port, and reads:
El rayo surca, sangiento,
El lóbrego nubarrón:
Echa al barco, ciento a ciento,
Los negros poe el portón.
El viento, fiero, quebraba
Los almácigos copudos:
Andaba la hilera, andaba,
De los esclavos desnudos.
El temporal sacudía
Los barracones henchidos:
Una madre con su cría
66
In addition—owing both to his insistence that independence from Spain necessitated the
arming of Cuban colonos and to his condemnation of “el racista blanco y el racista negro” [white
racism and black racism] presented in his 1893 essay “Mi Raza” [My Race] (Cuba’s
foundational fiction for race relations)—Martí provided Fernández de Castro with a progenitor of
sorts, with a Cuban founding father whom he claimed as an intellectual ancestor. Martí’s vision
Pasaba, dando, alaridos.
Rojo, como el desierto,
Salió el sol al gorizonte:
Y alumbró a un esclavo muerto,
Colgado a un siebo del monte.
Un niño lo vio: tembló
De passion por los que gimen:
¡Y, al pie del muerto, juró
Lavar con su vida el crimen!
Manuel A. Tellechea translate the poem as follows:
The lightning the heaven scorches,
And the clouds are bloodstained patches:
The ship its hundres disgorges
Of captive blacks through the hatches.
The fierce winds and brutal rains
Beat against the dense plantation:
In a file the slaves in chains
Are led naked for inspection.
All the storm’s fury assails
The thatched huts swollen with slaves:
A harried mother bewails
The human litter none saves.
Red as in the desert zone,
The sun rose on the horizon:
And upon the dead slave shone,
Hanged from a tree on the mountain.
A boy saw him there and shook
With passion for the oppressed:
And at his feet an oath took
That this crime would be redressed.
67
of a “caridad sublime” [sublime charity]—which could be engendered by a Cuban nation that
realized its independence by embracing racial cooperation (by, arguably, becoming race-blind)—
was not a far cry from Fernández de Castro’s conception that, a resurrection of the tema negro in
Cuban art, could free Cuba from the shackles of U.S. economic and foreign policy. Moreover,
Martí was a fellow translator and journalist, a figure who believed that translation and the
intellectual traffic accompanying its practice played a key role in nation building.26 Translation
was for Martí, as Jesús David Curbelo points out, a vehicle that could import intellectual and
artistic production in the service of Cuba’s development as well as a means to foster dialogue
across linguistic borders with the same interests in mind. As Martí himself would write, "yo creo
que traducir es transpensar […] traducir es estudiar, analizar, ahondar" [I believe that to translate
is to trans-think {…} to translate is to study, to analyze, and to examine in depth”] (Curbelo 6-7).
Martí’s use of the neologism transpensar is telling insofar as it exemplifies his vision of
translation as a means to think across borders and languages. This is particularly significant
when one takes into account—as does Julio Ramos in his “Trópicos de la fundación: poesía y
nacionalidad en José Martí” [Tropics from the Foundation: poetry and nationality in José
Martí]—that the pluma [pen], for Martí, created the ground of revolutionary discourse. And
without this ground, the sword of revolution had no firmament in which to stake itself.
However, Fernández de Castro and José Martí, despite the affinities the former was quick to
invoke, wrote discourses for revolt that differed in deeply significant ways. Fernández de Castro
could neither rest satisfied with the “famous French” postulates of liberty nor, in light of the
1912 Cuban race war, embrace the idealism of Martí’s sentiment contained in “Mi Raza” that
“[e]n Cuba no hay nunca guerra de razas” [in Cuba there are no race-wars]. In short, for a 1928
68
Cuban revolutionary, to be “race-blind” was not an option. Moreover, in Fernández de Castro’s
view of revolutionary struggle, such blindness was a recipe for failure.
Even more to the point, the socio-political panorama of 1928 Cuba was densely
populated by efforts to mobilize Cuban blacks. In fact, as both Platt Amendment and the efforts
of U.S. Governor General Leonard Wood to deny suffrage to the illiterate “sons and daughters of
Africans imported into the island as slaves” well attest, it was long-held common knowledge that
the best way to take control of Cuba was to seize its sugar-cane fields.27 Moreover, despite both
U.S. efforts to disenfranchise the largely black population that inhabited Cuba’s sugar rich
provinces and the Cuban white elite’s nearly genocidal response to the success of Cuba’s Partido
Independiente de Color (which not only outlawed the so-called “racist” Party but led to the
indiscriminate massacre of between three and six thousand black men, women and children),
efforts to mobilize Cuba’s black population were well under way in 1928.28 The organizations
vying for the allegiance of Cuba’s black cane-field workers included the Cuban Communist
27 The Platt Amendment was a |rider appended to the |United States |Army Appropriations Act, which passed in March |1901. Later in |1901, under U.S. pressure, Cuba included
the amendment's provisions in its constitution. The amendment ceded to the U.S. the naval base in Cuba (|Guantánamo Bay), stipulated that Cuba would not transfer Cuban land to
any power other than the U.S., mandated that Cuba would contract no |foreign debt without guarantees that the interest could be served from ordinary revenues, ensured U.S.
intervention in Cuban affairs when the U.S. deemed necessary, prohibited Cuba from negotiating treaties with any country other than the United States, and provided for a formal
treaty detailing all the foregoing provisions. After |U.S. President |Theodore Roosevelt withdrew federal troops from the island in 1902, Cuba signed the |Cuban-American Treaty
(|1903), which outlined U.S. power in Cuba and the Caribbean. The United States exercised that power. Following acceptance of the amendment, the U.S. ratified a tariff pact that
gave Cuban |sugar preference in the U.S. market and protection to selected U.S. products in the Cuban market. As a result of U.S. action, sugar production came into complete
domination of the Cuban economy, while Cuban domestic consumption was integrated into the larger market of the United States. Except for U.S. rights to Guantánamo Bay, the
Platt Amendment provisions were repealed in 1934, when a new treaty with the U.S. was negotiated as a part of U.S. President |Franklin D. Roosevelt's "|Good Neighbor policy"
toward Latin America.
28 The P.I.C, founded by war veterans in 1908, stands out as the first black party in the hemisphere, and demanded equality for Afro-Cubans, proportional representation for them
in public service, and social reform to improve the conditions of all lower-class Cubans. By 1910 it counted as many as 20,000 members. Immediately perceived as a threat to the
status quo, the P.I.C. leadership was arrested and prosecuted for allegedly conspiring to impose a black dictatorship in Cuba. Although they were acquitted the party was
outlawed—curiously enough by a law written by Martín Morúa Delgado that outlawed race-based political parties—and when the leaders organized an armed protest in the
province of Oriente to force the re-legalization of their party, the Cuban government sent an army of zealous volunteers to exterminate them.
True to form, Fernández de Castro, lamenting the repression of black religious, like the comparsa, that followed the revolt of 1912, obliquely ties the revolt to the literary output
of the elder Minorista Felipe Pichardo Moya and his embrace of the tema negro evinced in “La comparsa”(1910).
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Party (the P.C.C.), The National Sugar Workers Union (the S.N.O.I.A.), The National
Confederation of Cuban Workers (the C.N.O.C), and the Cuban branches of Marcus Garvey’s
United Negro Improvement Association (the U.N.I.A.). Paradoxically, the right-wing
propaganda surrounding the massacre of 1912 had actually strengthened the myth of a Cuban
racial democracy. Nonetheless, both the U.N.I.A. (which proposed “black pride” as an
alternative to cubanidad [Cuban-hood]) and the P.C.C. (energized by the 1928 Sixth
Comintern’s first resolutions concerning the promotion of world-wide black nationalism in the
service of black proletarianization) did much to foster both political and economic ties based
primarily on racial solidarity in their attempts to mobilize Cuba’s black community. In Cuba’s
largely black provinces, both blacks and mulattoes increasingly occupied visible positions in the
government, as the value of a black face in garnering the black vote (despite destruction of the
P.I.C.) did not go underestimated.29
Although the P.C.C., founded in 1925, was not officially recognized by the Cuban
government until 1938, Fernández de Castro was an active member in 1928 and, in fact, had
been imprisoned several times by the Machado Regime for this very reason. In fact, for
Fernández de Castro—whose opening paragraphs for Tema negro offer citations from Das
Kapital concerning Antillean slavery—the Cuban black was either a member of Cuba’s most
exploited “masa” [mass], a victim of an “explotación colonial” [colonial exploitation] that had
survived Cuban independence in the cane fields, or, if found in the city, a member of the
disenfranchised “lumpen-proletariat” (Fernández de Castro, Tema negro, 13-15). Hence, in
Fernández de Castro’s Marxist formulations, racial struggle is always inextricably linked to class
struggle, and racism is conceptualized as the living byproduct of both a colonial era and an
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unfortunate Spanish legacy that remains on something akin to life-support via the auspices of
U.S. imperialism. Only the triumph of the proletariat, a triumph that necessitated the
involvement of Cuba’s most exploited mass, would bring to Cuba a freedom greater than that of
the “no longer sufficient” conception of liberty born of the Enlightenment and borne by U.S.
imperial banners.
Fernández de Castro’s Marxist advocacy was not without its black adjuvants nor was
he without prominent black Cuban comrades. Although he would conceal his communist
affiliation for several more years, Gustavo Urrutia began his tenure as editor (1928-58) of
Ideales de una Raza (a column published in Diario de la Marina) by firmly imbedding his views
on race relations within critiques aimed specifically at economic injustice, and thus shied away
from any racial agitation that was not also linked to class. Pedroso was far less discreet, and
following the publication of “Salutación fraternal al taller mecánico,” he had been openly
celebrated as Cuba’s “poet of the proletariat” for over a year. Although he did not join the Party
until 1933, Guillén was also wary of the kind of ethnic nationalism that continued to grow in
popularity in the U.S. In fact, his first published essay, “Camino a Harlem” (1929), exhorts
Cubans—both those who bear the complexion of Martí and those who bear Maceo’s—to resist
the racial segregation rampant in Cuba, to avoid the road to Hughes’s beloved Harlem.
Nevertheless, his poetry published to date did not reflect this view; and although his popularity,
especially among critics, had grown substantially in 1927, he was seen as neither a poet of
Afrocriollismo nor a pen for the proletariat. Hence, although Hughes had not yet written the kind
of “radical poetry” that marked his poetic production throughout the 1930s, the racial pride his
poetry exhibited—born of a love of the culture of the “common people”—made him the ideal
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candidate for Fernández de Castro’s communist mill, a subject ripe for translation and
dissemination in furtherance of Cuba’s revolutionary cause.
Despite the publication prior to 1928 of Hughes’s poetry in leftist journals (including
Worker’s Monthly, Labor Herald, The Communist, Political Affairs, and New Masses) and his
commitment, celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, to the “common people” and the “beauty”
of his race, the potential of Hughes’ poetry in translation to infuse Cuba’s nascent Afrocriollo
movement with new vigor was complicated by one obvious factor—namely, that Hughes was not
simply an “American” (in the broadest sense of the term), but a U.S. citizen. Hence, Fernández
de Castro, in his engagement with Hughes, made the clever, daring, and almost paradoxical
decision to import a U.S. poet to undermine U.S. economic interests. Nevertheless, both the
powerful inter-American resonance of “I, Too” and Fernández de Castro’s skillful manipulation
of its title in translation do much to posit a solidarity between a Cuban population struggling to
free itself from U.S. domination and an Afro-American population struggling to free itself from
the strangleholds of “American standardization” and racism. More significantly, Fernández de
Castro’s decision to drastically alter the structure of Hughes’s poem—a choice both striking and
never replicated—represents his translation’s greatest success in community building. It reveals
a two-pronged solution to the paradoxical problematic mentioned above, a solution that both
domesticates Hughes inside a uniquely Cuban context and, curiously enough, reframes the poetry
of Nicolás Guillén in terms of the worldwide negro vogue.30
30 It almost goes without mentioning that this worldwide vogue propelled, and was propelled by, Hughes’s early poetic production.
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Fernández de Castro’s decision to reorganize “I, Too” into two stanzas—the first
composed of seven lines and the second composed of eleven—appears, at first glance, to be an
affront to fidelity without rhyme or reason. His reorganization is neither an attempt to imbed
Hughes’s verse within the traditions of Spanish prosody nor an attempt to regularize its
experimental or free verse form. Quite to the contrary, the stanzas of Fernández de Castro’s “Yo
Tambíen…” arguably find their only Cuban predecessors, in terms of structure, in the so-called
“transitional poems” of Nicolás Guillén: “Aeroplano” and “Piedra pulida.” These two poems
broke Guillén’s poetic silence of five years as well as his adherence to traditional forms. The
similarity is striking when “Piedra Pulida” is placed alongside “Yo, Tambien….”:
Yo, Tambíen…
Piedra pulida
Yo, también, honro a América
Vendrás cuando el camino te haya dado
Soy el hermano negro,
su secreto, su voz.
Me mandan a comer en la cocina,
Cuando –piedra pulida–
Cuando vienen visitas
estés desnuda de ti misma,
Pero me río,
y tengas la boca amarga,
Como bien
y apenas te saluden las horas,
Y así me fortalezco.
cruzados de brazos
Mañana
Entonces, ya no podré hablarte,
Me sentaré en la mesa
porque estarás más sorda que nunca;
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Y aunque vengan visitas
pasarás solamente
Nadie se atreverá
rodando hacia el abismo:
A decirme
te veré hundirte en él,
“A la concina, negro”
sonora de saltos
Al mismo tiempo
y esperaré que suba
Se darán cuenta
la última resonancia, el postrer eco,
De lo hermoso que soy
piedra pulida
Y se avergonzarán,
desnuda de ti misma
¡Yo soy también America!
Although these poems differ greatly in content—the first a protest against racial
exclusion and the second a metaphysical crisis of expression—their similarities do indeed extend
beyond form. Each poem employs verbs in present-subjunctive and future tenses in order to
address a mistaken conception held either by others (in Hughes’s poem) or by the addressee (in
Guillén’s) to envision and predict a future recognition of past blind-spots or lack thereof. This
type of prognostication is not unfamiliar to Guillén’s transitional poems. In fact, Guillén’s
transitional poems repeatedly demonstrate a desire to break with established modernista
rhetorical norms in order to offer his readers a metaphorical means of resistance to the racist and
corrupt Machado regime’s status quo. These poems bear little resemblance either to Tallet’s “La
rumba” (1928) or to Cuba’s first Afrocriollista poem written by a black man, Ramon Guirao’s
“La bailadora de rumba” (1928). Juan Marinello—the distinguished Cuban literary critic,
publisher, poet, and Fernández de Castro’s longtime friend and fellow authority on Cuba’s tema
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negro—credited these poems with offering Cuba’s its first view of “lo negro desde adentro,
hiriendo la resistencia de la perifería verbal” [the black from within, wounding the resistance
from the verbal periphery]. Hence, Fernández de Castro’s reconfiguration of Hughes’ stanzas—
a reconfiguration that invoked Guillén’s latest poetic production (well received by Cuban
critics)—linked the two poets together for the first time and, in the process, both Cubanized
Hughes and racialized Guillén. This association was, in turn, reinforced when Guillén’s
“Aeroplano” and “Piedra Pulida” were republished in the pages of Fernández de Castro’s Diario
de la Marina just a few short months after “Yo Tambien…” appeared in Social.31 In short, the
association of Hughes and Guillén, figures perhaps now forever intertwined in the literary history
of the hemisphere, was first accomplished by means of Fernández de Castro’s transgressive
translation. And this translation was born, in no small part, from his belief that “[m]ovimientos
raciales y expresiones artísticas encuentran un común denominador: la inconformidad con la
situation” [racial movements and artistic expression share a common denominator: inconformity
with the situation].
While “Yo Tambien…” made its appearance in the fall of 1928, the author of “I, Too”—
despite his achievements to date which included over two hundred poems published in numerous
journals and periodicals and two volumes of original verse—was confronted by the sad fact that
his “love affair” with poetry had foundered and his verse was uninspired (Rampersad, Life I,
166). The publication of his Fine Clothes to the Jew in the opening months of 1927 had resulted
in a spectacular failure, as the vast majority of literary critics on both sides of the color line
excoriated the volume. On February 5, William M. Kelly, leading the charge from black critics,
denounced the volume as “about 100 pages of trash” that reeked “of the gutter and the sewer”
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(Rampersad, Life I, 140). For both Kelly and the majority of his black colleagues, Fine Clothes
to the Jew represented a betrayal of sorts, as Hughes’ depiction of such taboo themes as
miscegenation, prostitution, and black despondency—as well as his employment of so-called
black dialect in verse forms patterned after those of the traditional blues—pandered to what
Kelly saw as a white taste for the sensational (Rampersad, Life I, 141). Although most white
critics followed suit, the volume, today generally ranked among Hughes’s finest, was not without
its champions. Hughes’s use of “common speech” was several times compared to that of Paul
Laurence Dunbar (one of Hughes’s acknowledged influences) and to that of Wordsworth and
Coleridge. Moreover, Howard Mumford Jones, inaugurating the present-day critical chorus,
credited Hughes with nothing less than the contribution of a “new verse form in the English
Language” (Rampersad, Life I, 145). Invited by the Pittsburgh Courier to respond to his critics,
Hughes wrote “These Bad Negroes: A Critique on Critics” in which he offered a nine-point
defense that celebrated the work of his Harlem Renaissance contemporaries—including Rudolph
Fisher, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer. Notably, his
defense also placed his own verse’s invocations of common folk in line with those of Homer,
Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman, whom, alongside Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay, Hughes
repeatedly cited as his greatest influence. Nevertheless, while Hughes publicly aligned himself
with a virtually inexhaustible panorama of poetic influence and inspiration, in his private
correspondence he confessed to confidantes like Amy Spingarn that his poetic well had run dry
(Rampersad, Life I, 167-168).32
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The Break Godmother: Pensions, Primitivism, and Patronesses
Hughes’s lack of inspiration was the byproduct of the overbearing presence of his new
patroness, Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason, an irascible figure who insisted that all of her
“children” (including Hughes, Locke, and Hurston) refer to her as “Godmother.”33 Although
Mrs. Mason had agreed to support Hughes when he was bruised and battered by the early events
of 1927, her intensity often made Hughes weak and tense. Nevertheless, Hughes had never
before received the kind of financial support that Godmother afforded. In fact, Hughes was
enjoying a measure of comfort for perhaps the first time in his life.
This comfort, however, was not without its costs. As Amy Spingarn counseled in a letter
that spoke to Hughes’s private preoccupation with his lack of poetic inspiration, “when things go
well with us—we feel no emotion—and you can’t write poetry without emotion” (Rampersad,
Life I, 168). Moreover, Godmother had demanded a novel (to which Hughes was not averse),
but her insistence on constant production, accompanied by the mandate that Hughes’s work
embody her racially essentialist conception of primitivism, left Hughes feeling stifled and
misunderstood. For although several of Hughes’s early poems played with the conceptions of
primitivism that animated and accompanied the worldwide negro vogue, they did so in a fashion
that, arguably, undermined atavistic negrophilia while enacting it in a fashion that placed
primitivism alongside colonial exploitation and ignorant consumerism. This, in turn, was a far
32 Hughes published only one new poem—“Sunset—Coney Island”—in the period between the publication of Fine Clothes to the Jew and his trips to Cuba, and its appearance in
New Masses (Feb. 1928) is often conceived, by critics such as Arnold Rampersad, as a clandestine challenge to Hughes’s patroness Charlotte Osgood Mason who abominated
socialism. Nevertheless, to Hughes’s great chagrin, Crisis continued to publish several of Hughes’s older poems.
33 Hughes was taken under Mason’s wing after a May 22 audience facilitated by Alain Locke.
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cry from Godmother’s conceptions of primitivism and the proper role of Negro Art, a role that,
as Arnold Rampersad brings to light, can be seen in her remarks concerning a museum of
African Art :
[L]ittle Negro children running in and out and learning to respect themselves
through the realization of those treasures. And… as the fire burned in me, I
had the mystical vision of a great bridge reaching from Harlem to the heart of
Africa, across which the Negro world, that our United States had done
everything to annihilate, should see the flaming pathway… and recover the
treasure their people had had in the beginning of African life on earth.
(Rampersad, Life, 147-148)
Mason’s vision is one in which African art serves as the center point of Afro-American
consciousness and self-respect. In the form of a flaming bridge, she sees an indestructible,
untainted conduit to an indispensable past. Harlem comes from Africa, and any intermediary
American influence in matters of art and identity is noteworthy only insofar as it makes the cage
of civilization. Messianic though it may be, Mason’s vision is a textbook example of the ethos
underlying primitivism in the United States throughout the 1920s—namely, that the “race
problem” could be improved by a greater awareness of an ancestral, African culture among
blacks. Blacks who lacked such awareness did so to their own detriment, and underestimated the
paramount importance of this ancestral tie that could be reestablished via the appreciation of
African art and the primitivist appropriation of it.
The difference of opinion between Hughes and Mason vis-à-vis primitivism, as Hughes
recounts, constituted a matter of sufficient weight to facilitate their split:
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She wanted me to be primitive and know and feel the intuitions of the
primitive. But, unfortunately, I did not feel the rhythms of the primitive
surging through me, and so I could not live and write as though I did. I was
only an American Negro—who had loved the surface of Africa and the
rhythms of Africa—but I was not Africa. I was Chicago and Kansas City,
Broadway and Harlem. And I was not what she wanted me to be. (Hughes,
The Big Sea, 325)
In short, Hughes was, as is the persona in “I, Too,” an American, and no primitivist
flaming bridge would change that fact. In a somewhat anachronistic account of the events that
led to his break with Mason presented in the final pages of his autobiography The Big Sea
(1940), Hughes would also assert that Mason’s dismissal of his “radical-socialist” poem
“Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria” (1931) provided the proverbial straw that broke the
camel’s back. Hence, as Hughes would have it, his split with Mason was the direct result of his
burgeoning class consciousness reflected in the scathing irony of “Advertisement.” This poem
juxtaposes the hotel’s opulence (as touted in the advertisements for its opening) against the
desolation and hunger afflicting the homeless masses of the Great Depression and comes into
conflict with both Mason’s dedication to her notions of primitivism and abhorrence of socialism.
In fact, Mason’s disgust for communism and socialism stemmed not, curiously enough, from her
great wealth, but from what she perceived as socialism’s rejection of primitivism (Rampersad,
Life I, 161).
Hughes’s The Big Sea also implicitly ties his break with Mason to his first trip to Cuba.
This is the case because the remarks above are prefaced by a brief mention of Fernández de
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Castro, whom he characterizes, in his Spanish-inflected syntax, as a “person extraordinary of this
or any other world” (Hughes, The Big Sea, 324). Given that Hughes’s second autobiography
begins with his trip to Cuba the following year and celebrates Fernández de Castro above all
other Cubans for his deep engagement with people from all walks of Cuban life, the importance
of this aside should not be underestimated. It implies that Hughes’s journey to Cuba represented,
for him, a pivotal moment in his life.34 In short, the conclusion of The Big Sea and the
commencement of I Wander as I Wonder (1956) suggest a Cuban rebirth of sorts. The death of
Hughes’s most lucrative relationship goes hand in hand with the birth of a new “extraordinary”
foreign friendship and a new international awareness. I Wonder as I Wander, both
autobiographic bildungsroman and travelogue figures Hughes’s maturation—by means of the
genre overlap it engenders—as a function of his contacts with foreign lands the world over.
Hughes’s narration of his life and poetic development does not correspond, however, to
the stories told by his biographers, friends, and by the history of his poetic production. Hughes’s
thematic break with primitivism occurred long before his separation from Mason. And his first
meeting with Fernández de Castro—an outgrowth of his search for a composer with whom to
collaborate—not only was financed by Mason, but was the result of her desire to re-infuse him
with a thirst for the primitive. Indeed, as biographer Arnold Rampersad wryly notes, Hughes’s
desire to go to Cuba was “an idea Godmother backed at once—Cuba must be very primitive”
(Rampersad, Life I, 176). Perhaps more to the point, the Hughes who set sail for Cuba was
propelled by no revolutionary wind. Quite to the contrary, he was a man with his tail between
his legs. Exhausted by the completion of the manuscript for Not Without Laughter (1930), he
was verging on both financial and inspirational bankruptcy and desperately trying to please
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Godmother. He was a man who, a year previous, had begged and pleaded his way back into her
good graces, graces from which he subsequently fell because he had not adequately thanked her
for his Christmas gift.
Hughes’s embarkation for Cuba proved no easy matter, as the clerk on duty for the Ward
Line refused to sell Hughes a ticket, producing an inter-office correspondence to the effect that
Cuba would not allow Negroes, Chinese, or Russians to land except as seamen (Rampersad, Life
I, 176). Outraged, Hughes sought the help of Walter White who sent wires to the Departments of
State of both the United States and Cuba demanding to know why “the distinguished American
Negro poet and novelist” Langston Hughes should not be allowed into Cuba to rest (Rampersad,
Life I, 176). In the end, Hughes managed to purchase passage from the Cunard line without
diplomatic intervention, and he arrived in Havana on February 25, 1930. The Ward Line’s
refusal proved to be a significant event because it provoked a strong response from the Cuban
friends whom Hughes would meet in the days to come. It inaugurated a series of correspondence
that ultimately allowed Langston Hughes, in his capacity as a translator, to link Du Bois’s Crisis
with Urrutia’s Ideales de una Raza.
The morning after arriving in Cuba, Hughes—unaware that Fernández de Castro had
even read his poetry—entered the offices of Diario de la Marina and presented himself to the
editor along wit a letter of introduction given to him by Miguel Covarrubias.35 Fernández de
Castro was hobbled by a recent car accident, but immediately began to telephone many of the
35 Covarrubias provided the first edition covers for both Hughes’s Weary Blues and Not without Laughter. In the years to come he would also co-translate, in 1945, the
anonymous “Ballad of the Death of Professor Enrique Lopes Guitrón,” a translation doomed, as were most of Hughes’s Mexican translations, to never see the light of publication.
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most prominent members of the Cuban literary community and, in the days to come, introduced
Hughes to, among others, Gustavo Urrutia, Regino Pedroso, José Zacharias Tallet, Conrad
Massaguer, Juan Marinello, Ramos Blanco (the black Cuban sculptor whom Hughes would soon
celebrate in prose), and Nicolás Guillén. Guillén’s recollection of his introduction to Hughes at
dinner on the night of February 26th is recounted in his 1967 essay “Recuerdo de Langston
Hughes” [Memory of Langston Hughes], but is clouded by his anachronistic assertion that, prior
to the meeting, he became acquainted with Hughes via Fernández de Castro’s publication of
“Presentación de Langston Hughes” [Presenting Langston Hughes] in Diario de la Marina. This
essay, in fact, appeared the following month in the March 1930 edition of Revista de Habana.
Nevertheless, Guillén’s claim testifies to the fact that, due to the work of Fernández de Castro,
Hughes’s reputation had preceded his arrival in Cuba. In contrast, the cloud surrounding Hughes
at home had neither preceded nor followed him across the sea. In fact, Fernández de Castro’s
“Presentación” goes so far as to imply that Fine Clothes to the Jew enjoyed enormous success
and, along with The Weary Blues, had earned Hughes a great deal of dinero.
Although both of these assertions do more than stretch the truth, “Presentación de
Langston Hughes” demands, nonetheless, to be read as an article of great import, for it both
accomplished the work of bolstering Hughes’s fame throughout the island and framed Hughes in
a rather unique context, as a proud, literary combatant for his raza [race] possessed by a vigor
unprecedented in the literary panorama of the United States.36 Indeed, Edward J. Mullen’s
assertion that “Presentación…” represents little more than “a paraphrase of Carl Van Vechten’s
preface to the Weary Blues does Fernández de Castro a great disservice. Although Fernández de
Castro does begin by invoking Van Vechten’s repeated characterization of Hughes’s career and
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life as a “picaresque romance,” he also does much work to divorce Hughes from the primitivist
context within which Van Vechten’s essay, via numerous rhetorical strategies, so emphatically
seeks to place him.
Van Vechten’s introduction purports to offer its reader a “sketch” that will provide a
“primitive outline” of the “picaresque romance” constituted by Hughes’s career as poet, mariner,
and vagabond. Moreover, he implies that Hughes’s poetry can be read as a type of
autobiography—or at least as the “primitive outline” of one. In the process, Van Vechten blurs
the line between poet and poetic persona despite the fact that the Weary Blues presents its readers
with a plethora of voices, both male and female, that range from port town prostitute to night
club patron and that, in poems like “Proem” or “The Negro speaks of Rivers,” embody a
community, or collective consciousness, stretching across space and time. Van Vechten’s essay
is indeed a remarkably slippery one, an essay that undermines as it asserts, but it consistently
goes about the task of placing Hughes inside frames, both primitivist and autobiographical, far
too narrow to accomplish the supposed work of introduction that Van Vechten presents as his
task. Van Vechten’s remarks on Hughes’s verse, in particular, prove particularly telling in all of
these regards:
[Hughes’s] verses, however, are by no means limited to an exclusive mood; he
writes caressingly of little black prostitutes in Harlem; his cabaret songs throb
with the true jazz rhythm; his sea-pieces ache with a calm, melancholy
lyricism; he cries bitterly from the heart of his race in Cross and The Jester; he
sighs, in one of the most successful of his fragile poems, over the loss of a
loved friend. Always, however, his stanzas are subjective, personal. They are
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the (I had almost said informal, for they have a highly deceptive air of
spontaneous improvisation) expression of an essentially sensitive and subtly
illusive nature, seeking always to break through the veil that obscures for him,
at least in some degree, the ultimate needs of that nature. (13)
Van Vechten begins by alluding to the poly-vocal world of voices that inhabit The Weary
Blues, noting that Hughes's verse is by “no means limited to an exclusive mood” and, in fact,
takes forms varying from “cabaret songs” to “bitter cries.” Nevertheless, by the end of this
paragraph, Van Vechten blurs the distinction upon which he originally insists, asserting that,
despite the volume’s multiplicity of form and mood, Hughes’s stanzas are always “subjective”
and (more to the point) “personal.” The moods alluded to above belong solely to the author
himself, and his verse—above all else—reveals an “illusive” nature seeking to “break through
the veil that obscures him,” an autobiographical impulse lurking beneath the surface yearning to
be uncovered. Moreover, Van Vechten’s erotically charged depiction of Hughes’ verse firmly
embeds the poet within the traditional tropes of primitivism. His writing is framed in terms of a
primal sex act: he writes “caressingly,” his songs “throb,” his pieces “ache,” he “cries” from the
“heart of his race,” and then, post-orgasmic, “he sighs.” And, as if this were not enough, the
entire process reflects—in Van Vechten’s now fully deployed vocabulary of primitivism—the
“ultimate needs” of Hughes’s “nature.”
In contrast, the race-proud, combative Langston Hughes introduced by Fernández de
Castro is a figure whose person and poetic persona, although similar, are clearly differentiated.
And while the story of Hughes’s life—specifically Hughes’s travels inside the United States,
Mexico, and, as a sailor, around the Atlantic rim—may indeed amount to “la más fascinadora
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novela picaresca” [the most fascinating picaresque novel], the style of his verse originates from
an entirely different realm (Mullen 169):
Su técnica es moderna y su sensibilidad alcanza matices personalísimos que lo
hacen destecar con propios lineamientos dentro del complicado panorama que
es la contemporánea produción poética en los Estados Unidos. (Mullen 170)
His technique is modern and his sensibility attains the most individualized
nuances which make it stand out with his own flare inside the complex
panorama that is contemporary poetic production in the United States.
Fernández de Castro figures Hughes’s technique as modern, asserting that it reflects the
highest degree of individualized nuance. More to the point, he does not frame poetic prowess in
terms of Hughes’s nature, but rather against the complex backdrop of contemporary poetic
production in the United States. Hughes is not a conflation of poet and persona. He is a master
of his craft capable of employing his talent in service of his combative agenda. Moreover,
Hughes’s travels do not comprise the autobiographical underbelly of his verse. Rather, in
Fernández de Castro’s formulation, they serve to make Hughes both a well-informed and wellreceived citizen of the world, a status well attested to by the translation of his poetry into French,
German, Russian, and Spanish (Mullen 169-170).37 Fernández de Castro’s introduction of
37 True to form, Fernández de Castro downplays his role and does not take credit for penning Hughes’s sole Spanish language translation to date, which was reprinted in the issue
of Revista de la Habana that contained his essay.
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Langston Hughes also stands apart from those written in France. 38 These introductions choose,
in rare cases, to imbed Hughes inside a history of African-American literary production. In
instances far more common, they frame Hughes in the terms typical to the vogue for l’art nègre,
and associate Hughes’s poetry with jazz, blues, Africa and the primitive. And—almost always—
they reflect a deep-seated colonial tension that figures Hughes’s poetry as an act of revolt.
Nicolas Guillén’s “Coversación con Langston Hughes”
The barbarism of French colonialism played a key role in Guillén’s interview of
Langston Hughes (conducted in Spanish) which took place on March 2, 1930 and was published
a week later under the title “Coversación con Langston Hughes” [Conversation with Langston
Hughes] in Urrutia’s Ideales de una Raza [A Race’s Ideals]. The interview was arranged by
Fernández de Castro and presented Guillén with a somewhat onerous task. As is evidenced by
his pro-integration essay “Camino a Harlem” (1929), Guillén was more than slightly suspicious
of Hughes and his brand of cultural Black Nationalism (which Guillén saw as, among other
things, self-destructive). Hence, the mere fact that the interview took place further testifies to
Fernández de Castro’s strong desire to link the two poets together. Guillén, however, did not let
his suspicions go unacknowledged. He chose to imbed them in the introductory remarks to
“Coversación,” and this decision has largely gone unnoted. He begins his essay/interview by
focusing on Hughes’s appearance, and asserts that the man he met bore little in common with the
Hughes Fernández de Castro had described, implicitly undermining the veracity of Fernández de
Castro’s “Presentación.” In fact, Guillén’s prefatory remarks suggest that Hughes bore a greater
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resemblance to a “little Cuban mulatto”—to a frivolous dandy of sorts—than he did to a black
champion of his race marked by his “combatividad” [combativeness]:
Parece justamente un “mulatico” cubano. Unos de esos mulaticos
intrascendentes que estudian una carrera en la Univ. Nac. y que pasan la vida
organizando pequeñas familiares a dos pesos el billete. (Mullen 172)
He seems just like a Cuban “little mulatto.” Like one of those trifling mulatto
dandies who pursues his studies at the National University and who spends his
life organizing small family outings at two pesos a ticket.
This negative characterization comes as no surprise, as much of Hughes’s reputation did
not sit well with Guillén. Not only was Hughes’s verse persistent in its celebration of a de facto
segregated Harlem, but his prose manifesto conceived of black culture—more specifically, black
“common” culture—as unique and distinctly separate from that of the American majority. Each
of these facets of Hughes’s writing, as “Camino a Harlem” and Guillén’s later formulation of
mulatez well attest, must have represented something like anathema for the young Cuban poet
whose conception of the “race problem” had far more affinity with Fernández de Castro’s than it
did with Langston Hughes’s. However, Guillén’s dismissal of Hughes’s dandy-like appearance
also ties Hughes to Cuba and vice versa by describing him not simply as a “mulatico,” but as a
Cuban mulatto (as was Guillén). In fact, by the conclusion of the interview, Hughes had made a
convert of Guillén who—while unwilling to part wholly with his previous suspicions—registered
his newly acquired respect for Hughes by following his wry remarks about Hughes’s appearance
with an appraisal that figured him as “uno de los espíritus más sinceramente interesados en las
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cosas de la raza negra” [one of the souls most sincerely interested in matters concerning the
black race]. Furthermore, Guillén lauded Hughes’s successful incorporation of “blackinfluenced” popular music into North American literature as unparalleled in its purity: “Él, antes
ningún otro poeta en su idioma, ha conseguido incorporar a la literatura norteamericano las
manifestaciones más puras de la música popular en los E.U., tan influido por los negros.” [More
than any other poet in his language, he has managed to incorporate into North American
literature the most pure manifestations of popular music in the U.S., so heavily influenced by
blacks] (Mullen 172). In short, Guillén had certainly acquired a new respect for Hughes.39
Guillén’s turning point can arguably be found on the printed page. After providing
several remarks from Hughes in quotation, Guillén forsakes the editorial voice of his prefatory
remarks and (via self-quotation) inserts his voice into a “conversation” that, until this point, is
remarkably one-sided. Guillén’s interjection reflects an earnest curiosity about Africa and
prompts Hughes to speak about his experiences on the continent’s west coast. In
contradistinction to the popular critical misconception that frequently includes Hughes among
other African-American artists supposedly enamored of the myth of a France free from racial
prejudice, Hughes’s elaboration reveal his deep seated hatred for France, a hatred born of
witnessing the brutality of French colonialism in West Africa:
--“¿En África?
--“Sí, señor.
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He visitado Dakar, Nigeria, Loanda… Por aquellas tierras se me fortaleció el
alma en el sentido de amor a los negros, que ya no habrá de abandonarme. En
contacto con esa dulce gente, a la que Bélgica le corta los brazos y a la que
Francia diezma brutalmente en la tala de bosques, como ha dado a conocer al
mundo el periodista Alberto Londres, yo comprendí que era necesario ser su
amigo, su voz, su báculo: ser su poeta. Yo no tengo más ambición que la de
ser el poeta de los negros. El poeta negro, ¿comprende usted?” (Mullen 173)
“In Africa?”
“Yes.”
I visited Dakar, Nigeria, Loanda… Those lands caused my soul to
fortify itself in regards to its love for black people, and that love has yet to
leave me. In contact with those sweet people—whose arms are cut off by the
Belgians and who are brutally decimated by the French in the tree-felling of
forests (which the journalist Alberto Londres has made known to the world)—
I understood that I had to be their friend, their voice, their support: to be their
poet. I have not greater ambition than to be the poet of black people. The
black poet, understand?
Hughes desire to be a poet for black people, to be “el poeta de los negros,” stems from his
experience witnessing colonial brutality in West Africa. In fact, it was the responsibility born of
this act of witnessing—as Hughes explains matters to Guillén—that initially fueled (and
continued to fuel) Hughes’s desire to be “el poeta de los negros” [the poet of the blacks].
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Shifting back into his editorial voice, Guillén not only relates that he understands
Hughes’ ambition, but also that Hughes’ poem (namely “Proem” or “Negro”) that contains the
words, “Yo, soy negro: negro, como la noche: negro como las profundidades de mi África” [“I
am a Negro / Black as the night is black / Black like the depths of my Africa”], makes him feel
as though it had “se me sube del alma” [sprung from the depths of his own soul] (Mullen 173).
Indeed, matters come full circle. Guillén’s initial suspicion of Hughes is transformed into a
solidarity between kindred souls that, race based though it may be, is radically more than skin
deep. Shortly thereafter (and again injecting his voice into the conversation), Guillén asks for
Hughes’s opinions concerning the “race problem” and its possible solutions. Hughes’s response,
a response that Guillén—in the laudatory portion of his introductory remarks—echoes in
advance, is both striking and, for our purposes, of unquestionable import. Deftly avoiding a
direct response to the query, Hughes reminds Guillén that he is not a “un sociólogo científico”
[trained sociologist] but “simplemente un poeta” [simply a poet], and completes his answer by
affirming his solidarity with U.S. blacks:
Vivo entre los míos; los amo; me duelen en la entraña los golpes que
reciben y canto sus dolores, traduzco [my emphasis] sus tristezas, echo a volar
sus ansias” Y eso lo hago a la manera del pueblo, con la misma sencillez con
que el pueblo lo hace. (Mullen 174-5)
I live amongst my own. I love them. The blows they receive hurt me
to the core, and I sing their pain, translate their sadness, and put their worries
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to rest. And I do this in the way that the people do, with the same simple
sincerity with which the people do it.
Hughes outlines the responsibilities entailed in being “el poeta de los negro.” He must be
of and among his people, and he must create as they create with the same purposes in mind. His
is a communal art. He also draws into relief the process (or task) that, for him, constitutes the
metaphoric core of his creative process—namely, translation.
Beyond Metaphorical “Translation”: “El Poeta de Los Negro”
Hughes’s metaphorical characterization of his poetic process as a process of
translation is one infused with both enormous and perplexing resonance. This is the case
because if his “blues verse” is to be conceptualized as work of translation, then the traditional
conception of translation—one involving a process whereby a writer remodels one sequence of
words (embodied in the foreign [or source] language “original”) into another (embodied in the
target language of the translation itself)—requires a certain amount of rethinking.
Hughes’s “blues verse,” best exemplified in his Fine Clothes to the Jew, does not present
its reader with crafty transcription, a process more akin to translation as it’s strictly conceived.
Rather, it employs both the blues lyric’s traditional form and thematic juxtaposition of pathos
and laughter to produce not only original poems, but, arguably, a “new” contribution to Englishlanguage verse forms. Hence, if indeed Fine Clothes to the Jew presents its reader with a series
of translations, then these translations, quite paradoxically—putting the crucial issue of a
difference in language aside for the moment—cannot be said to correspond to any series of
originals. Hence, Hughes’s (perhaps off the cuff) remark can be said to embody both a radical
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and metaphorical view of translation, which sees it not as a secondary activity but as a primary
one, and fits in—as Susan Bassnett points out in her Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and
Practice (1999)—with similar views of other American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez,
Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes (Bassnett 3). However, when one looks beyond Hughes’s
metaphorical musings and recognizes how the mountain of racial inspiration provided to him by
his “common people” differs significantly from the, quasi-infinite, iterations and reiterations that
constitute the history of belles lettres for Fuentes and that prompt him to assert that “originality
is a sickness” of a modernity “that is always aspiring to see itself as something new,” one quickly
recognizes that the “original” fount fueling Hughes’s so-called translations bears little in
common with a popular (or even forgotten) source-text (Bassnett 3). Rather, the distinct quality
of Hughes’s fount is the direct result of its historical marginalization, the result of slavery and its
aftermath. As Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1995) forcefully asserts, the fact that the various
“advances” of the Enlightenment—and, more broadly speaking, of modernity in general—draw
their force from the subjugation of the slave necessitates a critical framework that recognizes the
radical separation between the culture of modernity and slave culture:
Having recognised the cultural force of the term “modernity” we must
also be prepared to delve into the special traditions of artistic expression that
emerge from slave culture [….] [A]rt, particularly in the form of music and
dance, was offered to the slave as a substitute for the formal political freedoms
they were denied under the plantation regime. The expressive cultures
developed in slavery continue to preserve in artistic forms needs and desires
which go far beyond the mere satisfaction of material wants. In
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contradistinction to the Enlightenment assumption of a fundamental
separation between art and life, these expressive forms reiterate the continuity
of art and life. They celebrate the grounding of the aesthetic with other
dimensions of social life. The particular aesthetic which the continuity of
expressive culture preserves derives not from dispassionate and rational
evaluation of the artistic object but from an inescapably subjective
contemplation of the mimetic functions of artistic performance in the process
of struggles towards emancipation, but this form of interaction is not an
equivalent and idealised exchange between equal citizens who reciprocate
their regard for each other in grammatically unified speech. (56-7)
When seen in this light, both Hughes’ seemingly paradoxical conception of his verse as
translation—a conception that locates the position of the “original” inside a shared cultural form
and forum that praise originality but recognize no “original”—not only reiterates “the continuity
of art and life,” but also firmly embeds his poetic inside a “particular aesthetic” preserved by the
“inescapably subjective contemplation of the mimetic function of artistic performance in the
process of struggles towards emancipation.” As “el poeta de los negros,” Hughes grounds his
work in “other dimensions of social life.” He lives “entre los míos;” and pained by the
contemplation of “los golpes que reciben,” he sings “sus dolores,” translates “sus tristezas,” and,
in turn, helps them to cast off “sus ansias.” This “mimetic” intervention allows Hughes—
“simplemente una poeta”— to aid the “struggles towards emancipation” by means of “subjective
contemplation,” by writing “lo que me viene desde adentro” [that which comes from inside me]
(Mullen 175). His is not the “dispassionate and rational” evaluation of “un sociólogo científico.”
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Moreover, his task lies not in the perpetuation of the “sickness of modernity,” but in “continuity
of expressive culture.” He sings away his people’s troubles “a la manera del pueblo, con la
misma sencillez con que el pueblo lo hace.” He can, in short, sing “como hacían los antiguous”
[like the ancestors used to] (Mullen 175).
Guillén concludes “Conversación con Langston Hughes” by describing how he indulged
Hughes’s desire to experience authentic black Cuban culture by taking him to a dance hall.
Upon entry, Hughes exclaimed “¡Mi gente!” [My people!], and then stood for a long time next
to a band which was wildly playing a Cuban son. Hughes was eventually overcome by a new
spirit within him and exclaimed, “Yo quisiera ser negro. Bien negro. ¡Negro de verdad!” [I’d
like to be black. Really black. Truly black!] (Mullen 175-6). Given this newly infused spirit (a
desire—born of Hughes’s encounter with Cuba’s “common people”—to become more “truly
black”), his wish to be “el poeta de los negros,” his belief that the work of poetry consisted in
translating the black experience “a la manera del pueblo” in order to bolster the “pride” of “dark
skinned selves” in the face of “American Standardization,” and his dedication to the construction
of the “temples of tomorrow,” it comes as no surprise that—when Hughes left Cuba five days
later without having found a composer—he nevertheless did so as a proud ambassador with a
suitcase full of un-translated Cuban and Mexican verse. Hughes’s translations of these poems
would ultimately refill his poetic well gone dry despite the cold climate (caused by the shadow
that Godmother cast) which awaited him.
Death and Resurrection
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Hughes’s poetic career during the eleven months between his departure from Cuba on
March 7, 1930 and his return to the island on April 7, 1931 is perhaps best conceptualized—as
alluded to above—as both a death and a resurrection. Many of Hughes’s relationships that
propelled him both into and through the Harlem Renaissance—including the artistic and
financial support of Carl Van Vechten, the patronage of Godmother, Hughes’s oft-times vexed
friendship with Alain Locke, and his friendship (as well as his longstanding literary
collaborations) with Zora Neale Hurston—came either to an abrupt halt or died a slow death as
did both Hughes’s production of his so-called “authentic” blues verse and his engagement with
primitivism. Nevertheless, Hughes’s career both as a poet and as a literary translator (in the
strict sense of the term) experienced a rebirth. These resurrections were by no means separate
occurrences, quite to the contrary, they nourished each other. Hughes’s resulting poetic
production, informed by his translation of foreign texts, was comprised, in part, by the adaptation
of the verse forms he imported, and also reflected the incorporation of a new classconsciousness. Leftist themes and ideals such as interracial cooperation among a worldwide
proletariat, atheism, and a conception of racial struggle as inextricably linked to class conflict
surfaced alongside manifestations of Hughes’s increasing distaste for (and distance from) his
previous poetic personae and the themes to which they gave voice.
Hughes’s translations of foreign texts contain translation decisions that manifest his
desire to bridge the gap among darker brothers foreign and domestic by fomenting a sense of
international solidarity among them. And behind the scenes, Fernández de Castro’s continued
propagation of both Hughes in translation and of the Cuban authors that Hughes chose to
translate helped to fuel the fire. His encouragement of Hughes’s renewed dedication to
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translation drew its strength, in part, from his ability to instill in him with a sense of self that
insisted on the poet’s enormous international influence. This, in turn, served to strengthen not
only the reputations of Pedroso and Guillén—in Fernández de Castro’s thought—by
“consecrating” them in foreign language translation, but also the growing and crucial presence
(in terms of its role in the struggle against U.S. imperialism) of the tema negro in Cuba.
All of these occurrences—births, deaths, resurrections, and consecrations— occurred
against backdrops of demise and new life on both socio-economic and political fronts; namely,
against the worldwide depression that resulted from the Wall Street “Crash” of 1929 (the event
that marks the end of the Harlem Renaissance) and the burgeoning popularity of communism—
its “heyday” according to historian Harvey Klehr’s The Heyday of American Communism: The
Depression Decade—in the United States and abroad.40 In the U.S. black community, this
popularity was bolstered by the 1928 and 1930 “Comintern resolution[s] on the Negro Question
in the United States,” James W. Ford’s 1932 vice-presidential candidacy, and the Party’s central
role in the Scottsboro trials which began shortly after the Scottsboro Nine were convicted in
April of 1931.
Although Hughes, sometime in early April, had begun to collaborate with Zora Neale
Hurston on a play—touted by them as the first piece of black folklore ever to be adapted for the
American stage—that eventually bore the title “Mule Bone,” he was forced to confess to James
Weldon Johnson (in either late April or May of 1930) that he had no new material to contribute
40 A minute percentage of critics and authors (Alice Walker being chief among them) object to this 1929 date, citing the fact that Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1937) does not fall within this time frame. This, however, is a revisionist and somewhat ridiculous quibble, as the overwhelming majority of financial resources which fueled
the Renaissance’s patrons and publishers evaporated shortly after Black Thursday.
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to the revision of his 1922 seminal anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry (Rampersad,
Life I, 188). However, Hughes’s poetic dry spell soon came to an end with the publication of
“Dear Lovely Death,” “Flight,” and “Aesthete in Harlem” in the June edition of Opportunity.
And although these poems speak of death, disillusion, and enslavement, owing perhaps, as
Arnold Rampersad asserts, to Hughes’s strained relationship with Mason, they also respectively
bespeak change, escape, and new sources of inspiration. As Hughes’s (either subsequent or
simultaneous) submission of both his translation of Guillén’s “Mujer Negra” (a poem yet to be
published in Spanish) and his essay on the black Cuban Sculptor Ramos Blanco to Opportunity
well attest, this new fountstemmed from Hughes’s Cuban encounters. These relationships
continued to blossom via copious correspondence and literary exchange—in the form of
published and unpublished poems, periodicals, and books—with Guillén, Urrutia, and Fernández
de Castro. In fact, contrary to unanimous critical consensus, Hughes’s poetic dry spell did not
end with the morbid reflections published in Opportunity, but—as evidenced by the letter
Hughes received from Fernández de Castro on June 4, 1930—ceased the previous month with
the translation of “Havana Dreams” [“Momento Habanero”] published in Revista de Habana.
This whimsically pensive poem—published in English by Opportunity some three years later—
represents quite more than the sophomoric souvenir seen by its scant number of critics. Rather,
the poem is infused not only with references to the beleaguering weight of U.S. economic
interests in Cuba, but also with remarkably deft allusions to the complexity of Cuban class
divisions and to the histories which engendered them. Hence, editor Elmer A. Carter somewhat
missed the mark when he sent a letter to Hughes on July 2, 1930 congratulating him for taking
the “the first steps”—in translating Cuban poets and in securing a commitment from Opportunity
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to give Latin American writers special consideration—toward an intellectual rapprochement
between people of color in the Americas (Rampersad, Life I, 426). For although the forum
Hughes created to propagate his Cuban comrades in the U.S. was, arguably, without precedent,
the rapprochement between blacks in the Americas began (and indeed had been lauded) months
before and was not the result of “first steps” undertaken solely by Hughes.
In fact, Hughes’s very first publications in The Brownies’ Book (1920)—the
N.A.A.C.P.’s short lived journal for, in Du Bois’s words, “the children of the sun”—represent
attempts to bridge gaps among communities of color in the Americas. Jessie Redmon Fauset—
then literary editor for both The Brownies’ Book and The Crisis—repeatedly solicited Hughes, as
she did on January 18, 1921, for material to feed her “insatiable desire” to provide her reading
audience with aspects of Mexican life that were “markedly different from similar features in life
in the United States,” that would strike U.S. readers as “very exotic and unusual,” and that would
help “our children” to know “something of the sorrows of children in other countries.” To this
end, Hughes submitted “Mexican Games,” “In a Mexican City,” “Up to the Crater of an Old
Volcano,” pieces incisively described by Dianne Johnson as “ethnographic writings” in service
of the journal’s “Pan-African and international orientation” (Rampersad, Vol. 11, 3). Hughes
also translated one article and some “cancioneras” for The Brownies’ Book at Fauset’s request;
but due to the magazine’s imminent financial collapse, they never saw the light of day.
However, it was Fauset’s confessed “insatiable desire” for material on Mexico that lead to a
correspondence with Hughes that resulted not only in the publication of Hughes’s articles,
poems, and plays in The Brownies’ Book, but also to the publication of “The Negro Speaks of
Rivers” (1921) in Crisis, an event generally considered as Hughes’s poetic debut. Given that
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this publication and Fauset’s bridge-building were contemporaneous events, Hughes’s early
literary production can be framed as an attempt to satisfy of Fauset’s “insatiable” desire for the
“exotic and unusual,” as projects that rework (or metaphorically translate) elements of Mexican
and African-American culture in order to make them accessible to U.S. readers both black and
white.
Notwithstanding the importance of Hughes’s formative encounters with Fauset, the
bringing together of the black communities in the United States and Cuba in 1930 (vis-à-vis
Hughes) was sparked by the Ward Steamship Company’s refusal to sell Hughes passage. This
refusal prompted a diplomatic intervention not only from Walter White, but also from Gustavo
E. Urrutia who, before Hughes had even left the island, wrote a letter of protest to the Cuban
Secretary of State citing the discrepancy between Cuban immigration law and the illegal bulletin
issued by the Machado regime that stated that tourists of all nations—excepting those who were
blacks, Russian, or Chinese—were welcome in Cuba. Urrutia provided Hughes with a copy of
this letter dated March 5th, 1930 before his departure—a protest that made mention of letters of
inquiry from several of Hughes’s friends, including those that inhabited “los circulos
intelectuales sociales más distinguidos de ese patria” [the most distinguished intellectual social
circles of that county]—and embarked on a campaign that by the month’s end, resulted in the
Machado regime’s renunciation of the communiqué. Urrutia wrote Hughes about this latest
development in a letter dated May 1st, 1930, which by the year’s end resulted in the publication
of Urrutia’s article “Turistas negros en Cuba” [“Negro Tourists in Cuba”]—first in Ideales de
una Raza and later, via the auspices of Hughes’s translation, in the February 1931 edition of
Crisis—detailing the struggle’s success. While clearly sparked by Hughes’s encounter with the
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Ward Company, the essay focuses instead on a similar denial of passage to Mary Bethune.
Faced with journalistic pressure on two fronts, the Cuban government began to enforce laws
already on the books, laws clearly allowing the free passage of all U.S. citizens into Cuba.
Hence, the very first pieces of correspondence that Hughes received from his Cuban friends
detailed the international import—in explicitly political terms—of Hughes’s trip to the island,
and set in motion a series of events that produced concrete change on Cuba’s racial front and in
its immigration practices by forcing Machado to live-up to the letter of the law.
The missives sent to Hughes detailing the international ramifications of his entry into
Cuba were accompanied by other letters which sought to inform him of the impact his visit made
on to the Cuban literary community. On April 20, 1930, the very day that Guillén’s Motivos de
son were published in Diario de la Marina, Urrutia wrote Hughes of the appearance of “eight
formidable negro poems” that not only were “the exact equivalent of your ‘blues,’” but
constituted “real cuban [sic] negro poetry” because Guillén had “written in the very popular
slang.” Urrutia predicted enormous success for Guillén’s new work, and—in terms echoing
Hughes’s in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”— celebrated the unprecedented
appearance of “[t]he language and feelings of our dear negroes made most noble by the love and
talent of our own poets.” Although Urrutia by no means explicitly asserts that Guillén’s
achievement is the direct result of Hughes’s influence, he does much to imply that this is the
case. Moreover, Urrutia’s letter concludes with a postscript written by Guillén that does nothing
to undermine the implicit and explicit links forged by Urrutia. However, given Guillén’s
professed inability to speak English, it can be argued that this lack of contradiction derives
largely from Guillén’s inability to understand Urrutia’s implications. Nevertheless, the
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postscript that Guillén’s wrote to Hughes—one that, arguably, reveals the means by which
Hughes came into possession of the unpublished “Mujer Negra”—brings to light the existence of
correspondence, unfortunately lost, between the two men prior to the appearance of Motivos de
son:
My dear Hughes,
I will write you cuando tenga time, recibí your letter, que me alegro
mucho. But había demorado because quería enviarle seis mas nuevos poems
que Urrutia le envia now.
Creo que hay aura músico. I will write you,
le escribir in english and español para que este [illegible]
Lo abrazo,
Guillén
My dear Hughes,
I will write you when I have time. I received you letter which much
pleased me. But I’ve delayed because I wanted to send you six new poems
that Urrutia is now sending you.
I believe they’ve a musical aura. I will write you, to you in English
and Spanish because it’s [illegible]
Warmly,
Guillén
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Guillén’s postscript is significant in several respects. It lends credence to the argument,
albeit via an oblique autobiographical remark, that Guillén’s infusion of an “aura músico” into
his poetry, as both Hughes and others suggest, was the direct result of Hughes’s prompting.41 It
also points to an ongoing Conversación between the two poets that preceded the resurrection of
Hughes’s poetic production. And lastly, it illuminates a crucial fact that often goes overlooked—
namely, that owing to Guillén’s poor English, the nascent years of his literary friendship with
Hughes was, in large part, born in translation. Indeed, it seems highly likely—given the fact that
“Negro” had yet to be published in Spanish when Guillén interviewed Hughes—that Fernández
de Castro provided Guillén with the verse that caused him to feel as though “se me sube del
alma.” As Guillén’s letter of July 11, 1930 to Hughes attests, it was via Fernández de Castro’s
translations that Guillén first acquired knowledge of and appreciation for Hughes’ poetry and
prose.
Moreover, the role that Fernández de Castro played in fueling the conception—notably
inside U.S. borders—of a Hughes-inspired Guillén was far greater than that played by Urrutia.
In a letter sent in late August of 1930, Fernández de Castro reminded Hughes that his efforts to
disseminate his work in Cuba continued and inquired as to whether or not Hughes had seen his
translation of “Hay Boy”—a chapter from Not Without Laughter—in the July-August edition of
Revista de la Habana. He also chastised Hughes for his recent negligence in sending editions of
“‘The New Masses’ and the negro reviews,” and related that he was well aware of Hughes’s
strong praise for Motivos de son, writing, “I know that you like very much the “Motivos de Son”
de N.G. So do I. And I know also what he and Regino in his new poems owe to your poetry and
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your manner.” In fact, in a letter dated February 2, 1931, Fernández de Castro went so far as to
refer to Guillén as “[o]ur friend The Cuban Langston Hughes.”
Fernández de Castro’s late August missive is representative of the drive behind his
epistolary efforts, efforts that can be documented from June 4, 1930 onwards, but reference a
correspondence that well precedes this date. These efforts can be assigned four noteworthy
objectives. One, Fernández de Castro strove to make Hughes aware of the fact that he not only
continued to labor as Hughes’s translator, but was also enlisting the help of other Minoristas in
furtherance of his cause. Two, he attempted to awaken Hughes’ sense of reciprocity, to urge him
to translate as he himself had been translated, and thereby to use Hughes’s celebrity as a means
to propel that of Pedroso’s and Guillén’s.42 Three, the Cuban critic attempted to forge
partnerships both with Hughes and between Hughes’s circle of intelectuales sociales más
distinguidos and his own influential cadre to create a cultural exchange that extended beyond
poetic translation. He sought to use Hughes as a conduit for communication between “lefts”
both Cuban and North American, black and blanco. Four, in furtherance of all these ambitions,
he strove to convince Hughes of his important role as an international ambassador by reminding
him of the enormous influence that he had already exerted and could continue to exert in the
future.
Hughes’s response to all of these epistolary efforts was both immediate and much
appreciated. Within three months, in addition to regular installments of New Masses, New York
42 Perhaps owing to Fernández de Castro’s initial efforts in this regard, almost all of Hughes’s future translations were born of either a desire to reciprocate the favor of being
translated, or, conversely offered as a gift—or, more precisely, as a potlatch—designed to facilitate the foreign language translation and dissemination of his own poetry.
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Amsterdam News, The Pittsburgh Courier, Opportunity, and Crisis, Fernández de Castro,
Urrutia, and Guillén had received copies of all of Hughes’s original volumes.43 In addition,
Hughes sent editions of Alain Locke’s The New Negro, Walter White’s Rope and Faggot: A
Biography of Judge Lynch, V.F. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature, Scott
Nearing’s Black America, and Robert Russa Morton’s What the Negro Thinks.44 This collection
of Afro-American and leftist journals and seminal volumes of the New Negro Movement was
comprised of both Afro-American literary production and socio-political writing on matters
ranging from the “race problem” in the United States to worldwide struggles between newly
formed international organizations and the powers of European colonialism.
The infusion of this work into the heart of one of Cuba’s most influential circles is of
incalculable import. Moreover—and far more than the oft-cited personal relationships between
figures such as Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, and Jacques Roumain—it represents the
building blocks of rapprochement in the form of a concrete material exchange among
communities of color in the Americas. Hughes helped to forge relationships, largely comprised
by correspondence between, on one side, influential leaders and figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois,
James Weldon Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White and, on the other, Gustavo
Urrutia and Fernández de Castro who, after Machado’s fall, was appointed a Cuban ambassador
to Mexico and, some years later, to the Soviet Union. Hughes also dutifully translated the works
of, among others, Guillén, Pedroso, Urrutia, and Fernández de Castro’s sweetheart, Nellie
Campobello. During his time away from Cuba, he succeeded in publishing his literary
44 This traffic is documented by Urrutia’s letter to Hughes dated March 28th 1930 and by Fernández de Castro’s letter to Hughes dated February 2nd 1931.
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translations almost as often as he did his original verse. This achievement—seen through
today’s post-Boom eyes—may appear less than remarkable; but given the fact that the U.S.
publishing community at the time was steadfastly uninterested in Latin America, Hughes’
success in this regard is nothing short of titanic.45
Hughes’s efforts went neither unreciprocated nor unnoticed. Privy to Cuba’s most
contemporary (sometimes as yet unpublished) literary production, Hughes not only received
regular editions—sent largely by Fernández de Castro and Urrutia—of Cuba’s most popular
journals and periodicals (including Diario de la Marina [containing Urrutia’s Ideales de una
Raza], Social, Revista de la Habana, and La Semana), but also garnered him attention for both
his “original” verse and for translations of it contained therein.46 Once again, Fernández de
Castro proved to be Hughes’ greatest champion in this regard. In an article published by Revista
de la Habana in late 1930, Fernández de Castro not only celebrated Langston Hughes as “el
joven y vigoroso escritor norteamericano” [the young and vigorous North American writer], but
also alerted the Cuban reading public to the growing impact of young Cuban poets on the U.S.
audiences. Moreover, he asserted that the international notoriety of these poets was, in large
part, facilitated by the influential translator Langston Hughes.
46 These journals—like their counterparts throughout Latin America—constituted the chief organs for the dissemination of print culture in all its variety, uniting (to name but a
few elements) satirical essays, contemporary artistic production both foreign and domestic, scholarly articles, social critiques, and journalism. In this respect, their only
counterpart in North America was, in fact, the now largely defunct Afro-American press, journals and periodicals that for the vast majority of Afro-Americans—particularly in the
Northern States—served as the community’s only organ (outside the Church) for the reliable dissemination of information, art, and socio-political analysis.
For more on the seminal importance and wide scope of Latin American journals—from their first appearance up until 1940—see Fernández de Castro’s appendix to El Diario
(1941), the Spanish language translation of Weil’s examination of the various roles played—throughout history—by European presses in world events.
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El “blue” is not “El son”: Locating Influence
Hughes’s popularity in Cuba and, more specifically, the notion that Hughes had provided
Guillén with the inspiration for Motivos de son, were matters that produced of considerable
anxiety among many Cuban and Mexican critics. In fact, literary critic and journalist Ramón
Vasconcelos—in an letter exemplary of this anxiety which was sent to Guillén from Paris on
May 18, 1930—seems not only to have jumped to the conclusion that this was indeed the case,
but also to have urged Guillén to ignore the compliments he had lately received and to return to
his “estro bien enfrenado” [well-restrained inspiration] and the production of more refined
“avanzada” [advance guard] verse (Guillén, Epistolaria, 32-33). Invoking the specter of Hughes,
Vasconcelos imperiously informed Guillén that Cuba was not the South, and that “el son” was
not “el blue” (Guillén, Epistolaria, 32-33). In other words, the very idea of either a literary
exchange or artistic comradery between the U.S. and Spanish America was, for Vasconcelos,
tantamount—in an era where U.S. foreign policy ran roughshod throughout the hemisphere—to
dangerously equating the two.
While Vasconcelos acknowledged that Guillén’s Motivos de son deserved praise for their
“afrocubano” folk-flavor, he also asserted that the poet had done himself a great disservice by
embarking on a poetic quest whose object was of little worth and, more to the point, would not
long endure. Guillén was quick to respond; and, in a letter dated June 5, 1930, he advised
Vasconcelos not to misconstrue his efforts. His “sones” were not meant to stand by themselves,
but were to be included in a larger collection that would reflect a great variety of poetic depth
and style. The link between Cuba and the South, between “el son” and “el blue” was an
observation which he slyly credited to Vasconcelos, asserting that he had composed the poems in
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full ignorance of any such resemblance (Guillén, Epistolaria, 37-38). Contrary to his later
assertion that he dreamed the contents of Motivos de son, he informed Vasconcelos that a great
deal of time, effort, and thought had gone into composing his “sones” (Guillén, Epistolaria, 3738). They were neither unworthy endeavors nor simple quests, but prime examples of his “estro
bien enfrenado.” Guillén concluded his letter by saying that he remained, as always,
Vasconcelos’s most devoted admirer.
However, the very next day Guillén published an essay in El país, titled “Sones y
soneros” [Sones and Son Players], that defended his work in terms far more militant.
Responding to Vasconcelos’s review published six days earlier (one that echoed his letter to
Guillén in its criticisms and oblique invocations of Hughes), Guillén continued to contend that at
the time of the composition of Motivos de son—he was unaware of any similarity between the
blues and son or between Cuba and, in Vansconcelos’s published words, “el sur yanqui” [the
Yankee South] (Guillén, Prosa de prisa I, 20-21). In the same breath, Guillén defended his
“poemas de son” as an embodiment both of the Cuban vernacular and of Cuba’s most
representative music (Guillén, Prosa de prisa I, 20-21). Guillén argued further that, from a
literary view cognizant of the significance that popular forms held for the left in the
contemporary world, his “poemas de son” did indeed constitute the “avanzada” poetry that
Vasconcelos so craved (Guillén, Prosa de prisa I, 20-21). Moreover, Guillén figured his
embrace of local culture and speech as an anti-imperialist endeavor, a first step towards clearing
Cuban heads so often filled with imports. Once again, he asserted that the creation of Motivos de
son was no easy endeavor, and that it was, in fact, only his mastery of craft and laborious work
that had made them seem so. If indeed his “son poemas” constituted something fácil [easy], it
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was only because he had wanted to create “algo verdaderamente sencillo, verdamente fácil,
verdamente popular” [something truly sincere, truly easy, and truly popular] (Guillén, Prosa de
prisa I, 20-21). Guillén deft choice of words not only links his “son poemas” to José Martí’s
revolutionary Versos sencillos, but does so in a manner that associates the Comintern’s
revolutionary with the folk. In so doing, he neither embraces nor distances himself from Hughes,
but rather places their respective efforts inside the aforementioned leftist argument—one taken
up by a plethora of avant-garde poets including García-Lorca and Mayakovsky—that popular
forms (or folk forms) were indeed the best vehicle to communicate revolutionary (in this case
anti-imperialist) sentiment to the people, the best means to free Cubans thinking with “cabezas
de importación” [imported heads] (Guillén, Prosa de prisa I, 20-21).47 Guillén juxtaposes his
labor, a popular and populist tarea [work], against the elitism of Vasconcelos’s beloved
avanzada, and—in so doing—reclaims the helm of the advance guard, a position that Guillén
figures as the inheritance, albeit at times a burdensome one, of the heroic common laborer, a
position neither defined nor occupied by the elite circles of “el gran periodista Cubano [the great
Cuban journalist] (Guillén, Prosa de prisa I, 20-21). Hence, for Guillén, the influence that he
and Hughes share does not consist in the capacity of one poet to inspire another, but rather in
their shared desire to speak to and to uplift the “common people” with words and forms that
belong not to the select few but to the people as a whole, to the “common people”—black and
white—whose “cabezas” are beset by the onslaught of imported “American standardization.”
Complementary Conversations
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Hughes responded obliquely to the ongoing criticism that his oeuvre both lacked lyrical
refinement and failed to engage with canonical poetic themes, criticisms that closely mirror those
given to Guillén by Vasconcelos, in an essay titled “My Adventures as a Social Poet” written
some seventeen years after Guillén posted his defense. In terms that both echoed Guillén’s
eschewal of Vasconcelos’s avanzada and embraced the verdadero avant-garde (that of the
sencillo and popular), Hughes figured his poetic production as a politically, economically, and
ethically mandated embodiment of and response to the call of subjugated “common people.” He
also figured his literary translations and poetic production of 1930 and 1931—his “social
poems”—as the outgrowth of his increased class and international awareness, as the consequence
of a newfound consciousness fueled by the desire to expose the evils of U.S. economic
imperialism in Cuba, the ongoing Scottsboro trials, and his break with Mason. The essay is
telling, curious, and indeed spurious in several respects, as the anachronistic narratives that
Hughes offers therein are comprised by propositions supported with evidence drawn, in large
part, from Hughes’s citation of his poetry and translations. In other words, Hughes uses his
poetry (oft times, in terms of its composition and publication, incorrectly, albeit conveniently,
dated) as evidence to support his political propositions and visions of history. Nevertheless, the
essay provides testimony to the impact of Hughes’s translation of Guillén on his own poetic
production, to Hughes’s view of translation as a highly charged domestic and international
political endeavor, and to the fact that Hughes’s translation decisions—often akin to those of
Fernández de Castro—reflect a drive to forge new international communities.
“My Adventures as a Social Poet” presents its reader with a literary figure who is also a
paradox, the social poet. He is social in that his poetry is “about people’s problems,” and yet it
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is precisely this factor, alongside a commitment to Civil Rights and an attribution of communist
inclinations, that leads to his exclusion and to the censorship requisite for his curious identity
(Rampersad, Vol. 9, 271). He is, in short, a people’s poet who cannot speak to the people.
“So is the life of a social poet,” wrote Hughes, as he sardonically
reflected on how racism and poverty had shaped his art, both his “original”
poems and his literary translations, and, in turn, led to his political persecution
at home and abroad:
I am sure that none of these things would have happened to me had I
limited the subject matter of my problems to roses and moonlight. But,
unfortunately, I was born poor—and colored—and all the prettiest roses I
have seen have been in white people’s yards—not in mine. That is why I
cannot write exclusively about roses and moonlight—for sometimes in the
moonlight my brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansman’s hoods.
Sometimes in the moonlight a dark body swings from a lynching tree—but for
his funeral, there are no roses. (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 277)
Racial and economic injustice conspire to bar the social poet from a vocabulary
composed solely of “roses” and “moonlight” or from an “estro bien enfrenado,” as the specter of
racial terrorism incessantly haunts his verse. Moreover, censorship and international political
harassment—the “things” to which Hughes refers and from which he suffered—are figured as
the inevitable result (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 270-77). For it is precisely because his verse obscures
moonlight with dark bodies hung from lynching trees, and in the process casts light on the
brutality of the racial caste system in the U.S., that he finds himself hounded by the agents of Jim
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Crow. So hounded and having been separated from the protection of an unnamed patron owing
to an awakened class consciousness, the social poet in question looked for refuge in leftist Cuban
folds, refuge that would not only further open his eyes to the international dimensions of U.S.
racism and imperialism, but also serve to excite the empire’s hounds. As Hughes mused some
six years before he was subpoenaed by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous committee and
forced to renounce the literary merit of his most revolutionary verse, “I have never been a
Communist, but I learned that anyone visiting the Soviet Union and speaking in favor of it [as he
had done] is upon return liable to be so labeled” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 273). Well aware of the
growing power of the ardently anti-communist (and anti-socialist) House Un-American
Activities Committee and the concomitant danger that now surrounded these leftist labels, the
voice of Hughes’s 1947 essay tellingly adopts the diminutive appellation of “social poet” to
downplay and distance himself from the strong leftist ties that marked his career throughout the
1930’s, but does so, arguably, with an eye to bolster the very socialist politics he, tongue in
cheek, pretends to eschew.
Hughes’s deft rhetorical strategy centers the climax of his essay around three points in his
career. First, Hughes portrays his break with the patronage of an unnamed Charlotte Mason, and
does so on the grounds that he could no longer tolerate her “Park Avenue” society (Rampersad,
Vol. 9, 271). In contrast to Mason, Hughes portrays himself as a social idealist, someone who
could not ignore the “gulf between the very poor and the very rich in our society,” and he offers
his own poem “Park Bench”—written long after his break with Mason and his trips to Cuba—as
a peculiar form of testimony to these facts (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 271). The poem’s first stanza
reads: “I live on a park bench. / You, Park Avenue. / Hell of a distance / Between us two”
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(Rampersad, Vol. 9, 271). Hughes’s poem reflects his falling out with high society, enacts a
distancing from it, and is embedded to convince his reader that differences on issues of economic
class lay at the root of his break with Mason. Also of note is Hughes’s aforementioned unique
form of argument—a proposition supported by a poem—which he will employ throughout the
essay.
Combining massive understatement, falsehoods, anachronistic causality, and verifiable
personal history, Hughes then turns his essay’s focus to international political harassment, relates
how he was denied entry into Cuba in 1931, and speculates as to the reasons why:
On the way I stopped in Cuba where I was cordially received by the
writers and artists. I had written poems about the exploitation of Cuba by the
sugar barons and I had translated many poems of Nicholás [sic] Guillén such
as: “Cane” “Negro / in the cane fields. / White man / above the cane fields. /
Earth / Beneath the cane fields. / Blood / that flows from us.”
This was during the Machado regime. Perhaps someone called his
attention to these poems and translations because, when I came back from
Haiti a week later, I was not allowed to land in Cuba. (Rampersad, Vol. 9,
271-272)
Hughes’s assertion that his poems and translations lay at the core of the Machado
regime’s denial is striking in several respects. Contrary to his assertions, Hughes had not written
poems “about the exploitation of Cuba by sugar barons,” and his brief detention in Cuba in 1930
(where he was allowed “to land”) was the byproduct of his failure to properly obtain a re-entry
visa from Haiti. In fact, the only literary capital that could have played a role in Machado’s
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alleged decision to bar Hughes from Cuba in 1930 consisted in Hughes’s translations of Nicolás
Guillén’s poetry, translations that included “Cane,” but, in publication, were limited to the
apolitical “Madrigal,” the race-proud “Black Woman,” and “Wash Woman,” a poem never
printed in Spanish which is more of a celebration of a washwoman’s resilience than a social
critique of her condition. Hughes’s 1947 re-invention of history does not therefore simply serve
to critique the corruption of Machado’s collapsed regime and to betray his own leftist political
fidelities, but also figures his career as translator and poet as one endowed with international
import both literary and political. Once again, Hughes resorts to the rhetorical strategy of using
his own artistic production—in this case his translation of Guillén’s “Caña”—to attest to the
veracity of the implied claim that his is a voice both for the international proletariat and against
U.S. imperialism, going so far as to assert anachronistically that he was denied entrance into
Cuba because of his opposition to sugar barons made manifest in his translations of Guillén’s
poetry. Hence, Hughes’s actions are by his own understated proclamation neither tied to
patronage nor patriotism. Rather, the poet plays loosely with hegemonic ideologies (for
example, juxtaposing the ideology of socialism and the notion of a social poet who is constituted
first and foremost by his identity as an oppressed African-America in the United States) and
appropriates a Cuban poetic discourse in translation in order to introduce a polemic. This
polemic seeks to address the economic and racial injustices at work in cane fields that, differing
from Guillén’s formulation, could include the Georgia cane fields of the Black Belt, cane fields
only slightly less productive than those found in Cuba.
Hughes’s appropriation and modification of Guillén’s counter-conquest discourse can be
further illustrated by comparing his translation with Guillén’s original. Guillén’s “Caña” reads:
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“El negro / junto a cañaveral / El yanqui / junto a cañaveral / La tierra / junto a cañaveral /
Sangre / que se nos va!” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 272). Hughes’s translation (first published in 1934
by Nancy Cunard in her seminal anthology Negro): omits the exclamation point that concludes
the poem’s final stanza, translates yanqui as “white man,” and reorients the rhythmic pattern of a
traditional Cuban clave found in Guillén’s composition so as to shift rhetorical force from the
fourth stanza onto to the second. These choices produce a dramatic shift in focus in terms both
rhythmic and thematic. Given that Guillén’s first three stanzas resemble each other in terms of
both their rhythmic composition and their conformance to the clave of a popular Cuban son, the
fourth stanza presents the reader with a subject, sangre, that calls attention to itself not only by
its use of exclamation but also by its inability to keep the metric beat. Hughes’s translation
removes rhythmic accentuation and rhetorical force from Guillén’s fourth stanza, and shifts
focus to the second, having now made it stand out as the poem’s only subject line to be
composed of more than one word—“White man.” The blood of field workers is upstaged by the
image of the oppressor. Moreover, Hughes’s decision can be said to alter the identity of the
personage who inhabits the space “above the cane field,” who in some readings retains his
identity as it is incarnate in Guillén’s original (a yanqui), and in others becomes part of a social
and historical entity far more inclusive (the white race).
Hughes’s choice to translate “yanqui” as “White man” enacts a shift in meaning that
extends Guillén’s reference to the U.S. to include all European exploitation, and simultaneously
localizes and re-contextualizes this racial and economic exploitation in the specific arena of the
United States. For if Hughes’s “White man” is the same figure who appears in his “Mulatto,” a
rapist emissary from an overwhelming and oppressive U.S. racial caste system, then his
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translation has appropriated the language surrounding international economic exploitation for
the purposes of domestic discourse. In so doing, Hughes has shifted the light from Guillén’s
blood to the perpetrator of the crime, altered our conception of the victims, and partially erased
the identity of the party the poem itself holds accountable. What was portrayed as an
international socio-economic conflict becomes a conflict predicated on race, a transformation
tellingly parallel to the movement of Hughes’ essay as a whole, a movement that begins with the
invocation of a leftist political fidelity and then complicates this fidelity by calling the competing
and overlapping demands of racial identity to the fore, thus animating the pressures that weigh
upon the social poet.
The second alternative proposed above—that “White man” is intended to expand
Guillén’s indictment of the U.S. by also pointing the finger at European colonialism and
exploitation—is intriguing for it exhibits a proto-Diasporic awareness at work in the poet, a
consciousness that was absorbed by the often times competing demands of racial uplift,
socialism, communism, Pan-Africanism, Pan-Americanism, and the advancement of human
rights both in the United States and abroad. Hence, Hughes’s choice presents the reader with
both a creative distortion informed by a political agenda and an assertion of a semantic
equivalence between the terms “White man” and “yanqui.” This assertion has profound
implications that resonate precisely from the fact that the claim is untenable and demonstrative of
an ideologically driven translator at work. In a manner akin to “Yo También…,” Hughes’s
translation redraws the geography of the Caribbean and U.S. with bold strokes. It creates a new,
albeit only slight more expansive, “us”—as neither Hughes’s “us” nor Guillén’s plural first
person are assigned a race or exclusive nationality—composed of Cubans and U.S. blacks alike,
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and a “them” that no longer includes the colored citizenry of the U.S. populace, but is instead
restricted to the “White man,” creating anew the locus of oppression. It is, in essence, a vision
of an international black community that spans the hemisphere, a nation among many nations
constituted by its racial make up or, at the very least, in response to its common oppressor.
Along these lines, Hughes’s choice presents a plea from the translator to be exempted from the
category of Yankee on the basis of race, makes the implicit assertion that a black American holds
more interests in common with a black Haitian than he has with his fellow white-American
oppressor, and simultaneously offers a plea for admittance into a new “Nuestra América.”48 In
so doing, Hughes reveals an intention to bolster a racial and political agenda in his translations,
one that need not concern itself with semantic equivalency between original and translation.
Hughes’s translation creates more than a discourse that yokes Hughes to Guillén in a
common struggle against the “White man,” for it offers evidence, as does Hughes’s entire career
as a translator, that his translations often times influenced his original, artistic production in
profound ways. And although Hughes does not make explicit reference to this influence in the
course of his essay, he does—as does Guillén’s “Sones y soneros”—invite one to consider a
shared influence born of a common cause. After providing his translation and assigning it a
political import that—given the fact “Cane” had yet to be published when Hughes was denied reentry (from Haiti) into Cuba in 1931—can only be conceptualized as polemical, Hughes relates
that this was not the first time he had been “barred” from a place “because of poems about
poverty, oppression, and segregation.” Moreover, figuring himself as a translator and poet
48 The term “Nuestra América” was coined by José Martí to refer to Spanish America, and to differentiate it from the U.S.
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undaunted in his fidelity to the “common” cause, Hughes’s very next sentence relates how—
turned away from Cuba—he visited the Scottsboro Nine in the death house at Kilby prison and
was, in turn, inspired to compose the poem “Christ in Alabama”:
Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black—
O, bear your back.
Mary is His Mother
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.
God’s His Father—
White Master above,
Grant us your love.
Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth:
Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 272)
Although the translation of “Caña” occurred nearly nineteen months prior to the
publication of “Christ in Alabama,” Hughes’s decision to link them thematically in the two short
paragraphs that separate their appearance on the printed page—his decision to explicitly assert
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mutual influence born of a common cause—begs a reading of the latter in terms of the former,
and implies that “Christ in Alabama” was inspired not only by Kilby, but also by “Cane.” The
reader is struck by a series of correspondences: the “White man / above the cane fields” finds a
corollary in the “White Master above”; the subjugation of the “Negro / in the cane fields”
resonates with the implicit presence of plantation slavery invoked by both “beaten and black”
backs and intimations of slave rape; and the uncompensated “blood that flows from us” finds a
close cousin in blood from a “Nigger Christ” that bespeaks something quite apart from
redemption. Nevertheless, the two poems present no direct parallels, no correspondence that
goes uncomplicated: the “White man” of “Cane” can be read, albeit slightly against the grain, as
part of a larger religious thematic at work in the poem, but he is a far cry from the “White
Master” of “Christ in Alabama” who cannot be divorced from the series of intricate metaphors
that serve to critique Christianity as a tool of the slave master. These metaphors also leave the
reader—perhaps embodying this destruction of faith—with no firm ground on which to stand, as
the persona speaks of (to name but a few elements) the past, the present, prophets and profits all
at the same time.
Indeed, Hughes’ decision to place these poems (and the potential readings that arise from
them) in conversation constitutes an attempt to create a forum within which the two poems can
be said to complement one another, a forum that allows each poem to cast new light on the other.
In this sense, the bold critique of Christianity offered by “Christ in Alabama” draws the far more
subtle Christian resonances of “Cane” into stark relief, while the scene presented by “Cane”—a
scene whose economical diction and work song-like repetitions paint a portrait evocative of an
agrarian landscape—grounds the gruesome but nonetheless ethereal metaphorical machinations
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of “Christ in Alabama” in a more stark, quotidian reality. These complementary effects both
bolster the impact of the leftist themes at works in each poem (comprised, in part, by a rejection
of the opiate of the masses and an invocation of the exploitation of a black, agrarian labor force)
and offer a glimpse of Hughes’s conception of the task of the translator. In this instance, this
task consists in importing one of Cuba’s most highly crafted products in order to create an interAmerican dialogue that, in turn, combats the exploitative importation of Cuba’s raw materials by
U.S. “sugar barons.”
Not readily available to the bilingual reader, the complementary light that each poem
sheds on the other is one that arises only in translation. Hughes’s decision to translate Guillén’s
“Negro” (a word that specifically denotes a black man at work in the cane fields) with the
English-language gender neutral “Negro,” in combination with his earlier invocation of a “White
man / above,” imbues “Cane” with the potential to be read as a poem that, like “Christ in
Alabama,” speaks to the issue of miscegenation. In short, the white rapist above, in Guillén’s
poem, may very well be hovering over a woman. With respect to Guillén’s later formulation of
mulatez, Hughes’s “Cane” puts forth a pillar of Guillén’s oeuvre that is, nonetheless, absent in
“Caña,” as the “blood that flows from us” (formerly that of a plural first person who could only
be defined as a collective apart from that of the yanqui) takes on added connotations that bespeak
racial mixture born, if not explicitly of rape, of exploitative relations. Hence, “My Adventures as
a Social Poet” sets forth a vision of translation that ascribes to the task enormous political
import, a vision that pits both the importation of foreign literary material and the complementary
conversation such an importation engenders against the malevolent forces born of the collusion
of “robber barons,” the Machado regime, and U.S. hemispheric influence whose exploitative
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economic practices—vis-à-vis imports and exports—can hardly be characterized as a
compliment to the Cuban people.
Both Sides of the Fence
The notion of a Cuban-influenced Hughes is one that the poet helped subtly to
encourage though he never referred to himself in such explicit terms. And as Hughes
unsuccessfully struggled to compile, translate and publish Troubled Lands (1935), it was none
other than Fernández de Castro who transposed the conception of a Cuban-inspired Hughes from
the background it occupied to a more prominent place when Hughes solicited him to provide an
introduction.49 In a tangential remark he offered in Tema negro (1935)—a book that Hughes
made a brief, abortive effort to translate—Fernández de Castro argued that, like Federico García
Lorca’s and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s before him, Hughes’s poetry had been informed by his
contact with Cuba (Fernández de Castro, Tema negro, 69-71).50 Fernández de Castro points to
Hughes’s agit-prop “Ballads of Lenin” (1933)—in its placement of “Juan,” a black Cuban
farmer, along side that of “Ivan el mujick” and “Chang el culí” at the site of Lenin’s tomb—as
testimony to this fact (Tema negro 70-71).51
51 Positing a Cuban influence on Hughes, Fernández de Castro writes, “Langston Hughes que cuando nos visitó en 1930, trabó como García Lorca, amistad con nuestros jóvenes
intelectuales que seguramente influyeron la posterior producción del poeta. Langston Hughes, en su Ballad de Lenin, escrita muy recientemente, pone a Juan, un campesino negro
actual de Cuba como merecedor al par de Ivan el mujik y Chang el culí, en un sitio al lado de Lenin en la tumba del gran lider de la Revolución Mundial.” [Langston Hughes who,
like García Lorca, established friendships with our young intellectuals in 1930 that certainly influenced his later production/ In his Ballad of Lenin written very recently, Langston
Hughes puts Juan, a real Cuban Negro farmer on a par with Ivan the “mujik” and Chang the coolie in a place beside Lenin in the tomb of the great leader of the Global
Revolution.] (Fernández de Castro, Tema negro, 70-71).
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With regards to matters of influence, Fernández de Castro’s introduction proves telling in
several respects. Setting aside the fact that the “Ballads of Lenin” makes no mention of a Cuban
Juan, but rather, gives voice to a far less descript “Chico, the Negro / Cutting cane in the sun,”
Fernández de Castro’s decision to characterize Chang (in Hughes’s poem “Chang, from the
foundries / On strike in the streets of Shanghai”) as “el culí” suggests another linkage. “[E]l
culí” is a term that, in Cuba (and throughout Spanish America), refers to laborers of Chinese
descent. The choice arguably represents, in its uniquely Cuban translation and domestication of
Hughes’s foundry worker, Fernández de Castro’s conception of a Pedroso-inspired Hughes.
China finds its way into Hughes’s poetry only after his translation of Pedroso’s “Salutación a un
camarada culí” [“Until Yesterday: A Chinese Mood”] and “El heredero” [“The Heir”]. Both of
these proletarian dedicated poems reflect Pedroso’s perennial engagement with his own Chinese
heritage as well as his poetic debt to the agit-prop verse of Mayakovsky. In fact, Hughes begins
to offer poems that valorize and embody agit-prop verse while bespeaking worldwide struggles
against European colonialism and Yankee domination with the publication of “Merry Christmas”
(December, 1930) and “Call to Creation” (February, 1931) in New Masses.52 Much of the poetry
Hughes composed in the interim between his trips to Cuba reflects the influence of his
simultaneous efforts to translate Pedroso’s verse. For example, in its juxtaposition of an
enduring rhythm against human mortality Hughes’s “Drum” resonates profoundly with his
translation of “Perro mío, fiel perro” [“Alarm Clock”].53 In its presentation of a poetic persona
who forsakes his former docility for a new militancy, Hughes’s “Tired” (also known as
53 Hughes translated Pedroso’s “Perro mío, fiel perro” as “Alarm Clock” for Poetry Quarterly, Spring, 1931.
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“Militant”) bares close ties to Pedroso’s “Conceptos del nuevo estudiante.”54 Hughes’s “AfroAmerican Fragment” mirrors “El heredero” [“The heir”] insofar as the former depicts a gap
between its Afro-American persona and his ancestral roots that is unbridgeable save for the
cryptic messages of songs “beat back into the blood” and the “memories” that “history books”
create, while the latter forefronts the distance between opulent ancestor and revolutionary
descendant (who, in a similar vein, desires only the inheritance of “rare manuscripts” that
“penetrate more deeply / the meanings of the heart than the head”) depicted in Pedroso’s.55
Perhaps no poem exemplifies Pedroso’s influence on Hughes’s poetic production more
than “To the Little Fort of San Lázaro, On the Ocean Front, Havana.”56 The resemblance of this
poem, written upon Hughes’s return to Cuba, to “The Conquistadors” (Hughes’s unpublished
1930 translation, written in Havana, of Pedroso’s “Los conquistadores”) is telling, so much so, in
fact, that merely placing them side by side serves to provide ample evidence of how Hughes
enriched his poetic palette during his encounters with Pedroso:
“The Conquerors”
“To the Little Fort of San Lázaro, On the Ocean Front, Havana.”
They passed this way. Avaricious epics
Watch tower once for pirates
in their eyes from the Atlantic
That sailed the sun bright seas—
to the Pacific. They came in iron boots,
Red pirates, great romantics.
long guns on their shoulders,
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and the land wild.
DRAKE
DE PLAN
What Truth did they preach to men?
EL GRILLO
What gospel of joy to suffering humanity?
What psalm of Justice over the immense lands Against such as these
did their iron cannon raise toward the skies?
Years and Years ago
You served quite well—
In the name of law and peace they came…
When time and ships were slow
Came toward the people calling them brothers: But now,
And as in Holy Writ, America was the Christ
Against a pirate called
who saw them rend the earth like a garment
THE NATIONAL CITY BANK
and fight over the free tunic of their destiny!
What can you do alone?
Would it not be
They passed this way
Just as well you tumbled down,
They came in the name of a new democracy:
Stone by helpless stone?
even on the highest peaks of the Andes
they slept the deep and brutal sleep of bayonets.
They passed this way.
With new postulates of liberty they came:
reaching as far as the old land of Li Tai Pe
on the floating skyscrapers of their battleships,
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amidst the clamor of weak and torn nations.
They crossed here.
Now toward their barracks in Wall Street they go,
sacks of dollars on their shoulders,
and the land wild.
Hughes, like Pedroso, metaphorically links American imperialism to its counterparts in
times past (Spanish conquistadors or pirates of the Caribbean). He does so in a fashion that
figures, as does Pedroso, the new conquistadors as invincible marauders, explicitly tying them to
an American financial institution. In Pedroso’s poem it is “Wall Street” and in Hughes’s it is
“THE NATIONAL CITY BANK.” In addition to providing ample evidence of a new class
consciousness and an international awareness in his rejuvenated poetic production, Hughes’s
Pedrosian poem represents an instance where Pedroso’s additions to Hughes’s palette afforded
him the opportunity to augment his depictions of the sea (best exemplified in his sequence
“Water Front Streets”). Those portraits most often foreground the experience of the vagabond
sailor and the high price of a freedom born of a lack of roots and, far less often, offer disturbing
images meant to invoke the middle passage. They largely avoiding issues related to classstruggle and contain no Marxist overtones. Hence, given the fact that poems such as “Merry
Christmas,” “Pride,” “To the Little Fort of San Lázaro, On the Ocean Front, Havana” and “AfroAmerican Fragment” evince a class consciousness, an employment of agit-prop verse—
heretofore unprecedented in Hughes’s poetic production—and also a strident rejection of the
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power and potential of primitivism (as his former patron Charlotte Osgood Mason conceived it),
it is by no means an exaggeration to assert that Hughes’s “radical” period as a poet was the result
of a poetic palette enhanced by his work as a translator.
Fences Make for Illusory Influences: The 150,000,000 Trump Card
Fernández de Castro’s prefatory remarks to Troubled Lands cast still more light on the
question of influence vis-à-vis his comments concerning Mayakovsky (whose “Syphilis” and
Cuban-inspired “Black and White,” Hughes—with the help of Lidiia Filatova—would translate
in 1933) and García Lorca (whose Romancero gitano and Bodas de sangre, Hughes, starting in
1937, would translate over the course of several years). These references not only testify to
Cuba’s impact on Hughes (and vice versa) but also widen the influence debate by placing it
inside a larger one of greater international scale. For, as Fernández de Castro’s aforementioned
missive of June 4th attests, Langston Hughes was well aware of both Mayakovsky and his
inspirational, albeit brief, visit to Havana long before he undertook his year-long sojourn in the
Soviet Union, and, quite possibly, acquired a familiarity with the poet’s work from Fernández de
Castro and his compatriots. After inquiring about Hughes’s progress on his translations of Nellie
Campobello in a letter dated June 4, 1930, Fernández de Castro (who was responsible for the
first Spanish-language publications of Mayakovsky in Cuba) not only promised to send along “a
little essay I wrote on the death of Mayakowski [sic],” but also—implying either a desire to
influence Hughes or, conversely, a certain degree of expertise on Hughes’s part—solicits
Hughes’s opinion, “I will you to read it, and tell me about it.” The essay in question (eventually
titled “Sobre Mayakovski, poeta y suicida” [On Mayakovsky, Poet and Suicide]) was written
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shortly after the poet’s suicide, and presents the reader with a portrait of the poet’s life, his
Soviet poetics, and his international import. It also provides a translation of Mayakovsky’s
account of his stopover in Havana, as narrated in his My Discovery of America (1925). This tale,
in turn, makes abundantly clear whence “Black and White” derived its inspiration (namely, from
a crate of bootleg “Black and White” whisky destined for U.S. shores) and also manifests
Mayakovsky’s view that the exploitation of Cuba’s black population was largely the result of
U.S. capitalism. Hence, Fernández de Castro’s correspondence can be said to have provided
Hughes not only with a critical overview (from afar) of Mayakovsky’s work, but also with a
class-based analysis of the poems written by the Poet of the Revolution which concern racial
injustice and exploitation. In short, the very poet whose agit-prop verse and formal innovations
had inspired Pedroso, was now inspiring Hughes, and would continue to do the same for
countless others.57
Fernández de Castro’s remarks concerning García Lorca’s influence, albeit it “indirecta”
[indirect], on Cuba’s young poets complicates the notion of a Hughes-inspired Guillén still
further (Fernández de Castro, Tema negro, 69-71).58 In fact, two days before Hughes left Cuba
on March 7, 1930, García Lorca, his fame well preceding him, set foot on the docks of Havana
and was cordially received by the same community of Cuban literati that had gathered about
Hughes a week earlier. Throughout the next two months, García Lorca delivered a series of five
57Given this familiarity, the reductive simplicity that marks Hughes’s characterization of Mayakovsky in I Wonder as I Wander can only be seen as Hughes’s effort, one among
many, to distance himself from communism.
58 Although Hughes’s translations of García Lorca would, in the years to come, greatly impact his own literary production, it does not appear that Hughes possessed a familiarity
with Lorca’s work prior to 1937.
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lectures, each of which drew resounding applause and rave reviews. Like Hughes, García Lorca
was also captivated by the soneros of the Marianao district, and before the end of April he had
drafted his poem “Son”—modeled, as were the verses of Tallet, Guirao, and Guillén—on the
rhythms of the popular music form. Although “Son” was published in the April-May edition of
Havana’s Musicalia, and, hence, followed in the wake of Motivos de son, García Lorca’s
presence can be said to affect the debate over the inspiration for Guillén’s son poemas in two
respects. First, it suggests that an engagement between poetry and popular music was, in a sense,
looming in the contemporary air and instantiating across the globe. Second, and perhaps more to
the point, the fame that preceded García Lorca’s arrival in Cuba was largely due to the success of
his seminal Romancero gitano (1928), a collection that, albeit possessed by unparalleled
originality, represented an engagement (as did Hughes’s “blues” verse) with folk forms.59 In
fact, one of the factors that engendered García Lorca’s warm reception in Cuba was the leftist
argument that predated and surrounded the publication of Romancero gitano in avant-garde
poetic circles around the world; namely, that folk forms (while not in-themselves radical) were
often the best means to communicate radical ideas to the common people.60 Hence, García
Lorca’s “indirect influence” on Cuba’s young poets can easily be conceptualized as one that, in
part, urged poets like Guillén to embrace folk forms, an embrace unquestionably evinced by
Motivos de son. Moreover, the example of García Lorca casts a shadow over both sides of the
son poemas debate, as Hughes’s blues verse, Guillén’s son poemas, and García Lorca’s
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romanceros are easily conceptualized as local eruptions of an aesthetic conviction, a faith in folk
forms, held by leftists and recently embraced by the world’s avant-garde.
Nevertheless, Fernández de Castro’s essay “Poetas Hispano Americanos actuales
traducidos al ingles” [Contemporary Hispanic American Poets Translated into English] which
appeared in Revista de la Habana in late 1930, ultimately figures translation, and the influence it
engenders, as an exchange thatrepresents a complementary relationship. Published just a few
short months after Guillén made his stateside debut with the publication of “Black Woman”
(Langston Hughes’s translation of “Mujer Negra” was published in the August 1930 edition of
Opportunity), the essay celebrates the first English-language translation of a poem by Regino
Pedroso. Fernández de Castro praises Pedroso’s poem as “uno de los más valiosas que puede
presentar Cuba en la hora actual” [one of the most valuable poems Cuba has to offer at the
present moment], and relates with great pride that “el joven y vigoroso escritor norteamericano
Langston Hughes” [the young and vigorous North American writer Langston Hughes] has served
as his translator (Fernández de Castro, Revista, 79-80). He also tellingly praises the Communist
periodical that published the poem by referring to it as “la vigorosa revista yanqui New Masses”
[the vigorous Yankee periodical New Masses] (Fernández de Castro, Revista, 79-80). After
giving “Mujer Negra” its debut in print—notably alongside a reproduction of Hughes’s “Black
Woman”—Fernández de Castro cites a letter that he had recently received from Hughes
informing him that his translations of poems by Guillén, Pedroso, and Tallet were forthcoming.
Perhaps most intriguingly, he offers the reader an argument concerning the important role played
by translation in forums ranging from the strictly literary to those occupied by affairs of state,
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and brings into stark relief many of the most striking facets of his conception of the task of the
translator, a conception akin to that formulated by Hughes in “My Adventures as a Social Poet.”
Fernández de Castro begins his essay by probing the process by which, throughout the
Hispanic world in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, poems and poets from foreign
canons were selected for translation. Fernández de Castro asserts that both Latin American and
Spanish translators (and poets) tended to translate poets from times past, poets whose fame
(curiously enough) was close to extinction. The work of translation thus constituted both the
work of resurrection and—in large part owing to its few successes—a type of consecration. As
foreign poets, successfully resurrected, not only provided the Hispanic world with its primary
source of inspiration, they also came to form the literary backdrop against which to measure
contemporary poetic production. What would Bécquer have amounted to, Fernández de Castro
rhetorically questions, without the Spanish translations of German poets that preceded him?
How many Latin American elegies owed their existence to the importation of Lamartine’s verse?
Hence, for Fernández de Castro, the vast majority of Latin American literary production
throughout the nineteenth century was not only derivative, but measured against (as the hermano
más oscuro of) its European antecedents. This secondary status was, in turn, more than attested
to by the failure of Latin American literary production to achieve any degree of success in
foreign language translation.
However, with the appearance of Rubén Darío, José Martí, and José María Heredia y
Heredia Latin American verse had come into a “personalidad” of its own and, for the first time,
was possessed of sufficient originality and force of spirit to succeed in literary forums and
languages the world over (Fernández de Castro, Revista, 79-80). As Fernández de Castro goes
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on to assert, the José Martí translated into French—despite the grossest of “licencias que con él
se ha tomado su traductor” [license taken by his translator]—was still “el mismo gran poeta
sencillo y fuerte” [the same great, sincere, and strong poet] who wrote the seminal (and perhaps,
for Cuba, foundational) lines of Versos sencillos. Moreover, the recent translation of Maple
Arce’s Urbe by “el joven escritor John Dos Passos” [the young writer John Dos Passos] offered
ample testimony to the fact that the literary production of Nuestra América could well succeed in
English translation (Fernández de Castro, Revista, 79-80). In one of the essay’s most intriguing
passages, Fernández de Castro attests that readers familiar with both Urbe and its translation
(Metropolis) affirmed that no difference existed between the two versions, and that the texts—in
terms approximating Borges’s famous remarks on the ideal translation contained in his essay
“Las versions homéricas”—actually complemented one another: “una y otra se complementan”
(Fernández de Castro, Revista, 79-80).
Bringing his essay to a close, Fernández de Castro focuses his attention on the successful
breakthrough in yanqui presses of Cuba’s young writers—a success, in part, owed to Hughes’s
translations but also facilitated, no doubt, by a distinctly Cuban personalidad. After implicitly
qualifying Pedroso’s “Salutación Fraterna al Taller Mecánico” (translated by Hughes as
“Fraternal Greetings to the Factory”) as an anti-imperialist work, noting that the publication of
Hughes’s “Black Woman” preceded the publication of Guillén’s “Mujer Negra,” and printing (in
complementary fashion) the Spanish-language debut of Guillén’s poem alongside Hughes’s
translation, Fernández de Castro notes that times are indeed changing. Latin American literary
production is no longer the derivative byproduct of resurrected European poetry circumscribed to
a realm occupied by the erudite elite and doomed to die a domestic (unconsecrated) death,
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having never propelled its personalidad beyond Spanish-language borders. Rather, the true
poets of Latin American now had both a message to broadcast and a mission to carry out. And
their translators would, in complementary fashion, prove to be a means of support for the Latin
American poet’s new audience, the English reading público yanqui. It would seem, as
Fernández de Castro wryly concludes, that Cuba was now capable of exporting something more
than raw materials (Fernández de Castro, Revista, 79-80).
Despite the praise for Hughes contained therein, Fernández de Castro’s brief essay, seen
in the light of his missives to Hughes which repeatedly forefront the notion of a Hughes-inspired
Cuba, represents a strategic about face. Hughes’s role in Cuba’s struggle against the control
exerted by the U.S., as played between the covers of Revista de la Habana, is comprised not only
by his capacity to influence and invigorate the tema negro in Cuba, but also in his capacity to be
influenced and, in turn, invigorate the público yanqui. He is to serve as a conduit and as a source
of support for both the “true poets” of Latin America and, simultaneously, for an English reading
community yet to be affected by the infusion of new, highly crafted, Cuban exports ” (Fernández
de Castro, Revista, 79-80). As an accomplice to the “mission” these poets must “carry out,”
Hughes is both to broadcast the anti-imperialist, proletarian message of Pedroso’s “Fraternal
Greetings to the Factory” and to disseminate the distinctly Cuban, but nonetheless communist,
conception of the world-wide race problem as embodied by Guillén’s “Black Woman,” a poem
that proclaims “a newly arrived goddess” who is, nonetheless, already firmly embedded inside a
heterogeneous (if not worldwide) community, “the circle of the equator / Girdled about her
waist” ”] (Fernández de Castro, Revista, 79-80).
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However, when seen in light of his remarks that conceptualize the ideal translation as one
that both complements, and, in turn, is complemented by the “original,” Fernández de Castro’s
seemingly Janus-faced characterizations of poetic influence reveal him to be much more than the
personification of the Italian maxim traduttore: traditori. His actions do not represent a betrayal,
but rather a successful attempt to create a (for lack of a better term) mutual-picture, one that
encompasses the complexities of the ties he helped to forge. He is a translator whose conception
of fidelity allows for multiple allegiances, a translator confident that the personalidad of Cuba’s
true poets—now free from the literary shackles of European colonialism—will (even in the
clumsiest of foreign hands) never be divorced from its strength and sincerity. Fernández de
Castro is a translator who figures the ideal translation as a work that is both influenced and
influences, an artifact that must remain faithful to the original that engendered it but is also
imbued with the responsibility to provide its complement. In short, the paradoxical fidelity
possessed by the ideal translation infuses it with the capacity to broadcast the original in a
frequency free from static, and, al mismo tiempo, necessitates that its very arrival transform the
original forever, providing a complement that, for the reader privileged to both, makes it
impossible to see the original in its former light. In this respect, the task of translation and that
of the intellectual rapprochement between communities of color in the America—namely, the
work of black internationalism—are one in the same, as both require a conception of the foreign
in terms of the domestic, simultaneously demand that the difference or personalidad of each go
undiminished, and require a fidelity to an international context that, although marked by this
difference, forever extinguishes the circles of light that formerly separated one from the other,
thereby engendering a complementary relation that forever alters the conception of both. To
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close read “I, Too” in light of “Yo También…,” “Christ in Alabama” in light of “Cane” and
“Caña,” and “The Conquerors” in light of “To the Little Fort of San Lázaro, On the Ocean Front,
Havana” is to reveal the differences between the “race problem” in the United States and that in
Cuba and also to reveal their common condition, to reveal overlapping and competing
internationalisms, solidarities, and fidelities. Translation and the work of Diaspora, in this sense,
is bridge-building, and is an omnipresent reminder of a fact embodied in the final stanza of
Hughes’s “Cultural Exchange”—namely, “Culture, they say, is a two-way street.”
Postscript
By the time Langston Hughes arrived in the Soviet Union in 1932, the ideologically
driven translation and dissemination of Hughes’s poetry in Latin America had already created a
distinctly Latin American Hughes. This Hughes gave voice to the common folk oppressed by
the brutality of U.S., was decidedly leftist, and—as attested to his appearances in Social (Cuba),
Crisol (Mexico), Sur (Argentina), and Contemporáneos (Mexico)—was located within the
advance guard of poetry. The list of poems chosen for translation into Spanish when compared
against his poetic oeuvre to date reveal a tendency among his Latin American translators to
prefer what they arguably perceived as thematic and aesthetic commonalities, and to pass over
poems that might reveal a Hughes out of line with their various—and varied—agendas, a
radically other Hughes delineated by: Fernández de Castro’s “Yo Tambien…” [“I, Too”], “Los
Blancos,” [“The White Ones”], “Luna de Marzo” [“March Moon”], and “Soledad” [“Soledad”];
Jorge Luis Borges’s “Yo Tambien…” and “Nuestra Tierra” [“Our Land”]; Xavier Villarutia’s
“Yo También,” “Plegaria” [“Prayer”] “Poema,” [“Poem”] and “Nota de un suicida” [“Suicide
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Note”]; and Rafael Lozano’s “Ardella,” “Cruz,” [Mulatto], “Puerto” [Port Town], “Alegria,”
“Soy un negro” [“Negro”], “Soledad,” “Placera” [Mexican Market Woman], “Cancionera”
[“Young Singer”], and “Yo, también, soy América.” The preferred and thus privileged oeuvre
above stands slightly apart from Hughes’s poetic production as a whole. The translations
construct poems for their Spanish-reading audience that speak to issues of great import
throughout Latin America. Hughes in translation comes to speak for such particularly local and
long-held literary themes as mestizaje (in poems like “Cruz” and “Nuestra Tierra), Christianity
(in “Plegaria), U.S. hemispheric economic exploitation (in “Soledad: A Cuban Portrait” and
“Placera”), and continental-wide enfranchisement (in “Yo También” and “Nuestra Tierra”). In
translation, Hughes’s poetic persona seemed to care about Latin Americans.
In the years leading up to Hughes’ role as a war correspondent in Spain—years
marked by poetic production infused with ever-increasing revolutionary fervor—Fernández de
Castro remained tireless in his efforts. Despite Hughes’ increasingly proletarian prose, Latin
American critics, from time to time, framed him in manners akin to that employed by Van
Vechten in his preface to The Weary Blues. However, Fernández de Castro was always quick to
counter. For example, when Hughes was once again placed in primitivist frames by literary
critics upon his arrival in Mexico in 1935, Fernández de Castro (then a diplomat in Mexico)
countered with essays in El Nacional announcing the arrival of “el poeta militante negro” [the
black militant poet] Langston Hughes, and actually convinced many others, including Rafael
Lozano—who had previously interpreted Hughes’s poetry solely as primitivist—to publish
articles in line with those of Fernández de Castro’s. Moreover, he successfully urged his wide
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network of friends to print Hughes’s most militante poems in many of Mexico’s influential
journals and widely circulated magazines and newspapers, including El Nacional and Siempre.
In 1935, Fernández de Castro also introduced and inserted Hughes into Mexico’s vibrant
leftist artistic communities, an experience that Hughes described as the realization of a life-long
dream to belong to a circle of artists that could serve as a home for his own art and personal
growth:
I never lived in Greenwich Village in New York, so its bohemian life—in the
old days when it was bohemian—was outside my orbit. Although once I lived
for a year in Montmartre in Paris, I lived there as a worker, not an artist. So
the closest I’ve ever come to la vie boheme was my winter in Mexico when
my friends were almost all writers and artists like Juan de la Cabada, Maria
Izquierdo, Luis Cardoza y Aragon, Manuel Bravo, Rufino Tamayo and
Francesca and Nellie Campobello. (Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander, 295)
Hughes offers the outline of a movement that—in juxtaposing it against Greenwich
Village and Montmartre—he figures as a fecund source of artistic inspiration on a par with the
world’s most lauded. His cradle is Mexico, and, moreover, his sustenance is once again
translation. For Fernández de Castro helped to forge the friendships that constituted Hughes’s
“vie boheme” by recommending and introducing Hughes to most of the authors who would
comprise his “Troubled Lands” collection, including Nellie Campobello, Cipriano Carlos
Altorre, Herman List Arzubide, Juan de la Cabada, Antonio Acevedo Escobedo, José
Mancisidor, Rafael F. Muñoz. Arturo Ramirez, Luis Felipe Rodriguez, M. Sire-Valencio, Pablo
de la Torriente-Brau, and Gerardo del Valle. Virtually stopping his own writing—which would
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by year’s end see Hughes’s most radical leftist poems to date (such as “Let America be America
Again”)—Hughes “decided to place translations of as many of the fiction writers as he could,
especially the radicals” (Rampersad, Life I, 303). Although U.S. publishers never accepted
Hughes’s repeated submissions, we once again see Fernández de Castro playing an integral role
in tying the Latin American left to Hughes and Hughes to the Latin American left, serving as a
conduit for reciprocal relationships that played no small part in Hughes’s smooth inclusion into
Alberti’s Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas in 1937 Spain.
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Chapter 1: Works Cited and Consulted
Bassnett Susan, ed. “Introduction.” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London
and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Las versions homéricas” Discusión. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores,
1957.
de la Cuesta, Leonel. “Martí traductor-apuntes liminares.” ATA Conference Proceedings,
Miami: American Translators Association, 1985: 6-7.
Cunard, Nancy. Negro. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Company, 1970.
Curbelo, Jesús David. “Para una historia de traducción en Cuba.” Histal, January, 2004.
Darío, Rubén. Cantos de vida y esperanza. Lima: Nuevo Mundo, 1966.
Dawahare, Anthony. “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the ‘End of Race.’”
Melus, Vol. 23, No. 3, Autumn, 1998: 21-41.
Du Bois, W.E.B.. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Fauset, Jessie. “To Langston Hughes.” 18 January 1921, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Fernández de Castro, José Antonio. “Introduction.” Troubled Lands. Trans. Langston Hughes.
ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive,
Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Poetas Hispano Americanos actuales traducidos al ingles.” Revista de la Habana October,
1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale
University, New Haven.
137
--. “Presentación de Langston Hughes.” Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti.
Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977.
--. Tema negro: en las letras de Cuba (1608-1935). Havana: Ediciónes Mirador, 1935.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” August 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 2 February 1931, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 15 September 1931, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. New York: Verso,
1993.
Guillén Nicolás. “Camino a Harlem.” Prosa de prisa 1929-1972: Tomo I, Havana: Editorial
Arte y Literatura, 1975.
--. “Caña.” ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive,
Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Cane.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Coversación con Langston Hughes” Diario de la Marina, Langston Hughes Papers,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. Nicolás Guillén Obra Poetica, 1920-1972, Tomo I. Havana: Editorial de Arte y Literatura,
1974.
138
--. “Madrigal.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Madrigal.” Trans. Langston Hughes. Opportunity, August, 1931.
--. “Lavandera.” ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Recuerdos de Langston Hughes.” Prosa de prisa 1929-1972: Tomo I, Havana: Editorial
Arte y Literatura, 1975.
--. “Sones y soneros.” Prosa de prisa 1929-1972: Tomo I, Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura,
1975.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 20 April 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Ramón Vasconcelos.” 5 June 1930, Epistolario de Nicolás Guillén. Havana: Editorial
Letras Cubanas, 2002.
--. “Wash Woman.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Helg, Aline. “Race and Black Mobilization in Colonial and Early Independent Cuba: A
Comparative Perspective.” Ethnohistory, Vol. 44, No. 1, Winter, 1997. 53-74
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.
--. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Vintage
Classics, 1994.
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--. “Greetings, Good Neighbors.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on
Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “I Too.” The New Negro. ed. Alain Locke. New York: Albert & Charles Boni Inc., 1925.
--. “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9,
Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes,
Vol. 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De
Santis. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “These Bad New Negroes: A Critique on Critics.” The Collected Works of Langston
Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C.
De Santis. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “To José Antonio Fernández de Castro.” 7 May 1932, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Hoffman Reynolds Hays.” 13 July 1942, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. Troubled Lands. Ed. Langston Hughes. Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1935, Langston
Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New
Haven.
--. “Water Front Streets.” The Weary Blues, New York: Knopf, 1926.
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--. “Yo También.” Trans. Ahumada, Herminio. Yo también soy América. Organazación
Editorial: Novaro, S.A., 1968.
--. “Yo También.” Trans. Borges, Jorge Luis. Sur, No. 2, 1931: 164-5.
--. “Yo También….” Trans. José Antonio Fernández de Castro. Social, September, 1928.
--. “Yo También.” Trans. Xavier Villarutia. Contemporaneos, July-December, 1931.
Jackson, Richard. Black Literature and Humanism in Latin America. Athens and London: The
University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Johnson, Dianne. “Introduction.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 11, Works for
Children and Young Adults: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Writing. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Klher, Harvey. Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade. New York: Basic
Books, 1984.
King, John. Sur: a study of the Argentine literary journal and its role in the development of a
culture, 1931-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work, Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2002.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. “The Latin American Novel in English Translation.” The Cambridge
Companion to the Latin American Novel. Ed. Efraín Kristal. Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Martí, José. “Mi Raza.” Ensayos y crónicas. Ed. José Jimenez. Madrid: Anaya & Mario
Muchnik, 1955.
--. Verson sencillos. Trans. M. Tellechea. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1997.
141
Mullen, Edward J. Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti. Hamden, CT: Archon
Books, 1977.
--. “Contemporaneos in Mexican Intellectual History, 1928-1931.” Journal of Interamerican
Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 13, No. 1, January, 1971: 121-130.
Nueva Cultura, January 1936.
Pedroso, Regino. “Alarm Clock.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1930, Langston Hughes
Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Alarm Clock.” Trans. Langston Hughes. Poetry Quarterly, Spring, 1931.
--. “Conceptos del Nuevo Estudiante.” ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “The Conquerors.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Los Conquistadores.” ts. 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Fraternal Greeting to the Factory.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1930, Langston Hughes
Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “The Heir.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts., Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. Nosotros. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1933.
--. “Salutación fraterna al taller mecánico.” ts., Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
142
--. “Until Yesterday: A Chinese Mood.” ts., Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Ramos, Julio. “Trópicos de la fundación: poesía y nacionalidad en José Martí.” Paradojas de
la letra. Caracas: Ediciones Excultura, 1996.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes Vol 1: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Urrutia, Gustavo. “Negro Tourists in Cuba.” Trans. Langston Hughes. Crisis, 1931.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 5 March 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. --. “To Langston Hughes,” 20 April 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 1 May 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 4 May 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
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Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 10 July 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 4 December 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
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--. “To Langston Hughes,” 7 February 1931, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Van Vechten, Carl. “Introduction.” The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf, 1926.
Vasconcelos, Ramón. “Motivos de son.” El País, June 6, 1930.
--. “To Nicolás Guillén.” 18 May 1930, Epistolario de Nicolás Guillén. Havana: Editorial
Letras Cubanas, 2002.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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Chapter 2
Radical (Re)Actions: Mayakovsky, Aragon, Assimilation, and Me
“Oh, and what might happen to your poetry! There’s only propaganda in
Moscow,” charming ladies with artistic souls exclaimed.
Langston Hughes Moscow and Me (1933)
The ability to generalise is characteristic of the proletarian outlook and of
proletarian art. This is unquestionably a positive fact in the evolution of
Hughes. [….] The ability to give generalisations while retaining concrete
individual substance may be seen in the work of the great poet of the October
Revolution, Vladimir Mayakovsky. [….] Hughes’ poetry has a special
significance. To him has fallen the great honor of being the first revolutionary
poet of the Negro proletariat.
Lidiia Filatova Langston Hughes: American Writer (1933)
With few exceptions, scholarship on Hughes’s poetry tends to dismiss the
works of this [radical] period because they don’t measure up to aesthetic
standards, or, as Arnold Rampersad has written, because they fail to express
the “essential” identity of the black American.
Anthony Dawahare Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the “End
of Race” (1998)
For Hughes, the promise of a Soviet-inspired internationalism lay not
only in its ability to disrupt conventional national boundaries, but in its ability
to remap culture and in so doing reconfigure subjectivity.
Kate A. Baldwin Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain
(2002)
A Radical in Two Worlds: Aesthetic Regimes and Translation
In both the Soviet Union and the Francophone world of the 1930s, Langston Hughes held
a prominent place as a radical-socialist poet. However, the portions of his poetic production that
afforded him this prominence differed greatly in each arena, making for a Hughes who was
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“radical” in radically different ways. This chapter juxtaposes these two divergent visions of
Hughes’s “radical” poetic production—the first common in the Soviet Union and in the U.S. and
the second common in the Francophone world—to illuminate how the interplay between politics,
aesthetics, and translation in these arenas both informed the reception of Langston Hughes’s
poetry and determined, in different fashions, exactly what portions of his oeuvre constituted
radical-socialist verse.
The body of verse that Langston Hughes wrote between 1932 and 1938 is generally
considered, by U.S. critics, to be among Hughes’s worst, and has come to be labeled as
revolutionary or radical poetry. This appellation is derived not on the basis of its poetic or
aesthetic innovations, but rather on the basis of its socio-political content—one that manifests a
deep engagement with Marxist and Soviet ideology vis-à-vis class conflict and racial politics in a
global arena. In fact, Hughes’s greatest champions in the United States—both his confidantes at
the time and contemporary critics of his work—note a lack of lyricism in this body of verse,
often arguing that Hughes’s commitment to radical socialism results in a body of work that
should be considered as little more than demotic political propaganda devoid of artistic merit.
This chapter posits that translation provides a fruitful vantage point from which to
revalue Hughes’s poetic production during these years. More specifically, it argues that
Langston Hughes’s translations of proletarian poetry during his 1932-33 sojourn through the
Soviet Union—particularly his encounter with the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky—had an
impact on his “radical” poetic production, and on the proletarian verse he wrote over the next
four years in the shadow of the great poet of the October Revolution. This impact is manifest in
poetry that stakes (or remaps) the ground for a black, international subjectivity based not on
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formulations of racial essentialism or within artificially provincial notions of traditional AfricanAmerican artistic forms, but on a ground of intertextuality where Hughes’s poetic personae play
with and against those he forges in translation and with intertexts from poetic traditions ranging
from the Classical to the Post-Symbolist. The degree of literary sophistication requisite for
these endeavors not only begs for a domestic reevaluation of this portion of Hughes’s oeuvre, but
also begs for an examination of the genealogy of the discursive regime—one that resulted, in
part, from an international collision of aesthetic ideas and ideals—that contributed to the
domestic denigration of Hughes’s radical poetic literary output. Such an examination will not
only allow the argument to place this body of verse in the Internationale light for and under
which it was conceived, but will also highlight the degree to which Hughes’s revolutionary
poetry and personae are affected, and at times created, by their status in translation. With these
two points in mind, the chapter brings to the fore the notion of an aesthetic regime, where
aesthetic regime denotes the aesthetic criteria against which works of art are produced and
measured in the confines of a given culture (national, international, Avant-garde, etc.), and
argues that the positioning of primitivism within the aesthetic regime of French Surrealism made
for readings of Langston Hughes’s early poetry—as translated and disseminated from 1928-1936
in a Francophone context—that tied him not only to a poetic of revolt and a politic of anticolonialism and radical socialism, but also to the precursors and founders of the négritude
movement. Lastly, the chapter provides a close reading of Hughes’s poem “Cubes” (1934). This
reading illuminates how Hughes combined his familiarity with his poetics and personae as
created in French and Francophone interpretive contexts, his experiences translating
Mayakovsky’s poetry, his desire to articulate an international black subjectivity on an
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intertextual plane, and his familiarity with Avant-garde poetic innovations in order to criticize
French colonialism (and the racial essentialism that helped to fuel it) from a Marxist perspective.
By playing with and against Avant-garde conventions, “Cubes” draws the uneasy relationship
between empire, aesthetic regimes, and racial politics into relief, highlighting the various degrees
to which these elements are intertwined and inform one another.
In service of these arguments, the chapter offers close readings of Hughes’s essays dating
from the period, of Lidiia Filatova’s 1933 Comintern commentary on Hughes’s oeuvre, and of
extensive and heretofore-unearthed archival materials to reconstruct the conditions surrounding
the publication of Hughes’s “Columbia” and “Letter to the Academy” in the Soviet literary
journal International Literature in 1933. These archival materials include Hughes’s manuscripts
of published and unpublished translations of Mayakovsky, as well as essays by and about
Mayakovsky found in Hughes’s personal possession; namely, Louis Aragon’s translator’s
preface to Mayakovsky’s “A pleine voix” and Mayakovsky’s “How One Writes a Poem.” These
essays contain stratagems for the translation of Mayakovsky’s poetry, figure the task as among
the most important literary and social endeavors of the contemporary moment (as a means to
providing the West with a window on the Revolution), and offer Mayakovsky’s prescription for
writing poetry, a prescription that arguably provides aesthetic criteria for revolutionary verse.
Perhaps most importantly, this archival evidence reveals that Hughes’s profound
engagement with Mayakovsky, his composition and translation of radical verse for Soviet
journals, and his negotiation of his international status as “the first revolutionary poet of the
Negro proletariat” were all contemporaneous tasks, problem-solving operations that substantially
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informed one another and, in the process, widened Hughes’s poetic palette and altered the
horizons of his literary repertoire.
The Contexts of Literary Production: Reconstructing the Creative Process
The project of unearthing the conditions that surrounded Hughes’s literary production in
the Soviet Union to create a critical discourse that provides a fruitful perspective on his radical
poetry is a project that takes guidance from Richard Wollheim’s doctrine of criticism as retrieval.
Wollheim’s recommendation, as succinctly summarized by Efraín Kristal, that “the scrutiny of a
literary work ought to include an attempt to reconstruct the creative process,” as well as
Wollheim’s assertion that this process is a phenomenon of problem-solving, afford the present
argument both conceptual categories for an investigation of Hughes’s creative process and
production, and a model of criticism that allows Hughes’s radical verse to be read in light of the
complex and contradictory milieus for and in which it was produced (Kristal xvi). These
conceptual categories and models seek to account for the artist’s intentions, chance, and “many
background beliefs, conventions, and modes of artistic production,” including “current aesthetic
norms, innovations in the medium, rules of decorum, ideological or scientific world pictures,
current systems of symbolism or prosody, physiognomic conventions, and the state of the
tradition” (Wollheim 200-201). The chapter takes further guidance from Efraín Kristal’s astute
observation: “Wollheim’s approach complements Gombrich’s suggestion that the study of art
should pay as much attention to the repertoire of the artist as to the finished product. To
understand the possibilities and the choices involved in the creation of a painting for example,
Gombrich would recommend the study of the “artist’s palette” (Kristal xvi). As such,
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appreciating Hughes’s evolving “repertoire” transforms generally-held truisms among scholars
studying his work in this period, and allows for an account of the growth afforded him by the
accumulating and specific artistic choices made available over time via translations, travel and
individual innovation that finds its way into his verse.
Translation and Cultural Exchange: Reading the Revolution
Translation played a large role in Langston Hughes’s creative processes throughout his
sojourn in the Soviet Union, particularly during his stay in Moscow from December of 1932 to
January of 1933. As Arnold Rampersad records and Hughes’s manuscripts attest, Hughes spent
the month—with the assistance of Lidiia Filatova—finishing, amongst others, his translations of
Mayakovsky’s “Black and White” and “Syphilis,” Louis Aragon’s “Magnitogorsk,” and Emi
Siao’s [Xiao San’s] “Nanking Road” (Life I, 266).61 Moreover, the work of translation was, as
Hughes figured matters in the articles he wrote for International Literature as part and parcel of
the grand enterprise of putting literature in service of the Revolution, a necessary ingredient
claimed for the health of the Soviet literary world.
The articles that Hughes wrote for International Literature are titled “Moscow and Me”
and “Negroes in Moscow: In a Land Where There Is No Jim Crow.” They were published in
1933 in the third and fourth editions of the journal respectively, and demonstrate how Langston
Hughes saw the role of translation vis-à-vis cultural exchange between the American Negro
61
Of all of these poems, only Aragon’s “Magnitogorsk” and Mayakovsky’s “Black and White” saw publication.
Moreover, the publication of “Black and White” in the sixth program of The Film Forum in 1933 has been
overlooked, but can be found amongst Hughes’s papers at Yale.
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proletariat and the citizens of the Soviet Union. To be sure, the two essays present the reader, in
large part, with propaganda that contrasts the racism engendered by capitalism in the United
States with the egalitarian, nearly race-free (or racist free) society of Moscow made possible by
communism. However, and in a similar vein, the articles also contrast the artistic production of
both countries, arguing that the creation of literature and film in the United States answers only
to “the money-making ideals of the producers,” while in the Soviet Union artistic production is
governed by a desire to create socially important art infused with ideals for the “betterment of the
Soviet People” (Moscow 58-59). Hughes paints a picture of a vigorous, internationally engaged
Soviet literary community populated by idealistic editors who “welcome frank stories of
American Negro Life” and do not “shy away from the Negro problem and the work of Negro
writers,” editors who—in their quests for national “betterment” and International awareness—
necessarily place a high premium on translation (Moscow 59). As Hughes relates, “I received for
one edition of my poems in translation more money in actual living value than I have yet made
from […] my various volumes of poetry in America” (Moscow 61). Hughes seeks to overturn
closely-held beliefs among his contemporaries that U.S. capitalism works to engender wealth, to
facilitate the accumulation of capital (both monetary and artistic) through variously-articulated
and assumed freedoms in the marketplace and speech realms, by contrasting the embedded
socio-economic racial hierarchies then widespread in U.S. spheres with the openness of the
Soviet spheres to U.S. black artistic production (even as it is folded under the wing of Comintern
international aims), an openness whose ideological aims necessitate an entirely different value
system—politically, economically and artistically opposed to the very bases that make the
wheels of U.S. industry turn.62
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The financial premium placed on translation by the Comintern, as Hughes implies in
“Negroes in Moscow,” serves not only the interests of cultural exchange, but also helps to create
a literary space intended to hasten the global disintegration of racial chauvinism. Hughes begins
the article by detailing the importance of Pushkin’s international literary stature to both Soviet
citizens and African-Americans (who, in Hughes’s account, identify with Pushkin because his
mother was a “beautiful mulatto”), and then offers an account of a Moscow free of racial
prejudice and hungry for “modern Negro art” (65-71). Tying these threads together, Hughes
concludes the essay with the following remarks about Julian Annisimov and a citation of his
poetry:
A Moscow poet, Julian Annisimov (translator of a forthcoming anthology of Negro
poetry), has written a little poem which begins like this article with Pushkin; but which ends, not
like this article, with today, but with tomorrow:
It is called:
Kinship
The blood of Pushkin
Unites
The Russian and the Negro
In art.
Tomorrow
We will be united anew
In the International
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So merge past facts and present prophecy. (71)
Hughes neglects to mention that Annisimov translated his poetry, choosing instead to
quietly qualify Annisimov as a translator poet, and then offers, via quotation, a poem whose
status in, or as, translation is somewhat ambiguous owing precisely to Annisimov’s roles as
author and translator. The reader of the essay may ask: is this a poem written in Russian by a
“Moscow poet,” or the Moscow poet’s translation of his poem into English? Yet, Hughes’s
manuscripts housed at Yale suggest that he, with the assistance of Annisimov, may have been the
translator of this poem. In any case, the poem is offered via Hughes’s citation, or written once
again, and framed in an interstitial space, a space in which past facts and present prophecy merge
as they do in the work of translation itself (where past works are newly composed to resonate
with future readings in the target milieu). The logic that governs the racial essentialism of the
past (the assertion that the Negro and Russian are united in art as a result of miscegenation) gives
way to a present prophecy that is tellingly voiced in translation, a prophecy wherein the Negro
and the Russian are united anew in the International. Hence, it is not race, but the work of
literature, translation, and cultural exchange that forge the ties that bind.
The Aesthetic Norms of Proletarian and Revolutionary Literature
To unearth the “current aesthetic norms” and systems of prosody that governed the poetic
production of the first poet of the Negro proletariat may seem, at first glance, to be something of
a fool’s errand. What “norms” govern the work of a pioneer? What rules of prosody delineate
the boundaries of a nascent poetic project? Where do we locate the role of tradition in a poetic
of the Revolution? While these are, indeed, difficult questions to answer, they can nevertheless
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begin to be addressed via a deep examination of the chief organ where Hughes’s Moscow poetic
production was published. International Literature (published by the state press six times a year,
in English, French, German, and Russian) was self-described as “The only international
publication devoted to the proletarian and revolutionary literature of all countries” and as an
“organ of revolutionary militant thought” that devoted “special attention […] to questions of
Marxist literary criticism” (back liner notes). Hence, the journal’s title presents the reader with a
telling double entendre, as the publication is “International” in two senses: the journal’s
commitment to translation, evidenced by its publication in four languages, makes it an
international organ addressed to the world in the languages of the modern centers of European
culture (and power); and its dedication to “proletarian and revolutionary literature” and “Marxist
literary criticism” makes it an instrument of the Internationale, a vehicle for the worldwide
spread of communism. It therefore comes as no surprise that the journal embraced, in large part,
what can be labeled a Popular Front aesthetic, soliciting—in its first edition of 1933—works “of
all styles” with special preference given to “the work of the broad masses: workers, peasants,
office workers, civil employees, and students” (front liner notes).
The question now arises: does Hughes’s Moscow poetic production fit into this Popular
Front picture? And, if so, was it composed with the Comintern’s restraints and ideologies in
mind? In International Literature’s first edition of 1933—wherein Hughes is listed as a
“permanent contributor” despite the fact that the journal had not yet published any of his poetry
or prose—Lidiia Filatova wrote a piece of “Marxist literary criticism” that offered a critique of
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Hughes’s past poetic production and a prescription for his verse yet to come.63 The article
affords the present argument an important vantage point from which to consider the questions
above because it brings into relief the “aesthetic norms,” “rules of decorum,” and ideological
world pictures to and from which Hughes’s Moscow verse adhered and departed.
The Black Poet of the Proletariat: Aesthetic Norms, Ideology, and Ethics
Lidiia Filatova’s “Langston Hughes: American Writer” figures Hughes’s poetic career—
from the publication of The Weary Blues to the publication of his revolutionary verse of 193132—as one that reflects a gradual movement away from the “petty radicalism” of figures like
W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, or James Weldon Johnson and towards a socialist commitment to
using his writing “as a weapon in the struggle against capitalism, for the emancipation of toiling
Negroes and toiling humanity in all countries” (99). Printed in the edition of International
Literature that preceded the appearance of Hughes’s poem “Columbia,” the essay provides a
critical overview of Hughes’s oeuvre in line with the dictates of the Comintern’s aesthetic
regime, and serves to introduce Hughes to the journal’s international audience as “the first poet
of the Negro proletariat,” offering the reader a critical framework to evaluate Hughes’s Moscow
poetic production (107). Moreover, as Filatova’s account denigrates the very verse for which
Hughes is most celebrated by his contemporary U.S. critics and valorizes the poetry which—in
domestic circles—is counted amongst his worst, the essay provides an excellent starting point to
63
Although Hughes did not help to write Filatova’s article, he did provide her with a copy of “A New Song” before
it saw publication. Moreover, Hughes—just three short years after he appeared before the McCarthy committee—
praised Filatova as a “brilliant critic” in his second autobiography I Wonder as I Wander.
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show how divergent aesthetic regimes make for wildly divergent readings of Hughes’s radical
poetry.
Filatova begins her account of Hughes’s poetic career by detailing how Hughes “fell
under the spell” of “[b]ourgeois Negro ideologists like Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson”
who saw Negro achievement in the realms of literature and art as a means to upset theories of
white superiority (99-100). The project of Locke, Johnson, and Du Bois to express “Negro
genius” in art in order to solve the race problem is tantamount, in Filatova’s argument, to an
“advocacy of ‘pure art’ of ‘art for art’s sake’ […] divorced from the vital problems of the race,”
and is doomed to failure for two reasons: because the art produced is tailored to suit “the tastes of
the American bourgeoisie,” and, more importantly, because it fails to approach the problem as
one engendered by class conflict (100). Filatova cites the final paragraph of Hughes’s “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” as evidence of Hughes’s early missteps, arguing that
Hughes’s “temples of tomorrow” (where Negro artists will stand “free within ourselves”)
represent spaces where the artist is held “aloof from social themes” (100).
Filatova continues her critique of Hughes’s early poetic production by focusing on the
deficiencies of The Weary Blues, wherein racial oppression and “the life of the toiling Negro
masses” are largely ignored (100). While Filatova acknowledges a certain merit in Hughes’s
desire to “assert his race” in forms and locales “in which the peculiarity of Negro culture is
manifested,” The Weary Blues ultimately fails in her eyes because the volume, composed under
the spell of “petty bourgeois radicalism,” asserts the Negro’s worth in purely aesthetic terms.
Filatova cites “I Too”—“They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed”—to support this
assertion, and argues that Hughes’s enunciation of race pride based on beauty results in a volume
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where the “Negro is taken as some exotic creature against a backdrop of Harlem cabarets and
Jazz bands” (99, 101). Filatova extends her critique to the portrayal of Africa in The Weary
Blues and notes that while Hughes “endeavors to establish the historic past of his culture, to
contrast the conventionality and inward emptiness of capitalist America with the richness of the
race that has not been spoilt by civilization,” his volume ultimately “shuns reality and varnishes
it [Africa] with romantic illusions” (101). Filatova’s critique of Hughes’s manifesto and his
poetic engagement with primitivism (or the “exotic”) does not shy away from the Comintern
assumption of an essentialist connection between Hughes and an unspoiled ancestral Africa, but
takes exception to Hughes’s early poetic production based on the assertion that underlies the
polemic of her essay as a whole: namely, that Hughes’s poetry written before 1931 was overly
concerned with a bourgeois aestheticism that approached the race problem from a capitalist
standpoint.64 In Filatova’s eyes, it is only after Hughes’s awakening to communism—and his
concomitant conceptualization of the race problem as a problem rooted in class struggle—that he
becomes a revolutionary poet, an effective agitator for the worldwide Negro proletariat. For her,
poems such as “Call to Creation” and “Waldorf Astoria” testify to Hughes’s awakening, and
mark his arrival as an “agitator-poet,” as an effective voice for the “revolutionary struggle for
Communism” (104). Moreover, Hughes’s status as an “agitator poet” is derived, in large part,
from the mode of address that his revolutionary, poetic personae assume. Filatova is careful to
note that the poems Hughes composed after his revolutionary awakening, his “best poems,”
make frequent use of direct address in their “call to militancy” (106).
The mode of address that made for Hughes’s “best poems” in Filatova’s eyes was, in
part, the cause of their rebuke inside the United States. Commenting on a manuscript of
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revolutionary poems sent to him in March of 1932, Van Vechten wrote Hughes, “The
revolutionary poems seem very weak to me: I mean weak on the lyric side” (Life I, 266).
Given the constitutive paradox of the lyric—namely, that the lyric provides a private,
personal sentiment in a public forum—Van Vechten’s criticism is both fair and unfair. Hughes’s
agitator-personae, insofar as they agitate by means of direct address, inhabit poems that are
necessarily “weak on the lyric side.” Van Vechten’s criticism is therefore more of a critique of
Hughes’s choice of poetic ventures than of his poetic prowess, more a manifestation of divergent
aesthetic regimes than a matter of taste.
While Filatova’s essay holds Hughes’s revolutionary verse in high esteem, it is not
without its criticisms. Hughes’s tendency to “generalise”—as alluded to in the chapter’s
epigram—is figured as a positive development, but Filatova (without making reference to a
specific poem) sees Hughes as a poet in “danger” of “falling into schematism and rhetorics”
(106). This is the case because, unlike Mayakovsky, Hughes has yet to master the art of
synthesizing generalizations with “concrete individual substance” (106). Filatova’s critique is
somewhat paradoxical because the “concrete individual substance” to which she alludes is far
from “individual.” Quite to the contrary, it is a matter of voicing a race/caste system:
Revolutionary art is international in character. Hughes’ verses are
impregnated with a spirit of proletarian internationalism, which ought to be
welcomed in every way. Yet the poet goes to extremes by obliterating
national boundaries and to some extent destroys the specific national
atmosphere of his poetry; in this sense it is a step backward in comparison
with his earlier works. We are for an art that is national in form and socialist
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in content. Hughes first of all is a poet of the Negro proletariat. His writing
should help to solve specific problems confronting the Negro toilers of the
United States. Hughes has closer grasp and understanding of these problems
than many writers of other races and nationalities. The writer should present
with the utmost sharpness the problems of his own race, but they must be
presented in a class aspect. The force of Hughe’s [sic] will be stronger, the
influence deeper, if he will draw closer to the Negro masses and talk their
language (107).
Filatova invokes the Comintern’s credo, advocating for an art that “is national in form
and socialist in content.” In line with her paradoxical call for “concrete individual substance,”
she argues that since Hughes is a member of the Negro proletariat, his poetry ought to present the
“problems of his own race” in their class aspect. Moreover, she argues that Hughes’s voice
would be stronger if he spoke to the Negro masses in “their language.” Filatova is unclear on
exactly what “their language” constitutes, but seems to intimate that Hughes ought to return to
his use of black dialect in his poetry if he wishes to draw closer to “the Negro masses.”
Filatova’s prescription is remarkably obtuse in its assumption that, inside U.S. borders, a
homogeneous Negro mass exists, all of whom are confronted by the same “specific problems”
and speak the same “language.” Matters become still-more murky when one remembers that the
term Negro masses, in the logic of the Comintern, applies to Negroes the world over, to a
collective without a shared language, geography, or “concrete individual substance.”
We can now begin to see some of the aesthetic norms, ideological world pictures, and
ethical problems with which Hughes had to grapple when he composed his Moscow verse. The
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self-same poet who told Guillén that he yearned to be “el poeta de los negros” was now dubbed
“the first revolutionary poet of the Negro proletariat,” but the appellation carried an enormous
amount of baggage. Hughes’s poetic production, arguably, never had to negotiate with so many
demands and constraints. He was now charged not only with the task of composing verse that
was “nationalist in form and socialist in content,” but also with the perilous ethical responsibility
of being the agitator-voice of the Negro proletariat. The subject matter of his poetry, if
Filatova’s prescription was to be followed, was also limited, confined to the specific, and yet
quite nebulous, problems of the Negro masses. Even Hughes’s choice of voice (for the poetic
personae he was to create) was circumscribed, for if Hughes desired to draw closer to the Negro
masses, he had, in essentialist essence, to “talk black.”
The amount of poetic possibilities open to the first revolutionary poet of the Negro
proletariat paled in comparison to the amount of constraints that Filatova’s Marxist literary
prescriptions placed on his future poetic production, but if Hughes found the task before him
daunting, he could, as Filatova asserts in the epigram above, look to the work of Mayakovsky,
the “great poet of the October Revolution,” for guidance. Hughes’s papers, archived in the
James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale, suggest that he did just that. Hughes collected
precious few articles on the poets and poetry he translated, but the case of Mayakovsky proves
an exception to the rule. His copy of Mayakovsky’s How One Writes a Poem (translated for
Paris Monthly in 1931)—whereupon Hughes’s red pencil highlights Mayakovsky’s prescriptions
on how to write poetry in service of the Revolution—affords the present argument greater access
to Hughes’s creative processes, suggesting that multiple prescriptions for the composition of
revolutionary verse augmented his poetic palette and informed his poetic production in Moscow.
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Mayakovsky’s Manual: The Poetics of Dialectical Revolt
The opening paragraphs of How One Writes a Poem present the reader with a series of
juxtaposed arguments that draw Mayakovsky’s loose prescription for writing revolutionary verse
into relief. He begins the essay by playfully insisting that, although much of his literary criticism
tends “to discredit, if not destroy, the ancient art of poetry,” his attacks are not aimed at ancient
poetry itself. Rather, they are aimed at a “petty bourgeois spirit” which embraces “the belief that
only eternal poetry is above all dialect and that the creative process merely consists in throwing
one’s hair back with inspiration and waiting until celestial poetry descends on one’s head [….]”
He then abruptly shifts gears, and asserts that Ghandi’s belief that England “can be prevailed
upon by love” is mistaken, and that India will only gain her independence through “brute force.”
After offering this polemic of revolutionary dialectical materialism, Mayakovsky turns his
attention, once again, to the “ancient” poetry of Pushkin, arguing that “it is doubtful whether a
young man who is burning with desire to devote his powers to the Revolution will still want to
occupy himself with the antiquarian element in poetry.” The implication behind this
juxtaposition of assertions is one that informs the logic of the essay as a whole. Mayakovsky,
who qualifies himself as a “practitioner” and not a “theorist,” distances his art from the verse of
times past and displays a predilection to address proletarian struggle in a global arena, but is
nevertheless forced to make recourse to the “antiquarian” in order to delineate, in negative terms,
the concerns of a revolutionary poet. He holds no prejudice against ancient poetry in and of
itself, only a prejudice against verse held “above all dialectic,” against the assignation of art and
creativity to a realm outside that of the material. And while it is “doubtful” that a poet who
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wishes to devote himself to the Revolution will “occupy himself with the antiquarian element in
poetry,” Mayakovsky—who, somewhat self-ironically, figures himself as the ideal candidate to
provide the reader with a “manual” on how to write the verse of the Revolution—begins his
essay by occupying himself with precisely that element.
Mayakovsky’s “manual” is, in essence, a rallying cry against formulaic verse and calls
upon poetry to develop as does the course of human history in Marxist terms. Poetry that
adheres to traditional versification is, in Mayakovsky’s eyes, little more than “the work of any
trained copyist,” and “general rules” are useful only in “getting one’s work under way.” These
rules are akin to the rules governing the opening moves in a game of chess, “always the same”
and “purely conventional,” and it is only when rhyme and rhythm are employed unexpectedly
(when rules are transgressed) that “a brilliant coup” is made possible. In short, Mayakovsky
introduces his poetic as a dialectical process, as a poetic that synthesizes a reworking of
“antiquarian” poetics and a Communist commitment to the worldwide proletariat.
Mayakovsky is careful to point out that the rules that govern the production of a poetry of
the Revolution are dictated by life itself: “Life creates the situations that must be expressed and
for which rules must be invented.” Mayakovsky’s poetic of dialectical revolt is, as a result, one
in line with the ideologies and dictates of the Revolution. The poetics of revolution should, in
short, embody revolution, and this requires a poetic that is, in essence, in a perpetual state of
dialectical revolt. The need for a new poetry is, in turn, the outcome of the tremendous changes
brought about by the revolution:
Language is being carried away by a new torrent. How can it be made
poetic? The old rules with all their dreams, rose, and Alexandrines do not fit
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anymore. How can current speech be introduced into poetry, how can poetry
be extracted from current conversation? Must we spit on the revolution in the
name of iambic verse? Certainly not.
Mayakosky’s prescription for a new poetic that favors the introduction of “current
speech” in a realm where old rules no longer suffice is one intended for a Revolution where what
was previously considered poetic —“dreams, roses, and Alexandrines”—gives way to the urgent
need for revolutionary speech in the contemporary moment. This speech, if it is to qualify as
poetry in service of the Revolution must—as Mayakovsky argues and Hughes, in the marginalia
of the essay, highlights with a stroke of his red pen—concern itself with a “social task that can be
accomplished only through poetic work.” Poetry should not be considered independently from
other forms of human activity, but should nevertheless concern itself with tasks that poetic work,
and poetic work alone, can accomplish.
Hughes Responds to Mayakovsky: Intertextual Subjectivity and Inequity
Langston Hughes’s “Columbia” presents its reader with a poem that answers to
Mayakovsky’s call for a poetry of dialectical revolt that actively engages life. Published in
International Literature’s second issue of 1933, “Columbia” not only provides what Arnold
Rampersad labels “a highly sensational attack on the United States,” but also offers its reader a
persona whose precarious subjectivity comes to the fore as a result of an intertextual conflict
between the action of the poem and the poetic tradition to which it alludes (Life 1 266). More
specifically, “Columbia” plays upon the tradition of the carpe diem poem (a tradition that
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reaches back to Horace) via its allusion to, and reworking of, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in
order to redress the inequities of the global politics of Hughes’s day:
Columbia
My dear girl,
You really haven’t been a virgin for so long
It’s ludicrous to keep up the pretext.
You’re terribly involved in world assignations
And everybody knows it.
You’ve slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you’ve taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows
In loin cloths and cotton trousers.
When they’ve resisted,
You’ve yelled, “Rape,”
At the top of your voice
And called for the middies
To beat them up for not being gentlemen
And liking your crooked painted mouth.
(You must think the moons of Hawaii
Disguise your ugliness.)
Really,
164
You’re getting a little too old,
Columbia,
To be so naive, and so coy.
Being one of the world’s big vampires,
Why don’t you come out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power
Who’ve long since dropped their
Smoke-screens of innocence
To sit frankly on a bed of bombs?
O, sweet mouth of India
And Africa,
Manchuria, and Haiti.
Columbia,
You darling,
Don’t shoot!
I’ll kiss you!
Although the persona of “Columbia” does not specifically invoke “To His Coy Mistress”
as an intertext until the poem’s twentieth line, “Really, / You’re getting a little too old, /
Columbia, / To be so naive, and so coy,” the conceit of the poem as a whole presents the reader
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with a reworking of “antiquarian” poetics that inverts the normal economy of the carpe diem
poem (wherein the persona artfully seduces the chaste object of his affection).
Whereas the “vegetable love” of Marvell’s persona grows “[v]aster than empires” in
pursuit of his coy mistress, the persona Hughes offers moves from potential seducer to potential
rape victim precisely because “coy” Columbia becomes the violence of empire incarnate.
Hughes’s decision to employ the poetic and first popular name of the United States is telling in
this respect, as Columbia also refers to the Americas as a whole. The assumption of the
appellation is therefore a kind of imperialist gesture: Columbia’s name betrays her designs.
Hughes’s “Columbia” puts poetic tradition in conflict with itself, and offers the
reader, in Mayakovsky’s terms, a series of brilliant coups, or inversions, that play upon the
reader’s “antiquarian” expectations of the genre, complicating them at every turn. The chaste
object of affection common to the genre is figured, in Hughes’s poem, as a vampire or
nymphomaniac, and the artfully seductive gentleman poet becomes a naive bungler whose
central argument—a call for his mistress to drop all pretense and seize the day—ultimately
proves to be self destructive, as Columbia’s desire, once awakened, puts the persona in grave
peril. Moreover, the day to be seized is one that belongs, somewhat exclusively, to Columbia,
and represents the intrusion, or synthesis, of what Mayakovsky might label “life”—or
contemporary global events seen through socialist eyes—into Hughes’s poem. This intrusion
comprises, in large part, the “social task” of the poem: namely, to critique in dramatic terms the
imperialist designs of the United States.
While “Columbia” certainly provides its reader with an indictment of imperialism and
colonialism the world over (with a jab at the world’s “nymphomaniacs of power”), the poem is
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far from a straightforward polemic. Rather, the intertextual conflict staged by the poem brings to
the fore a persona whose subjectivity is rooted not in race or nation, but in the alluvial soil of the
powerless. Hughes offers a poetic persona who both is and is not the inheritor of the poetic
tradition in which he seeks to participate, a persona familiar with the genre’s conventions but
unable to participate in its spoils. His position is in many ways analogous to that of
disenfranchised worldwide proletariat, the rightful heirs to the spoils of capitalism denied their
due by the “big powers” of the world who sit “frankly on a bed of bombs.” Nevertheless, it
would be a mistake to simply characterize “Columbia” as a poem that offers a commentary on
“life” from the perspective of the powerless, for the poem also represents an attempt to redress
the inequities of “life,” a poem that concerns itself with a social task that, given the realities of its
contemporary moment, can only be accomplished through “poetic work.”
In regard to Filatova’s prescription for Hughes’s verse, “Columbia” both conforms and
diverges from the parameters laid out for the first revolutionary poet of the Negro proletariat.
While “Columbia” may be “socialist in content,” it is certainly not “nationalist in form.” Quite
to the contrary, the carpe diem tradition from which “Columbia” springs is unquestionably
international, possessed with roots that reach back to Antiquity. The reader finds very little of
the “concrete individual substance” of the “Negro toilers of the United States,” and while
Hughes’s persona speaks in a straightforward Popular Front diction, he does not employ the
“language” that Filatova deems suitable for a Negro proletarian poet. Rather, Hughes rejects
Filatova’s essentialist assumptions, and—in his first offering as the poet of the Negro
proletariat—creates a poetic persona whose subjectivity is delineated not in terms of race, but in
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terms of power, a persona forged not in the fires of the color line, but in the interplay of
international literature.65
Hughes’s “Letter to the Academy,” published in the fifth edition of International
Literature in 1933, is less of a response to Mayakovsky’s call for a new poetic, and more of an
echo of it. Just as Mayakovsky’s How One Writes a Poem urges the revolutionary poet to
forsake the antiquarian notion that art should be held “above all dialectic” and to respond to life’s
“new torrent” with a new language, Hughes’s “Letter to the Academy” calls upon the
academician, “whose books have soared in calmness and beauty aloof from the struggle,” to
forsake the Classical division of “spirit” from “flesh” and to “Speak about the Revolution—
where the flesh triumphs (as well as the spirit)” (ll. 1-19). Nevertheless, it would be unfair to
characterize “Letter to the Academy” as a straightforward polemic. Rather, Hughes (as he does
in “Columbia”) presents the reader with a persona who is drawn in progressively greater detail as
the poem progresses and invokes other texts. This progression comes to a head between the third
and fourth stanzas of the poem wherein the persona announces that the Revolution has no need
of “Kipling writing never the twain shall meet— / For the twain have met” (ll. 14-15). The
persona’s invocation of Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” in combination with his
assertion that “the twain have met” delineates the personae as a voice for (and of) the worldwide
proletariat, as the meeting of East and West, in the logic of Kipling’s ballad, results in the
65
I do not mean to suggest that the entirety of Hughes’s radical poetic production concerns itself with complicating
notions of race, nor do I mean to suggest that Hughes was steadfastly reluctant to be the voice of the Negro
proletariat. I simply wish to illustrate, here, how the work of Mayakovsky (the voice of 150,000,000) affected the
poetic production of Hughes (who begins his “A New Song” with the ethically vexed claim that “I speak in the
name of black millions”).
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annihilation of racial chauvinism, nationalism, and classicism: “But there is neither East nor
West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, / tho' they come
from the ends of the earth!” This multiple identity is drawn into stark relief in the poem’s final
lines when the persona forsakes his “I” and asks: “The subject of the Revolution. / We want to
know what in the hell you’d say?” Through clever punning, Hughes both quests after the
“subject”—in other words, the topic of the Revolution—as well as the “subject”—both the
personified self of the Revolution and her political subject—while he simultaneously takes
advantage of this play in the following line by both directly addressing the reader and soliciting
her opinion, even as he asks Revolution and her political subject to answer. Once again, the
subjectivity of the personae Hughes creates is one engendered by international, intertextual play,
and its demand echoes Mayakovsky’s call that discourse keep pace with life. Hughes
demonstrates his vexed position regarding the Revolution, as his poetic expression disallows any
facile attempts to locate him as an all-knowing or completely convinced devotee of the dictates
of any conception of a revolutionary aesthetic regime because he multiplies his quest and
questioning after its subject.
Translation as Political Ethnography: Aragon’s Advice
Indeed, Mayakovsky’s prescription is no doubt daunting to the poet who seeks to
devote his heart to the Revolution, but is perhaps, as is demonstrated by Aragon’s translator’s
preface to his translation of “A pleine voix” [“For the Voice”] even more so for the translator.
What disservice is done to a rhyming poem, whose rhymes only seem to matter when they are
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unexpected, when one considers all the reworking necessary to maintain the formal features of a
past best, if not forgotten, then subsumed:
Oui, le poèmes de Maiakovsky sont rimes. Mais allez comparer la
rime française, et je ne dirais pas la rime russe, mais la soviétique! Tout un
nouveau langage, le langage d’une nouvelle vie, des mots qui n’ont jamais été
usés par les rabacheurs poétiques, jetés du jour au lendemain à la disposition
du lyrisme. [....] De plus, la rime de Maiakovsky toujours imprévisible,
souvent complex, faites de plusiers mots, tient peut-etre advantage du jeu de
mots que de la rime.
Yes, Mayakovsky’s poetry rhymes. But let’s compare French rhyme,
and not Russian rhyme, with Soviet rhyme. An entirely new language, the
language of a new life, composed of words that were never used by old, tired
poetics, thrown out because of a thirst for lyricism. [....] Moreover,
Mayakovsky’s rhyme, alway unexpected, often complex, is perhaps more
concerned with word play than rhyme.
Aragon frames the problem of the poetic translator’s time-worn concern with the
“lyricism” of rhyming verse—whether to preserve rhyme at the risk of a loss of meaning or to
forsake the translation of rhyme at the risk of a loss of the poetic—in terms that highlight the
stakes of his task. He must translate the “new language” of “a new life” and not fall victim to a
“thirst for lyricism.” As he goes on to write, the task of translating Mayakovsky is one of
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“exceptional gravity” because it represents a chance for the West to know the Soviet Union
better:
C’est que Maiakovsky nous ouvre une porte sous l’union Soviétique,
c’est qu’a travers Maiakovsky c’est l’Union Soviétique qu’il s’agit de
traduire.
C’est ici que toutes ces histories de rime et de raison deviennent de
difficultés majeure qu’il y a comprendre, à faire comprendre un poème, en le
détachant un beau jour de la realité sociale sur laquelle il s’est formé.
Mayakovsky offers us a door to the Soviet Union, and it is by way of him that we can
translate the Soviet Union. Concerns over the reason of rhyme become infantile when measured
against the high cost of understanding an unstained poem and the beautiful social reality in
which it was created.
Translation is figured as a type of political ethnography, one that seems to homogenize
the culture of the source-text, and as a way to facilitate a somewhat one-sided cultural exchange,
as a means to import the Revolution to the West. To understand an “unstained poem”—or, to be
more precise, the translation of Mayakovsky’s poetry unsulllied by the attempt to match rhyme
for rhyme—is to begin to understand the Revolution and life inside the Soviet Union. The
translator of Mayakovsky’s verse should not, in Aragon’s account, concern himself with
preserving elements of Russian or Soviet prosody, but with the responsibility to recreate the
“l’éclatante vérité proletériene” [“dazzling proletarian truth”] of Mayakovsky’s verse within the
translator’s own “social conditions.” This recreation is figured by Aragon as an “écho” [“echo”]
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of the source text, and it is the translator’s task to manipulate the “énorme baggage lyrique”
[“enormous lyrical baggage”] of the target language in order to allow this “echo” to ring in his
own social conditions. Hence, Aragon’s preface argues with a forked tongue, calling for a
domesticating strategy of translation (where the translator pays heed to his domestic literary
canon, or his “lyrical baggage,” in developing a stategy for translation) and also for a type of
foreignizing translation which, paradoxically, allows the cultural difference of the foreign text to
impact the target language precisely because its “dazzling proletarian truth” is unsullied by the
attempt to recreate its prosody.
Hughes Translates Mayakovsky66
Before Hughes spent the winter of 1932-33 in Moscow, his work as a translator
hadbrought him into contact with only one rhyming poem, Guillén’s “Two Weeks.” Although
completed in manuscript form years earlier, “Two Weeks” was published in the March 1933
edition of Opportunity, and offers ample evidence that Hughes was more than willing to rework
a poem’s semantics in order to reproduce its rhyme scheme. Likewise, his unpublished, rhyming
translation of Emi Siao’s (Xiao San’s) “Nanking Road”—also translated with the assistance of
Lidiia Filatova in 1933—demonstrates that the Hughes who inhabited Moscow was, contrary to
Aragon’s credo, quite concerned with the preservation of rhyme. Nevertheless, Hughes’s
translations of “Black and White” and “Syphilis”—both rhyming poems—make no effort to
preserve Mayakovsky’s prosody, forsaking both rhyme, meter, and Mayakovsky’s—often
unconventional—use of the lesnitsa, or ladder-step line in his verse. Rather, Hughes (given his
penchant for play exemplified in “Cane”) offers surprisingly literal translations of both poems,
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where literal denotes the always incomplete drive towards an ideal word for word translation.
The rhyme and, to a large extent, the rhythm of Mayakovsky’s verse are forsaken—a choice
perhaps informed by Mayakovsky’s valuation of prosody in “How One Writes a Poem”—and
what emerges are stark portraits of racial and economic injustice in Cuba. Take, for example, the
opening lines of “Black and White” as translated from “Blek End Uajt” or, in Cyrillic, «
ЗH
»:
To do Havana in a glance—
Paradise land, all it ought to be.
Under a palm, on one leg, a flamingo stands.
Calero blossoms all over Vedado
In Havana everything has its place:
The white folks have dollars,
The blacks haven’t. Therefore
Willie stands with his brush.
In Henry Clay & Co., Ltd.
(1-9)
Esli
Gavanu
Okinut’ migom raj-strana,
strana chto nado.
173
Pod pal’moj
na nozhke
stoyat flamingo.
Tsvetet
kolario
po vsej Vedado.
V Gavane
vse
razgricheno chetko:
u belyh dollary,
u chernyh – net.
Poetum
Villi
stoit so schetkoj
u “Enri Klej and Bok, limited”. [italics mine] (1-20)
Ec
-
,
ч
П
.
na b
174
e
я
a
Ц
n
.
ч
r
ҳ
ч
:
,
yч
ҳ–
.
П
щ
«З
,
» (1-20)
Here, Hughes heeds Aragon’s advice and chooses neither to replicate Mayakovsky’s
ladder-step lines nor to reproduce the rhymes (italicized above) at each ladder-step’s end. This
decision has a dual effect, as the ladder-step is also a rhythmic device where empty spaces
denote reading pauses. Each ladder-step line becomes a single line of blank verse in Hughes’s
translation and, while Mayakovsky’s punctuation is retained, the rhythm afforded the poem by
Russian prosody finds no compensation in translation. Colloquialism (“raj-strana, strana chto
nado”) is replaced with colloquialism (“Paradise land, all it ought to be”), making for, if not a
175
strictly literal translation, a sense for sense translation, and a paramount importance is placed on
straightforward readability.67 The remainder of “Black and White” continues to juxtapose
images of opulence and extreme poverty while telling the story of Willy “the Negro.” Faced
with the gulf that separates white from black and rich from poor, Willy finally confronts his
employer with a question: “Excuse me, Mr. Bragg, / But why’s your white, white sugar ground
by black, black Negroes?” When the already beleagured Willy is denied an answer and goes
away crestfallen, the persona asks a question that, arguably, is also the answer to Willie’s query:
“How could he [Willy] know that with such questions / He should address the Comintern at
Moscow?” The Comintern alone holds the remedy for the racial and economic injustices that
haunt the Cuban colonos, and only communism will solve the race problem. In short, prosody
takes a back seat to the “dazzling proletarian truth” the poem seeks to convey vis-à-vis racial
injustice in Cuba, and this truth—in line with Popular Front poetics—is conveyed in language,
and in a form, easily accesible to the English-reading worker.
Setting Hughes’s Popular Front strategy of translation aside for the moment, the present
argument would be remiss if it did not address what, arguably, constituted the chief motive
behind Meschrabpom’s (the German production company) desire to have Hughes translate
Mayakovsky’s verse: namely, the desire to put a “black face” onto Mayakovsky’s diagnosis of
Cuba’s ailment.68 In a sense, this desire overturns the normal economy of translation, where a
67
Hughes is guilty of one mistranslation in the entire poem: “flamingo” should be “flamingoes.”
Langston Hughes’s trip to the Soviet Union was, in large part, the result of the Meschrabpom’s—a German film
company based in Berlin—desire to co-produce, along with the Soviet Union, a film titled “Black and White.” The
company assembled a talented troupe of African-Americans, and planned to shoot a film in the Soviet Union
addressing the U.S. race problem. As both Rampersad and Hughes recount, the project quickly fell apart when the
68
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cultural outsider (the translator) refashions the work of an author for export, as Hughes’s status
as a Negro affords Mayakovsky’s account (that of an outsider) a kind of insider legitimacy.
“Blek end Uajt” offers a diagnosis and cure from the perspective of a Soviet poet whereas “Black
and White” offers the same from an insider who shares Willy’s race and, to some extent, his
predicament. Outside becomes inside, and the very binary that lies at the core of the race
problem is traversed in translation.
Moreover, Hughes’s translation of Aragon’s “Magnitogorsk”—a fragment from his
Hourra l’Oural published in the fourth edition of International Literature in 1933—
demonstrates that Hughes was well aware that his status as a black translator would have a
significant affect on how his translations were received. Given that “Magnitogorsk” is a poem
that does not employ rhyme and utilizes the most simple of syntaxes, Hughes’s literal translation
encounters precious few obstacles, translating Aragon’s poem (nearly) word for word and line
for line. His translation diverges from Aragon’s at only one point, the end. Aragon concludes
“Magnitogorsk” with a five line stanza, “A ses pieds les petits enfants nus se trainent dans la
terre / noire / Un jour de plus un jour de plus dans les petites maisons de terre / noire / un jour de
plus” (ll. 55-59). Whereas Hughes, arguably wary of potential readings that could arise if he
translated line for line, collapses Aragon’s five line stanza into one composed of three, “At his
feet little naked children crawl in the black earth / One day more one day more in the little
houses of black earth / one day more” (ll. 55-57). The two lines composed of one word, “noire”
[black], in Aragon’s original are subsumed in accordance with the rules of English grammar and,
script arrived, and the troupe led by Louise Thompson and Langston Hughes—who both arrived with high hopes—
deemed it an unacceptable, unrealistic portrayal of race relations in the United States. (Life 1, 237-243).
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as a result, Hughes’s translation does not highlight the word black as does the source text, and
this, arguably, is the motive behind Hughes’s choice. In a poem intended to celebrate
Magnitogorsk, the showpiece of Stalin’s Five Year Plan, the last thing Hughes wants to do is
draw attention to himself or to the problem of the color line.69
Hughes’s awareness of the affect that his race might have on potential readings of his
translations and the inside/outside reversal at work in “Black and White” are both manifest in his
translation of Mayakovsky’s “Syphilis.” “Syphilis” is a narrative poem that begins when a
steamboat pulls into a Cuban port, and its black passengers are held in quarantine awaiting
vaccination while its white passengers, despite their questionable health, are allowed ashore.
The poem then focuses its attention on three characters: Tom, a black Cuban awaiting
vaccination; Tom’s wife who awaits his return; and Mr. Smith, one of the steamboat’s white
passengers who is also a carrier of syphilis. While Tom waits onboard ship, happy to be
vaccinated, Mr. Smith takes advantage of Tom’s wife’s dire straits, forcing “dollars” and himself
upon her. Vaccinated, Tom happily returns home, but in the months and years to come syphilis
ravages Tom, his wife, and Tom’s children in their mother’s womb. Hughes employs the same
strategy he used to translate “Black and White” in his translation of “Syphilis.” Rhyme and
Russian prosody are forsaken in the interest of a literal and easily readable translation. However,
Hughes’s translation tellingly departs from the source text at the poem’s end, and concludes:
I did not intend to enter politics with this.
I intended simply to make a little picture.
Some call it—
civilization.
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Others—
colonial policy. (90-95)
Hughes inverts the source text’s conclusion, as the terms “civilization” and “colonial
policy” occupy opposite spaces in Mayakovsky’s original, and, in so doing, reveals himself to be
a translator not simply aware of the impact of his race on potential readings of his translations,
but one who also, as the translator-poet of the Negro proletariat, wishes to distance himself and
his translation from the rhetoric of primitivism. If Hughes had chosen to remain “faithful” to the
original, the emphasis of the poem’s conclusion would rest with the term “civilization.” As a
result, his translation would run the risk of invoking primitivism’s premiere trope: namely, the
cage of civilization as the cause of modern man’s ills. An invocation of primitivism along these
lines would be, in both Hughes’s and Filatova’s eyes, a backward step for the “first revolutionary
poet of the Negro proletariat.” Quite to the contrary, Hughes’s decision to invert the order of the
terms—to place the emphasis on “colonial policy” rather than “civilization”—can easily be read
as an attempt to focus the reader’s attention on the global politics of the day as conceptualized by
the Comintern, wherein the Negro masses of both Africa and the New World are figured as the
victims of European colonialism. Hughes’s inversion takes on added significance when one
considers the manner in which he highlights both of these terms: namely, by using two ladderstep lines. This decision is demonstrative of a poet-translator whose creative processes are
informed by the problem-solving involved in the work of translation: the very element “lost in
translation” resurfaces as a means to thwart unwanted and unwarranted readings of Hughes’s
translations.
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Bourgoise Illusions vs. Revolt, Surrealism, and Primitivism
Highlighting the importance that must be paid to divergent aesthetic regimes, the black
communists in France and in the French Antilles would arguably have interpreted this inversion
in quite a different manner, and read Hughes’s choice as one that enacts a distancing not only
from the communist cause, but also from a body of verse that, for much of the French reading
public, had been considered radical, or revolutionary, for quite some time. This is the case
because the aesthetic regimes governing artistic production in France and in the French Antilles
conceptualized the poetics of the Revolution in terms quite different from those embraced by
Filatova or by U.S. critics. In fact, the body of Hughes’s verse that Filatova criticized for its
petty bourgoise aestheticism and the manifesto that she denounced for being socially “aloof”
comprised, in French translation, the very material of revolt, surrealism and Revolution.
In June of 1932, the first and only edition of Légitime Défense—the journal that
Lilyan Kesteloot argues, in her seminal 1963 study Les écrivains noirs de langue française:
naissance d’une littérature [Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude],
inaugurated the New Negro movement in France and laid the foundations for the Négritude
movement—was published in Paris by a group of young students from Martinique: Jules
Monnerot, Etienne Léro, and René Menil.70 Printed in the journal’s first few pages is an
Avertissement that cries out against the “abominable system of coercion and restrictions [...]
generally known as Western Civilization,” and rejects the “borrowed personality” of West Indian
70
Unless otherwise noted, I am using Ellen Conroy Kennedy’s translation of Kesteloot’s study for the purposes of
citation in this chapter.
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bourgeoise blacks and mulattoes (Kesteloot 15). In short, the polemic presents the reader with a
rallying cry against the assimilationist policies of French colonialism that figures Antillean racial
and cultural differences not as a deficiency, but as a fruitful source of pride: “We refuse to be
ashamed of what we feel” (Kesteloot 15). No longer content to “compromise with the disgrace
surrounding them” and “suffocated by this capitalistic, Christian, bourgeois world,” the students
looked to communism and surrealism to achieve their ends (Kesteloot 15). Readers were
referred to, among others, the socio-political works of Marx and Freud, the manifestos of Breton,
and the surrealist poetry of Aragon, Tzara, and—curiously enough if viewed from the
perspective of his domestic readership—Langston Hughes for an antidote to the dated,
assimilationist, and inauthentic French Caribbean literature exemplified by the works of poets
like Gilbert Gratiant and Henri Flavia-Léopold. As Etienne Léro wrote in the journal’s first
article, “Misère d’une Poésie” [“A Poetry’s Misery”]:
Le vent qui monte de l’Amérique noire aura vite fait, espérons-le, de
nettoyer nos Antilles de fruits avortés d’une culture caduqe. Langston Hughes
et Claude Mac-Kay [sic], les deux poètes noirs révolutionnaires, nous ont
apporté, marinés dans l’alcool rouge, l’amour africain de vie, la joie africaine
de l’amour, le rêve africain de la mort. [...] Du jour où le prolétariat noir, que
suce aux Antilles une mulâtraille parasite vendu à des blancs dégénérés,
accédera, en brisant ce double joug, au droit de manger et à la vie de l’esprit,
de ce jour-là seulement il existera une poésie antillaise. (12)
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We hope the wind mounting in black America will soon
cleanse our Antilles of the abortive fruit of an obsolete culture. Langston
Hughes and Claude McKay, the two black revolutionary poets, have brought
us: seascapes of red alcohol, the African love of life, the African joy of love,
and the African dream of death. [...] From the day when the black
proletariat—bled dry in the Antilles by a parasitic mulatto class that has sold
itself to degenerate whites—gains access, by breaking this double yoke, to the
right to eat and to the life of the mind, only from that day on will there exist
an Antillean poetry.
Léro figures the “surrealist” poetic production of Hughes and McKay as an exemplar for
the as yet unwritten poetry of the black Antillean proletariat, as a means to unshackle Antillean
poetry from the suffocating weight of antiquated French poetic traditions. Moreover, this
liberation is, in large part, to be brought about via an engagement with Africa as seen through the
poetic lense of primitivism. Invoking the very thematic that Hughes had hoped to leave behind
him when he left the good graces of Charlotte Mason and began to write the kind of radical verse
praised by Filatova, Léro figures Hughes’s poetic primitivism as the communist antidote for the
tri-tier caste system engendered by French assimilationist colonial policy, as a vehicle for the
liberation of the black Antillean proletariat.
The question now arises: How could the very body of Hughes’s verse that Filatova’s
Marxist critique admonished for its “romantic illusions” serve the communist ideology to which
Léro subscribes? While there is no easy answer to this question, Kesteloot points to two key
factors that help to untangle the web created by this collision of aesthetic regimes. First is the
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fact that almost all of the French surrealists were, at some point, members of the Communist
Party. Second, and more to the point, is the role occupied by the primitive in Freud’s thought.
Kesteloot argues that Freud’s “vision of a world of children and primitive people” was specially
significant to the surrealists, and points to Breton’s 1946 appraisal of surrealism to support her
assertion:
In the twentieth century, the European artist, swept along by the
reasonable and the useful, can guard against the drying up of his sources of
inspiration only by returning to a so-called primitive vision, the synthesis of
sensorial perception and mental image. (39)
Kesteloot further argues that this reevaluation of primitive vision “did not pass unnoticed
among representatives of races still considered inferior because of their nonrational cultures,” as
“[v]alues had, in effect, been reversed; it was now the most ‘civilized’ man who was the most
‘naked,’ the least pure” (39-40). Surrealism, therefore, provided “an excellent brake to cultural
assimilation” (40). We can now begin to see how Hughes’s primitivist poetry represented, for
Léro, the very material of communist revolt and anti-colonial protest. Given that primitivism
was conceptualized as an integral part of surrealism, and surrealism was seen as a weapon of
communist revolt, Léro’s assertion that Hughes’s primitivist vision of Africa could both “cleanse
the Antilles of the abortive fruit of an obsolete culture” and unshackle the black proletariat
makes perfect sense.
Léro’s depiction of Hughes as a poet primarily concerned with bringing African notions
of love, joy, life, and death to his readers is not simply one of convenience. Rather, it is the
result of the translation and dissemination of Hughes’s poetry in the Francophone world from
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1928-36 wherein Hughes’s primitivist poetry predominates, precisely because French language
translators, perhaps possessed with colonial anxiety, paid special heed to his primitivist poetry.
In fact, one is hard pressed to find—in either the limited number of articles written about Hughes
or in the precious few translations of his verse—arguments and poems that do not speak to the
issues of primitivism, assimilation, and revolt.
In 1930 and 1931 the French communist review Nouvel Age devoted several issues to
American Negro poetry, and published Léone Louis’s “Langston Hughes,” an essay
accompanied by a collection of eleven translations of Hughes’s poetry (the largest to date) that
not only speaks to the complementary relationship among communism, assimilation, and
primitivism mentioned above, but also provides an example of how the choices made by
Hughes’s early French translators encouraged and facilitated these associations. Louis begins his
essay by constrasting the “double aspects” of the American “colored man”:
La condition du ‘colored man’ dans l’Amérique moderne, considérée
sous un double aspect, d’une part au point de vue strictement politique ou
social et de l’autre au point de vue intellectuel, forme une matière d’antithèse
assez frappante.
Le ‘colored man’ est aujourd’hui une force intellectuelle; il a acquis un
rang littéraire indiscuté. Ses oeuvres sont lues, recherchées par ceux-lá
mêmes que fuient sa seule présence comme en témoigne l’existence des Jim
Crow cars, des ‘negro colleges’ et autres inventions de l’Amérique
négrophobe que dresse partout des barrières ethniques. Pourtant, ce n’est pas
que cet engouement de l’Américain pour l’art nègre puisse s’expliquer par
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quelque raison mesquine d’un côté ou de l’autre: le Blanc communie
spirituellement avec le Noir devant la réalité artistique. (1060)
The condition on the “colored man” in modern America, considered
from a double aspect, on the one hand from a strictly political or social point
of view, and, on the other, from an intellectual point of view, makes for quite
a striking contradiction.
The “colored man” is an intellectual force today; he has acquired an
undisputed literary rank. His works are read, researched by the very people
who flee his presence as shown by the existence of Jim Crow cars, of “negro
colleges” and other inventions of American negrophobia that place ethnic
barriers everywhere. However, it is not that this infatuation of the American
with Negro art can be attributed to some petty reason on one side or the other:
the White communes spiritually with the Black in the face of artistic reality.
Louis argues that the American “colored” man, in spite of his socio-political
disenfranchisement, has nevertheless become an intellectual force in the world, and points to his
achievements in the realms of literature and the arts to support his assertion. This argument,
when considered in light of Filatova’s critique of the petty bourgeois radicalism of James
Weldon Johnson (whose famous argument vis-à-vis racial uplift and artistic achievement is
closely mirrored by Louis’s), seems somewhat out of place in a journal and article dedicated to
the communist cause. Louis retreats from the earthly plane of dialectical materialism, and enters
into the realm of the quasi-mystical, asserting that Black and White, though separated by Jim
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Crow, “spiritually commune” in the presence of l’art nègre. The communist commitment to
abolish racial chauvinism is, curiously enough in Louis’s argument, bolstered by the power of an
“artistic reality” whose parameters, while largely unclear, are figured in primitivist terms. Louis,
in stark contrast with Filatova, praises Hughes for his “nostalgiques” [nostalgic] and
“romantique[s]” [romantic] depictions of an Africa whose “atmosphère” [atmosphere] and
“rythme” [rhythm] are captured, in spite of “la civilisation brutale” [brutal civilization], in his
verse (1061). This praise of Hughes’s primitivism goes hand in hand with Louis’s portrayal of
Hughes as a radical revolutionary. Not only does Louis figure Hughes’s oeuvre as a “[r]évolte
en face de la méchanceté et de la cruauté” [revolt in the face of malice and cruelty] that defends
the cause of his race as well as the interests of the oppressed the world over, but he also offers
the reader, by way of conclusion, an account of Hughes’s triumph over the Ward Line in
obtaining passage to Cuba (1061). Hughes’s poetry and his social agitation (outside the literary
realm) serve the same interests, and, once again, we see how the aims of communism are fueled,
in the context of contemporary French and Francophone aesthetic regimes, by the power and
potential of primitivism.
Both Louis’s choice of texts to translate and his translation decisions provide further
testimony to the complementary relationship between primitivism and communism in the French
context. While Louis’s collection does include Hughes’s (Pedrosian inspired) “Appel à une
création nouvelle [“Call to Creation”] as well as “Epilogue” [“Epilogue” or “I Too,”], the
majority of the poems selected are either primitivist, as is the case with “Poème” [“Poem”],
“Danse Africaine” [“Danse Africaine”], “Nous avons peur” [Afraid], and “Le petit mendiant”
[Beggar Boy], or celebrations of black beauty, as is the case with “Variation de rêve” [“Dream
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variations”] and “Chant de la Vierge noire” [“Song to the Dark Virgin”]. However, it is arguably
Louis’s translation of Hughes’s “Désillusion” [“Disillusion”] that provides the strongest example
of Louis’s desire to paint Hughes in primal colors, as his translation decisions (as is often the
case) amplify the poem’s primitivist resonance. Hughes’s “Disillusion” reads:
I would be simple again,
Simple and clean
Like the earth,
Like the rain,
Nor ever know,
Dark Harlem,
The wild laughter
Of your mirth
Nor the salt tears
Of your pain.
Be kind to me,
Oh, great dark city.
Let me forget.
I will not come
To you again.
Hughes plays with and against the conventions of primitivism. The poem’s persona
yearns for a kind of primitive simplicity, but the simple life he craves is not to be found on either
the Dark Continent or in “Dark Harlem.” Rather, the persona, arguably disillusioned by the
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primitivist promise of both, seeks refuge in a kind of prelapsarian space, a space where he can
forget the “laughter” and “pain” of a “great dark city” whose darkness is derived not only from
Conradian convention, but also from the city’s black inhabitants. Hence, the poem presents the
reader with a persona who wishes to retreat both from segregated Harlem and from primitivism
itself, with a persona who wishes to forget the lessons learned in “Dark Harlem.” Louis’s
“Désillusion” presents the reader with quite a different picture:
Je voudrais, de nouveau, être primitif
Primitif et pur
Comme la terre,
Comme la pluie,
Et ne jamais connaître,
Sombre Harlem,
Le rire sauvage
De ta gaieté
Ni les larmes amères
De ton chagrin.
Sois-moi clémente,
O grande cité noire
Laisse-moi oublier
Je ne retournerai jamais plus
Vers toi.
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Whereas Hughes’s persona plays with the conventions of primitivism, both invoking its
promise of simplicity and distancing himself from primitivism incarnate in a “great dark city,”
Louis’s decision to translate “simple” as “primitif” suggests a persona driven by an intense desire
to be primitive. This decision colors the thrust of the entire poem, as the persona’s desire to
forget “Sombre Harlem” is no longer a desire to move away from a Harlem depicted in
primitivist terms. Rather, it is a willed amnesia in service of the persona’s drive towards a
primitive consciousness, a consciousness that can be attained by means of forgetting. Louis’s
decision to translate “dark” in two different ways—first as “Sombre” [dark] and secondly as
“noire” [black]—dramatizes the double-entendre vis-à-vis race in Hughes’s original, but
ultimately limits poetic play, as the “grande cité noire” is no longer a Harlem made incarnate in a
primitivist framework, but rather a city to be fled and forgotten in search of a primitive existence.
While Louis’s translations of Hughes’s primitivist poetry do indeed strike a blow against
the premium placed on assimilation in the project of French colonialism, it is arguably his
decision to translate a portion of Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” that,
more than anything else, qualifies Louis’s “Langston Hughes” as an anti-assimilationist tract.
Following his treatment of the double aspect of the modern American “colored man,” Louis
offers the following excerpt in French from Hughes’s essay, qualifying it as a manifesto:
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our
individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are
pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are
beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If
colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
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doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know
how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves. (Hughes 9,
36)
When one considers the fact that French colonial policy—as Martin Deming Lewis
argues in his “One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The ‘Assimilation’ Theory in French Colonial
Policy”—was firmly invested in the projects of political, linguistic, and cultural assimilation, the
politically explosive content of Hughes’s manifesto comes into stark relief. The very manifesto
that Filatova painted as politically disengaged and “aloof” becomes, in French translation, a
rallying cry against the project of colonialism precisely because of Hughes’s insistence on
standing apart, on being “free within ourselves.” With this in mind, it becomes quite easy to
understand how Louis could see Hughes as a poet in revolt, and Léro’s figuration of Hughes’s
work as an antidote for the assimilationist drive in the French Antilles makes still more sense.
Hughes’s French translators and critics, between 1928-1936, not only saw Hughes as an
anti-assimilationist poet, but—on the contrary—also saw the poetry of the Harlem Rennaisance
as the byproduct of a failure on the part of the United States to adopt assimilationist policies with
regards to the “race problem.” Régis Michaud, in his Panorama de la littérature américaine
contemporaine (1928), argued that the “tragic” failure of the United States to assimilate its black
population led to a “beautiful revenge in poetry and in art” that, in the case of Langston Hughes,
manifested in a “primitive outpouring” that celebrated the grandeur of Africa’s ancient
civilizations with a remarkable “vivacity of rhythm” (205-207, [translation mine]). Paulette
Nardal, in her “Éveil de la Conscience de Race” [“Awakening of Race Consciousness”] (1931),
argued that Hughes’s poetry and his “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” represented a
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rejection of an “inferiority complex” thrust upon him, as U.S. blacks were denied “the liberal
spirit which characterizes the politics of France towards coloured peoples” exemplified in “the
power of assimilation of French genius” (344-45, [translation hers]).71
Propaganda for What?
In 1929, Frank Schoell published Hughes’s “Notre pays” [“Our Land”] and “Moi
Aussi” [“I Too”] in La Revue de Paris, and Hughes’s “Cabaret” [“Cabaret”], “Jeune danseuse
nue” [“Nude Young Dancer”], “Untitled” [“Songs to the Dark Virgin”], “Lamentation pour les
hommes au teint foncé” [“Lament for Dark Peoples”], “La Peur” [“Afraid”], “Moi Aussi” [I
Too], and “Une Mère a Son Fils” [“Mother to Son”] in Revue politique et littéraire, making him
Hughes’s most prolific translator to date. His translations were widely read and, according to
Abiola Irele, an acclaimed critic of and participant in the négritudemovement, helped to expose
Césaire, Damas, and Senghor—who all figure Hughes as a literary forefather—to Hughes’s early
verse.72 While Schoell’s choice of poems does not depart from the general trend of focusing
72
Irele’s arguments concerning these meetings and influences are both echoed and well-documented by numerous
Francophone and U.S. literary scholars. Lilyan Kesteloot’s Histoire de la littérature négro americaine offers its
readers two accounts, given by Césaire and Senghor, of how they and Damas first encountered Hughes’s poetry in
the Nardal salon. Kesteloot cites a letter from Senghor dated February, 1960 in which he relates “C’est dans les
années 1929-1934 que nous [Senghor, Césaire, and Damas {my addition}] avons été en contact avec les NégroAmericaines par l’intermédiare de Mademoiselle Andrée (?) Nardal … elle tenait uns alon littéraire [….] (62). [It
was between 1929 and 1934 that we [Senghor, Césaire, and Damas {my addition}] came into contact with American
Negroes via the graces of Ms Andrée (?) Nardal…she had a literary salon {….}]. Kesteloot also records that
Césaire locates his first exposure to Hughes’s poetry in the Nardal salon, “C’est là que j’ai vu pour la première fois
les poèmes de Langston Hughes” (63). [It was there {the Nardal salon {my addition}] that I first saw the poems of
Langston Hughes.]
In chorus with Irele and many of négritude’s most distinguished critics, Kesteloot also argues that the
poetic production of Damas, Césaire, and Senghor was influenced by Hughes, asserting that Hughes weighed
heaviest with Damas, “Ces poètes américaines eux-mêmes, et surtout Langston Hughes qui eut tant d’influence sur
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attention on Hughes’s primitivist poetry, his evaluation of Hughes’s verse—offered in “Un poète
nègre: Langston Hughes” (an essay which accompanied his translations for Revue politique et
littéraire)—departs from those offered by Hughes’s other early French translators. Schoell
credits Hughes with great poetic talent, but finds his choice of subject matter limiting, arguing
that Hughes’s focus on race limits his artistic horizons:
Il ne faudrait sans doute pas que Langston Hughes se confinât dans
cette poésie de propagande et de revendication raciale, qui a naturelement un
gros succès dans les périodiques nègres. La veine en serait vite épuisée, et des
tentatives renouvelées dans cette direction pourraient être bien moins
heureuses. (437)
There is little doubt as to why Langston Hughes limits himself to this
poetry of propaganda and racial demand which, naturally, has met with great
success in Negro periodicals. The inspiration will quickly run dry and further
attempts in this direction could prove less successful.
Léon Damas [….]” (63). [It was American poets themselves, and above all Langston Hughes, who had so much
influence on Léon Damas.] The plethora of scholarly articles that share Kesteloot’s assessments in these regards
include: W.F. Feuser’s “The Afro-American Literature and Negritude,” Abiola Irele’s “Négritude—Literature and
Ideology,” and Thomas A. Hale and his “From Afro-America to Afro-France: The Literary Triangular Trade.”
Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a critic of the négritude movement in poetics who does not figure both Hughes
and Claude MacKay as precursors to (or as influences on) the oft-labeled “Big-Three.”
As for the poets themselves, Damas, Senghor, and Césaire each professed a poetic debt to Langston Hughes in
print. W.F. Feuser’s “The Afro-American Literature and Negritude” assiduously compiles the numerous references
made by Damas and Senghor vis-à-vis Hughes’s influence on their poetic production. And Césaire’s proclamation
of poetic debt to Hughes can be found (among other places) in his interview with Jean-Michel Djian “Aimé Césaire:
une longue amitié,” recently published in Jeune Afrique.
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Schoell’s critique, once again, highlights how divergent aesthetic regimes make for
divergent readings. It is not Hughes’s radical poetry that is figured (as is so often the case with
Hughes’s U.S. critics) as propaganda, but rather his poetry of “racial demand” that fits the
pejorative bill. The question now arises: If these poems are indeed “propaganda,” what ends do
they serve? While Schoell does not provide an answer to this question in “Un poète nègre:
Langston Hughes,” he does argue—in the essay he wrote for La Revue de Paris (an overview of
the Harlem Renaissance titled “La ‘Renaissance nègre’ aux États-Unis”)—that the poetry of the
Harlem Renaissance, insofar as it concerns itself with Africa and race pride, functions as a means
to bolster solidarity amongst blacks the world over (161-162). Schoell alludes to two
incarnations of black internationalism (Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism and Marcus Garvey’s UNIA),
arguing that the worldview of each is akin to that of a naive poet who considers himself to be a
symbol of his race (157-160). This is the case because, in Schoell’s eyes, each organization
represents an attempt by a small minority of New World blacks to speak for the world’s black
population as a whole, a population with which they have little in common (159).
Black Internationalism and the Birth of Négritude
The question of black internationalism was of great interest in the literary salon of
Paulette Nardal who, along with Haitian born Dr. Sajous, founded the bilingual journal Revue du
Monde Noir, wherein articles and poetry were printed in both English and French translation.
While the bilingual journal represents, in itself, an attempt to foment the rise of black
internationalism, Nardal’s “Awakening of Race Consciousness”—published in the journal’s
sixth and final edition—speaks directly to the matter. Nardal sets forth the argument that the
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artistic achievements of the “American Negro” aroused “the interest of the Antillean students in
their own race,” and, in so doing, alerted the latter to “the necessity of creating a feeling of
solidarity between different groups of Negroes living throughout the globe” (27-30). Confirming
Schoell’s worst suspicions, Nardal figures New World blacks as a kind of advance guard, as a
population charged with the responsibility of lending a “helping hand” to “their retarded
brothers” (31).
From 1929 to 1934, Nardal’s salon, as Kesteloot notes, provided a forum in which
American Negro writers—such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean
Toomer, and Alain Locke—could interact with African and West Indian students living in Paris
(56). In 1935, René Maran’s salon came to play the same role, while Mercer Cook also helped
to put French and black American intellectuals in contact with one another (Kesteloot 57). It
was in these salons that Aimé Césaire and L. S. Senghor first became acquainted with Hughes’s
poetry, and, as Kesteloot argues, it was also in these salons where the seeds of the main themes
of négritude were planted (57). This is the case because, in Kesteloot’s eyes, it was the black
writers of the United States who were “the real fathers of the Negro cultural renaissance in
France” (57). Mercer Cook, who introduced Hughes to Senghor and Léon Damas in 1936,
echoes Kesteloot’s assertion, arguing that “[t]o these men [Senghor and Damas], and Aimé
Césaire of Martinique, the name Langston Hughes meant a tremendous amount. [...] His work
had a lot to do with the famous concept of négritude, of black soul and feeling, that they were
beginning to develop” (Life I, 343). However, it is important to keep in mind that the Hughes
whom Cook introduced to Damas and Senghor in 1936 was, in a very real sense, a Hughes who
they understood via a poetic persona delineated by his race-proud and primitivist verse. Hence,
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the seeds of négritude were, in part, sown by anti-assimilationist readings of Hughes’s early
verse in French translation. Moreover, given the fact that all of the participants involved, except
for Senghor, were born in the Americas, one could make a strong case that négritude—defined
by Abiola Irele as the cultural wing of Pan-Africanism—was, despite its Parisian birth, a brand
of black internationalism with strong roots in the genealogies of cultures in the colonized and
globalized Americas.
For his part, Hughes, who had inverted Mayakovsky’s ordering of “colonial policy” and
“civilization,” was well aware that he, in large part, owed his international stature to the
worldwide vogue of l’art nègre and the place of primitivism inside it, but he also held little faith
that the aesthetic regime which brought the Negro into the international spotlight (and planted
the seeds for négritude) could also address his international concerns. This is the case because
aesthetic regimes (as we have seen throughout this chapter) are not easily disentangled from the
political regimes under which they were conceived. Hughes, quite cognizant of this fact,
published “Cubes” in 1934, a poem that testifies to the affect of his translations of Mayakovsky
on his poetic palette, and also, like “Columbia,” represents a Mayakovskian coup, as the persona
Hughes creates plays with and against avant-garde poetics in order to both criticize French
colonialism and articulate a revolutionary international subjectivity and a U.S. Black subjectivity
that, in part, stakes its ground on an international intertextual plane built in translation.
Full Circle: Hughes Plays with and Against the Vogue that Made Him Famous
Hughes begins “Cubes” by painting an almost prototypical Modernist scene that becomes
the poem’s primary problematic:73
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In the days of the broken cubes of Picasso
And in the days of the broken songs of the young men
A little too drunk to sing
And the young women
A little too unsure of love to loveI met on the boulevards of Paris
An African from Senegal (1-7)
The persona temporally locates his cosmopolitan encounter by first making reference to
the aesthetic vogue of l’art nègre for which Picasso’s Cubism—given its supposed African
inspirations— stands as an emblem; furthermore, Hughes invokes the tale of a Picasso newlyarrived from Spain finding inspiration in the parades of camouflage down Parisian streets. He
then links, with repetitions of “the days” and “broken,” Picasso’s avant-garde production to a
crisis of self-expression, to “broken songs” not quite sung by “young men / A little to drunk to
sing,” implying the will toward forgetting the trenches none too far away. These crises, in turn,
are linked—with the decadent repetition of “A little too”—to a failure of human connection, to
young girls “too unsure of love to love.” The time worn traits and travails of Modernity—the
manifest inadequacy of convention to express contemporary consciousness and the alienation of
cosmopolitan existence and, even, war—are brought to the fore just as Hughes’s flâneur meets
“An African from Senegal” on the “boulevards of Paris.” Hughes’s heavily charged use of the
phrase “boulevards of Paris” suggests an African who is almost on display, an exoticism
exhibited in the world’s cultural capital, yet also one who is under fire, having the signs of being
a colonial conscript in the First World War. Hughes thus, brings the first stanza full circle.
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Picasso’s exotic engagement with the primitive is juxtaposed with the presence of an African
incarnate on the Parisian streets, and Empire’s cultural cutting edge is set against the backdrop of
the colonial enterprise that fueled its innovation. Moreover, Picasso is separated from the
Senegalese man, on Hughes’s page, by a crisis of self-expression and a failure of human
connection, suggesting that Picasso’s African art serves more to silence the African than to give
him voice.
Hughes constructs a poem that is, in a sense, guilty of the same crime, as the meeting
between persona and African does not produce conversation or contact. Rather, the encounter
sets the persona spinning, and the remainder of the poem is dedicated to the persona’s
hypothetical machinations about the Senegalese man. The second stanza reads:
God
Knows why the French
Amuse themselves bringing to Paris
Negroes from Senegal. (8-11)
The persona offers more of a rhetorical jab than an honest question. The irony is tinged
with a bitter identification that both comprises and goes beyond the metaphysical cursing of the
injustice of a colonized African fighting a European war for their national territories, because
Hughes’s (arguably) black American persona extends the American appellation of Negro to the
man described formerly as an “African from Senegal.” This identification in combination with
Hughes’s choice to qualify the Senegalese man as someone who has been brought to Paris, not
only suggests a Diasporic solidarity between the two men, but also forefronts the issue of French
colonialism. The organization of the stanza itself, in its hierarchical presentation of “God,” “the
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French,” and “Negroes from Senegal,” invokes both the specter of colonialism and the logic—
that only God could know—driving the “white man’s burden.” However, it is arguably
Hughes’s use of the word “amuse” that constitutes the stanza’s most striking feature. It is at
once remarkably apt, as it invokes the callous cruelty of the French colonial regime in Senegal,
and remarkably inappropriate, as the Senegalese presence in France can hardly be characterized
as a simple matter of amusement. As Hughes, in his “Negroes Speak of War,” remarked a year
earlier, “Somebody ought to put the French black Africans wise to the fact that they ought to
treat them well in Paris when they are drilling them by the hundreds of thousands to stop bullets
with their breasts and bombs with their heads [….]” (Rampersad 9, 65). Hence, each of
Hughes’s first two stanzas presents the reader with a union and a collision between aesthetics
and colonialism. In the first case, Picasso’s artistic achievement is haunted by the brutality that
gave rise to it, as the “pretty face” of colonialism comes face to face with the colonized. And in
the second, the most malicious of motives for “bringing to Paris / Negroes from Senegal” are
ironically, and quite caustically, figured as amusing. In short, Hughes suggests that the aesthetic
regime of the French avant-garde is strikingly out of step with the global realities of French
colonialism, or—perhaps more maliciously—strikingly in step with a desire to obfuscate
colonialism’s disturbing truths.
Hughes continues to forefront a disjuncture between a mode of artistic production (an
aesthetic regime) and the reality which a work of art purports to convey in the poem’s next
stanza:
It’s the old game of the boss and the bossed,
boss and the bossed,
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amused
and
amusing,
worked and working,
Behind the cubes of black and white,
black and white,
black and white
(12-20)
With the repetition of “black and white,” Hughes invokes his own translation of
Mayakovsky as an intertext, and as the poem progresses, the reader finds that “Syphilis” also
leaves a large imprint on “Cubes,” as the Senegalese man, like Tom’s wife’s rapist, carries an
infectious French disease—arguably a metaphor for colonialism or “colonial policy”—home
with him. However, Hughes also—with his spatial play and reference to an “old game” of
“black and white” in a poem titled “Cubes”—figures Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés” as an
intertext. This invocation impacts Hughes’s poem in several respects, as the poet puts his work
in line with a text that is not only credited with inaugurating spatial play in French poetics, but
that also, as Elizabeth McCombie succinctly argues, has at its center a “metaphysical crisis, the
constant threat of collapse into incoherence” (xxxvi). This crisis is the result of Mallarmé’s
poetic experiment—which McCombie summarizes as “a thoroughgoing investigation of chance
as an aesthetic principle”—and is embodied in the poem’s principal statement, “Un coup de dés
jamais n’abolira le hasard” [“A Dice Throw at Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance”] (xxxvi).
Hence, at the very moment when Mayakovsky and Mallarmé are invoked with a reference to the
rigid binary of “black and white,” the stability of language itself, its capacity to avoid a “collapse
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into incoherence,” is called into question. Moreover, the business of colonialism—which
Hughes figures, in this portion of the poem, as a “game”—is now yoked to a “thoroughgoing
investigation of chance as an aesthetic principle.”
On the one hand, the implications of these associations are radically liberating. It is only
chance that divides the “boss from the bossed” and the “amused” from the “amusing,” while
multiple perspectives on the race problem, “the cubes of black and white,” only serve to obscure
the game going on “behind” them. On the other hand, the implications of these associations are
callous and out of place. Is colonialism (not to mention the worldwide problem of the color line)
ethically portrayed in an aesthetic of chance? Can the brutality of race oppression really be
reduced to a smokescreen?
Once again, the poem’s ethics and aesthetics of representation seem out of step with the
harsh realities it seeks to address. Hughes highlights this disjuncture in the poem’s seventeenth
line which provides a visual symmetry to Hughes’s hourglass of colonialism, but disrupts its
conceptual symmetry as the relationship between the “worked” and the “working” is hardly akin
to the relationship between “boss” and “bossed” or “amused” and “amusing.” Hence, the
subjectivity of Hughes’s persona is one that plays with and against the aesthetic regime he
inhabits, one that manipulates tradition in order to demonstrate its representational shortcomings
while simultaneously exploiting those shortcomings to perform the work of representation.
In fact, the poem’s next stanza, switching both diction and register, recalls Hughes’s
previous poetic use of so-called black dialect not only to bring a new voice, a new perspective, to
the poem, but also to revise his own aesthetic practices in light of his accruing knowledge of
competing cosmopolitan aesthetic regimes. This new voice is not a rupture, but a continuation
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and complication, a point bolstered by the fact that the previous stanza does not end with a
period. Hence, when Hughes begins the next stanza with an as of yet to be seen series of words,
such as “But,” “fun,” and “em,” that evoke a shift from English words that resonate with the
French cognates, like “amuse,” or employs forms that call to mind Mayakovskian ladder-steps or
Mallarmean avant-garde poetics, he lays bare a new context of interpretation that both redefines
and is in line with the Cubist framing of the poem. Even more specifically, this shift highlights
the juxtaposition and similarity of French and American democratic traditions to aesthetically
address both the Realpolitik of the legal, colonial, and imperialist underpinnings of their national
ideals, and the role of aesthetic regimes in articulating and dis-articulating this politic with
respect to the diverse disenfranchised:
But since it is the old game,
For fun
They give him the three old prostitutes of
France—
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—
And all three of ’em sick
In spite of the tax to the government
And the legal houses
And the doctors
And the Marseillaise
Hughes marks an abrupt transition in this stanza by starting with the rather colloquial
linguistic marker of contrast, “But,” a choice that is especially striking in relation to the series of
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“ands” that precede and follow the hinge of difference it marks. Indeed, in the previous stanzas,
he not only begins two lines with “And,” but also embeds “and” as a sign of the inter-related
hierarchies between the “boss and the bossed,” “amused and amusing,” and “worked and
working,” not to mention “black and white.” Thus, the aesthetic of accumulation is interrupted
by an exception, an exception that points to the blind-spots in accounting for the exceptional
nature of U.S. black culture that each aesthetic regime, in some fashion, fails to account for or to
subsume entirely.
Hughes’s move towards the colloquial is reinforced in the second line of the stanza when
the persona claims the trope of gaming “[f]or fun.” The use of “fun” continues the persona’s
strategy of contrast—which is not coincidentally a different form of continuity—by moving from
what would be considered the upper registers, French ones at that, of a word like “amuse,” to
what would be considered the lower registers of a word like “fun,” even as their dictionary
definitions closely link them semantically. Moreover, “fun,” arguably, is a word more common
to U.S. day-to-day parlance than “amuse.” In this sense, Hughes revises “the old game” for a
U.S. audience, specifically the U.S. leftist population who would most likely read this poem
given its publication in New Masses. Thus, since U.S. audiences, like Filatova, expected Hughes
to speak from and for a U.S. black perspective, he layers the avant-garde “hasard” of Mallarmé’s
dice with the “fun” of a U.S. dice game, even, arguably, the specific signifying of a game of
craps.
The “fun” of U.S. interpretive contexts, which includes the sense of “fun” as tricks and
hoaxes, finds its suggestive correlative in the “three prostitutes,” which, at first, evokes an inside
American joke on the French. However, when set against the backdrop of the poem’s spatial
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play wherein three triangles thrice shape the poem’s very form—invoking, among other things,
the triangular trade—the triple trope ties the classic triangle of French political stability,
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” to the most malevolent manifestations of colonialism. Moreover,
as the maxim, or joke, is presented in English translation it arguably serves to implicate the U.S.
in the serious games of empire, democracy, and their rhetorical structures. The rights of man are
for sale to the highest bidder, and, tellingly, they are to be found amongst the marginalized, the
prostitutes, suggesting that the promise is little more than a pittance.
It is precisely at this point that Hughes invokes U.S. dialect to draw in the contours of this
local, and linked, disenfranchisement: “And all three of ‘em sick.” The lack of a verb—in a
phrase where no verb is needed to convey meaning, precisely because the meaning inheres in the
lack of a verb—and the dropping of the “th” of the implied “them” typifies certain U.S. speech
patterns, especially as they are represented in Hughes’s use of so-called black dialect in his
earlier work. This aesthetic—one that, as Hughes is well aware, is situated differently within a
whole host of aesthetic regimes—is re-contextualized in the poem as it precedes a description of
the juridical ordering of prostitution in France, an ordering that attempts to define, confine, and
isolate sexual disease.74 Tellingly, the presentation of this juridical ordering mirrors the promise
of the French colonial project, to bring government, law, medicine (or science), and a national
culture to the darker peoples of the world. Hughes ends the stanza by embodying this national
74
The taxes, legal houses, and doctors that Hughes alludes to have a historical correlative, as French prostitutes
were required to register at the Bureau des Moeurs (Bureau of Public Morals), pay taxes, and submit to medical
examinations at the Bureau Sanitaire. If the prostitute was infected with a venereal disease she would then be
confined to Saint-Lazare Hospital (Acton 97-98).
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culture in France’s militaristic, bloody national anthem, Marseillaise, placing the poem’s
previously mentioned peoples—those on and of the periphery of French society and culture (the
“African from Senegal,” the “bossed,” the “amusing,” the “worked,” the “prostitutes,” and the
U.S. Negro enmeshed in a Parisian negro vogue)—in the context of both a national call to defend
France, and in a larger context of war: revolutionary, colonial, and race. Indeed, this stanza
demands that the reader revisit the re-articulation of the “African from Senegal” to the “Negroes
from Senegal.” This return, this folding back for a new perspective, allows the poem to
encompass the effort made by U.S. citizens of African descent to rename themselves “Negroes,”
with a capital “N,” as a means to combat derogatory racist appellations. Hughes makes this
reading possible, and problematic, by beginning the line with the word “Negroes,” multiplying
possible readings in order to encompass an internationally diverse understanding of both
“Negro” and negro exemplified in the plurality of discourses that evoke and invoke U.S. (and
other) racial paradigms and politics for their own aims, including those of the Comintern, of PanAfricanism, and of “colonial policy.” In other words, or in the very words of the poem, Hughes
asks us to think about the chances of “black and white,” pointing to the impossibility of
maintaining a homogeneous and binary discourse about race within the aesthetic and political
regimes at play in a global arena.
The concomitant switch in rhetorical registers in the following stanza continues the
complication and multiplication of aesthetic strategies with the transitional phrase, “Of course,”
calling to mind the formal, argumentative practices of traditional Rhetoric. Yet, when cast in
light of the multiply inflected “But,” this “Of course” becomes more than a concession of fact,
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working with and working over its inheritance of the obvious. In other words, this “Of course”
becomes not a matter of course, but an ironic consciousness of the all-too-easy acceptance of
canonical discourses and their multiple revisions at play throughout the poem in the various
aesthetic regimes evoked. Furthermore, it points to and beyond a rhetorical disease inherent in
attempts to express subjectivities definitively—especially ideologically driven aesthetics that
hope to speak for the marginalized—to a rhetorical disease that is in many ways driven by its
obfuscation of chance:
Of course, the young African from Senegal
Carries back from Paris
A little more disease
To spread among the black girls in the palm huts.
He brings them as a gift
disease—
From light to darkness
disease—
From the boss to the bossed
disease—
From the game of black and white
disease—
From the city of the broken cubes of Picasso
d
i
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s
e
a
s
e
What the “African from Senegal” inherits “from Paris,” what he “[c]arries back,” is no
less than a supplementary disease, “[a] little more disease.” Moreover, the “disease” he brings
home, to his other and already colonized homeland, adds to the existing diseases of colonialism
inhabiting Hughes’s conscious dwelling on “the palm huts” as the end of a line which builds
from the “spread” of a cosmopolitan infection through a return, a homeward journey (a to-andfro implied in colonial exchange), and toward sexual and, ultimately, social disease. Hughes’s
deft use of a “little more disease” implies the latent presence of a sickness among “the black girls
in the palm huts.” It is certainly a sexual sickness, which brings to mind the layers of the
imperialist mindset displayed in “Syphilis,” and is here unearthed from Hughes’s palette. Yet,
he revises the trope to implicate, too, the colonized as also a carrier of the disease of the
metropole, both literally and figuratively. Likewise, the poet implicates his persona in the
rhetorical disease of certain discourses of colonialism that would have all of “the black girls” in
exoticized “palm huts,” even as it pays heed to the historical realities of some Senegalese
dwelling under the shelter of palm leaves. Thus, Hughes at once criticizes the avant-garde
obsession with an artistic exploitation of the primitive, addresses Filatova’s critique of his own
use of exoticism by showing how irony makes of it a tool of and for the people, and pays heed to
the possible economic marginalization of certain colonized peoples, something that goes beyond
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resting easy with the platitude that all people under colonial rule are hegemonically and equally
marginalized.
The knowledge of hierarchies (racial, social, colonial, economic, but even hierarchies of
knowledge itself) are crucial to understanding the revision that takes place in the lines that
follow. The very “gift” that the “African from Senegal”—an appellation that points to his
interpellation within colonial knowledge structures (indeed, he is never called simply African, or
Senegalese, which might constitute a revolutionary, perhaps hopeful, invocation of a postcolonial independent state)—“brings” a “disease” that Hughes folds into the scientific and
religious knowledge structures of the White Man’s Burden in order to point to their power as
well as to criticize them at their foundation. The biting irony that “disease” might constitute a
“gift” is also troubled by the serious gift that Hughes wishes to impart to his readers, a
consciousness of the multiple frames through which they come to know the world and its
peoples.
Relying on repetition, Hughes uses the age-old tradition of anaphora to invoke precisely
how imbedded tropes of knowledge can become. He starts each of the next four clauses with the
evocative repetition of “From,” pointing not only to distant origins, but also to the possibility of a
new starting point for a different, and differing, inflection of old ways of knowing. Likewise, he
intersperses a newer, Mayakovskian and Mallarmean-inspired use of the empty space on the
page to create a new context for anaphora when, in a manner suggestive of a ladder-step line, he
indents and repeats “disease— .” Not only does the indentation of each new invocation of
“disease—” move farther across the page to work in tandem with the lengthening of each
“From” line to form a triangle, reinforcing the triangles we have already explored, but it visually
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displaces the word to represent the revised connotations associated with “disease” from the
perspective of each new origin and starting point that modifies it. The hyphen reinforces the
compounding meanings by highlighting the interconnectedness and continuation of each
repetition, and thus multiplication, of “disease.” Moreover, Hughes’s re-articulation of the
ladder step line points to a poet whose palette has been broadened by his work as a translator, to
a translator who infuses his own poetry with what he could only partially forge in translation.
The final visual representation of the multiply-formed triangle is of paramount
importance at the end of the poem because it visually places the “New World” in conversation
with colonial Africa via the shape of the triangular trade, forefronting (in partial cahoots with an
avant-garde) the fact that the White Man’s Burden also has a trans-Atlantic dimension. In these
lines, Hughes first re-articulates a movement “From light to darkness” that calls upon the
rhetoric of both Genesis and the Enlightenment. With a consciousness that it was among the
European aims—broadly conceived as so-called humanitarian aims—to bring Christianity and
Reason to the “dark continent,” Hughes inverts the trope to shed a new light on how “darkness”
is structured. The movement from light to dark may still retain the hierarchical privileging of
light over dark, but it also asks the reader to shift toward “darkness,” to place herself in an
uneasy relation with what she may have perceived as an already-known (or figured as unknown)
territory. Hughes thus indicts the discursive power that light wields over darkness by correlating
it to “disease,” while also allowing for and encouraging a dis-ease with any formulation that
would see the discourse as in natural or given.
Hughes continues his indictment in the phrase that follows, invoking the power (and
economic) structures of colonialism, “boss to the bossed,” while simultaneously embedding a
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Marxist movement from “boss” to “bossed.” This movement, facilitated by Hughes’s use of
“[f]rom,” reworks the poem’s earlier power dynamic between “boss and bossed,” suggesting that
the “old game” may be up, that it may have succumbed to the “disease” it engendered.
Moreover, given the work performed by the fourth stanza, “boss” can be framed in a diseased
U.S. context, where “boss” and boss-man are particularly charged with the legacy of slavery and
the weight of Jim Crow.
The poem’s penultimate phrase serves not only to destabilize the categories of “black and
white,” but also returns the reader to the third stanza and, in so doing, renews and revises the
terms of “black and white,” changing the poem’s economy from one of accumulation to one of
circulation. It is no longer “the old game” but “the game,” changing from a cynical posture of
looking backwards toward, and “[f]rom,” the here and now that invokes chance as a change in
fortune. The positioning of the penultimate “disease,” and its lack of a hyphen, serves a triple
purpose. First, the term destabilizes the categories of “black and white” by making their
grammatical status unclear: “black and white” may refer to race, but the phrase can also act as an
adjective modifying “disease.” Furthermore, both the repetition of the phrase and the lack of a
hyphen return the reader to the third stanza because it maintains the original “black and white,”
rather than switching the phrasing to: “From […] to […].” Lastly, the positioning of “disease”
creates a triangle within a triangle—one created solely from disease—which casts the poem’s
other triangles in a new light. In fact, the new light is shed “[f]rom the city of the broken cubes
of Picasso.” In other words, the triangle within the triangle is not only a new ladder-poem, but
also a re-articulation of the multi-perspectival, Cubist strategy in the plastic arts that casts the old
and the new as a simultaneity, a violent one at that. At the same time, the poem claims this
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strategy of simultaneity, born in the specific Parisian metropole, as doubly-broken: broken in
order to evoke the simultaneity, and itself diseased and broken-down.
Indeed, the break-down of the disease comes in the final snaking “disease” that ends the
poem. This final word brings together, and breaks apart, the global intertextual discourses at
work and play in the poem. First, its visual trailing down the page suggests an inevitable path of
disease. Simultaneously, it draws upon the avant-garde resources of visual poetry that invoke the
intersection of innovations in the plastic arts with innovations in poetic practice. Moreover, it
breaks the word into three triangles that point like arrows to the future to the past and returns to
point to the future which suggests a circularity, a vicious continuity between past and present
incarnations of “the game.” And, finally, the three triangles re-visit the dis-ease, or malaise, of
modern discourse that can have no real recourse to the solid base of the Trinity for salvation,
even as it again invokes a U.S. Black dialect that turns disease into two words: “dis ease.” This
final point is perhaps the most crucial, since the three triangles enable a rupture, and another
paradigm shift, that “signifies” on the continuation of the ease of the “old game” (by invoking
another “old game”) from a particularly U.S. black rhetorical strategy that requires the audience
to understand that what is said has behind it another meaning.75 One of these meanings is that
reading “dis ease” in this fashion highlights the degree to which the poem’s largely French
aesthetic is both in and out of step with the anti-colonial message the poem conveys.
Aesthetically, “disease” is associated with a roll of a die, as its repetition six times in the final
stanza achieves a correlation to the six sides of this particular cube that, in light of Hughes’s
globally artistic game, becomes plural: “Cubes.”
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Conclusion: Recuperated Revolutionaries and Poly-vocal Proletariats
The seeming seamlessness and the ironic disjuncture between the avant-garde aesthetics
and the anti-colonial sentiments proffered by “Cubes” not only bring to the fore how Hughes’s
Moscow encounters allowed him to capitalize on the powerful interplay between political and
aesthetic regimes in order to articulate nascent black international subjectivities, but also reveal
(once again) the extent to which the dialectical poetics embodied in the Mayakovskian coup
influenced Hughes’s poetic production. The recuperative phase of Hughes’s dialectal poetic
yields a third term which is also a newborn subjectivity that—insofar as it is part of an ongoing
Marxist historical progression—shows its awareness of the ethical pitfalls of a Comintern
envisioned Negro citizen-subject whose homogeneous socio-political ambitions parallel the
essentialist assumptions assigned to the whole of Negro race. Just as this chapter has juxtaposed
two divergent visions—one Soviet and one Francophone—of what constitutes radical or
revolutionary verse in order to show how Hughes’s verse was multiply figured as Marxist, so too
does “Cubes” juxtapose two visions of a Negro from Senegal—one Avant-garde and fueled by
colonial acquisition (embodied in the poem’s form) and the other anti-colonial (in its sentiment
and Mayakovskian prosodic recuperation)—to illustrate how the malleability of what comprises
the revolutionary problematizes the notion of an ideal black revolutionary subject or, perhaps
more to the point, the idea of a homogeneous Negro proletariat. Hughes’s Moscow sojourn thus
augmented both his poetic palette and his political persuasions. It afforded him the instruments
necessary to portray, in aesthetic terms, the birth of revolutionary international Negro
subjectivities that were defiantly conceived as heterogeneous in the face of what he saw as racial
discourses of homogeneity in various aesthetic and political regimes. In other words, he
211
capitalized on his exposure and experience to articulate black internationalism and the people he
envisioned it might represent on an intertextual plane created, in no small part, by his work as a
translator.
212
Chapter 2: Works Cited and Consulted
Acton, William. Prostitution. Ed. Peter Frye London: MacGibben and Kie, 1968.
Annisimov, Julian. “Kinship.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts., Langston Hughes Papers,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Aragon, Louis. Introduction. “V. Maiakovsky ‘A pleine voix.’” Langston Hughes
Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Magnitogorsk.” Trans. Langston Hughes. International Literature, No. 4, 1932-33:
82-83.
Baldwin, Kate. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2002.
Dawahare, Anthony. “Langston Hughes’s Radical Poetry and the ‘End of Race.’”
Melus, Vol. 23, No. 3, Autumn, 1998: 21-41.
Djian, Jean-Michel “Aimé Césaire: une longue amitié.” Jeune Afrique, No. 11, 2006: 30-37.
Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise
of Black internationalism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Feuser, W.F. “Afro-American Literature and Negritude.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 28, No.
4, 1976: 289-308.
Filatova, Lidiia. “Langston Hughes: American Writer.” International Literature, No. 1,
1933: 99-107.
Hale Thomas A. “From Afro-America to Afro-France: The Literary Triangular Trade.” The
French review, Vol. 49, No. 6, May, 1976: 1089-1096.
213
Hughes, Langston. I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Hill and Wang, 1956.
--. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. ed. Arnold Rampersad.
New York:
Vintage Classics, 1994.
--. “Moscow and Me.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9,
Essays on Art,
Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “Negroes in Moscow.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on
Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “Negroes Speak of War.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on
Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 2002.
Irele, Abiola. “Négritude—Literature and Ideology” The Journal of Modern African
Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1965: 499-526.
Jolas, Eugene. “Langston Hughes: Po’ Boy Blues.” Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie
américaine. Editions Kra, 1928.
Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Trans.
Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991.
Kipling, Rudyard. Ballad of East and West. New Nork : M.F. Mansfield and A. Wessels,
190?.
Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt
214
University Press, 2002.
Lewis, Martin Deming. “One Hundred Million Frenchmen: The Assimilation Theory in
French Colonial Policy” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 4, No.
2, January, 1962: 129-153.
Léro Etienne. “Misère d’une Poésie.” Légitime Défense, Vol. 1, June, 1932: 10-12.
Louis, Léone. “Langston Hughes.” Nouvel Age, No. 12, December, 1931: 1060-1064.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems and Other Verse with
Parallel French Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Poems. London: Penguin Group, 2005.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. “Black and White.” Trans. Langston Hughes. The Film Forum
Program 6, May 20-21, 1933.
--. “How One Writes a Poem” Paris Monthly, 1931, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Syphilis.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts., Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. IIOЛOEБ ОБ AH E COЧHEH
Moscow: U.S.S.R. State Press, 1958.
Michaud, Régis. Littérature américaine. Paris: Editions Kra, 1928.
McCombie, Elizabeth. Introduction. Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems and Other
Verse with Parallel French Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Nardal Paulette. “Éveil de la conscience de race / Awakening of Race Consciousness.”
La Revue du Monde Noir, No. 6, 1931: 25-31.
215
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Siao, Emi [Xiao San]. “Nanking Road.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1930, Langston
Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University,
New Haven.
Schoell, Franck L. “La Renaissance nègre aux Etats Unis.” La Revue de Paris, No. 1,
January 1, 1929: 124-165.
Schoell, Franck L. “Un poète nègre: Langston Hughes.” Revue politique et littéraire, No.
14, June 20, 1929: 436-438.
Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
216
Chapter 3
Langston and Lorca: Pan-Africanism, Translation, and the Ethics of the Other
In the metropolis of the modern world, in this the closing year of the
nineteenth century, there has been assembled a congress of men and women
of African blood, to deliberate solemnly upon the present situation and
outlook of the darker races of mankind […] In any case, the modern world
must remember that in this age when the ends of the world are being brought
so near together the millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands
of the Sea, not to speak of the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere, are
bound to have a great influence upon the world in the future, by reason of
sheer numbers and physical contact.
W.E.B. Du Bois’s closing address to the first Pan-African Congress,
“To the Nations of the World” (1900)
Where would I be the next New Year came, I wondered? By then,
would there be a war—a major war? Would Mussolini and Hitler have
finished their practice in Ethiopia and Spain to turn their planes on the rest of
us? Would civilization be destroyed? Would the world really end?
“Not my world,” I said to myself. “My world will not end.”
Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander
Historical Context, International Conflict, and the Making of a Martyr
On July 27, 1936, the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic saw its
worst fear come to fruition when a failed coup d’état by a sector of the army gave rise to the
nationalist-traditionalist rebellion known today as the Spanish Civil War. Less than a month
later, Granada’s laureate became one of the Republic’s first martyrs when the fascist Falange
kidnapped and murdered Federico García Lorca. Every day that the civil war raged on it became
increasingly international in scope, as the Nationalist rebels enlisted the aid of Hitler’s Germany
and Mussolini’s Italy while the Republicans turned to Mexico, the Soviet Union, and to the
International Brigades for help on the front lines.
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The war also became a colonial war when Nationalist forces easily took hold of Spanish
Morocco and, with it, the battle-hardened Army of Africa. Commanded by General Francisco
Franco and composed of the Spanish Foreign Legion and (often times) conscripted Moroccans,
the shock troops of the Army of Africa were airlifted to the Spanish Peninsula by the Luftwaffe
and quickly took control of south-western Spain.
Conflicting Fidelities: Pan-Africanism, the Popular Front, and the International
Brigades
By the time that Langston Hughes arrived in Spain as a war correspondent on July 24,
1937, over 60,000 soldiers in the Army of Africa were on the front lines. This bloody fact
presented the fledgling reporter—who charged himself with the responsibility of recording
colored involvement in the war—with a vexing dual mandate, as the Lincoln Brigade (the
portion of the International Brigades comprised of U.S. volunteers) also brought colored
combatants to the Spanish Peninsula. Dedicated both to the realization of a worker’s world and
to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism, Hughes’s dual allegiance was put to the test by the civil
war, as his fidelities allied him both with conscripted colonial Moroccans (as distinguished from
the cause for which they fought) and with the Republic’s Popular Front.1 These responsibilities
and fidelities followed Hughes to Madrid where he was more than warmly welcomed by the
Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas, a cadre artists and intellectuals sympathetic to the
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This chapter, in line with the convention established by George Shepperson, shall use a capital “P” when referring
to Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism, and a lower case “p” when referring to other forms of pan-Africanism.
218
Republican cause led by Rafael Alberti and (somewhat unofficially) by his wife María Teresa
Léon. While in residence, Hughes—in addition to reporting on the war—composed original
poetry and, assisted by members and friends in the Alianza, translated (among other works)
Lorca’s Romancero gitano [Gypsy Ballads].1
The reciprocal influence of Hughes’s pan-Africanism and his Gypsy Ballads
The central argument of this chapter is that the techne Hughes employed to translate
García Lorca’s Romancero gitano informed and was informed by Hughes’s vision of panAfricanism. This vision sought to acknowledge difference in unity, and placed a paramount
importance on authority of voice, on the ability to speak for one’s own community, for someone
else’s, or, via translation, for another text. Moreover, Hughes drew upon both the innovations of
García Lorca and the explosion of romanceros de la guerra in order to create a new poetry of
revolution that not only sought to articulate his vision of black internationalism, but also strove
to export the Republican cause and to foment the advent of a worker’s world across Spanish
borders. Hughes’s newfound ethics of translation—one that figures the translator as a type of
witness or medium—also led him to forsake his penchant for play (exemplified in the first
chapter by “Cane” and in the second by his strategic reworking of “Syphilis”), prompting him to
enlist a plethora of collaborators drawn from García Lorca’s closest friends and family to aid him
in the production of a text that could speak for the martyred poet.
Constructing the Case
219
In support of these arguments, the chapter begins by providing close readings of
Hughes’s poetry, as published and translated by Rafael Alberti and Emilio Delgado, in order to
illustrate how Hughes’s Spanish persona was carefully crafted with particular aims in mind.
These aims sought to position the poet not only at the forefront of Marxist literati sympathetic to
the Republic, but also as a black American (in the largest sense of the term) whose politics and
presence in Spain were representative of black proletarian support for the Republican war effort.
Complementing these readings, the chapter makes extensive use of archival correspondence—
including missives from Alberti, Nancy Cunard, and Pablo Neruda—to illustrate how Hughes
placed an ethical premium on approaching the Other from a humble position of curiosity and
wonder. This archival correspondence also attests to the fact that Hughes played an active role
in the creation of his radical Spanish persona, one ripe for inclusion in Alberti’s Alianza.
Building on readings that speak to Hughes’s ethics in encounters other peoples and
places, the chapter examines both Hughes’s war correspondence and his famous speech “Too
Much of Race.” This examination affords the present argument the tools necessary to unfold
Hughes’s complex vision of writing as both a process that allows one to acquire a greater
understanding of the Other, and as an anti-fascist tool capable of destabilizing monolithic notions
of race and nation. Moreover, a close reading of these texts will offer a picture of a Hughes
increasingly vexed by the ethical perils inherent in serving as the voice for an oppressed
population, and reveal how Hughes subtly distanced himself from essentialist instantiations of
pan-Africanism as he began to articulate his own brand of black internationalism by drawing
from Du Bois, Marx, and the thick fog of war that confronted the correspondent and his
overlapping fidelities.
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By offering a reading of Alberti’s introduction to Hughes’s heavily annotated personal
copy of Romancero gitano, the chapter continues to examine how the war affected Hughes and
his poetic production. This examination strongly suggests that Hughes’s understanding of Lorca
was both guided by Alberti and framed by the Popular Front aesthetic that Alberti, perhaps
unfairly, ascribed to him. Moreover, this archival evidence suggests that Hughes saw the
explosive production and publication of romanceros de la guerra—poems, often times
composed at the front, intended to serve as both news of and propaganda for the Republican
cause—as, in part, the legacy of García Lorca’s remarkable intervention into the form. In light
of this poetry of the trenches, the argument then reads Nicolás Guillén’s interview with Hughes
and Miguel Hernández, titled “Un poeta en espardeñas” [“A Catalan Poet”], as evidence that
demonstrates Hughes’s commitment to creating a new poetry of revolution out of existing
popular forms. This poetry of revolution was not intended to mirror the reportage of the
romanceros de la guerra, but rather to serve as the artistic concomitant to the Republican
struggle and to foment similar movements across borders.
The chapter then turns its attention to an analysis of both the aesthetic innovations of
Romancero gitano and of the ethics behind Hughes’s strategy for their translation. Offering a
close reading of both Hughes’s archival correspondence with Arna Bontemps and his “Letter
from Spain,” the argument figures the latter as a poem demonstrative not simply of Lorca’s
influence on Hughes, but rather as a text that exemplifies the commingling of Lorca’s aesthetic,
the Popular Front aesthetic of the romanceros de la guerra, Hughes’s new vision of black
internationalism, and his new translation techne. The collision of all of these influences allowed
Hughes to articulate a new vision of pan-Africanism in a decidedly anti-fascist, popular, and yet
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wholly original form. The chapter concludes by offering a reading of Hughes’s “Ballad of the
Sinner” that highlights the impact of García Lorca’s Romancero gitano on Hughes’s post-war
poetic production, especially in regard to a sequence of ballads he published in his Shakespeare
in Harlem (1942).
Alberti, the Alianza, and creating Hughes’s Spanish Radical Persona
The project of reading Hughes’s Spanish Civil War ballads as an attempt to produce a
revolutionary anti-fascist poetry infused with a vision of pan-Africanism and as an attempt to
articulate a vision of pan-Africanism inside a specifically anti-fascist poetic is a project that
necessarily builds on analyses of Hughes’s multi-faceted fidelities, his multiplying poetic
horizons, and his multiple personae created in translation. With all three of these facets in mind,
the present argument is well served by an investigation that begins with an examination of
Hughes’s relationship with Rafael Alberti, for it was Alberti who helped to situate Hughes
among the international advance guard in residence at the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifacistas,
who guided Hughes through his first experiences with García Lorca’s poetry, and who—by
means of translation—situated Hughes as an anti-fascist writer for Spanish audiences long before
his arrival in Spain.
Rafael Alberti introduced Langston Hughes to his Spanish public by publishing
Emilio Delgado’s translation of Hughes’s “I Too” and “Carta a los camaradas del Sur” [“Open
Letter to the South”] in the August edition of his Octubre in 1933. Octubre carried the subtitle
of “Escritores y artistas revolucionarios” [“Revolutionary Writers and Artists”], and—in the
estimation of Enrique Montero (one of Octubre’s preeminent historians)—was intended to serve
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as a venue to propagate the Marxist advance guard and “la atmósfera madrileña de la República”
[“Madrid’s Republican atmosphere”]:
Alberti sabe que para mover las masas revolucionarias se require un
grupo selecto que gritan [sic] la orden de ataque. Este pensamiento, caso de
haber estado presente en Alberti, habría que buscarlo con anterioridad en la
líneas maestros del pensamiento de Lenin sobre la función del partido.
(Montero xv)
Alberti knows that moving the revolutionary masses requires a select
group to cry out the attack order. This line of thinking, present in the case of
Alberti, can find its precursor in the masterful lines of Lenin about the
function of the party.
Hence, by publishing an anonymous translation of “I Too” and Emilio Delgado’s
translation of “Open Letter to the South,” Alberti not only placed Hughes among a “select
group” charged with the task of fomenting Marxist revolution, but also associated Hughes with
Madrid’s Republican “atmosphere,” an atmosphere that, with the rise of Hitler and Mussolini,
had become (all the more) anti-fascist and anti-imperialist.
These associations were bolstered by the manner in which Octubre framed Hughes’s
poetry for its readers. In the case of “Open Letter to the South,” Emilio Delgado not only
strengthens the revolutionary content of the poem through his translation decisions—imbuing,
for example, the poem’s title in translation, “Carta a los camaradas del Sur” [“Letter to the
Comrades of the South”], with Marxist markers—but also, in his translator’s note, qualifies the
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whole of Hughes’s literary production as a reflection of “el drama social de su raza, sus
aspiraciones, sus sufrimientos y sus luchas contra la explotación capitalista” [“the social drama
of his race, their aspirations, their suffering and their struggles against capitalist exploitation”]
(17). Delgado figures Hughes as a Marxist mouthpiece and his literary production as but a tool
in the revolutionary struggle, homogenizing and conflating Hughes’s aspirations, suffering, and
struggles with those of all U.S. blacks in an attempt to make Hughes their spokesman. Hughes’s
voice becomes still more expansive with Octubre’s publication of “Yo También…” [I Too]. The
anonymous translation serves to punctuate Alejo Carpentier’s “Retrato de un dictador” [“Portrait
of a Dictator”], an article that attacks the Machado regime for its tyranny, its economic
exploitation of Cuba, and its complicity in the project of U.S. imperialism in the Western
Hemisphere (5-10). So positioned, the voice of Hughes’s poem serves to speak not on behalf of
U.S. blacks, but for the Americas as a whole, for a hemisphere beset by the malignant
benevolence of U.S. Pan-Americanism.
Some four years after Hughes’s appearance in Octubre and some seventeen months
after Nueva cultura anointed Hughes “el poeta negro de la revolución” [“the black poet of the
revolution”], Rafael Alberti—now at the helm of El mono azul (a major organ for the Spanish
Republican cause)—translated and published four poems by Langston Hughes: “Yo soy negro”
[“Negro”], “Estoy haciendo un camino” [“Florida Road Workers”], “Hombre convertido en
hombres” [“Man into Men”], and “Yo También…” [I Too]. In so doing, Alberti offered his
Republican readers a glimpse of both Hughes’s race proud personae, as presented in The Weary
Blues’s “Negro” and “I Too,” and Hughes’s Marxist, labor-agitator personae exhibited in his
sardonic “Florida Road Workers” and “Man into Men.” The motivation behind Alberti’s
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decision to offer this dual portrait of Hughes can be gleaned from a reading of the caption
offered below Hughes’s picture on the periodical’s front page:
Langston Hughes, el gran poeta negro norteamericano, está en Madrid
con nosotros, en la Alianza. Toda la delicadeza, toda la gracia triste, toda la
fuerza de su raza oprimida emanan de sus sencillos poemas, que no sólo los
negros de su país aman y repiten, sino que también los escritores y lectores del
Mundo han sabido ya valorizar. Langston, que vino a España como delegado
al II Congreso de Escritores, quedará aquí algún tiempo llenándose del
espíritu heroíco de nuestro pueblo, propagando en más de trescientos
periódicos de sus hermanos en color y sangre la causa de la Libertad, la
Justicia y dignidad humanas.
Langston Hughes, the great, U.S. black poet is with us in Madrid at the
Alianza. All of the delicacy, all of the sad grace, all of the force of his
repressed race emanate from his unaffected verse which is loved and recited
not only by the blacks in his country, but also by writers and readers who have
valorized it the world over. Langston, who came to Spain as a delegate to the
Second International Writers Congress, will stay here for some time filling
himself with the heroic spirit of our people, publicizing, in more than three
hundred newspapers of his brothers in color and blood the cause of Liberty,
Justice, and human dignity.
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Mirroring both his own choice of texts and (to some extent) Delgado’s translator’s
remarks, Alberti is careful to characterize Hughes in both national and international terms.1
Hughes’s verse carries with it both the approbation of “the blacks in his country” and “the force
of his repressed race,” but is also highly valued in international arenas. Moreover, Hughes
himself—while indeed a great, black U.S. poet—is pictured as an international figure with
international concerns that extend beyond the poetic realm. Hughes is to serve (in his capacity as
a journalist) as a mouthpiece for the Spanish Republican cause, or as Alberti implies, to serve the
Spanish people in the same manner he served his own, by championing “Liberty, Justice, and
human dignity.”
The decisions made by Alberti in his translations of Hughes’s poetry also serve to
locate Hughes as both a nationalist race poet and an internationalist proletarian poet. Alberti
chooses to assign each poem a number and his translations of “Negro” and “I Too”—the poems
that bracket the collection (numbers one and four)—are relatively conservative and succeed in
preserving Hughes’s race pride and agitation. To the contrary, Alberti’s transgressive
translations of “Florida Road Workers” and “Man into Men”—the poems at the heart of the
collection—tend to augment and universalize Hughes’s Marxist bent but nevertheless, in service
of the creation of a dual Hughes, add dimensions of race conflict where none are present in the
source text. Alberti’s translation of the second and third stanzas of “Florida Road Workers” is,
in part, demonstrative of these aims. Hughes writes:
78
Alberti’s characterization of Hughes’s poems as “sencillos” subtly suggests a tie between Hughes and José Martí,
the Cuban author of the paradigmatic American work Versos sencillos. In so doing, Alberti slyly paints Hughes as,
among other things, a poet of the Americas.
226
I’m makin’ a road
For the rich to sweep over
In their big cars
And leave me standin’ here.
Sure,
A road helps everybody.
Rich folks ride—
And I get to see ‘em ride.
I ain’t never seen nobody
Ride so fine before. (8-17)
Alberti translates:
Haciendo un camino
para que los viejos blancos
pasen en sus grandes coches
y aquí plantado me dejen.
¡Qué verdad es que un camino
ayuda a todos!
La gente rica pasea.
Y yo tengo la fortuna
de ver cómo se pasean.
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Jamás he visto en mi vid[a] [sic]
pasear con tanto lujo. (8-18)
Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for his decision to forsake translating Hughes’s
dialect, Alberti’s second stanza racializes Hughes’s “rich,” and offers “viejos blancos” [“old
whites”] in its stead, relegating—in proper materialist fashion—the locus of wealth to the cars
rather than to their inhabitants. In so doing, Alberti introduces the problem of the color line into
the work and, arguably, situates the poem (as his title does not) in a U.S. context. However,
Alberti’s decision also domesticates Hughes’s poem by employing the colloquial “viejos” to
mock those who will pass by the road worker, reshaping the poem’s wry economic protest along
distinctly Spanish lines. Likewise, Alberti’s translation of “leave me standin’ here” as “aquí
plantado me dejen” continues the work of domesticating the source text, as “plantado”
[“planted”] evokes not the image of a nomadic road worker, but rather that of an agrarian
laborer—the kind of man who formed the backbone of the Spanish Republican Army. Alberti’s
greatest departure from Hughes’s original occurs at the beginning of the third stanza when he
transforms the understated, biting irony of “Sure, / A road helps everybody” into the bombastic
lampoon “¡Qué verdad es que un camino / ayuda a todos!” [“How true it is that a road helps
everybody!”]. This decision arguably infuses Alberti’s text with a criticism of the Catholic
Church (a Church allied with Franco’s front), as “camino” (arguably not the best choice of words
to describe the type of road Hughes offers) often carries with it a religious dimension. Alberti’s
lampoon therefore works on both economic and religious planes, criticizing the construction (by
many) of a road for the few while simultaneously mocking the Church’s “camino” to God, a
“camino” co-opted by fascist forces and hardly helpful to everybody. Moreover, Alberti’s wry
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economic critique is drawn in starker terms than is Hughes’s. Whereas Hughes’s persona
“get[s]” to see the rich “[r]ide so fine,” Alberti’s has the good “fortuna” [“fortune”] to witness
“tanto lujo” [“so much luxury”]. Hence, the Hughes that Alberti offers in translation is not only
a black American spokesman who seems to speak directly to Spanish concerns, but also a poet
militantly engaged with the international language of Marxist economic and social critique.
The translations composed by Alberti and Delgado—in combination with Miguel
Alejandro’s translations of “¡Buenos días, revolución!” [“Good Morning Revolution”] and “El
Waldorf-Astoria” [“Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria”] printed in Nueva cultura in 1936—
comprise, with one exception discussed below, the whole of Langston Hughes’s oeuvre
published in Spain before his arrival at the Alianza in August of 1937. The Hughes known to the
Spanish reading public was therefore a decidedly “radical” Hughes, firmly embedded in leftist
circles, agitation, and aesthetics. Moreover, Hughes’s correspondence with Nancy Cunard and
Pablo Neruda suggests that Hughes was not only aware of this status, but was himself actively
engaged in the projects of disseminating his revolutionary poetry in and for the cause of Spain.
In a letter dated March 5, 1937, Nancy Cunard—writing in tandem with Neruda—asked Hughes
to write a poem about the Spanish Civil War whose publication would aid the Republican cause:
Dear Langston,
Here is a request. You will most certainly know (with your
long and full acquaintance with American-Latin and Spanish poetry) the name
and works of Pablo Neruda, a famous Chilean poet; I spent much time with
him and his friends when in Madrid. At present he is in Paris, and together we
have decided to make a whole series of poems, by poets of diverse
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nationalities, on and for the people and government of Spain. We want one
from you; we think of you most particularly as the one in America that will
make such a poem, from the heart and from the revolutionary angle.
Having published several translations by Hughes of the poetry of Nicolás Guillén, Regino
Pedroso, and Jacques Roumain in her seminal anthology Negro, Cunard begins her letter with
flattery alluding to Hughes’s past work, coyly praising him for his “full acquaintance” with
Hispanic poetry. She then deftly turns the table of flattery, and informs Hughes that Neruda is
not only well acquainted with his work, but that he sees Hughes as the ideal American to provide
a poem “for the people and government of Spain” that is both “from the heart and from the
revolutionary angle.” Cunard is careful to forefront Neruda’s connection to Spain, figuring him
and his friends as her hosts in Madrid, and, in so doing, implies that her request is one made on
behalf of the Republic’s literati. Drawing her letter to a close, Cunard replies to a question most
likely posed in previous correspondence, informing Hughes that “Yes, I have Valdés’
anthology.” Idelfonso Pereda Valdés’s Antología de la poesía negra americana was published
in Santiago de Chile in 1936 and contains translations of eleven of Hughes’s poems.1 The
temporal proximity of Cunard’s letter and the publication of Pereda Valdés’s anthology suggest a
Hughes both intensely aware of and concerned about the publication of his poetry in translation,
and it is therefore by no means a stretch to assume that Hughes was well acquainted with his
Spanish persona even before he received Cunard’s and Neruda’s request.
“Song of Spain”: In Search of the Emblematic
230
Hughes responded by submitting his “Song of Spain” which, as David Schidlowsky
reports, was promptly published alongside a poem written by Federico García Lorca in the third
edition of Cunard’s and Neruda’s series (printed in French and Spanish) in April of 1937 (180).
At present, no copy of this edition is extant, and the poem selected from García Lorca’s oeuvre is
not known. Nevertheless, Cunard’s and Neruda’s decision to place Hughes’s work alongside
that of the poet martyr of the Republican cause testifies to the enormous capital Hughes held in
international leftist circles before and during the Spanish Civil War.
“Song of Spain” presents its reader with a poetic persona whose desire to know Spain
transforms him, throughout the course of the poem, from a spectator into an active participant in
an international workers’ struggle against the forces of fascism. The poem begins with a metacommentary on the Popular Front aesthetic that marks Hughes’s poetic production throughout
the war, and then begins an incessant line of questioning that dramatizes the problematic of how
best to represent the state of Spain in aesthetic terms:
Come now, all you who are singers,
And sing me the song of Spain.
Sing it simply that I might understand.
What is the song of Spain?
Flamenco is the song of Spain:
Gypsies, guitars, dancing
Death and love and heartbreak
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To a heel tap and a swirl of fingers
On three strings.
Flamenco is the song of Spain
I do not understand. (1-11)
In line with a pattern of questioning that comprises the first half of the poem, Hughes’s
persona expresses a desire to know the “song of Spain” and is provided with an answer that
points him to an example of the rich history of Spanish achievement in the arts. However, these
answers—comprised, in part, of references to the works of Goya, Velasquez, Murillo, and
Cervantes—ultimately frustrate the persona’s earnest desire to know Spain’s song. The reader is
left with the impression that the Spain the persona seeks to know can neither be sung in
traditional terms nor represented by the aesthetics of times past. This impression is concretized
when the persona, having rejected Don Quixote as a candidate for the song of Spain, exclaims
“A bomber’s plane’s / The song of Spain” (31-32). With these lines, Hughes not only intimates
that the fight against Franco and his German bombers has fundamentally changed Spain’s song,
but also recasts the persona’s rejection of Spanish tradition since reference and recourse to the
Spain of old comprised one of the mainstays of Franco’s propaganda machine. The poem then
takes a turn towards the agit-prop, calling upon the workers of the world to end their complicity
in Franco’s atrocities by refusing to build the tools of war, and does not shy away from selfindictment, “I made those bombs for Spain / I must not do it again” (71-72). This “I” is but a
part of an international we of workers inspired by and linked to the Spanish Republican cause, a
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cause that, as the poem’s final lines suggest, spills over Spanish borders, “A workers’ world / Is
the song of Spain” (80-81).
Introducing Langston Hughes
The “I” who earnestly seeks to know “the song of Spain” bears much in common
with the Hughes that Alberti first met. Contrary to critical consensus, this meeting did not take
place in Spain in 1937, but rather in Mexico City in 1935. This fact is substantiated by the date
on several letters of introduction written for Hughes by Alberti and addressed to, among others,
Emilio Delgado, Emilio Prados, Arturo Serrano Plaja, and Pablo Neruda. These unsealed (and
most likely undelivered) letters not only serve to testify to the fast friendship between the two
men and to bolster the argument that Hughes was well aware of his nascent Spanish persona, but
also make it clear that Alberti, well before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, saw Hughes as
a powerful ally for the Hispanic left, an ally possessed by a sincere desire to know Spain’s song.1
In a letter dated May, 29 1935, Alberti introduces Hughes to Emilio Prados as “el gran poeta que
tú ya conoces por la revista ‘Octubre’” [“the great poet whom you know from ‘Octubre’”], and
informs him that he and Hughes have become “grandes amigos in México” [“great friends in
Mexico City”]. He then relates that Hughes “ahora quiera ser amigo tuyo” [“now wants to be
your friend”] and “[q]uiere ver Málaga” [“to see Malaga”], imploring Prados to “le oriente en esa
in the cases of “Cruz” and “Mulato.”
Since the letters that Alberti wrote for Hughes are to be found among his papers at Yale, it is logical to assume
that they did not reach their intended addressees.
80
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parte del sur que tan bien conoces” [“guide him through that part of the south that you know so
well.”]
The requests and characterizations made in Alberti’s letter to Prados are mirrored in
nearly all of the letters that Alberti gave to Hughes. He is repeatedly figured as “the great poet”
who appeared in Octubre and as a friend not only to Alberti, but to Alberti’s circle, and arguably
to Spain, as a whole: as Alberti wrote Arturo Serrano Plaja, “Vereis qué gran amigo se os entra
por España” [“You all will see what a great friend has come to you by way of Spain.”] Alberti
also continually portrays Hughes as open minded and eager to acquire a better knowledge of
Spain, imploring his friends to either “guide” Hughes through Spain, as is the case with Prados,
or to bring him into close contact with Madrid’s international literati. Along these lines, the
letter that Alberti addressed to Neruda provides a prime example both of Hughes’s will to know
and of Alberti’s desire to control the frame of instruction:
México, 29 mayo 1935
Querido Neruda:
Quien te visita es el gran poeta Langston Hughes al que queremos
mucho y admiramos más. Va con el deseo de quedarse una [illegible] en
Madrid y está con nosotros. Preséntale a Vicente Aleixandre, Federico al gran
Kotapol a todos. Orientale en el cazalla y otra maravillas. Como tú hablas
inglés puedes entenderte con él admira frecuente. Aunque él habla muy bien
castellano. Llega a España dispuesto a quedarse con la boca abierta. Llevadlo
a Toledo, Segovia, etc. No te pido sólo a ti Pablo sino a todos.
Con Langston te envío todo mi amistad verdadera
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Rafael
Mexico City, May 29, 1935
Dear Neruda,
The man who visits you is the great poet Langston Hughes who
we love greatly and admire more. He comes with the hope of staying
[illegible] in Madrid and with us. Introduce him to Vicente Aleixandre,
Federico, to the great Kotapol, to everyone. Familiarize him with cazalla and
other wonders. Since you speak English you can deal with his habitual
admiration. Yet, he speaks Spanish well. He arrives in Spain ready to die
from a wet appetite. Take him to Toledo, Segovia, etc. I’m not just asking
this of you Pablo, but of everyone.
With Langston I send you all of my true friendship
Rafael
From the very first line, Alberti’s letter seeks to enlist and invest Neruda in the project of
exposing Hughes to Spain. Neruda has yet to meet Hughes, but Alberti slyly includes him in a
“we” that loves Hughes greatly and admires him more. Implying a mutual affection while
betraying a desire to, more or less, orchestrate Hughes’s experience of Spain, Alberti is careful to
emphasize that Hughes comes not simply with the desire to stay in Madrid, but to stay in Madrid
with “us.” He asks Neruda to plunge Hughes into the midst of Spain’s leftist literati, to introduce
him to Aleizandre, to (arguably) García Lorca, to “everyone.”1 And he cajoles Neruda by
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appealing to his sense of fidelity to this collective, to an “everyone” supposedly involved in the
imagined enterprise of guiding Hughes through Spain. Setting aside the fact that the letter itself
testifies to a Hughes intent on visiting Spain (and to an Alberti intent on orchestrating this visit)
prior to the outbreak of war, Alberti’s letter of introduction repeatedly, and playfully, refers to
Hughes not only as someone curious about Spain, but also as someone struck by the wonder in
almost everything. Moreover, with the double entendre contained in the phrase “[l]lega a España
dispuesto a quedarse con la boca abierta,” Alberti implies that Hughes is both hungry to know
and somewhat clueless, as “dispuesto a quedarse” can be read either literally as “ready to stay”
or colloquially as “ready to die” (or “dying to”) and “con la boca abierta” oscillates between
“with a wet appetite” and “astonished.” Nevertheless, Alberti’s letter to Neruda (as do his other
letters) highlights an aspect of Hughes that is also central to the present argument: namely, that
Hughes (well before his tenure as a war correspondent) was propelled towards Spain by an
earnest and sincere desire to better know other peoples, and that elements of the Spanish left
were hungry to orchestrate Hughes’s encounter and to welcome him into their midst.
In Pursuit of the Colored Other: Hughesian Internationalism Takes Shape
But who constituted these other peoples? In May of 1935, they were, arguably,
limited to the citizens of Spain and the literati of Madrid. However, by the time Hughes arrived
in 1937, the country was in the throws of a war both international and civil, populated by hosts
and hostiles from around the world. And while Alberti may have seen Hughes as the ideal
candidate to publicize the Republican cause of “Liberty, Justice, and human dignity” to his
“brothers in color and blood,” Hughes, as the column he published in the Baltimore Afro-
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American on October 30, 1937 well attests, conceptualized the purpose of his tenure in Spain
along slightly different lines, lines seemingly dictating that he place a greater premium on the
racial dimensions of the war than he did on its radical ones:
Why had I come to Spain? To write for the colored press. I knew that
Spain once belonged to the Moors, a colored people ranging from light dark to
white. Now the Moors have come again to Spain with the fascist armies as
cannon fodder for Franco. But, on the loyalist side there are many colored
peoples of various nationalities in the International Brigades. I want to write
about both Moors and colored people. (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 161)
As he does time and time again in both his war correspondence and in his memoir,
Hughes—displaying the same earnest desire to know other peoples that Alberti sees in his “boca
abierta” and that springs, modestly and carefully, from a state of wonder or admiration—figures
his task as a journalist for the “colored press” as one that charges him with the responsibility of
writing specifically about the involvement of “colored people” in the war. Hughes is careful to
leave the matter of who constitutes a colored person open to debate, qualifying the Moors as a
“colored people ranging from light dark to white” and then—after noting the presence of “many
colored peoples of various nationalities in the International Brigades”—expelling them from the
collective with the proclamation that he wishes “to write about both Moors and colored people.”
Nevertheless, Hughes approaches both camps from a position of wonder, careful to forefront his
relative ignorance about either side of the trenches. He displays no in-depth knowledge of the
Moors—aware only of their distant past and present mortal predicament—and offers the reader
still less in regard to the colored people in the International Brigades. Rather, Hughes implies
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that he and his readers are, in essence, starting from scratch, that they are both engaged in the
process of encountering, and beginning to understand, the colored Other through writing.
The project of understanding Hughes’s commitment to know better the colored peoples
of the world and, more specifically, to document their collaboration in an international struggle
against fascism is one that leads back to an examination of Hughes’s relationship with W.E.B.
Du Bois and his investment in Du Bois’s vision of Pan-Africanism. While the Hughes who
entered Spain in 1937 had certainly done much to distance himself from Walter White’s
N.A.A.C.P. by aligning with the Communist party and the Comintern’s diagnosis of and cure for
what Du Bois labeled “the problem of the twentieth century,” he had done very little to distance
himself from his childhood hero who, in like fashion, had also come to see class-struggle at the
core of the so-called race problem in the U.S.1 In fact, Hughes’s extant correspondence with Du
Bois suggests that the two men remained in cordial contact. In a letter dated May 26, 1941, Du
Bois not only thanked Hughes for his “kind note of May the seventeenth,” but also (alluding to
the date of his publication of Hughes’s first poem) praised him for his continued growth: “[y]ou
have done much to be proud of since June, 1921.” More to the point, Du Bois’s letters testify to
his belief that Hughes remained unshaken in his commitment to the Pan-Africanist cause,
enlisting the poet’s help in the organization of Pan-African Congresses and conventions in letters
spanning from 1929 to 1945. However, given that the “first poet of the black proletariat” had
grown both increasingly wary of iterations of racial essentialism and distrustful of monolithic
when he mentions “the great Kotapol.”
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The highly acclaimed Du Bois scholar David Levering Lewis notes that although Du Bois had firmly embraced
Marxism by 1933, he nevertheless did so with the caveat that the “black proletariat is not part of the white
proletariat” (308). Hence, Du Bois’s commitment to Marxism does not equate to an abandonment of his early PanAfricanist ideology, but rather an augmentation of it.
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formulations of racial categories (as did Du Bois), many of the tenets that grounded other panAfricanist visions—such as that of Marcus Garvey’s U.N.I.A. whose most famous slogan,
“Africa for Africans at home and abroad,” embodies the racial essentialism at the heart of his
African Zionism—must have proved troublesome. Nevertheless, Hughes’s “Too Much of
Race”—an address delivered to the Second International Writers Congress shortly before the
poet crossed over the French border into Spain—characterizes the problem of the worldwide
color line and its relation to the spread of fascism in terms that are both decidedly Du Boisian
and Marxist. In so doing, the speech presents its audience with a remarkably deft confusion that
reworks several of the assumptions that underlie both of these global frameworks, and offers
what could be labeled a Hughesian internationalism, a vision that allows for difference in unity,
for the possibility of racial self-definition and expression freed from the baggage of racial
essentialism, and for collective action against the malevolent forces of fascism and capitalism
that can and can’t be characterized as interracial.
The body of literary criticism concerning “Too Much of Race” is marked by a pervasive
tendency to figure Hughes’s remarks not only as Marxist dogma, but also as testimony to
Hughes’s rejection of the concept of race itself. This rejection is usually figured as part and
parcel of Hughes’s international awakening, an awakening that supposedly prompted the poet to
forsake nationalist formulations of identity intended to bolster the interests of capitalism. In
service of these arguments, critics most often point to both the speech’s title and to Hughes’s
summary remark that he and other leftist writers like him—namely, Nicolás Guillén, Jacques
Roumain, and Indian born Raj Anand—“represent the end of race” (Rampersad, Vol. 10, 223).
To be sure (and fair), these arguments are not without merit, as Hughes’s concluding sentiments
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unquestionably employ the rhetoric and reason of Marxism to challenge traditional conceptions
of race and their role in fascist politics. However, these remarks also employ the rhetoric of Du
Bois’s Pan-Africanism to designate a collective capable of opposing the rise of European
fascism, and, in so doing, beg a reconsideration of Hughes’s vexing claim to “represent the end
of race.” Drawing his address to a close, Hughes offers the following explanation for both the
U.S. State Department’s refusal to grant him permission to go to Spain as a representative of the
Negro press and for the British government’s seizure of Anand’s passport:
It is because the reactionary and Fascist forces of the world know that
writers like Anand and myself, leaders like Herndon, and poets like Guillén
and Roumain represent the great longing that is in the hearts of darker peoples
of the world to reach out their hands in friendship and brotherhood to all the
white races of the earth. The Fascists know that we long to be rid of
conquering and of being conquered, to be rid of conquering and of being
conquered, to be rid of all the ugliness of poverty and imperialism that eat
away the heart of life today. We represent the end of race. And the Fascists
know that when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and
no more war, and no more money for the munition makers, because the
workers of the world will have triumphed. (Rampersad, Vol. 10, 223)
Making recourse to terminology reminiscent of Du Bois’s, Hughes asserts that he and his
fellow writers (as well as labor leader Angelo Herndon) pose a threat to “the Fascists” because
they represent the desire of the “darker peoples” of the world to achieve fellowship with “all the
white races of the earth.” This fellowship is, in turn, figured as the precondition for the cessation
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of a cycle of conflict which serves the conjoined interests of fascism, capitalism, and war.
However, Hughes stops notably shy of alluding to the world’s “darker races” that Du Bois’s
politic seeks to unite to combat the forces of Western imperialism and colonialism, and envisions
a far more expansive collective of workers as the antidote for the ills of fascism. This collective,
composed of “darker peoples” and “white races,” arguably represents a felicitous collision
between nationalism and internationalism, where “races” and “peoples” both refer to ethnic
identities and affiliations but, respectively, connote fidelities to nation states and to international
allegiances forged outside the context of state relations. In this sense, Hughes and his comrades
can be said to “represent the end of race” insofar as they represent an international brotherhood
of “darker peoples” united under a workers’ banner. However, Hughes’s leftist critique
complicates this assertion by inverting the economy underlying the traditional Marxist
conception of race with regards to capitalism. It is not the divide-and-conquer logic of
capitalism that both imbues the nation state with its self-conception of race and foments the
practice of racism, but rather racism that engenders capitalism and, in turn, foments war amongst
nation states: “when there is no more race, there will be no more capitalism, and no more war.”
Hence, in this figuration, race antedates both nationalism and internationalism, and, accordingly,
it does not stand to reason that a fraternity between the “darker peoples” of the world and the
world’s “white races” will result in “the end of race.” What results is a dizzying, albeit
purposeful, confusion, as Hughes’s dual reworking of Du Boisian and Marxist ideologies serves
to destabilize the very conceptions of race and nation that comprise the backbone of his antifascist tract
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The “End” of Race: Towards a Better Understanding of Self and Other
Hughes’s conundrums and the deft destabilizations they engender do not simply serve
to call conceptions of race and nation into question or to prompt a dismissal of either as illusory.
Rather, they are arguably intended to forefront an ethical strategy that permeates the address as a
whole, a strategy that places a premium on keeping race grounded on alluvial soil while
recognizing (and seeking to curb) the dangers engendered by its malleability:
The same Fascists who forced Italian peasants to fight in Africa now
force African Moors to fight in Europe. They do not care about color when
they can use you for profits or for war [....] Race means nothing when it can
be turned to Fascist use. And yet race means everything when the Fascists of
the world use it as a bugaboo and a terror to keep the working masses from
getting together. Just as in America they tell whites that Negroes are
dangerous brutes and rapists, so in Germany they lie about the Jews, and in
Italy they cast their verbal spit upon the Ethiopians. (Rampersad, Vol. 10,
222)
Invoking the leftist divide-and-conquer conception of race mentioned above, Hughes
figures fascism’s use of race as a “bugaboo” intended to prevent solidarity among the working
masses and to bolster the interests of profits and war. However, he stops far short of asserting
that “race” can only be used in this manner or considered in this light. Rather, race becomes a
threat to peace and to the working masses when specifically enlisted in the service of fascism
where its malleability is exploited for nefarious ends. Race is both “nothing” and “everything”
in fascist hands, a kind of X factor that helps to facilitate the dissemination of falsehoods which,
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in turn, serve the interests of economic and social discrimination. With this in mind, one can
read Hughes’s claim that he, Guillén, Anand, and Roumain “represent the end of race” as one
that positions the “colored” writer and his works as instruments that thwart fascism’s capacity to
manipulate race as an empty variable. The more that Hughes writes from the perspective of a
Negro, the more difficult it becomes for fascists to paint Negroes as “dangerous brutes and
rapists,” to, in essence, make “too much of race.” In this sense, writing serves—as it does in
Hughes’s remarks concerning “Moors” and “colored people”—as a means to know better both
self and Other, and race, while still malleable (or writable), becomes less capable of meaning
“nothing” and “everything.”
In furtherance of a dual drive to destabilize authoritative (and potentially essentialist
or fascist) racial discourses and to dramatize the problematic of giving voice to an oppressed
population (as does the advocacy of Pan-Africanism), Hughes begins his address by claiming the
right to speak on behalf of the American Negro and then lays siege to the grounds on which his
claim rests. After qualifying his country as one marked both by an unequal distribution of
wealth and by a racial prejudice figured as the historical legacy of slavery, Hughes announces:
I come to the Second International Writers Congress representing my
country, America, but most especially the Negro peoples of America, and the
poor peoples of America—because I am both a Negro and poor. And that
combination of color and of poverty gives me the right then to speak for the
most oppressed group in America, the group that has known so little of
American democracy, the fifteen million Negroes who dwell within our
borders. (Rampersad, Vol. 10, 221)
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Hughes does not claim a right to speak “for the most oppressed group in America” on the
grounds that he is their representative. Rather, he draws his authority from the fact that he, “both
a Negro and poor,” is representative of the oppressed group for which he speaks. In so doing,
Hughes—perpetuating and emphasizing the disenfranchisement of this group—undemocratically
asserts the right to speak while democratically granting that same right to the unheard “fifteen
million Negroes who dwell within our borders.” Hence, Hughes’s is an authoritative voice but
not the authoritative voice for “the group that has known so little of American democracy,” and
it is this discrepancy that serves to dramatize the vexing problematic that lies not only at the
heart of Hughes’s opening remarks but also at the heart of Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism: namely,
how can one speak credibly for those denied a voice without contributing to their silencing?1
The Hughes who entered Spain as a war correspondent in the company of Nicolás
Guillén (who was also a correspondent for the leftist periodical Mediodía) was therefore a writer
possessed by concerns over the ethical perils of a voice serving as the voice for a disenfranchised
population, over the dangers of authoritative racial discourse, over the potential for writing to
serve both as a means to know better both the Other and as a means to disrupt fascism’s use of
race to further its own ends, and over the success of the Spanish Republican cause. But he was
also a writer who was figured as “el poeta negro de la revolución” by Nueva cultura,
championed as the voice who would publicize the cause of Liberty, Justice, and human dignity to
his brothers in color and blood by Alberti, and charged with the responsibility of reporting on
“colored” involvement in an international war that, by the time of his arrival, had tilted decidedly
in Franco’s favor. His wartime poetic production, in turn, was informed by all of these concerns,
characterizations, and responsibilities, but also bears the imprint of four additional factors: his
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translation of Federico García Lorca’s Romancero gitano, his residency at the Alianza de
Intelectuales Antifascistas, the publication explosion of romanceros de la guerra [war ballads],
and his quest to write a poetry of revolution that, ultimately, took up these tools to dismantle the
traditional foundations and frames for the English ballad.
Discerning the Poetry of Revolution in the Poetry of War
On October 25, 1937, Mediodía published Nicolás Guillén’s “Un poeta en
espardeñas” [“A Catalan Poet”], an article that purports to reproduce a conversation between
Guillén, the poet martyr Miguel Hernández, and Langston Hughes that took place in Valencia,
and that testifies to: Hughes’s ongoing desire to articulate a poetry of revolution, the weight cast
by Lorca’s shadow on Republican poetic production, and the revolutionary capital held by
romanceros de la guerra. Guillén begins his article with a brief biography of Hernández and
then describes—via citation and narration—how the three men quickly turned their attention to
the evolving relationship between poetry and war:
La conversación ha ido derivando hacia la lucha en España y sobre la
posibilidad de una literatura más cercana a nuestro dolor. Es decir, la
posibilidad de un nuevo aliento a las letras españolas, que traiga a ellas la vida
de las trincheras, el martirio de las ciudades, los crimines de los fascistas
invasores.
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--Pero no sería únicamente—apunta alguien de nosotros—una
literatura de guerra, sino también, y esto es más importante, una literatura de
revolución.
Miguel interviene, y dice:
--Yo creo en esa literatura nuestra, producto de la revolución y de la
guerra. ¿Cómo va a producirse? No lo sé. Pero sólo careciendo en lo
absoluto de sensibilidad artística es posible sentir cómo ronda la muerte los
frentes de combate, y no acudir a nuestra voz para trasmitir y fijar ese
drama…
Langston Hughes exclama interrumpiendo:
-No es sólo eso, sino que ya sabemos cómo los grandes movimientos
humanos presentan siempre un concomitante artístico, principalmente
literario. La guerra en España tiene una enorme fuerza dramática, desde
luego, pero todavía es más profunda la transformación social que está
operándose mediante esa guerra, transformación que, por otra parte, se había
operado ya lo suficiente para lanzar a un pueblo a la conquista de su libertad.
(Guillén, Prosa II, 90)
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The conversation went drifting toward the struggle in Spain and
toward the possibility for a literature closer to our pain. In other words, the
possibility of bringing a new spirit to Spanish letters, one that brought to them
the life of the trenches, the martyrdom of the cities, and the crimes of the
fascist invaders.
--But it should not simply be—one of us pointed out—a literature of
war, but also, and this is more important, a literature of revolution.
Miguel intervened and said:
I believe in that literature of ours, the product of the revolution and of
the war. How’s it going to be produced? I don’t know. But only a total lack
of artistic sensibility would make it possible for one to feel how death patrols
the battle fronts, and then refuse to help our voice broadcast and fix that
drama…
Interrupting, Langston Hughes exclaimed:
It’s not only that. Rather, we know how mankind’s great movements
always introduce a concomitant artistic movement, principally literary. The
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war in Spain has an enormous dramatic force, really, but the social
transformation that is underway as a result of that war is still more profound.
Moreover, it’s a transformation that has worked enough already to propel a
people towards the conquest of their liberty.
Guillén begins by intimating a shared investment among the three poets in the project of
articulating a literature that is “closer to our pain,” but then complicates this “our”—composed of
poets from Cataluña, Cuba, and the U.S.—by confining the project of infusing literature with the
stark realities of the Spanish Civil war to the realm of specifically Spanish letters. In so doing,
he not only forefronts the international dimension and interest of the Spanish Civil War in a
slightly limited fashion, but also highlights the pitfalls of representing an international conflict in
strictly nationalist terms. Guillén’s subsequent report of an anonymous interjection from an
outside “someone”—who is logically Hughes but who could also be Guillén—serves to bring
this literary reworking, or possibility for a literature “closer to our pain,” back into the
international arena, as this appeal by “someone” for a literature of “revolution” over one of
“war” suggests a preference for the mobile and international over the entrenched and local.
Representing and Fomenting Revolution
Hughes’s rejection of Hernández’s vision of a new literature capable of broadcasting
and fixing “this drama” offers further evidence of Hughes’s desire to mine the Spanish
Republican cause for an international revolutionary aesthetic. It is not enough to offer readers a
vision of Spanish trenches stalked by death. This, it would seem, amounts to little more than
reportage in Hughes’s eyes. Rather, Hughes posits the possibility for a revolutionary literature
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that not only comes out of the Spanish Civil War, but is also its concomitant, suggesting that the
war is possessed of sufficient “dramatic” vigor to engender a literature as powerful as what he
sees as the larger forces propelling Spain’s social transformation. Moreover, Hughes’s reference
to the Republican cause as one of “mankind’s great movements” firmly locates the civil war in a
global sphere, and casts Hughes’s drive to create a new literary movement as one that seeks to
provide the worldwide proletariat with a literature that does not simply speak of “revolution,” but
also foments it.
Responding to Hughes’s interruption, Hernández intimates that the Spanish Civil War
has already given birth—or to be more precise, a rebirth—to its literary concomitant:
--En las trincheras hay un gran número de hombres del pueblo cuya
vocación literaria ha brotado frente al enemigo; y no escasa parte de tal
producción acusa temperamentos de primer orden. ¿No habéis leído algunas
de esas cosas, prinicipalmente los romances de la guerra? (Guillén, Prosa, 91)
--In the trenches there are a great number of men of the people whose
literary vocation sprouted facing the enemy; and there’s no small part of that
production that demonstrates first order talent. Haven’t you all read some of
those things, principally the war ballads?
The romances de la guerra, also labeled romanceros de la guerra, to which Hernández
refers find their poetic precursor, in part, in the romanceros of old, poems written or recited in
octasyllabic verse with assonant rhymes ending each even numbered line. According to Aurelio
Espinosa, these romanceros date back to the tenth century and find close cousins—in regard not
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only to their employment of a popular rhyme scheme, a traditional meter, and a colloquial
register, but also in their use of themes martial, heroic, and fantastic—in the English popular
ballad and the French ballade (1-2). Prior to the Spanish Civil War, these romanceros could be
divided into five main categories: the romances históricos, which narrate either primitive or nonprimitive history; the romances fronterizos, which offer histories of the war for Granada; the
romances carolingios, dedicated to chivalric epics and legends from France; the romances
novelescos, inspired by common Western folklore; and both the romances eruditos, erudite
retellings of popular romances, and the romances artísticos, original poems written by
professional poets (Espinosa 3). With the advent of the Spanish Civil War, as Hernández relates,
the popularity of the romancero soared. In the words of Alberti, soldiers and professional poets
alike turned to “el viejo metro tradicional” [“the old traditional meter”] to express “[l]a nueva
conciencia política cantaba por España” [“the new political conscience being sung throughout
Spain”] (Alberti, Romancero, 9). Moreover, Alberti—having received thousands of romanceros
from the battle front at the Alianza— recalls dedicating a column in El mono azul to their
publication, qualifying them as both “casi periodística” [“almost journalistic”] and as “el
lenguaje más vital de aquella realidad” [“the most vital language of that reality”] (Alberti,
Romancero, 10). In addition to their journalistic quality, the romanceros de la guerra served
chiefly as propaganda and can furthermore—according to Eduardo Mayone Dias—be subdivided
into six categories: romances narrativos, the closest cousin to the romancero of old that
portrayed episodes from the war from a limited, or personal, perspective; romances
encomiástics, which differed little from romances narrativos and elegized heroes and heroic
deeds or attempted to bolster esprit de corps; romances exhortativos, utilitarian romances
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designed, often apoetically, to incite; romances satíricos o insultantes, generally an attack on an
enemy (person or country); romances morales, which offered didactic, exemplary tales of
Republican virtue or conduct; and romances líricos, generally small, intimate portraits of
individuals (a soldier missing a limb, an orphan, etc.) imbued with the intense atmosphere of war
(436).
For his part, Hughes—after listening to Guillén tell Hernández how Octavio Paz and Raúl
González Tuñon characterized the romance as the revolutionary Spanish form—spoke to the
value of the popular romances de la guerra, but stopped short of labeling them as a revolutionary
form (Guillén, Prosa II, 91). In fact, when pressed as to whether or not revolutionary poetry
should forsake traditional poetic forms in favor of new techniques, the very same (or perhaps
dramatically changed) poet who wrote “Cubes” asserted that popular forms and revolutionary
poetry go hand in hand:
--Yo creo que no podemos olvidar por ahora las formas tradicionales.
Ellas son las conocidas por el pueblo, y por tanto el mejor vehículo para
transmitirle una nueva inquietud. De otro modo, tendría que asimilar dos
elementos, la forma y el fondo. Es bueno hablarle siempre al pueblo con voz
que no lo asuste. (Guilén, Prosa II, 91)
--I believe that, for now, we cannot forsake traditional forms. They’re
the ones the people know, and hence the best vehicle to broadcast a new
unrest. On the other hand, two elements have to be weaved together, form
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and content. It’s always good to talk to the people in a voice that doesn’t
alarm them.
Hughes embraces traditional forms as the best vehicle for broadcasting revolutionary
unrest precisely because the forms themselves do not provoke unease amongst the people. In
short, a shocking message should be delivered by a familiar messenger. Testifying to his vision
of the war as an event of enormous global importance, Hughes is careful to avoid asserting that
the romance is the form to broadcast “unrest,” suggesting instead that it derives its revolutionary
potential from its popularity. Hughes remains somewhat vague on the question of what
constitutes revolutionary content, but his rejection of Hernández’s vision of a poetry of “war”
replete with battlefield descriptions suggests that, for Hughes, the “casi periodística” romances
did not fit the revolutionary bill. Hence, while Hughes recognized the potential to mine the
“great human movement” for a concomitant, and equally powerful, literary movement composed
of popular forms, he did not confine this potential to a specific form nor did he view poetry that
merely described revolution as revolutionary. Nevertheless, the Hughes who took up residency
at the Alianza was surrounded by distinguished poets who had both embraced the romancero as
the poetic form of the Spanish Republican cause and, like the soldiers in the trenches, were
actively engaged in the project of writing them. These authors, many of whom collaborated with
Hughes on his translation of Romancero gitano, included: Rafael Alberti, Emilio Prados, Miguel
Hernández, Arturo Serrano Plaja, Manuel Altoguirre, and José Bergamin.
The Aesthetics of García Lorca and the Popular Front
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Although the romancero is a popular Spanish poetic form that, arguably, predates the
tenth century, its explosive popularity during the Spanish Civil War amongst both soldiers in the
trenches and writers at the Alianza can also be attributed to the impact of Federico García
Lorca’s Romancero gitano first published in its entirety in 1928. Indeed, Hughes’s annotated
edition of Lorca’s collection—published in 1937 with an introduction by Alberti and archived
with Hughes’s papers at Yale—well attests to the attention Hughes paid to Alberti’s claim that
the tips of the romancero’s wings were Lorca and the people:
Tú [Lorca], sobre las piedras del antiguo romancero español, con Juan
Ramón y Machado, fuiste otra, rara y fuerte, a la vez sostén y corona de la
vieja tradición castellana. Luego, vino la guerra. El pueblo y los poetas de
nuestro país escriben romances. En diez meses de lucha llegan a cerca del
millar los recogidos. Tú—la mayor gloria para ti—andas por debajo de casi
todos ellos. Tu voz, velada, a través de otra voces, se escucha en nuestra
guerra. (Alberti, Romancero, 4)
You [Lorca], on the stones of the old Spanish romancero, with Juan
Ramón and Machado, were another, unusual and strong, at the same time
foundation and crown for the old Castilian tradition. Then the war came. Our
country’s people and poets write romances. After ten months of fighting,
almost a thousand have been collected. You—the glory going mostly to
you—walk beneath almost all of them. Your voice, remembered, through
other voices is heard in our war.
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Addressing his introduction to the martyred poet, Alberti figures the romances de la
guerra as the inheritance of Lorca bequeathed to both the people and poets. Alberti paints
Lorca’s poetic intervention as one built on the stones of the old Spanish romancero, and then
ushers in a new time period, the war, where Lorca is figured as both the foundation and the poet
laureate. Not only is Lorca immortalized through his poetic achievements, a more Classical
notion of Fame, but he is remembered and renewed through the people and poets writing
romances in service of the Republican cause. His voice becomes the voice of others that form
the soundscape for “our war.”
Alberti’s hopeful testament to Lorca’s popular appeal belies the aesthetic differences
between his and (the then) contemporary romances de la guerra. Lorca—in the words of Miguel
Hernández—“le impuso un sello único” [“put his unique seal”] on the form, reworking a genre
marked by its linear narration in order to produce poems that are now celebrated for their vexing
temporal play and experimentation with non-cohesive narratives. In contrast, the actual
romances de la guerra that were published closely followed the traditions of old. They more
closely resembled romances hístoricos and romances fronterizos. Hence, Lorca’s role in the
publication and writing explosion of romances is debatable both because of the charge of Lorca’s
martyrdom and because of the equally striking differences between his work and that of other
poets.
Alberti’s desire to link Lorca’s voice to that of the people, however vexed it may be, is
demonstrative of his commitment to a Popular Front aesthetic that permeated Republican literary
production at the Alianza. This aesthetic echoes both Hernández’s and Guillén’s desire for a
literature “closer to our pain.” The governing principle behind this aesthetic—as Hughes reports,
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and, in so doing, testifies to both the enormous influence exerted by Lorca’s legacy on the artists
in residence at the Alianza and to Alberti’s role in shaping this legacy—was described by Alberti
as the desire:
[T]o make art life, and life art, with no gulf between the artist and the
people. After all, as Lorca said, “The poem, the song, the picture is only
water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them
in a cup of beauty so that they may drink—and in drinking, understand
themselves” (Rampersad, Vol. 14, 371).
As Alberti frames matters for Hughes, Republican art is produced with an aim to link the
artist with the people. This aim is one figured in terms of the legacy of Lorca. In effect, Alberti
through Lorca envisions the breeching of the gap as a road towards self-understanding on both
individual and communal fronts. The work of art itself holds the paradoxical status of a gift
given from artist to people, as water “given back to them in a cup of beauty,” and as the
perennial property of the people, a gift to the artist for which he fashions a receptacle for its
return.
Lorca’s poetic praxis, as Alberti records it, may purport to provide both self and
community with the capacity to better “understand themselves,” but the portrait of life it offers is
neither crystal clear nor straightforward. Far from “casi periodística” quality that Alberti
ascribes to the romances de la guerra, the poems that comprise Lorca’s Romancero gitano—
poems that, as Lorca frames them, paint a portrait of Andalusia—offer their reader, in
Christopher Maurer’s words, “the feeling of a story half told or understood,” “narrative gaps,”
and “the shadow of narration” (Maurer xlvii, xlix, li). Hence, if Lorca’s Romancero gitano does
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indeed wish to offer its readers “water drawn from the well of the people” in a “cup of beauty” in
order to promote understanding, then this understanding is one that seeks to undercut itself, one
that seeks to highlight its own incompletion.
The project of highlighting the incompletion of knowledge vis-à-vis a portrait of
Andalusia is one that is arguably informed by Lorca’s desire not to offer a portrait of the
province of his day, but rather by a desire to render Andalusia throughout time in a manner that
forefronts its heterogeneity both past and present. Seeking to clarify what he intended to achieve
with his romanceros, Lorca relates:
Although it is called Gypsy, the book as a whole is the poem of
Andalusia, and I call it Gypsy because the Gypsy is the most distinguished,
profound, and aristocratic element of my country, the one most representative
of its way of being and which best preserves the fire, blood, and alphabet of
Andalusian and universal truth.
The book, therefore, is a retable expressing Andalusia, with
Gypsies, horses, archangels, planets, its Jewish breeze, its Roman breeze,
rivers, crimes, the everyday touch of the smuggler and the celestial touch of
the naked children of Cordova who tease Saint Raphael. A book in which the
visible Andalusia is hardly mentioned but in which palpitates the invisible
one. And now I am going to be explicit. It is an anti-picturesque, antifolkloric book, with not a single short jacket, bullfighter’s suit of lights, widebrimmed sombrero or tambourine [….] (Gibson 135)
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Given the nearly perennial persecution and disenfranchisement of the Romany in Spain,
Lorca’s characterization of the “Gypsy” as “the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic
element of my country” can only be read as a creative reworking of their place in Andalusian
society and history. This reworking eschews the awful truth in order to posit a “universal” one,
and offers a vision not of the Romany, but of Lorca’s imaginative figuration of the
“representative” “Gypsy,” a wandering figure whose movement comes to symbolize Lorca’s
poetic movement through an invisible Andalusian landscape. Lorca’s avowed disinterest in
portraying “visible Andalusia” works in harmony with his repositioning of the “Gypsy,” as his
rejection of the picturesque and the folkloric (and all of their accoutrements) does not simply
represent a rejection of the clichéd, but is also demonstrative of Lorca’s desire to present the
reader with a new vision of Andalusia, an Andalusia whose “truth” has yet to generate a folklore
of its own.
Hence, Lorca both undercuts his “universal truth” claim while simultaneously relocating
the very position of that claim to the realm of letters.
Intertextuality and García Lorca’s Composite View of Córdoba
Lorca’s reference to the elements that comprise his “retable expressing Andalusia”
serves to highlight the temporal disjuncture that permeates his collection and alludes to several of
the poems therein. His mention of “the naked children of Córdova who tease Saint Raphael” is
arguably foremost among these allusions, and invokes his “San Rafael (Córdoba),” a poem
exemplary of the manner in which the collection’s imagery depicts Andalusia by conflating past
and present, lying era upon era and empire upon empire:
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Y mientras el puente sopla
diez rumores de Neptuno,
vendedores de tobacco
huyen por el roto muro.
II
Un solo pez en el agua
que a los dos Córdobas junta:
Blanda Córdoba de juncos.
Córdoba de arquitectura.
Niños de cara impasible,
en la orilla se desnudan
aprendices de Tobías (23-33)
And while the bridge whispers
ten rumors of Neptune,
tobacco sellers flee
along a broken wall.
II
Only one fish in the water
that joins the two Cordovas:
pliant Cordova of reeds,
Cordova of architecture.
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Children with impassive faces
undress on the river bank
apprentices of Tobias (Hughes, 1937 Alberti assisted manuscript, 23-33)
Lorca paints a scene that is at once inhabited by the “the naked children of Cordova who
tease St. Raphael” and also by a “Roman breeze” that “whispers / ten rumors of Neptune.” The
action of the poem and the history of Andalusia work in harmony to form Lorca’s “retable,” and
the result is a temporal confusion that serves to depict Córdoba as a city not only built on the
ruins of civilizations past, but also as a city inhabited by a past that still “whispers.” Lorca
further compounds eras and empires by invoking a shared religious icon and an intertext that
belongs to Christianity and Islam. As H. Ramden convincingly argues, Lorca’s invocation of the
“one fish” that joins “two Cordovas” is intended to refer to a story in the Book of Tobit wherein
St. Raphael helps Tobias to catch a fish that attempts to eat him, and, in so doing, provides
Tobias with the necessary tools (namely the fish’s heart, liver, and gallbladder) to cast out devils
and to cure his father’s blindness (58). Lorca himself would draw attention to the story’s shared
heritage when he, in his lecture on the Ballads, labeled St. Raphael the “peregrine archangel who
lives in the Bible and the Koran […] and who fishes in the river of Córdoba” (Maurer 926).
Moreover, the archangel and the cures he helped to engender are commemorated in Córdoba by a
series of statues, one of which can be found on the Roman bridge alluded to in the passage above
(Maurer 926). Hence, Lorca’s intertextual play forefronts a heterogeneous Andalusia, one that
speaks of multiple peoples, multiple empires, and multiple faiths, a space whose action takes
place in the present, as “Children with impassive faces / undress,” but is nevertheless rooted
firmly inside and outside of history. In short, via the invocation of intertexts and of living
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history, Lorca infuses his Spanish Catholic Córdoba with the Córdoba of the Roman Empire and
with the Córdoba of the Caliphate’s second period of glory (from 929 to 1031).
Hughes’s 1937 translation of “St. Raphael,” as excerpted, bolsters Lorca’s composite
vision of Córdoba and offers a small piece of testimony to Hughes’s careful attention to and
reproduction of Lorca’s verb tenses in his Gypsy Ballads. Hughes chooses not to replicate
Lorca’s two short phrases, punctuated by periods, which distinguish one Córdoba from the other,
“Blanda Córdoba de juncos. / Córdoba de arquitectura,” and augments the degree to which the
poem blends one historical era into another by offering the conjoined, “pliant Cordova of reeds,
Cordova of architecture.” Likewise, his decision to translate “[b]landa” [“soft”] as “pliant”
results in both a translation that is arguably literal and a translation that juxtaposes Córdoba’s
mutability (now positioned in political and material frameworks) against its historic, adamantine
architecture. Nevertheless, the “vague and mysterious space time continuum” that Charles H.
Leighton attributes to Lorca’s romances is not solely the creation of Lorca’s synthesis and
economy (Leighton 378). Rather, Lorca’s “continuum” is also well served by his adept
manipulation and sequencing of verb tenses. Joseph Szertics figures this manipulation as, in
part, in step with the romances of old, but also—citing Cristoph Eich’s F. García Lorca poeta de
intensidad [F.García Lorca Poet of Intensity]—notes that Lorca’s verb conjugation allows him
to highlight and complicate “la noción del aspecto” [“the notion of aspect”] (Szertics 271).
Lorca’s “notion of aspect,” in turn, is reflected in the manner in which he employs verbs, a
manner that, as Szertics figures matters, allows Lorca to introduce temporal confusion into a
form most commonly associated with its narrative clarity. Echoing Eich, Szertics cites the
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opening lines of the collection’s first poem, “Romance de la luna, luna” [“Ballad of the Moon,
Moon to illustrate his point:
La luna vino a la fragua
con su polisón de nardos.
El niño la mira, mira.
El niño la está mirando. (1-4)
The moon came to the forge
with her bustle of spikenards.
The child looks, looks.
The child is looking. (Hughes, 1937 Alberti assisted manuscript, 1-4)
Szertic asserts that the order of events presented to the reader in combination with
Lorca’s sequencing of verb tenses creates scenes wherein a “cierta oposición aspectual” [“certain
opposition of aspect”] between verbs in the preterit like “vino” [“came”] and verbs in the present
or present progressive like “mira” [“looks”] or “está mirando” [is looking] gives rise to narrative
confusion (271). Having disrupted the normal narrative economy between imperfect, preterit,
and present, Lorca makes it difficult not only to determine what constitutes the backdrop of the
narrative, but also obfuscates the position of the present. How can we consider the arrival of the
moon as somehow setting the stage for the poem’s action when the description of this arrival
uses the preterit instead of the more customary imperfect? Are we to assign an added dimension
to the moon’s arrival based on these very grounds? Who occupies the present: a child who
persistently “looks, looks” or a child who “is looking”?
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Hughes Translates Romancero gitano
Whatever the case or confusion might be, Hughes’s translation of Romancero gitano
displays, as does the above excerpt, a remarkable attentiveness and fidelity to Lorca’s
unconventional manipulation of verbs, reproducing them tense for tense even in cases where this
fidelity makes for a translation that, arguably, reads poorly. By way of contrast, Christopher
Maurer’s eminently poetic and readable translation of the same passage clarifies what, in
Hughes’s and Lorca’s formulations, is left somewhat obscure:
The moon came to the forge
wearing a bustle of nards.
The boy is looking at her.
The boy is looking hard. (1-4)
Perhaps realizing that the sonic resonance of Lorca’s third line cannot be reproduced in
English translation, Maurer forsakes the repetition of the present tense “mira” [“looks”]. This
repetition—when aided by Lorca’s combination of “i” and “a” sounds—reads both strangely and
lyrically in Spanish, but draws even greater attention to itself in English where, divorced from
the source text’s sonic play, it reads somewhat clumsily. Albeit in separate lines, Maurer
proffers a repetition of the present progressive in its stead, and reverses the order of the third and
fourth lines, replacing the emphasized “mira, mira” [“looks, looks”] with what arguably could be
considered its semantic equivalent “is looking hard.” In addition to creating a more readable
translation, Maurer offers a passage with decidedly less temporal confusion than does Hughes, as
warring present tenses give way to a singular use of the present progressive.
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The steadfast preservation of Lorca’s verb use imbues Hughes’s translation with the
source text’s “vague and mysterious space time continuum” and is complemented—both in the
excerpt above and throughout the collection—by translation decisions that routinely feed Lorca’s
vagaries by refusing to delimit meaning. For example, Maurer’s translation of the passage above
concretizes both the subject and object of the verbs in the poem’s third and fourth line. “El niño”
is translated as “[t]he boy” and the pronominal object of his gaze (“la luna” or “the moon”) is
offered to the reader in a manner that goes so far as to preserve the noun’s gender in Spanish,
“The boy is looking at her.” In contrast, Hughes chooses an acceptable, but somewhat less
concrete, alternative and translates “niño” as “child.” He omits Lorca’s pronoun, both
sidestepping the problematic of translating gendered nouns and allowing for the possibility that
his child’s gaze may be directed towards something more than the moon.
Hughes’s desire to preserve the polyvalence of Lorca’s romances is perhaps best
exemplified by his translation of the first line of the collection’s most famous poem, “Romance
sonámbulo” [“Ballad of the Sleepwalker”]. This line, which also serves as the poem’s refrain,
reads “Verde que te quiero verde,” and, as Lorca’s brother Francisco argues in his De Garcilaso
a Lorca [From Garcilaso to Lorca], presents the translator with a particularly difficult task.
Christopher Maurer, who chooses to render the line as “Green I want you green,” translates and
summarizes this argument in the following terms:
Francisco García Lorca explores the ambiguity of this refrain, which
can mean “I want you green,” but also “I love you green”: the “act of will” is
more pronounced than the “act of love.” “We can even suppose that the poet
is anticipating not a particular green, but the very idea of green, not yet
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created. In this case, ‘Verde que te quiero verde’ would announce the creation
of green… ‘Let green exist, for I want it so.’” (Maurer 923)
Attempting to speak to all of these potential meanings, Hughes, unlike Maurer, rejects a
translation that reduces the “ambiguity” of the Spanish verb “querer” [“to want” or “to love”],
and, instead, offers his reader, “Green as I would have you green.”1 This phrasing allows for
multiple readings of the Lorca’s refrain, readings that allow the line to be interpreted as an
expression of “want” or “love” which forefronts the “act of will” over the “act of love” while
encapsulating both in the phrase “I would have you.” Hughes’s translation even goes so far as to
gesture towards the persona’s announcement of “the creation of green,” as “I would have you
green” suggests an almost divine will made incarnate. In short, Hughes’s translation strategy for
Romancero gitano is one that seeks to safeguard (and at times to augment) both the explosive
interpretive potential of Lorca’s “space time continuum” and the polyvalence of his poetic
language. It is a strategy that places a premium not on readability, but on the possibility for
Lorca’s verse to engender multiple readings in English, readings that often times escape
interpretive closure.
Avoiding Ethical Peril: Translation as Work of the Collective
The strategy that Hughes employs to translate Lorca—one that, in essence, seeks to avoid
speaking for the poet by eschewing decisions that make for closed readings—is imbued with
84
Hughes’s translation of this line remains consistent from his first draft, completed in 1937, to the final publication
of “Gypsy Ballads” in 1951.
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Hughes’s growing concern over the ethical dangers inherent in speaking for others. Just as “the
first poet of the Negro proletariat” had grown reticent of acting as the mouthpiece for an entire
population, so too had Hughes the translator grown wary—despite the arguably inevitable
realization of his fears—of penning translations guided by a definitive interpretation or a single
hand, translations that reduced the source text’s poetic potential. Hughes allayed his concerns, in
part, by enlisting the help of an unprecedented number of collaborators. As his manuscripts
attest, Hughes turned to Alberti, Manuel Altoguirre, and other unnamed “friends” of Lorca to
complete his first and second drafts of “Gypsy Ballads” while in residence at the Alianza in
1937. And over the course of the next fourteen years, Hughes completed five more drafts of his
manuscript with the help of: Miguel Covarrubias (in 1945); publishers Robert Glauber and David
Ignatow (in 1951); and Francisco García Lorca (also in 1951).1 Hughes’s manuscripts also
indicate that he checked his translations against those of Lloyd, Spender, and Barea, and his
correspondence relates that Francisco García Lorca helped him to compare his collection with
others published in French and Italian. Hence, Hughes avoided the perils and pitfalls of being
the translator of Lorca by distributing responsibility for his translation’s accuracy among Lorca’s
closest associates and by gleaning insights from existing translations.
The paramount importance that Hughes placed on collaboration and semantic precision
while composing and revising his translations of Lorca’s poetry bespeaks not only of a translator
who forsook his former penchant for play, but also of a translator who viewed the quest for
accuracy as a collective endeavor. The success of this endeavor, in turn, was both a requisite and
a selling point for a good translation. In a letter dated June 8, 1951, Hughes informed David
Ignatow, the associate editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, that he had gone so far as to consult
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García-Lorca’s brother, Francisco (who was a scholar of his brother’s work, his sometime
collaborator, and an author in his own right), for assistance:
I had a very pleasant and helpful visit with Lorca frere [sic] this
evening---just back home. A very nice guy and most careful about the
translations. We went through them thoroughly, comparing French and Italian
versions of lines where shades of meaning are difficult. I doubt if any other
versions of Lorca have had more checking and rechecking with former friends
and relatives of the poet than these.
Hughes’s coy praise for his own text rests not on its aesthetic achievements, but rather on
its thorough preservation of Lorca’s “shades of meaning.” This preservation is figured, in large
part, as the result of Hughes’s close collaboration with Lorca’s “careful” “friends and relatives.”
Hughes thus figures the authority behind his translation decisions as one that is multiple or
shared, and also as one that ultimately rests not with him, but with those who have checked and
rechecked his translation. In short, Hughes’s collaboration diffuses responsibility for translation
decisions and, as he frames matters, also makes for ideal translations.
Echoing and augmenting these sentiments, Hughes also informed co-editor Robert
Glauber of his meeting with Lorca, writing:
I have just spent about four hours this evening with Francisco Garcia
[sic] Lorca who is delighted that the Beloit Poetry Journal is publishing my
translations of his brother’s poems from the ROMANCERO GITANO. He
had let the official translator of the Lorca plays read them and had gotten an
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O.K. from him. And he himself had gone over them line for line with the
original Spanish.
Together we went over the poems again, correcting a few mistakes of
my own in exact meaning, and improving on what Francisco felt to be his
brother’s original meanings which he thought might not come across in my
English renderings—largely matters of nuance, but certainly important, since
we both wish to be as exact as possible in both the literal meanings and the
emotional and musical shadings. I think the translations now are about as
fool proof as we can make them in their rendering from Spanish into English.
Once again, Hughes seeks to endow his translation with additional authority by relating
that it has been checked both by the “official translator” of Lorca’s plays and by Lorca’s brother.
Hughes endows the latter with the capacity to decipher “his brother’s original meanings,” an
ability that, in turn, allows Hughes’s translation to capture better “matters of nuance.”
Privileging Francisco García Lorca’s insights over his own and, arguably, over any other
reader’s, Hughes differentiates these “original meanings” from the “exact meaning[s]” which he
failed to translate correctly, and assures Glauber that his translations are now “about as fool
proof as we can make them.” The “we” to which Hughes refers—a we that includes Francisco
García Lorca and, vicariously, his brother Federico as well—seeks to render “exact” translations
of both “literal meaning” and “emotional and musical shadings.” Hughes’s notion of a “fool
proof” translation betrays either a naiveté or a certain amount of hubris on his part, and seems
particularly out of place given his strident rejection of racial essentialism and thirst for poetic
polyvalence. However, Hughes is careful to qualify that the desire for an “exact” translation,
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albeit admirable, is ultimately unattainable, as his translations are not quite “fool proof,” but
rather “about as fool proof as we can make them in their rendering from Spanish into English.”
Hence, Hughes’s letter testifies to his belief that the work of translation entails much more than a
reworking of “literal meaning,” and suggests that Hughes viewed the work of “exact” translation
as a Sisyphean endeavor that seeks to reproduce “meaning” in all its shades and variety by
privileging the “original meanings” of the source text’s author.
Hughes’s thirst for “exact” translations of “original meanings,” his fear of limiting the
source text’s poetic potential, and his attempts to diffuse responsibility for his translation
decisions betray ethical anxieties akin to the ones that Shoshana Felman ascribes to the witness,
and suggest (among other things) that Hughes’s work as a war correspondent greatly affected his
vision and praxis of translation. Exploring the ethical conundrums and paradoxes that confront
the witness, Felman writes:
It is a strange appointment, from which the witness-appointee cannot
relieve himself by any delegation, substitution, or representation [….] To bear
witness is to bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to bear the
responsibility, precisely of that solitude [….] And yet, the appointment to bear
witness is paradoxically enough, an appointment to transgress the confines of
that isolated stance, to speak for and to others. The French philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas can thus suggest that the witness’s speech is one which,
by its very definition, transcends the witness who is but its medium, the
medium of a realization of the testimony. “The witness,” writes Levinas,
“testifies to what has been said through him. Because the witness has said,
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“‘here I am’ before the other.” By virtue of the fact that his testimony is
addressed to others, the witness, from within the solitude of his own stance, is
the vehicle of an occurrence, a reality, a stance or dimension beyond himself.”
Hughes’s almost maniacal drive to distance himself from the authority behind (and the
responsibility for) his translation decisions—despite the fact that, in the end, he and he alone will
bear the responsibility for the exactitude of his “Gypsy Ballads”—manifests a desire to acquit
himself of the witness’s “strange appointment” to “bear the solitude of a responsibility, and to
bear the responsibility, precisely of that solitude.” Likewise, Hughes’s desire to enlist
collaborators is representative of his desire to rid himself of the enormous ethical burden of
speaking “for” someone “to others” from a solitary stance. Hence, Hughes’s translation
strategies manifest an awareness of the perils and burdens of bearing English language witness
to, or translating, Lorca’s verse, and seek to mitigate these dangers by escaping a position of
“solitude.” This mitigation, in turn, speaks to the impact that Hughes’s (and Du Bois’s)
revaluations of essentialist incarnations of pan-Africanism had on his translation praxis, as
Hughes’s reticence to speak for the unheard and for another text seeks remedy, in both cases, in
the form of greater collaboration. The quest for a “fool proof” translation of “original meaning”
is also demonstrative of Hughes’s wariness to speak for others, and figures the task of the
translator as one nearly identical to the responsibility of Levinas’s witness, as both are to serve as
a “medium” for “what has been said through” them. Moreover, both Hughes’s ideal translator
and Levinas’s witness—insofar as the former strives to avoid limiting the poetic potential of
other texts and the latter addresses what has been “said through him” to the “other”—are
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ethically bound to give rise to “an occurrence, a reality, a stance or dimension beyond himself”
that is “exact” and open to interpretation.
Foreclosing Closed-Readings: “Letter from Spain to Alabama”
The ethics informing Hughes’s praxis of translation, his in-depth familiarity with both
the poetic innovations of Lorca’s romanceros and the explosion of anti-fascist romanceros de la
guerra supposedly inspired in Lorca’s wake, his desire to create a poetry of revolution forged out
of popular poetic forms and the “drama” of the “great human movement” represented in the
Spanish Republican cause, his vision of a “darker” internationalism that allowed and accounted
for difference within unity, his belief that writing could both provide a means to know the
“other” and thwart fascist attempts to manipulate “race,” and his responsibility to bear witness to
“colored” involvement in a decidedly international civil war all figured heavily in his creative
process while in residence at the Alianza. The commingling of these factors, beliefs, concerns,
desires, and responsibilities is given poetic voice in Hughes’s “Letter from Spain (Addressed to
Alabama),” first published in Volunteer for Liberty—a periodical published for the Englishspeaking 15th Brigade that provided background about current events in the U.S., official news
of the war, explanations of military strategy, and writing and cartoons designed to boost
morale—on November 15, 1937.
Arguably testifying to the great value that the poem held for him despite its lack of
acclaim, Hughes chose to reproduce “Letter from Spain” in its entirety in his
autobiography/travelogue I Wonder as I Wander (1956). Therein, by way of introduction, he
describes the intent behind its composition in succinct terms:
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The International Brigades were, of course, aware of the irony of the
colonial Moors—victims themselves of oppression in North Africa—fighting
against a Republic that had been seeking to work out a liberal policy toward
Morocco. To try to express the feelings of some of the Negro fighting men in
this regard, I wrote verses in the form of a letter from an American Negro in
the Brigades to a relative in Dixie. (Rampersad, Vol. 14, 341)
In line with the mission of Volunteer for Liberty, Hughes figures the poem as both a
political commentary and a form of reportage concerning “colored involvement” in the war.
Echoing the desire he professed nearly twenty years earlier “to write about both Moors and
colored people,” Hughes asserts that the poem concerns itself with the ironic position that the
“colonial Moors” held in the eyes of “Negro fighting men.” And in step with the dictates of
Popular Front artistic production, Hughes implies that the reprinted poem, insofar as its intent is
easily summarized by way of introduction, is relatively straightforward and easy to decipher—it
is simply an attempt to “express feelings” about a tragic colonial “irony.”
Hughes’s I Wonder as I Wander also grounds “Letter from Spain” in the realm of the
quotidian by prefacing the poem’s introduction with an autobiographical account whose details,
in many ways, resurface in the course of the poem. These details include: Hughes’s confession
to being “startled out of his wits” by the sight of a wounded Moor; Hughes’s feelings of guilt
over this shock; the memory, prompted by this guilt, of a “white woman” in Louisiana crying
out, “[y]ou colored boys get away from here. I’m scared of you”; Hughes’s thwarted attempts to
speak to captured Moors in Republican hospital wards that lacked translators; and his eventual
success in communicating with one orphaned Moroccan boy who detailed the horrors of being
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conscripted into Franco’s army. Hughes’s relation of these incidents, many of which also appear
in his war correspondence, not only allows for a reading of the poem as a composite of
autobiographical incidents, but—in combination with the work of the preface—allows “Letter
from Spain” to be read as an almost “true story,” both a representation of and report from the
front.
It is perhaps these autobiographical correlatives in combination with Hughes’s
description of his poem’s subject matter and intent that prompted Arnold Rampersad to
characterize the ballad as “doggerel” proletarian propaganda, to—in essence—take Hughes at his
word (Rampersad Life I, 351). However, when one considers Hughes’s remarks about his poem
in light of a long tradition of modest self-interpretation amongst poets that, often times, manifest
in claims of simplicity or in light of an English poetic tradition of offering reductive metacommentary on literary ballads (exemplified and dating back to Coleridge’s use of marginalia in
his “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), Hughes’s recollections and explanations become but a
part of the picture, commentaries that his poetry of revolution works with and over to articulate a
new vision of black internationalism that, quite tellingly, is poetically framed as an act of bearing
witness:
Lincoln Battalion,
International Brigades,
November Something, 1937.
Dear Brother at home:
We captured a wounded Moor today.
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He was just as dark as me
I said Boy, what you been doin’ here
Fightin’ against the free?
He answered something in a language
I couldn’t understand.
But somebody told me he was sayin’
They nabbed him in his land
And made his join the fascist army
And come across to Spain.
And he said he had a feelin’
He’d never get back home again.
He said he had a feelin’
This whole thing wasn’t right.
He said he didn’t know
The folks he had to fight.
And as he lay there dying
In a village we had taken,
I looked across to Africa
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And seed foundations shakin’.
Cause if a free Spain wins this war,
The colonies, too, are free—
Then something wonderful’ll happen
To them Moors as dark as me.
I said, I guess that’s why old England
And I reckon Italy, too,
Is afraid to let a workers’ Spain
Be too good to me and you—
Cause they got slaves in Africa—
And they don’t want ‘em to be free.
Listen, Moorish prisoner, hell!
Here, shake hands with me!
I knelt down there beside him,
And I took his hand—
But the wounded Moor was dyin’
And he didn’t understand.
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Salud,
Johnny
Just as Hughes states in his autobiography, “Letter from Spain (Addressed to Alabama)”
expresses the irony that a “Negro fighting m[a]n” recognizes in having “colonial Moors” as
enemy combatants, but the portrayal of this irony—far from simply tragic—speaks to the heart
of a disjuncture that comprises both the possibility for and the difficulty of envisioning (and
realizing) an equally inclusive Pan-Africanism. Simultaneously, the poem offers a deft
manipulation of poetic forms and traditions that not only speaks to the affect of Lorca’s
romances and the romances de la guerra on Hughes’s poetic production, but also demonstrates
how Hughes, in translation, took advantage of the aesthetic strategies and poetic potential of
these forms to create a text that both voices and embodies a non-essentialist and anti-fascist
conception of black internationalism. And the poem figures translation as both a vehicle for and
symbol of this internationalism, dramatizing the ethical stakes involved in both endeavors by
offering narrative content that both translates and testifies to the last words of an Other.
The poem’s epistolary frame and first rhyming stanza draw the work’s Pan-Africanist
machinations into immediate relief, setting up alternating patterns of distancing and affiliation, of
connection and disjuncture, and of free will and lack of agency that will come to comprise, in
large part, the thematic backbone of the text. Writing to his “Brother at home,” Johnny, the
poem’s persona, relates in distinctly Du Boisian terms that “[w]e” captured a Moor who “was
just as dark as me,” and then—invoking the logic of Pan-Africanism while highlighting the holes
with which it is ridden—reports how he rebuked the Moor for fighting “against the free,” a
collective comprised of American soldiers in the International Brigades. The socio-political
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aims of the Spanish Republican cause and Pan-Africanism are, in turn, portrayed as in harmony
with one another, as a Moor “just as dark as me,” given Johnny’s surprise, is figured as someone
who, somewhat naturally, should never fight “against the free.” The “free” to whom Johnny
refers occupy a somewhat paradoxical status insofar as their freedom is part and parcel of their
shared martial status with the Moor, an irony that Hughes places at the forefront by introducing
“the free” as a force engaged in the act of capture. However, this free collective of Americans is
not representative of a free America, a fact that Hughes’s autobiography highlights by providing
an intertextual reference that links the racism of the scared Louisiana woman’s derogatory
“boys” to Johnny’s expression of internal and internalized racism, “Boy, what you doin’ here /
Fightin’ against the free?” Hence, Johnny’s Pan-Africanist rebuke is painted in terms that
highlight its U.S. bent and origin. Moreover, neither Johnny’s “Brother” nor the “wounded
Moor” can be counted among Johnny’s “free,” and his letter—from Spain addressed to
Alabama—can be read as a missive from a martial medium that connects two arenas where
freedom’s status is highly precarious. In this sense, among others, Hughes’s poem comes to
serve as the type of poetry he envisioned with Guillén and Henández in Valencia, a verse form
that mines the dramatic potential of Spain’s great “human movement” for the purposes of
exportation. Hughes’s epistolary frame, in turn, speaks to this purpose and brings to the fore the
notions of circulation and migration (as, on October 30, 1937, the Spanish Republican Army was
forced to abandon their capitol in Valencia for Barcelona). Borrowing a page from Lorca,
Hughes places these movements in a vexed temporal continuum that, over the course of the
poem, will become decidedly more so, as the incident Johnny relates is firmly fixed in a “today”
that is nonetheless a day like any other day, one of many dispersed throughout a “November
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Something.” The notions of perennial circulation and migration speak to the dispersal and return
which lie at the very core of the concept of Diaspora and comprise the potential for and reason
behind pan-Africanisms. Hence, the poem’s opening moments invoke and problematize the
notion of a black internationalism, portraying its preconditions in the very form of its
problematic while simultaneously figuring this internationalism as a free and yet martial force
that captures first and, by way of Johnny’s vexed American rebuke, attempts to convert second.
Johnny and the Wounded Moor: Affinity and Distance
The “irony” at the core of “Letter from Spain” arises from the fact that both Johnny and
the wounded Moor, despite their position on opposite sides of the trenches, share a common
condition that can be attributed to a denial of freedom, and that both would be well served by the
overlapping objectives of the Spanish Republican cause and Pan-Africanism. The wounded
Moor—as Johnny comes to “understand” matters via the graces of a tellingly anonymous
someone who serves as translator and medium—fights against “the free” precisely because he is
not free. He has “come across to Spain” because he has been “nabbed from his land” by
Franco’s “fascist army,” and holds little hope of getting “back home again.” However, given the
fifteenth century expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the wounded Moor’s arrival in Spain also
represents a paradoxical form of homecoming, re-conquest, or unwilling return. In a similar
vein, Johnny’s journey to Spain represents a type of trans-Atlantic re-crossing, as the freedom
that he and his “Brother” are denied by Alabama’s racism is nothing less than the historical
legacy of slavery, the result of his ancestors being “nabbed” from a home to which only a far too
belated or metaphorical return is possible. The themes of circulation and migration resurface as
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a common bond between the two colored men, but whereas the wounded Moor doubts he will
“get back home again,” Johnny’s visionary return to the “foundations” of Africa inspires a
solidarity that bespeaks of fraternal fidelities to the Republican cause and to Du Bois’s “darker
races.” A Republican victory equates to the triumph of a post-colonial “workers’ Spain,” and
also serves the interests of a Pan-Africanist agenda, “Then something wonderful’ll happen / To
them Moors as dark as me.”
Indeed, if Hughes’s Moor were to reciprocate Johnny’s sentiments or to share in his
vision, then “Letter from Spain” could easily be read as an endorsement of the power, potential,
and politics of a Pan-Africanism that purports to speak for peoples of African descent dispersed
throughout the continent and the world who share a common, oppressed condition. But it is
precisely the failure of this fellowship that allows Hughes’s poem to be read as a re-working of
black internationalism that eschews its monolithic incarnations and figures its potential for
success as, in part, a function of its willingness to fail. Hughes does not simply dramatize the
death of the Moor who “didn’t understand” to illustrate the danger that fascism poses to black
internationalism, but rather uses the “wounded Moor” to illustrate the fascist potential of certain
black internationalisms, ones fueled by a monolithic vision rather than by mutual assent.
Johnny’s vision may prompt him to see the Moor as a “dark” comrade, and the translation of the
Moor’s last words may bespeak of their common condition, but the hand that Johnny extends to
his “Moorish prisoner” is hardly representative of an attempt to reach a mutual accord. Quite to
the contrary, Johnny’s extended hand presents the Moor with another form of conscription, as the
latter is not in a position to enter freely into an allegiance (with “the free”). The Moor does not
offer his hand. Johnny “took” it. Likewise, mutual accord is made impossible by the absence of
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mutual understanding. The anonymous “somebody” in Johnny’s company only translates in one
direction, and his disappearance is arguably responsible for the Moor dying whilst “he didn’t
understand.” The Du Boisian brotherhood that Johnny envisions with “Moors as dark as me”
plays out as a one-sided affair, and, in the process, Hughes’s concerns about the ethics of
representing or speaking credibly for those denied a voice again come to the fore. If the goal of
black internationalism is an ethical community of “the free,” then this internationalism must
forsake a monolithic incarnation and allow for difference, dissent, the near impossibility of
knowing its colonized self, and even the for the possibility of its own failure.
In this sense, Johnny’s “Letter from Spain” can be read as an implicit prescription for a
pan-Africanism less flawed than the one it dramatizes, as a kind of ethical sign post for black
internationalisms yet to come. Insofar as the letter also represents a translation and an act of
bearing witness, the prescription offered therein can be assigned the ethical weight that these
endeavors carry—the ethics of a Hughesian black internationalism find correlatives in the ethics
of translation and testimony which serve as their frame. The black international, the ideal
translation, and the act of bearing witness all serve as mediums that: bear the responsibility to
speak faithfully for and to others; testify to what has been said through them; pursue
understanding; desire equity or equivalence; strive to be both “exact” and malleable or open to
interpretation, and give rise to “an occurrence, a reality, a stance or dimension beyond”
themselves.
The egalitarian ethics that inform Hughes’s internationalism are complemented by his
choice and manipulation of poetic form. Just as the poets of the Spanish trenches looked to the
“el viejo metro tradicional” of the romancero to transmit “[l]a nueva conciencia política cantaba
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por España,” so too did Hughes embrace a Popular Front aesthetic when he chose to imbed a
faux English popular ballad inside an epistolary frame. Indeed, given the similarities between
the Spanish romancero of old and the English popular ballad (a form that arguably predates
English), Hughes’s choice can be characterized as a metaphorical translation of form, as an
epistolary attempt to export the “great human movement” by employing the English verse form
that most closely resembles then romancero.
Despite their many similarities, the romance and the English popular ballad do differ
from one another, especially, as Aurelio Espinosa noted in 1929, in regard to their “espíritu”
[“spirit”] (Espinosa 2). While both forms present the reader/listener with narratives composed of
dialogue and action, the romancero is infused and perennially associated with its nation’s history
and national character:
El romancero español es la poesía narrativa, popular-nacional, por
excelencia de la literatura española. Por su origen, por su historia y por su
carácter eminentemente realista llegó a expresar mejor que cualquier otro
género poético las ambiciones, los sentimientos, el alma verdadera del espíritu
nacional. Es la quinta esencia del cáracter español, una expresion emocional
de su naciente vida nacional, de sus glorias pasadas una contribución de valor
permanente a la literatura universal. (Espinosa 2)
The Spanish romancero is the popular-national, narrative poetry of
Spanish letters par excellence. Because of its origin, history, and eminently
realistic character it has come to express, better that any other poetic genre,
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the ambitions, feelings, and true soul of the national spirit. It is the
quintessence of Spanish character, an emotional expression of nascent
national life and past glories, and is a contribution of permanent value to
universal literature.
Espinosa figures the defining spirit of the romancero as nationalist. It is nothing short of
“the quintessence of Spanish character.” The form’s capacity to express the “ambitions, feelings,
and true soul of the national spirit” is a direct function of its “eminently realistic character.” And
although an expression of “nascent national life and past glories,” it is also, curiously enough, a
contribution to “universal literature.” In contrast with the episodic romancero, the English
popular (or folk) ballad “tells a compact tale in a style that achieves bold, sensational effects
through deliberate starkness and abruptness” (Merriam-Webster). The familiar stanza form is
four lines, with four or three stresses alternating and with the second and fourth lines rhyming. It
is neither defined by nor the product of English nationalism. Rather, the popular ballads, far
from “eminently realistic,” are primarily based on older legends and romances that are nationalist
at times, and at other times not.
Hughes’s decision to offer a poetic account of the Spanish front in the form of an English
popular ballad is therefore neither a simple matter of exchanging one ballad form for another (of
assigning the English popular ballad the work normally carried out by the romancero) nor is it
simply an attempt to replace a decidedly nationalist popular form with one less affiliated with a
particular nation state in the hopes of fomenting the “great human movement” across borders.
Rather, “Letter from Spain” presents its reader with a fusion of the content normally associated
with each form in a ballad that, owing to its epistolary frame, both is and is not popular. In line
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with the dictates of the romance narrativo, “Letter from Spain” portrays an episode from the war
from a limited, or personal, perspective in a “casi periodística” fashion, and—in line with the
dictates of the English popular ballad—the poem “tells a compact tale in a style that achieves
bold, sensational effects through deliberate starkness and abruptness.” It is both realistic
reportage offered to the reader in epistolary form, and—recalling Johnny’s vision—a tale that
“achieves bold, sensational effects” which, in turn, become all the more so when juxtaposed
against the sparse, stark quality of Johnny’s quotidian language. Hence, the form in which
Hughes chooses to imbed his visions of the Spanish Civil War and black internationalism can be
characterized as a hybrid of his own invention, an original creation that, nevertheless, carries
with it the popular and anti-fascist weight of both ballad and romancero.
The Epistolary Ballad: A Hybrid Form
The epistolary frame that surrounds Hughes’s ballad of English form and hybrid content
highlights Hughes’s conventional invention while simultaneously imbuing it with a kind of
nomadic quality that emphasizes movement and circulation over nationalistic roots. The frame
also contributes to the creation of a new poetic insofar as it invokes the distinction commonly
made between the English popular ballad—a form generally associated with an oral tradition and
dismissed as “doggerel” by literary critics writing after the nineteenth century—and the English
literary ballad, its erudite offspring. Although the English literary ballad is a narrative poem
created by a poet in imitation of the old anonymous folk ballad, it is usually more elaborate and
complex. Generally lacking the impersonal characteristics of the popular ballad, the literary
ballad calls attention to itself, its composer, and to the fact that it is written and not recorded.
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Quite the rage in nineteenth century England, famous examples of the form are to be found in
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Keats’s “La
Belle Dame sans Merci,” and Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” With this distinction in
mind, Hughes’s epistolary frame and use of dialect—insofar as the former both emphasizes the
written quality of Hughes’s ballad and calls attention to its “composer” and the latter points to a
letter that, nevertheless, approximates speech—can be said to blur the lines between folk and
literary ballads, between popular and “high” art. This blurring allows for the emergence of a
new, in-between form that is at once both popular and literary. It is a form that answers to the
demands of Popular Front aesthetics and testifies to Lorca’s influence on Hughes, as Lorca’s
Romancero gitano—according to Alberti and Hernández (among others)—creates a new poetry
by fusing the popular romancero of old with Góngora’s highly literary (and at times hermetic)
manipulation of the form.
The form invented for “Letter from Spain” is by no means the only evidence to suggest
that Hughes’s Lorcan translations affected his own poetic production. Quite to the contrary, not
only is Hughes’s verse multiply marked by Lorca’s footprints, but his correspondence and essays
bear witness to both the remarkably high esteem in which he held Lorca and to his belief that the
translation of Lorca’s verse could serve as an ideal model for writing poetry. In a letter dated
June 9, 1951, Hughes updated his best friend Arna Bontemps on the publication progress of
“Gypsy Ballads,” writing:
Meanwhile I’ve done a few little things anyhow—two articles for
DIGEST. Revised with Lorca’s brother last night his ROMANCERO which
Beloit College Poetry Journal is going to publish in the fall as their First
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Anniversary Issue, also in Chap Book form. The poems are really beautiful.
Wish I had written them myself, not just translated them.
Hughes confesses to a deep envy of Lorca’s poetic prowess, figuring the quality of the
latter’s verse as something akin to a goal almost out of reach, as something for which to “wish.”
He coyly praises the success of his translations and relates that the poems “are really beautiful,”
but downplays his translator’s task as a “little thing,” assigning the work of translation a kind of
secondary status, “Wish I had written them myself, not just translated them.”
Translation: Midwife of the Creative Process
The Hughes who sees translation in this secondary light is a far cry from the one who, in
conversation with Guillén six years earlier, framed his own poetic production as but a mode of
translation, but his remarks do speak to his new vision of the translator as a medium, as one who
testifies to what has been said through him. Nevertheless, in his “Ten Ways to Teach Poetry”
(1951)—an article that recounts ten effective ways of teaching creative writing gleaned from
Hughes’s experience as an instructor at both Atlanta University and the University of Chicago’s
lab school—Hughes holds fast to the belief that translation and the composition of poetry are
complementary endeavors:
Finally, as an incentive toward the study of foreign languages,
American poems in French or Spanish or German translation might be studies
with the original at hand. The Dudley Fitts Anthology of Contemporary-Latin
American Poetry, with the Spanish on one page and the English on the other is
particularly good for this. Various editions of Federico García Lorca are
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published this way, too, as are the Edna St. Vincent Milay translations of
Baudelaire. For Negro students it is particularly interesting to see their own
writers in another language. (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 322)
Hughes not only paints the simultaneous study of translations and their originals as a
means by which students can learn to write poetry, but also suggests—by way of his reference to
“Negro students” interested in their “own”—that the experience of reading his own verse in
translation, as he did at the Alianza, was “particularly” formative. Although his pedagogical
polemic seems to favor the study of translations with English language source texts, the bilingual
anthologies that he characterizes as “particularly good for this” all represent cases where English
is the target language. More to the point, by singling out both Fitts’s anthology—to which he
contributed translations drawn from the works of Nicolás Guillén, Regino Pedroso, Jacques
Roumain, and Nellie Campobello—and the “various” editions of García Lorca, Hughes
forefronts the study of his own translations and their respective originals as helpful models for
the composition of poetry. In so doing, Hughes offers his reader a vision of translation and of his
own poetry that could be characterized as a precursor to the present argument, for it is his
contention that studying source and target texts set side by side—a process both akin to and part
of the work of translation—facilitates the creation of original poetry.
Given the fact that the ethics behind Hughes’s translation strategy for Romancero gitano
find their re-articulation in the vision of black internationalism that “Letter from Spain”
poeticizes, as well as the fact that the poem’s multiple frame represents, in large part, a rearticulation of Lorca’s inventive intervention into the longstanding tradition of the Spanish
romancero, it is more than fair to assert that the creation of “Gypsy Ballads” heavily informed
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the creation of Hughes’s war ballad. However, it is arguably the manner in which Lorca creates
a “retable” of Andalusia by employing polyvalent symbols and the intertexts that they invoke
(like the “one fish” who inhabits “St. Raphael [Córdoba]” and invokes both Bible and Koran)
that, more than any other factor, influenced Hughes’s creative processes. This influence helped
Hughes to compose a poetry of revolution dedicated not only to the propagation of a workers’
world and to a new vision of black internationalism, but also to the project of remaining
revolutionary.
Hughes creates his own retable of a “colored” Spain that employs polyvalent imagery and
overlapping intertexts in order to imbue “Letter from Spain” with multiple layers of meaning that
prohibit any attempt at interpretive closure. In so doing, he purposely denies his vision of black
internationalism and Revolution authoritative (and potentially fascist) weight, as any explicit or
implicit prescriptions for either are complicated by the competing or dissident discourses that
arise from a dizzying array of literary, popular, and historical allusions. In short, Hughes’s
vision of revolt, dispersal, and migration remains revolutionary precisely because it’s constructed
of doorways that refuse to stop revolving, of elements and arguments whose revolutions, or
perennial eschewal of definitive meaning, are constitutive of Hughes’s poetry of revolution.
Intertextuality: Circulation, Dispersal, and Hughes’s Black International
Hughes’s decision to assign his ballad an epistolary frame not only bolsters the
work’s themes of circulation, dispersal, and revolutionary export, but also serves as a prime
example of how Hughes uses polyvalent images, figures, and symbols to invoke intertexts that
work with and against the ideas that his poem places at the forefront. For example, Johnny’s
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letter to his unnamed “[b]rother” invokes the epistles of St. John the Apostle as an intertext, an
invocation that speaks quite well to several of the poem’s facets. Just as Johnny writes home to
bear witness to the wounded Moor’s death, arguably, with the hope of propagating the
Republican vision of a workers’ world amongst his “colored” brothers, so too does the Apostle
John write his dispersed brethren to “bear witness” to “[that] which we heard, which we have
seen with our eyes” in the hopes of propagating “fellowship” and cementing the dictates of a
nascent faith (1:1-3).
In both cases, it is the missive that carries with it both the potential for a greater
fellowship amongst men seeking to redress their physical dispersal through mutual
understanding and also a vision of a world where such an act is possible. Johnny’s vision of
“foundations shakin’” and a post-colonial Africa further invokes the New Testament as an
intertext, as it is suggestive of the sixth Book of John’s Revelations wherein the Apostle John has
an apocalyptic vision of a “great earthquake” that displaces the “kings of the earth,” forcing them
to take refuge in the mountains (6: 12-14). However, despite their shared visions of an
apocalyptic leveling, this invocation proves troubling for several of the tenets that underpin
Johnny’s post-colonial polemic, as it is not the will of man that brings about this leveling but
rather the cyclical will of God. Hence, what is figured as the potential outcome of human
endeavors, “If a free Spain wins this war, / The colonies, too, are free,” is overlaid with a
competing messianic will that undermines human agency, placing the, now inevitable, liberation
of Africa not in the hands of a “workers’ Spain” but in ones decidedly more divine.
s checked Hughes’s Lorca translation.
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The righteousness of the cause for which Johnny and “the free” fight is both bolstered
and called into question by Hughes’s use of an intertext which is also a war ballad. Johnny’s
letter home invokes the famous “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” a U.S. Civil War ballad
sung on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and composed by Patrick S. Gilmore (a Union
soldier) who claimed to base the ballad on a Negro spiritual. As is the case with the epistles of
the Apostle John, the lyrical content of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” compliments the
themes of “Letter from Spain” in several ways. Just as Johnny’s letter, in itself a form of return,
prophesizes a re-appropriation of wealth, so too does Gilmore’s ballad foresee a “jubilee” as part
and parcel of Johnny’s return home. This Jubilee is, in turn, figured by the Bible as a decision to
“return to the origins” when Israel was marked by economic equilibrium and everyone had his
own property and hence his own freedom (Lev. 25-10). In addition to their portrayal of
economic justice, both ballads also represent instances where martial endeavors are lauded as
emancipatory struggles, especially in regard to “colored” involvement. This overlap endows
Johnny’s fight in Spain with the ethical high ground occupied by the Union during the U.S. Civil
War, figuring the Republican cause as a fight against a metaphorical slavery or, in the case of the
“wounded Moor,” captivity. However, when one considers that Gilmore’s ballad is, in all
likelihood, based not on a Negro spiritual, but rather on the Irish folk song “Johnny I Hardly
Knew Ye,” yet another intertext comes to the fore and complicates this laudatory vision of the
Republican war effort. Far from a joyous anticipation of the “jubilee,” “Johnny I Hardly Knew
Ye” details the tragic homecoming of a maimed Irish conscript and dates from the nineteenth
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Hughes’s invocation of the Apostle John becomes still more vexed when one considers the fact that the Catholic
Church allied itself with Franco against the Republican cause.
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century when Irish regiments were extensively raised for the East India service. It is both dirge
and protest, and—in the context of “Letter from Spain”—speaks both to the tragic fate of the
conscripted Moor, and to a nihilistic vision of martial endeavors, as the intertextual layering of
ballad upon ballad suggests an almost endless cycle of conflict wherein the poor, colonized, and
conscripted serve as perennial cannon fodder for “the cause.” Hughes forecloses the potential
for “Letter from Spain” to be read as an unqualified Republican endorsement, and draws into
relief a machine of war that feeds itself with the displaced, dispersed, and disenfranchised.
Insofar as “Letter from Spain” presents the reader with what could be labeled the last
breath of the “wounded Moor,” the poem also invokes the famous story of “the last sigh of the
Moor.” This quasi-historical tale of Boabdil’s capitulation of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabella
figures “the last sigh of the Moor” as the place (now a tourist site) where Boabdil is said to have
wept when he last gazed at Granada while, simultaneously and magically, staring across the
sea—much like Johnny does—at the African continent that would come to serve as a home for
the expelled. This intertext not only echoes the action of the poem, and offers a type of historical
precedent for Republican victory, but also bolsters the poem’s themes of circulation, migration,
and (a kind of) revolution. It speaks to the “irony” that Hughes saw in “colonial Moors”
returning to a land their forefathers once ruled in order to fight against “a Republic that had been
seeking to work out a liberal policy toward Morocco.” However, the “irony” that arises from
overlaying Johnny’s tale and that of “the last sigh of the Moor” is darker than Hughes’s
autobiography paints it, as the tying of “colonial Moors” to Boabdil’s subjects also implies that
the Republican martial effort should be metaphorically allied with the expansionist, expulsionist,
and genocidal armies whose conquests helped to engender Spain itself. The Republican cause is
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allied with the Spanish nation state, but this Spain is a Spain of old, a Spain of conquest and the
Church, a Spain that Franco’s propaganda machine so often elegized. The capture of the Moor
by Johnny and his comrades becomes slightly more vexed, as the Moor’s defeat is akin to a
second expulsion from Spain brought about, in part, by a fellow member of the “darker races.”
Interstitial Space: Circulation Commonality and Difference
Once again, Hughes’s invocation of an intertext frustrates any attempt at a closed reading
of the work, and what comes to the fore is a “retable” of Spain from a “colored” perspective, a
picture akin to that of Lorca’s Andalusia, composed of composite symbols and intertexts that
bespeak of multiple empires and eras while simultaneously offering a vision of the present
moment. This present moment is both fictional and quasi-autobiographical, the latter facet
adding yet another dimension to Hughes’s colored “retable,” one that implicates him personally
in a vision of Spain which also serves as a symbol for the black international. This poetic vision
figures the collective as both martial and mobile, a population possessed not of or by a nation
state, but rather marked by its movement, migration, dispersal, and quest for a return, by the
common conditions of slavery, colonialism, and conscription that gave rise to its nearly perpetual
motion. In short, Hughes suggests that if a black international does indeed exist then it occupies
an interstitial space, a space inside, between and across borders marked by circulation,
commonality, and difference. Moreover, Hughes’s poem implicitly suggests that if this
collective is to recognize itself as such and, in so doing, foment a potent solidarity amongst
peoples “just as dark as me” (which also constitutes a metaphorical form of return), then it must
do so in a manner that does not re-enact the crimes that engendered it. It cannot make converts
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of the “captured” nor can it eschew the difference that is both the consequence of its dispersal
and the precondition for its existence. Rather, its conditions for the inclusion and recruitment of
others must possess an elasticity and health akin to Johnny’s salutary “[s]alud”—the Republican
fraternal hail that serves as both greeting and goodbye—as it must respect the differences and
wishes of peoples who may or may not want to be included in this international collective.
Hughes’s “retable” of “colored” Spain is, in fact, so riddled with allusions that a catalog
of all of them would be beyond the scope of this chapter, but given the ballad’s final moments—
where a “deluded” Moor dies, arguably, because he does not “understand”—the present
argument would be remiss if it did not include the intertextual role played by Othello in “Letter
from Spain.” Like Johnny and the “wounded Moor,” Othello occupies a place in the long line of
“colored peoples” displaced and dispersed by martial endeavors. Likewise, just as the “wounded
Moor” is both other and potential brethren, so too is Othello both a foreigner and an agent of the
Venetian court, and it is arguably his status as both that fuels Iago’s hatred and leads to his
downfall. Missives figure prominently throughout the tragedy, and it is the discovery of Iago’s
and Roderigo’s letters (by Cassio and Lodovico respectively) that facilitate Othello’s partial
understanding of the tragic fate and trickery to which he has fallen victim. Once Othello
possesses this partial understanding of events, he refuses to leave Cyprus and account for his
murder of Desdemona before the Venetian court, a court that holds him in racist contempt from
ainst and aided by “colored peoples.”
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Hughes made reference to “deluded Moors” in his “Negroes in Spain,” published in Volunteer for Liberty in
September of 1937 (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 156). And Othello can be said to be Spanish insofar as the sword he carries
is, in his words, “a sword of Spain.”
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the play’s opening moments. Instead, he asks that his fate be relayed to the court in a letter, one
that speaks to his dual status as other and as a member of the Venetian collective:
Soft you; a word or two before you go
I have done the state some service, and they know’t.—
No more of that.—I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice [….]
Set you down this;
And say besides, —that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took him by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him—thus.
[stabs himself] (5.2.498-517)
Stabbing himself “thus” (tellingly with his “sword of Spain”), Othello frames his suicide
by recounting (and, in some senses, reenacting) his former Venetian heroism while
simultaneously aligning himself with the enemy of the state, “a malignant and a turban’d Turk.”
He figures his former “service” to the state, “[no] more of that,” as both evidence of his former
acceptance by the collective, “and they know’t,” and as something which endows him with the
right to ask that those present to bear witness to the events surrounding his death. He asks that
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they speak of him as “I am,” as both unlucky Venetian and as radically other, begging that they
“extenuate” nothing. Othello’s dying request is one that asks for the same type of respect
exemplified in the ethics lying behind “Letter from Spain,” Hughes’s translation strategy for
Romancero gitano, his vision of pan-Africanism, and the act of bearing witness. It is a respect
for the other that demands the most accurate account possible, and requires that witness,
translator, or representative serve as a medium who extenuates nothing. The medium does not
thin out the multiple mediations of his message, or, as Johnny articulates, neither he nor the
Moor “understand” completely. Adding thus to the above apocalyptic readings, “seed” does not
extenuate understanding, but rather points to it as potential, as a seed which may bare identity,
bear fruit, bear witness. Hughes takes up Othello’s multiply wrought demand for testimony that
juxtaposes the negative, “[n]or set down aught in malice,” with the positive “[s]et you down
this.” The first speaks to the disposition of the messenger, pointing not only to the avoidance of
“malice,” but also—via an aural pun in “aught”—to a willed absence as well as to the ethical call
of “ought.” And, when compared with the second, the dual meaning of “set down,” at once
place lower and place on the page, becomes apparent. By heeding these words from “old
England / And I reckon Italy, too” in his “Letter from Spain” that is “Addressed to Alabama,”
Hughes offers another example of temporal layering, the contemporary with the Elizabethan and
with Italian notions of Old Spain, to grapple with the “aught” and “ought” of testimony in his revisionary ballad. He layers racial, political and aesthetic hierarchies and timelines not dreamt of
in Lorca’s romanceros. In short, Othello may reenact the death of the “wounded Moor” and add
to the “colored” tragedy of Hughes’s alluvial “retable,” but the vision, ethics, and predicament
that fuel Othello’s dying request find an echo and ethical counterpart in Hughes’s poem.
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García Lorca in “Shakespeare in Harlem”
Given the temporal overlap of Hughes’s composition of “Letter from Spain” and his
translation of Romancero gitano, the process of determining whether Hughes’s ethics of
translation inspired his vision of black internationalism or vice versa becomes something akin to
a chicken-egg problem which is, perhaps, best resolved by granting each process its due and
allowing for mutual influence. However, Hughes’s poetic repertoire, especially in regard to the
composition of ballads, was decidedly enhanced by his encounter with Lorca. Prior to his
residence at the Alianza, Hughes composed only four poems which he labeled ballads: “Ballad of
Ozie Powell,” a ballad recounting Ozie Powell’s (one of the Scottsboro nine) persecution at the
hands of “a white High Sheriff who shoots to kill”; “Ballad of Roosevelt,” a satirical first person
account of “waitin’ on Roosevelt” to cure the ills of abject poverty; “Ballads of Lenin,”
discussed in the first chapter; and the “Ballad of Gin Mary,” a poem detailing the imprisonment
(and sobering up) of the cheerfully named, but alcoholic, Gin Mary. With the exception of the
latter, all of these poems, like “Letter from Spain,” present the reader with a, more or less,
popular ballad that offers a decidedly leftist take on current events, but none offer the reader the
intertextual and temporal play that marks Hughes’s Spanish Civil War ballads. However, in the
years following the war, Hughes’s poetic production saw an explosion of ballads, as the poet
wrote twenty-one ballads that bare the unmistakable imprint of Lorca.
Just as Romancero gitano does for an unnamed Andalusia, Langston Hughes’s
Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) contains a sequence of ballads portraying stock figures who, in
conjunction with one another, offer a portrait of an anonymous Harlem. These figures occupy a
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“vague and mysterious space time continuum” that is, often times, comprised of past, present,
and future, and whose major themes—as is the case in Romancero gitano—are sex and death.
The first ballad of the sequence, “Ballad of the Sinner,” not only provides an example of this
“continuum” and these themes, but is also exemplary of the sequence as a whole. The poem’s
first moments present the reader with a temporally vexed stanza that narrates an event that is
both past and a beginning, “I went down the road, / Dressed to kill— / Straight down the road /
That leads to hell” (1-4). The persona narrates a completed action in the past, “I went down the
road.” He then paints a portrait of himself that is at once idiomatic, sexual, and murderous,
“[d]ressed to kill,” and concludes the stanza by relating that the road traveled is not simply a
literal one, but an eternal one best represented in the present tense, “[t]hat leads to hell.” In the
course of the next two stanzas, the persona narrates how he ignored the advice of both his
“Mother” (who is twice invoked with this appellation) and family who “warned me true,”
consistently framing matters in the past tense, even though this past is multiply layered, “I did
not act like / My mother’s child” (5-6, 11-12). Throwing referent, time, and religious
connotations into turmoil, the persona concludes with the following stanzas:
She begged me, please,
Stay on the right track
But I was drinking licker,
Jitterbugging back,
Going down the road,
All dressed to kill—
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The road that leads right straight to hell.
Pray for me, Mama! (16-25)
With “She begged me, please, / Stay on the right track,” Hughes creates two poly-vocal
lines that blur present and past as he both recalls the religious tones of prior admonishments and
voices defiance. If the poem means to imply, with the dialogue marker “[s]he begged,” that
“please, / Stay on the right track” represents prior advice, then it is a remembrance that holds the
possibility of redemption through a memory held true. Yet, if “please” is read not as pleading
but as revolt against the words of advice, “Stay on the right track”—a reading supported by the
line break which would punctuate the implied dialogue correctly—then the line harbors within it
the seeds of a repeated Fall. Indeed, the next two lines invoke the sexualized vocabulary of jazz,
as the misspelling of “licker” brings to mind the licks of a jazz rift to which the persona is
“jitterbugging back.” If “please” rhetorically sways toward God, “back” also implies the seeds
of contrition when the reader keeps in mind that the road back up could be a spatial return as
well as a temporal turn back to the warnings against an earthly life that leads to eternal
damnation. It is at these crossroads, that the poem stages the vexed moral, temporal and spatial
locations of the narrator. In the penultimate stanza Hughes creates a feeling of a pregnant now
composed of present tense verbs wherein the narrator balances between the paths of
righteousness and of perdition: “Right straight to hell.” This line clearly evokes the
colloquialism of going “straight to hell,” but the punctuated emphasis of “Right” gestures toward
the lost “[r]ight” and “straight” way. The final stanza brings the poem home with a Blues tone
when for the first time the narrator replaces “Mother” with “Mama.” This small change
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multiplies the poem’s semantic and temporal possibilities, where “Pray for me, Mama!” is
simultaneously a prelapsarian revisiting of a child’s cry for his mother’s prayers, an adult’s
gesture of contrition over his fallen state, and an invocation of music-inspired slang that makes
of the line a provocative call to his lover. The aforementioned “[s]he” ostensibly has potentially
two prior referents, “Mother” and “Sister,” but—with the word play that results in the
introduction of a lover—Hughes multiplies the subjects as well as the interlocutors. When
“[s]he” might be a lover, Hughes proliferates the possible temporal location of the original
utterance, as well as the moment when the narrator chooses to tell his tale. Given the contexts of
the here and now versus the eternal, Hughes courts a jovial defiance of his own where the paths
of time cross so that what might lie beyond sings out as a questioning supplication. Indeed,
given the temporal play of Hughes’s ballads, it would seem that the “Poeta en Nueva York” was
reincarnated in Harlem.
Although Hughes’s poetic production while in Spain is indeed scant, his residence at the
Alianza—a residence that allied him with many of the Spanish speaking world’s most acclaimed
poets, including (to name just a few) Alberti, Pablo Neruda and José Bergamin is perhaps, more
than any other factor, responsible for cementing Hughes in leftist Latin American contexts. His
high profile residence at the Alianza is well attested to by the rapidity with which his verse was
translated into Spanish. This rapid fire back and forth is perhaps best exemplified by the
translation of his “Roar China,” which was published: in Volunteer for Liberty on September 6,
1937; in the Spanish journal Ayuda twelve days later (owing to the auspices of one of Hughes’s
Cuban connections Lino Novás Calvo); and in the very influential Mexican periodical Repertorio
americano on November 6, 1937, where Novás Calvo’s translation appeared under a headline
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highlighting Hughes’s cemented, international stature, “El que cantó Harlem canta China y
España” [“He Who Sang Harlem Sings China and Spain”].
Hughes’s pressing desire for unity coupled with his respect for difference does not then
result in a categorical rejection of theoretical unities designed to foment global black
emancipation (black internationalisms). Rather, this desire is best brought to light when Hughes
faces a world proliferated with the conundrums of realpolitik that run up against the multiple
aesthetic strategies proposed to address multifarious and nefarious injustices through “great
human movements.” Desire is an especially apt word in this case as it addresses both the wellrecognized sincerity of Hughes’ verse, but illuminates the heretofore unappreciated pained
skepticism that this desire for the ideal engenders, since the object of desire inherently flees from
the one who pursues it. The object of desire remains steadfast on the horizon. And, in the case
of Hughes’s poetic mind, these horizons historically arise as numerous and under the sway of
ideological frames that show up their irreconcilability. Hughes cultivates poetic strategies culled
from his alliances and translations to articulate and create a poetic idiom that represents political
desire. The temporal layering, the attention to the material as well as mutability, the hand held
out to black solidarities and the hand held back, the black arm linked with the worker and the
effort to break the links of oppression and enslavement that haunt full and equal political
participation testify to voices recognized as consciously striving for unity in a way that copes
with the mourning that these strategies engender. Hughes’s questioning and questing after
utopian, heterotopian (for lack of an adjective less anachronistic) and tangible political solutions
results in a poetic that shows up the edges of each horizon and can’t thusly but undermine their
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hearts. Red heart, green heart, yellow heart, black heart, white heart, no heart beat but a
syncopated rhythm in Hughes’s poetic revolution.
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Chapter 3: Works Cited and Consulted
Alberti, Rafael. “Langston Hughes.” El mono azul. August 19, 1937.
--. Introduction. Romancero general de la guerra española. Buenos Aires: Patronato Hispano
Argentino de Cultura, 1944.
--. Introduction. Romancero gitano. Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Emilio Delgado.” 29 May 1935, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Pablo Neruda.” 29 May 1935, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Emilio Prados.” 29 May 1935, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Arturo Serrano Plaja.” 29 May 1935, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Anon. “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’.”
The Bible. |url: http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/new-testament/john_1/1.asp
Carpentier, Alejo. “Retrato de un dictador” Octubre, No. 3, Octubre-Agosto, 1933.
Cunard, Nancy. Negro. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Company, 1970.
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--. “To Langston Hughes.” 5 March 1937, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Delgado, Emilio. “Nota.” Octubre, No. 3, Octubre-Agosto, 1933.
--. “Carta a los camaradas del Sur.” Octubre, No. 3, Octubre-Agosto, 1933.
Du Bois, W.E.B.. “To the Nations of the World” in Alexander Walter’s My Life an My
Work. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1917.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 31 January 1929, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 15 September 1931, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 26 May 1941, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes,” 8 January 1945, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Eich, Christoph. F. García Lorca, poeta de intensidad. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1958.
Espinosa, Aurelio. “El Romancero.” Hispania, Vol. 12, No. 1, February, 1929: 1-32.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony : Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Fitts, Dudley. Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry. Ed. Dudley Fitts. Norfolk,
Conn: New Directions, 1942.
García Lorca, Federico. Federico García Lorca Collected Poems. Ed. Christopher Maurer.
New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002.
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--. Romancero Gitano. Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive,
Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Gypsy Ballads.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts. 1937, 1945, 1951, Langston Hughes Papers,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
García Lorca, Francisco. De Garcilaso a Lorca. Madrid: Istmo, 1984.
Guillén, Nicolás. “Un poeta en espardeñas.” Prosa de Prisa 1929-1972: Tomo II. La Habana:
Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975.
Gibson, Ian. Federico García Lorca: a Life. London: Faber, 1989.
Gilmore, Patrick S. “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” 1863.
Hughes, Langston The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. ed. Arnold Rampersad. New
York: Vintage Classics, 1994.
--. “Haciendo un camino.” Trans. Rafael Alberti, El mono azul. August 19, 1937.
--. “Hombre convertido en hombres.” Trans. Rafael Alberti, El mono azul. August 19, 1937.
--. “Hughes Finds Moors Being Used as Fascist Pawns in Spain.” Afro American, October 30,
1937, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 10, Fight for Freedom and Other
Civil Rights Essays. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and London: University of
Missouri Press, 2002.
--. I Wonder as I Wander. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 14, ed. Joseph
McLaren. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “Negroes in Spain.” Volunteer for Liberty, September, 1937, The Collected Works of
Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed.
Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
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--. “Ruge China.” Trans. Lino Novás Calvo. Ayuda, September 18, 1937 and Repertorio
americano, November 6, 1937.
--. “Ten Ways To Teach Poetry.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on
Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “Too Much of Race.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 10, Fight for Freedom
and Other Civil Rights Essays. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and London:
University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “To Arna Bontemps,” 9 June 1951, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To David Ignatow,” 8 June 1951, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Richard Glauber,” 8 June 1951, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “Yo soy negro.” Trans. Rafael Alberti, El mono azul. August 19, 1937.
--. “Yo También….” Trans. Rafael Alberti, El mono azul. August 19, 1937.
Leighton, Charles. “The Treatment of Time and Space in the “Romancero Gitano.” Hispania,
Vol. 43, No. 3, September, 1960: 378-383.
Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century
1919-1963. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000.
Pereda Valdés, Idelfonso. Antología de la poesía negra americana. Santiago de Chile, 1936.
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Maurer, Christopher. Introduction. Federico García Lorca Collected Poems. New York: Farrar,
Strauss, and Giroux, 2002.
Mayone Dias, Eduardo. “Los Romanceros de la Guerra Civil.” Hispania, Vol. 51, No. 3,
September, 1968: 433-439.
Merriam-Webster. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Ed.
Philip Babcock Gove. Springfied Mass: Merriam-Webster, 2002.
Montero, Enrique. Revelación de una revista mitica. Madrid: Ediciones Turner, 1977.
Neruda, Pablo. “To Langston Hughes.” 5 March 1937, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Nueva Cultura, January 1936.
Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume I: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Ramsden, H. Lorca’s Romancero gitano: Eighteen Commentaries. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988.
Shakespeare, William. “Othello.” The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Stamford:
Longmeadow Press, 1980.
Shepperson, George. “Pan-Africanism and ‘Pan-Africanism’” Phylon, Vol. 23, No. 4, 4th
Quarter, 1962: 346-358.
Szertics, Joseph. “Federico García Lorca y el romancero viejo.” MLN, Vol. 84, No. 2, Hispanic
Issue, March, 1969: 269-285.
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Chapter 4
NégritudeWhat ?:
Anthologies and the Consecration of Langston Hughes in the U.S. and the Hispanic and
Francophone worlds.
Literary anthologies—along with academic surveys of literature,
which are usually based on anthologies—contribute more than anything else
to the canonization of certain literatures. Yet the very concept of literary
anthologies is problematic at best. On what bases are such anthologies
constructed? “Merit” and “historical importance” are the criteria traditionally
invoked by anthologizers, but, like “truth” and “beauty,” these terms are not
easy (perhaps not possible) to define. Factors such as inertia, tradition,
prejudice, and capriciousness seem to influence the contents of literary
anthologies as often as honest (albeit of arbitrary and subjective) efforts to
evaluate excellence and importance.
Howard Mancing, “A Consensus Canon of Hispanic Poetry.”
The factors and bases that informed the anthologization of Langston Hughes’s verse in
the U.S., France, the Francopohone world, and Spanish America are as varied and heterogeneous
as the literary arenas in which these anthologies were published. The diverse aesthetic and
discursive regimes that greeted Hughes’s early poetic production endured and helped to solidify
his international personae, but they also transformed in step with developments in global arenas
both literary and political, positioning Hughes anew several times over. Via an in-depth analysis
of each of the anthologies of Hughes’s poetry published in the U.S., Hispanic, and Francophone
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worlds since 1940, this chapter draws into stark relief how each of these factors played a role in
the poet’s international consecration in the pantheon of the world’s great poets. This
consecration was in no small part fomented by several global literary and political developments
that influenced the anthologizing process, and allowed for multiple incarnations of Langston
Hughes’s personae to inhabit different literary spheres and to serve literary forefather to multiple
literary movements and writers. Through an in-depth analysis of Hughes’s archival
correspondence as well as of the anthologies of his verse, the chapter also illustrates that Hughes
played an active role in fashioning his international literary consecration by providing his
anthologists with a helping (and at times guiding) hand. This help and guidance reflects
Hughes’s acute awareness of the different instantiations of his poetic personae and the divergent
literary arenas they inhabited, his desire to perpetuate these multiple personae, and his
concomitant wish to be known not simply as a U.S. poet, but also as a world poet. Hughes’s
work as an anthologist of poetry, of poetry in translation, and of his own verse also dramatically
affected his conception of translation. This impact transformed him from a translator nearly
obsessed with producing literal translations into one who saw more value in multiple translations
of a single poem (which reveal multiple perspectives on the poem) than he did in any “perfect”
translation. He came to see translation as an asymptotic and never-ending process that served to
consecrate the work of great poets in the international literary pantheon, as a part of the grand
project of world literature. Lastly, the chapter traces Hughes’s reticence to speak to the issue of
négritude throughout the majority of his career and the role played by the movement in
consecrating him in the Francophone world. It explains how his initial distrust of a movement
that he equated with racial essentialism became an ideal vehicle for his conception of the ethics
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of translation vis-à-vis black internationalism. At life’s end, Hughes saw translation not only as
a means to express what had not yet been expressed in his maternal tongue (a healthy injection of
outside, intellectual and literary thought), but also as a means through which one could give
onself (and one’s voice) over to an Other in the pursuit of mutual understanding.
In order to substantiate these claims it is necessary to examine multiple works in order to
delineate the spread of the poet’s fame in the U.S., France, and the Hispanic and Francophone
worlds. The parameters of the relationship among Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and
Nancy Cunard led to the first instantiation of literary black internationalism, published in
Cunard’s seminal anthology Negro. Hughes’s contribution of his own verse and of his Englishlanguage translations of Roumain, Nicolás Guillén, and Regino Pedroso consecrated an
international pantheon of black poets for the first time, a pantheon that (exempting Pedroso) both
long endured and came to serve as a fount for the poets of the négritudeand the Spanish
American poesía negra movements. René Piquion’s French-language anthology and study of
Hughes’s verse, Langston Hughes: Un chant nouveau (1940), built upon Cunard’s international
vision by anthologizing the poet’s verse in a manner that painted him, first and foremost, as a
Marxist revolutionary whose racial politics served as a complement to his communist ambitions.
Hughes’s relationship to Piquion’s project indicated that he was more than comfortable with
fomenting differing instantiations of his poetic personae abroad, but was also intimidated by the
Second Red Scare and therefore reticent to allow these leftist personae to follow him home.
Piquion’s figuration of Hughes as a poet whose Marxism and anti-assimilative politics were one
and the same was attractive to negritude’s “Big Three”—Aimé Cesaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor,
and Léon Damas—who each (without prompting from Piquion) looked to Hughes as a literary
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exemplar whose poetry embodied their thirst for cultural autonomy. In service of their agendas,
all of these figures were not only inspired by Hughes, but also aided in the dissemination of
Hughes’s poetry in French-language translation and in the consecration of his Marxist personae
in the Francophone world. Nevertheless, Hughes’s distaste for iterations of racial essentialism
made him distrustful of the early articulations of négritude, and—despite numerous requests—he
declined to comment on the topic even after its chief proponents framed him as a forefather. As
Hughes was well aware, the “Big Three” were not the only cadre of poets who looked to Hughes
as a forefather, as Hughes was seen throughout Spanish America as a radical-socialist and a
precursor to (or member of) the poesía negra movement. Quite cognizant of this fact, Hughes
helped Julio Galer to shape the first Spanish-language anthology of his verse, Poemas (1952), in
order to suit uniquely Spanish American tastes and expectations of the poet, fomenting (in the
process) still more international personae for himself that were comfortable in Marxist arenas
abroad, but not welcome in the U.S. Nevertheless, the chickens came home to roost when
Hughes was summoned before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities
Committee and forced to renounce his former communist affiliations and leftist sympathies.
Despite his valiant defense, McCarthy’s attempt to stifle a leftist Hughes proved successful
insofar as it influenced the red-free compiling of Hughes’s self-anthology, Selected Poems
(1958), a collection whose focus is, in large part, responsible for consecrating Hughes solely as a
race-poet in U.S. literary arenas where the growing strength of the Civil Rights movement made
such a focus politically palatable. In France, the Cold-War climate had already produced a
somewhat similar effect on the first anthologization of Hughes’s poetry in French-language
translation, Poèmes (1955) by François Dodat. This collection was devoid of Marxist content
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and—answering to the demands of a pro-assimilation French-reading public whose colonial
empire in Africa was rapidly crumbling—of Hughes’s verse of racial injustice and discontent, a
fact that did not go unnoticed by proponents of négritudewho, nevertheless, found some relief in
Dodat’s inclusion of Hughes’s early primitivist verse because they considered it to be a reflection
of Marxist sentiment. Dodat’s decisions were replicated for the same reasons in his larger
anthology of Hughes’s verse, Langston Hughes (1964). Hughes’s experiences collaborating with
his anthologists, constructing English-language anthologies of the verse of Nicolás Guillén in
1947 and Gabriela Mistral in 1957, and compiling his own self-anthology dramatically affected
his views on translation. The ideal of a literal translation gave way, in the face of multiple
Hugheses, to a conception of translation that saw the process as one that engendered and
perpetuated world literature. Hughes’s re-evaluation of translation, in turn, led him to rethink
négritude in his “Black Writers in a Troubled World” (1966). The concept was no longer a
dangerous manifestation of racial essentialism for Hughes, but rather an ideal metaphor for
translation itself. In Hughes’s eyes, translations were akin to instantiations of négritude because
both constituted individual and collective re-distillations of inherited artistic production and of
worldwide incarnations of the so-called race problem.
Anthologizing the Living
In the frugal eyes of Pierre Seghers, an anthology devoted to a living author was both an
honor and a reward in and of itself. It offered a type of literary consecration and prestige seldom
afforded to practicing poets, granting them a priceless place in literary history. Hence, when
Seghers decided to publish an anthology of Langston Hughes’s poetry in French language
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translation, he did not contact Hughes’s literary agent to obtain and pay for the necessary
translation rights (as he did years earlier while assembling a smaller collection of Hughes’s verse
in 1955). Offering prestige in the place of financial recompense, the maverick publisher instead
chose to write Hughes directly (on April 18, 1963) to inform him of the great honor which
Éditions Seghers was prepared to bestow:
Cher Poète,
Je viens de decider de vous consacrer un livre important dans
le cadre de ma collection “Poètes d’Aujourd’hui”.
Vous y serez le 4ème poète américain après Walt Whitman, Edgar
Poe, Emily Dickinson. Je pense que votre oeuvre mérite bien cet hommage,
dans cette collection que est diffusée dans le monde entire.
Dear Poet,
I’ve decided to devote an important book to you. It will be
published as a part of my collection “Poets of Today.”
You’ll be the fourth American poet to be included in the series,
after Walt Whitman, Edgar Poe, Emily Dickinson. I believe that your oeuvre
well deserves this homage in this collection which is disseminated throughout
the entire world.
Seghers appeals to a presumed thirst for fame on Hughes’s part, offering the poet both
contemporary worldwide recognition and, perhaps more importantly, Fame in its Classical
incarnation. He implies that the proposed anthology will serve to place Hughes amongst the
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great poets in U.S. literary history as well as amongst poets whose talents have allowed them to
escape the confines of their borders and their language. Figuring translation as a form of
international literary consecration, Seghers proposes not simply to “consacrer” an important
book to Hughes’s poems, but rather to devote an “hommage” to Hughes’s entire oeuvre. The
Poètes d’Aujourd’hui series will offer the French reading public a, more or less, definitive and
defining panorama of Hughes’s verse, an “important” book that will come to stand for Hughes
himself.
François Dodat—the man twice chosen by Seghers to translate Hughes for the French
reading public—both echoed the publisher’s sentiments and his relative ignorance of Hughes’s
international stature in the Francophone world in a letter he sent to the poet on June 11, 1963.
Commenting on the Poètes d’Aujourd’hui series, Dodat informed Hughes, “In fact [sic] it is here
a best-selling series and as you will be the first living American poet to be published this ought
to make your poetry widely known throughout the French speaking countries of Europe and
Africa.” Dodat’s characterization of Seghers’ series as “best-selling” not only speaks again to
Seghers’ promise of fame, but also brings into relief the financial stakes of his venture. Seghers
had taken great pains to misrepresent these stakes in his missives to Hughes, repeatedly
informing him that the series “n’est pas une enterprise commerciale, mais une collection de
prestige destine à mieux faire connaître les grands poètes” [is not a commercial enterprise, but
rather a prestige collection intended to make the work of great poets better known]. One
hundred dollars was supposedly all the money that Éditions Seghers could offer.
Hughes was careful neither to accept nor refuse the pittance offered by Seghers, but
quickly agreed to let Seghers go forward with the project and to assist Dodat in its preparation.
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In a sardonic letter dated June 20, 1963, Hughes offered a glimpse into the reasoning behind his
decision:
Cher Pierre Seghers:
Je suis hereux que vous avez decider de me consacrer un livre
dans le cadre de votre collection, POÈTES [sic] d’Aujourd’hui. Comme je ne
suis pas mort, c’est un honeur [sic], non? Merci.
J’ai reçu une bonne carte de François Dodat, et je viens d’ecrier
[sic] à lui et d’envoyer plusiers choses (notes autobiographique [sic], etc.)
pour lui aider, aussi quelques poemes [sic] inédites.
Dear Pierre Seghers:
I’m happy that you’ve decided to devote a book to me as a part
of your collection “Poets of Today.” As I’m not dead, it’s an honor, right?
Thanks.
I received a nice card from François Dodat, and I’ve just
written to him and sent several things (autobiographical notes, etc.) to help
him, as well as some unpublished poems.
Hughes begins his letter by mirroring, almost word for word, Seghers’ annunciation of
his forthcoming volume, but then plays with the publisher’s sentiments and logic, offering a quip
that illuminates the motivation behind Hughes’s participation in the project. It is not the quality
of his oeuvre that merits Seghers’ “hommage,” but rather the fact that Hughes is “not dead”
which merits the “honor” afforded him. Hughes thus highlights the fact that his oeuvre is still
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under construction, and that Seghers’ volume constitutes but a part of a growing corpus.
Simultaneously, Hughes forefronts the high stakes involved in Seghers’ project. Although
Hughes is not yet buried, the forthcoming volume—if it is to treat him as Éditions Seghers has
treated his U.S. counterparts—is nevertheless deeply invested in Hughes’s mortality and his
literary legacy. In short, the collection honors him because he is not dead and, somewhat
paradoxically, also honors him as if he were dead, as if he were a Whitman, Poe, or Dickinson.
The “honor” granted to Hughes therefore amounts to nothing less than an allowance that permits
him to shape his own legacy, a license to enshrine himself in translation and in international
literary history. In fact, Hughes is quick to point out that he has already set about the task of
writing his own revisionist tombstone. He relates that it is he who has provided the
“autobiographical notes” that will frame his poetry and that, perhaps more intriguingly, it is he
who will alter existing conceptions of his oeuvre by augmenting it with a selection of his
unpublished poems. With this in mind, Hughes’s agreement to labor for a pittance—despite
Seghers’ deception—begins to make sense. Hughes does not labor for one hundred dollars or for
fame in and of itself, but rather for the opportunity to play a role in sculpting his own French
Fame. Moreover, this Fame is of a curious nature. It is an evolving Fame, one whose
instantiation in French translation both cements Hughes’s literary reputation while
simultaneously augmenting and transforming it, begging yet another (and another) attempt to fix
it into place. In short, it is a Fame that embodies the paradoxes, pitfalls, and potential inherent in
anthologizing the living.
The Literary Black International is Born
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The promises of Fame that Seghers and Dodat offered Hughes constitute a type of fool’s
gold (where Hughes was no fool) since Hughes was positioned and had been positioning his
poetic identity through translation throughout the “entire world” for over thirty years. In fact,
Hughes’s francophone fame was part and parcel of his rebirth in translation, as his relationship
with Haitian poet Jacques Roumain, facilitated in no small part by Fernández de Castro’s letter
of introduction, not only led Hughes to translate Roumain’s verse, but also gave rise to a
triumvirate—composed of Hughes, Guillén, and Roumain—that is often credited as a precursor
(or the genesis) of what would come to be known as the négritude movement.
In 1931 and 1932, Roumain sent Hughes two prescient missives that both named Hughes
the kernel and captain of black international poetry, and also signaled what would come to be a
shared and split canonical heritage for the poets of négritude and poesía negra. In the letter sent
in 1932, Roumain wrote “en tout sincerité que je vois en vous le plus grand poète noire de tant
les Ameriques” [in all sincerity I see in you the greatest Negro poet in all the Americas].
Roumain’s perspective on who constitutes the greatest Negro poet of the Americas is in no small
part the result of a history of reading a wide array of black authors writing in the Americas which
was largely facilitated by the translations Hughes sent him. Roumain’s 1931 letter details the
emerging literary horizons on which he bases his judgment:
Mon cher Langston,
Je vous remercier infiniment l’envoi de poèmes de Guillén,
Pedroso, et de la traduction splendid que vous avez bien voulu faire de mes
vers. Traduction splendid en qui me plait tant que je la [illegible] á l’original
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français. Je vous sais également que de [illegible] á Nancy Cunard pour une
collaboration á Color.
Je ferai de mon mieux [illegible] lui donner pleine satisfaction.
Veuillez me croire, mon cher Langston, votre trés sincere,
Jacques Roumain
p.s. J’ai écrit un poème inspire par votre existence magnifique et
aventureuse (au sens le meilleur de cet mot).
My dear Langston,
I’m infinitely grateful for the poems by Guillén and
Pedroso that you sent me and for the splendid translation you skillfully
made of my verse. Splendid translation that pleases me as much as if I
[illegible] it in the original French. I know you also know that [illegible] to
Nancy Cunard for a contribution to Color.
I will do my best [illegible] to fully satisfy her.
Please believe me, my dear Langston, very sincerely yours,
Jacques Roumain
p.s. I wrote a poem inspired by your magnificent and adventurous (in
the best sense of the word) existence.
Roumain’s letter, as do Hughes’s “splendid” English translations, tie together the three
poets who constitute key figures in the emergence of three black literary movements: Hughes
and The New Negro movement in the United States, Guillén and the poesía negra movement in
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Spanish America, and Roumain and the négritude movement in the Francophone world. Yet,
this tying together also demonstrates how disparate cultures and geographies develop poetic
movements through a concomitant interdependence facilitated by translation, conversation and
dissemination. This interdependence is reified and complicated not only by the fact that
Roumain’s critical assessment of the black poetic landscape of the Americas is one derived from
comparisons of English language translations, but also by fact that Hughes, in the critical
literature and anthologies surrounding all of these movements, occupies a transient central space.
He is routinely figured as a precursor to the négritude movement (as is also Guillén), and he is
also a fount for the development of the poesía negra movement. The pleasure Roumain derives
from the translations, as he describes in his letter, is equal to the pleasure he would derive from
reading the very original. In this way, although the possibility of linguistic hierarchies is everpresent, it is belied by a faith in “existence” itself, in the very existence of Hughes being a main
and mediating figure.
Roumain’s letter also gestures toward his desire to satisfy another literary maverick
looming large on the horizon vis-à-vis the dissemination of black authors, Nancy Cunard, as his
reference to “Color” is in all likelihood a reference to Cunard’s seminal anthology Negro (1934).
Cunard’s eight-hundred page anthology in generally considered the last attempt to anthologize
the “Negro” (where “Negro,” in this case, denotes Africans and peoples of African descent) in a
single volume and is largely comprised of leftist (if not communist) political commentaries and
historical essays. Poetry forms a small part of the anthology, and Hughes’s original poems
(including “I Too” which actually begins the anthology) as well as his translations of Guillén,
Roumain, and Pedroso comprise the bulk of the verse contained therein. Hence, the first and last
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attempt to offer a worldwide panorama of black poets was facilitated largely by Hughes’s work
as poet and translator and by his international leftist stature. With the help of international
literary figures like Pablo Neruda, Cunard would continue to publish Hughes’s selection in
English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese in the decades to come, cementing these translation
ties (that did indeed bind) the world over. In so doing, she offered the world its first picture of
international black literature, the seeds and the saplings of what would become the genealogical
trees of black literary movements on both sides of the Atlantic.
By the time Langston Hughes was buried in 1967, the figures of these international
literary movements had been in engaged with both Hughes’s poetry and with Hughes himself for
quite some time. Thus, the progeny of the poetic precursors that Cunard brought together under
one umbrella had been founding and re-founding their poetic identities and identifications in
specific ways (both cultural and aesthetic) that took Hughes into account and, conversely, that
Hughes—in the fashioning of his international personae—also took into account. The
Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States responded to Cunard’s vision with their own
anthologizing projects, and, in so doing, made it (and make it) impossible to see Hughes’s as a
singular, complete or unified poetic voice. The histories of the various ways that these
anthologies arise and embed Hughes lay bare both the aesthetic regimes which drove each
endeavor and Hughes’s astute and active role in self-fashioning his various international
incarnations.
Revolutionary and Racial Solidarity: Hughes as Phoenix
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The first anthology of Hughes’s verse was also the first book length study devoted to
Hughes’s literary production, and was written by René Piquion. Composed in French and
published in Haiti, Piquion’s Langston Hughes: Un chant nouveau (1940), curiously enough,
does not offer its readers a translation of Hughes’s compilation of his “radical” poetry presented
in A New Song (1938). Rather, the volume seeks to paint a portrait of Hughes and his entire
oeuvre that is, among other things, an argument to read his poetic as one of revolutionary and
racial solidarity. Composed with the help of both Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, when
the former was actively disassociating himself from the U.S. left, Piquion’s book provides a
prime example not only of how the construction of Hughes’s international personae was dictated
by differing aesthetic regimes, but also of how Hughes—aware of these differences—sought
international avenues to encourage a memorialization of the concept of himself as a
revolutionary poet.
Piquion’s avant-propos frames the entire volume (and Hughes’s poetic project) in terms
of both a military struggle and a resurrection. After invoking the present World War and
detailing a history of slavery and conflict that stretches back to Antiquity, Piquion suggests that
the promises of the Enlightenment and of the abolition of slavery in the United States are finding
their fulfillment—vis-à-vis the world’s black population—rising out of what Lincoln could not
imagine when the New World began the process of enfranchising the “nouveau citoyen-esclave”
[new citizen-slave] (9). He argues that the successors of the new citizen-slave are finally
founding a trans-Atlantic identity and freedom: “Depuis, en Amérique comme en Afrique le
Nègre médite, développe sa personnalité, attend l’ere de la liberation definitive” [Since then
{emancipation}, the Negro in the Americas as in Africa contemplates, develops his personality,
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awaits the era of definitive liberation] (9). Piquion views the vexed inheritance of the
Enlightenment to blacks as an unexpected thinking and development outside the bounds of its
own legitimating logic, beyond its limits of imagination. It is at these limits, here represented by
the cross-currents of thought that bridge and cross the historical perils of the Atlantic, where
“definitive liberation” is engendered. Piquion first imagines this liberation in terms of Western
intellectual history and myths, but develops a notion of freedom through his reading of Hughes
which is tied to the necessity of realizing a more complete political emancipation through a new
political ordering of worlds Old and New.
Hughes is figured by Piquion as the voice who will rise up from the dying light— the
darkening of the Enlightenment inheritance—of the old pantheon, “le crepuscule des dieux
cruels et insatiables” [the twilight of cruel and insatiable gods], to secure a new one: “Dans
l’atente angoissée un jeune dieu d’ébène fort et confiant lutte. Et dans la lutte etonne Un chant
nouveau.” [In the anxious wait a strong, confident, and young god of ebony fights. And in that
fight he begins to sing a new song] (9). Piquion might be seen to envision a developing, ebony,
and universal god. Yet, when we consider the concluding words of the avant-propos, “Un chant
nouveau,” in relation to the volume’s title, Langston Hughes: Un chant nouveau, it becomes
clear that Piquion is explicitly casting Hughes as this liberating deity. In fact, Piquion goes so
far as to implicitly tie Hughes to the Classical Phoenix, reformulating the old story of a
reemergence from the ashes as a revolutionary uprising.
Building on the trans-Atlantic ties forged by Piquion’s avant-propos, the volume’s
introduction—written by Arna Bontemps, printed in both French and English, and titled “Meet
Langston Hughes”—performs the work of tying Haiti to Hughes and Hughes to the communist
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cause in Haiti. In line with Carl Van Vechten’s introduction to The Weary Blues and the plethora
of imitations and replications that followed in its wake, Bontemps begins his introduction by
emphasizing Hughes’s extensive travels abroad, but devotes the second half of his introduction
entirely to Hughes’s brief visit to Haiti in 1931, detailing the impact it had on his literary
production: namely, that the visit was the genesis of Hughes’s and Bontemps’ Popo and Fifina.
In fact, Bontemps goes so far as to claim that Hughes’s “Haitian Journey”—in contrast to his
trips to Africa, Asia, and Europe—“made a lasting impression on him” (13). Bontemps then
yokes Hughes to the Haitian left (and vice-versa)—if we recall the discussion in our first chapter
about the importance of folk forms to leftist poetics—by relating how Hughes “sought out the
dances of the country folk” and qualifying him not only as “a great lover of simple people,” but
also as “their spokesman” (14). Applying a final coat of Haitian red paint, Bontemps relates that
Hughes’s only time away from the “simple people” was spent with the founder of the Haitian
Communist Party, Jacques Roumain.1 Piquion’s curious but telling decision to print the
introduction in both English and French continues Bontemps’ work of bridge building between
communities of color with a common (daresay communist) cause. It not only makes manifest
the intellectual, political, and cultural exchange that translation engenders, but also qualifies
Piquion’s anthology—insofar as it is quasi-bilingual—as authoritative and (via extension) as an
instrument that allows him and his American counterparts to speak in different languages while
singing the same song.
c90 Jacques Roumain founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934. This act would lead both to his repeated
imprisonment and premature death, but also cemented Roumain amongst the pantheon of Haitian revolutionary
figures.
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Hughes’s encouragement of Piquion’s leftist literary endeavor is well documented in a
series of missives that testify to: his awareness that Piquion was framing him as a revolutionary
poet, his complicity in this act of framing, and to his deft manipulation of his divergent
international personae. Some six months after Hughes wrote to his leftist friend Louise
Thompson that “I am laying off of the political poetry for a while” and some six months before
People’s World—angered by Hughes’s renouncement of the sentiments expressed in his
“Goodbye Christ”—gave voice to Hughes’s repudiation by the U.S. left, Hughes received a letter
from Piquion that bears witness to the fact that Hughes was still quite happy with his radical
persona in its healthy Haitian incarnation (Rampersad, Life I, 375, 395):
Mon cher ami,
J’ai reçu votre lettre en date du 7 juin et je l’ai lu avec beacoup
de plaisir [….]
Je suis hereux que “Un chant nouveau” vous ait joli. Je
regrette seulment qu’il ne soit pas assez complet. Mais comme vous avez dû
le remarquer, je me suis volontairement place à un point de vue special,
essentiellement révolutionnaire [….]
C’est pour moi l’occasion de vous dire une nouvelle fois
combine Un chant nouveau a connu du success en Haiti. Il a éte une
revelation et je vous affirme que vous êtes devenu dans mon pays un figure
populaire et sympathetique.
My dear friend,
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I received your letter of June 7th and read it with great pleasure
[….]
I’m happy that “Un chant nouveau” pleases you. My only
regret is that it wasn’t complete enough. But as you had to notice, I
voluntarily position myself within a special point of view, essentially
revolutionary [….]
It’s the occasion for me to tell you one more time about the
success Un chant nouveau has had in Haiti. It has been a real find, and I
assure you that you’ve become a sympathetic and popular figure in my
country.
Piquion’s pleasure over Hughes’s happiness with his volume not only points to a lost
missive wherein Hughes voiced his approval of the project, but also suggests that Hughes—
given that he “had to” have noticed the volume’s revolutionary bent—was quite happy to be
painted in revolutionary colors on Haitian soil. Moreover, the success that Piquion details
provides ample evidence that Hughes, by 1941, was well aware that his “sympathetic and
popular” personae were context dependent. Given Roumain’s missives and his friendship with
Hughes, this awareness may very well have predated the success of Piquion’s volume and,
perhaps, informed Hughes’s decision to support it. In other words, since Hughes knew Roumain
to be both an admirer of his poetry and a popular communist hero in Haiti, it would be logical to
assume that his leftist poetry would do well amongst the folk in the Haitian literary arena.
Piquion’s half-hearted regret that his anthology is not “complete enough” is (as he
suggests) the result of his desire to approach Hughes from an “essentially revolutionary” point of
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view. However, Piquion’s determination of what constitutes Hughes’s revolutionary facets and
faces is far from “essential,” and lays bare his unique hermeneutic position as an anthologist, a
position that (to a large extent) synthesizes the Hispanic and Francophone conceptualizations of
Hughes’s radicalism that we have explored thus far. Piquion’s first chapter—titled “Du Missouri
à la Conquete du Monde” [From Missouri to the Conquest of the World]—provides an overview
of Hughes’s poetic production to date, and characterizes the mature Hughes as an almost
Trotsky-esque poet “en révolte constant” [in constant revolt] against injustice as well as a
“citoyen du monde” [citizen of the world]. However, this revolutionary progression from local
to international is, as Piquion details in the following chapter, not only a function of an acquired
class consciousness but also of Hughes’s long-standing race pride. After providing translations
(new to the Francophone world) of Hughes’s “Always the Same” and “Union”—two poems
firmly embedded in Hughes’s communist canon—Piquion translates a portion of Idelfonso
Pereda Valdes’s introduction to his Antologia de la poesía negra americana [Anthology of
American Poesía Negra] (1936) in order to partially explain Hughes’s poetic and political
growth:
Nous considérons Langston Hughes comme un grand poète qui chante
l’âme de sa peau, avec l’angiosse indicible [emphasis mine] du mulâtre. En
lui se joignment deux rivières, deux Univers apparemment disctints et
irréconciliables. Le fond sub-social de la lutte pour l’émancipation du peuple
nègre d’Amérique qui n’aspire pas à égaler le blanc (il convient de signaler
une fois pour toutes la tendance égalitaire du nègre à l’imitation des habitudes
bourgeoise [emphasis mine], ce qui lui est préjudiciable) sans exercer dans sa
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plenitude le droit d’être nègre, s’aprofondit dans la poésie de Langston
Hughes. Mais un jour ce poète si authentiquement nègre fit une découverte
qui devait transformer l’orientation de sa poésie. Il découvrit la revolution.
Une fille agile qu’il rencontra partout. Dans les bras de cette fille il parcourra
le monde et offríra son sang à la Révolution, parce qu’il ne vaut pas la peine
de mourir pour l’opulence des exploiteurs. Poète Révolutionaire il chant
comme le plus universel des poétes de sa race; au sentiment racial il ajoute le
sentiment de solidarité avec tous les opprimés de la terre.
We see Langston Hughes as a great poet who sings with the soul of his
race, with the color of his skin, and with the unspeakable anguish of the
mulatto. Two rivers join in him, two apparently distinct and irreconcilable
universes. The sub-social bottom of the fight of the black American people
for emancipation which does not aspire to compare equally with whites (that
brings to our attention, once and for all, the egalitarian tendency of the black,
his tendency to imitate the customs of the bourgeoisie prejudiced against him),
without having exercised to its fullest the right to be black, is delved into in
the poetry of Langston Hughes. But one day this so authentically black poet
made a discovery that transformed the orientation of his poetry. He
discovered the revolution. An agile girl that he finds everywhere. In the arms
of this girl he travels all over and offers his blood to the Revolution because
he doesn’t see the worth in dying for the opulence of the exploiters.
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Revolutionary poet, he sings as the most universal poet of his race: to his
racial sentiment he adds a sentiment of solidarity with all of the world’s
oppressed.
Piquion’s decision to cite Pereda Valdés as a means to explore Hughes’s poetic growth
presents the Francophone reader with a counter-argument to the reigning French aesthetic
regime—explored in our second chapter—that figures Hughes’s race proud, and therefore antiassimilative, verse as revolutionary. In its stead, he seemingly offers the popular narrative
formulated by writers and critics in the U.S., Spain, and Spanish America in order to account for
a poem like “Always the Same.” In short, Piquion (through Pereda Valdés) suggests that
Hughes’s discovery of the Revolution transformed him from a (somewhat myopic) poet
concerned with racial solidarity into a “universal” poet, into a champion of the world’s
disenfranchised.
However, when one compares the frame that surrounds Piquion’s somewhat subversive
translation and citation of Pereda Valdés with the one that encapsulates Pereda Valdés’s preface
to his own anthology, it becomes clear that Piquion actually complicates and, to some extent,
undermines this narrative, reworking it for his Haitian milieu. Pereda Valdés’s introductory
remarks about Hughes, in essence, stand alone, serving—alongside several other introductions
that preface the volume—to both acquaint the readers with the poets anthologized and to
legitimate his choice of texts which, in Hughes’s case, tellingly begin with selections from The
Weary Blues and culminate with the first Spanish language translations of “Always the Same”
and “Union.” In fact, Pereda Valdés—in a footnote that follows Hughes’s bio and
bibliography—goes so far as to assert that his choice of texts is intended to mirror Hughes’s
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poetic growth and presents the reader with two incarnations of Hughes: the immature (and
somewhat narcissistic) “el poeta negro que canta temas negros” [the black poet who sings black
themes] and “el poeta de la revolución social” [the poet of social revolution]. Conversely,
Piquion’s decision to offer his translation of Pereda Valdés on the heels of “Toujours la Même
Chose” [“Always the Same”] helps Piquion to undermine the notion of a Hughesian growth into
revolution. The Hughes that Piquion introduces to his readers is a Hughes already enmeshed in
“constant revolt.” His discovery of “revolution” does not represent an evolution, but an addition
to his poetic repertoire. This addition, as Piquion argues immediately after he cites Pereda
Valdés, allows for a hybrid poetic that, in essence, constitutes Hughes’s chief gift: “La fusion
dans l’esprit d’un Négre d’un racisme conscient, consequent et du socialisme forme l’un des
aspects les plus caractéristiques de son genie” [The fusion of socialism and a substantial,
conscious racism inside the spirit of a Negro constitutes one of the most characteristic aspects of
his genius]. In short, Piquion—unlike countless others—sees no inherent contradiction in a
Hughes who is both a “poeta negro que canta temas negros” and a “poeta de la revolución
social.” To the contrary, Hughes’s place and poetry represent a rather unique opportunity to
combine two discursive regimes that, in most contexts, are hopelessly divergent.
The motivation behind Piquion’s decision to thwart the notion of a Hughes who has
somehow outgrown his fidelity to the “fond sub-social de la lutte pour l’émancipation du peuple
nègre d’Amérique” that remains unsoiled by a self-destructive notion of egalitarianism is part
and parcel of his attempt to figure Hughes as a poet whose verse serves to critique Haiti’s tri-tier
color/caste system. Piquion realizes this figuration, in part, by twice employing a deft slight of
hand in his translation of Pereda Valdés preface: the “angiosse indicible du mulâtre” [the
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unspeakable anguish of the mulatto] is, in Valdés’s text, the “angustia entrecruzada del mulato”
[the interwoven anguish of the mulatto]; the highly charged New World use of the term “nègre”
finds no anti-assimilative counterpart in Valdés’s neutral “negro”; and Piquion’s mention of the
“bourgeoisie” conveniently erases Valdés’s racial qualification of them as “burgesía blanca”
[white bourgeoisie]. Piquion then builds upon these transgressive translations in the paragraph
that follows Piquion’s characterization of Hughes’s genius:
Lui qui aurait pu avec avantage, à l’instar de certains intellectuels noirs
«assimilés», abondonner ses congénèrs à leur misère; lui qui aurait pu, grace
au prestige universel de sa personnalité, se placer à la remorque de la
bourgeoisie blanche en tant que bourgeois de couleur; lui qui enfin aurait pu
tourner le dos à ses frères de race et de clase, se désintéresse avec grandeur
des triomphes ilusoires de la vanité, repousse avec dignité tout idée de
trahison. (40)
He who could have to his advantage, following the example of certain
“assimilated” Negroes, abandoned his ilk to their misery; he who could have,
thanks to the universal prestige of his personality, tagged along behind the
white bourgeoisie as easily as he could have the bourgeoisie of color; he who,
lastly, could have turned his back on the brothers of his race and class, with
dignity repels any idea of treason.
These sentiments in combination with Piquion’s transgressive translation of Valdés’s
“burgesía blanca” allows the former to begin inserting Hughes’s voice into a Haitian (and as we
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have seen Antillean) conversation. Unlike Piquion’s “certains intellectuels noirs [my emphasis]
«assimilés»,” Hughes is no traitor. He embraces the “fond sub-social de la lutte pour
l’émancipation” and proves himself to be “authentiquement nègre [my emphasis].” Hence, he is
seduced by neither side of the bourgeoisie binary that Piquion’s omission of blanc engenders.
He tags along behind neither the white nor black bourgeoisie. This black bourgeoisie—
unaccounted for by Pereda Valdés’s Spanish text—not only represents another cadre of noirs
assimilés, but also, given Haiti’s tri-tier color/caste system, is largely comprised of mulâtres
who, given their position of power and class superiority, are naturally devoid of “angustia
entrecruzada.” Quite to the contrary, their anguish to which Hughes, nevertheless and somewhat
paradoxically, gives voice is “indicible” precisely because it is not interwoven into the nonexistent fabric of a trifurcated Haiti. Piquion—in celebrating the ebony god’s poetic prowess—
implicitly subverts the hierarchical logic of Haiti’s racial structure. It is Hughes, the embracer of
“la fond,” who is endowed with the capacity not only to give voice to the soul of his race, but
also to a mulâtre class that—owing to its bourgeois aspirations, imitation of whites, and resulting
self-alienation—cannot even give voice to itself. What was, in Pereda Valdés’s formulation, a
voicing of an interweaving between black and white forsaken in favor of another on a far grander
scale becomes, in Piquion’s volume, an echo of (amongst many others) Etienne Léro, a
figuration of Hughes the revolutionary who largely derives this status from his anti-assimilative
persona and poetic. Nevertheless, Piquion is careful to preserve the fusion that he sees at the
heart of Hughes’s genius. Hughes repels treason by refusing to turn his back both on his racial
brothers and on the brothers with which he shares class solidarity.
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Piquion’s third chapter, “Des Spirituals aux Poèmes de Langston Hughes” [From
Spirituals to the Poems of Langston Hughes], provides an abbreviated history of African
Americans and African American artistic expression in order to draw the multiple founts that he
sees as the base of Hughes’s poetic production into relief. True to form, Piquion figures these
largely religious founts as the byproduct of two factors: the essential (and essentialist) nature of
the Negro, and the hyperbolic capitalism inherent in the institution of slavery. Hence, Hughes’s
artistic inheritance is framed in both racial and Marxist terms, and it is ultimately this framing
that affords Piquion the argumentative capital to stake the curious claim that Hughes’s blues
verse is not only proletarian in content and form, but also—insofar as it represents a fusion of
racial and Marxist influences—anti-assimilative.
Piquion sets about the task of articulating this curious fusion by beginning his third
chapter with a dizzying sequence of paragraphs that, at first (and perhaps even second and third)
glance, not only fail to offer the reader a cohesive argument, but seemingly contradict
themselves. These contradictions, however, prove to be the ground work for the dialectical
synthesis that, in the end, will comprise the backbone of his anti-assimilative argument.
Piquion’s initial thesis argues that a knowledge of the African American spirituals anonymously
composed before emancipation is a prerequisite for an understanding of Langston Hughes, his
genius, and the preeminent place he occupies, arguing that Hughes’s poetic production is the
outgrowth of his racial inheritance:
Langston Hughes! Héritier des chanteurs anonyms, de poètes de
l’esclavage, de ceux de la «renaissance nègre»; à son tour créateur de beautés.
(45)
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Langston Hughes! Heir of anonymous singers, of the poets of slavery,
of those of the “Harlem Renaissance”; takes his turn as creator of beauty.
Piquion figures Hughes as, among other things, a link in America’s darkest chain. The
beauty he creates is the outgrowth of an anonymous poetic inheritance incarnate in the spirituals
composed by his slave-ancestors, and his poetic production, the beauty he creates, is the work of
but one in a long line of creators. Piquion is careful to emphasize the racial dimension of this
inheritance by invoking the “renaissance nègre,” and yet, quite curiously, distances Hughes from
a renaissance in which he played an integral role. This distancing is suggestive of an anthologist
possessed by the desire to distance Hughes from the New Negro movement of the U.S. in order
to place him in the broader hemispheric context of an Americas haunted everywhere by the
specter of slavery.
Turning his attention to the “peculiar institution,” Piquion downplays (but does not erase)
the racial dimension of Hughes’s inheritance in the paragraph that follows, framing the
institution of slavery—and, via extension, Hughes’s poetics—in decidedly Marxist terms:
Deux peuples ou plutôt deux races ont vécu pendant des siécles sur le
même territoire. L’une, en maîtresse absolue, l’autre, en paria. L’une, en
confisquant tous les fruits d’un labeur force, l’autre anéantie dans l’abjection.
Et tandis que l’une, repue, poursuivait en haut sa digestion de parasite, en
emplissant ses coffres-forts, en bas, les déshérités se récréaient parfois en
extériorisant sur le mode mineur leur douleur séculaire et leur joie éphémère.
(45)
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Two peoples or rather two races have lived for centuries in the same
territory. One, as a mistress in absolute control, the other, as an outcast. One,
confiscating all the fruits of forced labor, the other, crushed in abjectness.
And whereas one, well fed, pursued its parasite’s digestion from the top,
filling its safes, down below, the deprived sometimes cried out expressing
their secular pain and their ephemeral joy in a minor mode.
Piquion walks an intriguing tightrope. He begins with a sly assertion of common
humanity between whites and blacks that is also a commentary on the society they inhabit as a
whole. The two collectives do not constitute two different peoples, but two different races. And
yet, with this very same move, Piquion implicitly asserts—or, at the very least, allows for the
possibility—that these two races constitute a single people. This population, as the following
sentence suggests, is a cohesive (and corrupt) whole that depends upon the disparities between
mistress and outcast for its self-perpetuation.
The mistress-outcast relationship that Piquion describes not only serves to describe the
institution of American slavery, but also frames this relationship, to a certain extent, in Marxist
(and Hegelian) terms. Piquion’s choice to employ the binary maîtresse and paria in place of the
more customary maître [master] and esclave [slave] presents the reader with a deft allusion to
and subversion of Marx’s and Hegel’s master-slave dialectics (or, properly translated, dialectics
of Lordship and bondage). This is indeed the case because the relationship between mistress and
outcast, while suggestive of the relationship between master and slave, is by no means—
especially in regard to Hegel’s conception of self-consciousness—its equivalent. There can be
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no masters without slaves and vice-versa, but the existence of a mistress in complete control can
hardly be said to depend upon that of the outcast, in part, because within the norms of the history
of Western culture the mistress needs a master. Moreover, the very idea of an outcast subtly
recasts the philosophical precepts of Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness because it steps
outside the idea of absolute domination. The self-consciousness of the pariah in question—
unlike that of the slave with regards to his master—does not result from his recognition of his
mistress’s self-consciousness. To the contrary, Piquion—painting slavery in terms of class
struggle with distinctly Marxist terminology (labeur, parasite, désérités)—suggests that the slave
derives self-consciousness from self-expression, from the crying out of his human condition. In
short, the class struggle of slavery gives rise to the spiritual, and the spiritual nourishes the slave
“from the bottom” just as—if we are to follow Piquion’s parallelisms—his forced labor
nourishes the parasite. And while this self-expression is indeed “ephemeral” it is also, in
Piquion’s thought, based in the material: “l’art dépend directement ou indirectement de la base
matérielle” [art is dependent upon, directly or indirectly, a material base].
Having established the spiritual both as Hughes’s artistic racial inheritance and as the
materially based byproduct of class struggle in its most malevolent incarnation, Piquion adopts a
quasi-essentialist stance in a series of explanatory remarks that preface his translations of several
traditional Negro spirituals.1 He asserts that their unique and powerful aesthetic both exemplifies
and is engendered by “les qualitiés natives du Négre” [the native qualities of the Black], innate
qualities that include: “le sens du rythme” [the sense of rhythm], “une concrete conception des
choses” [a concrete conception of things], “une capacité émotionnelle extraordinaire” [an
extraordinary emotional capacity], “une richesse verbale inouïe” [an unprecedented verbal
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richness], and “une puissance d’imagination des posibilités d’expression illimitées [a power of
imagination with limitless possibilities] (47). Piquion notes that these innate qualities are to be
found not only in spirituals, but also in the sounds of the “tam-tam” that emanate from the U.S.,
Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and “la jungle africaine” [the African jungle].
Piquion’s argument then grafts his conception of the aesthetic, materialist, and
essentialist qualities of the spiritual onto Hughes’s “blues” verse, and tellingly—given his
“essentiellement révolutionnaire” point of view—omits any reference to or translation of the
plenitude of Hughes’s religious poems in order to ground firmly the poet’s literary production in
the realm of the quotidian. He also forgoes any citation of Hughes’s blues verse, but
nevertheless frames the kinship between the spiritual and Hughes poetry as self-evident: “Il suffit
de lire ses «Blues» pour noter leur allure caractéristique, ces répétitions de vers, pareilles aux
refrains des spirituals, de airs of jazz” [One needs only to read his “Blues” in order to note that
their characteristic allure and repetition of verse parallels the refrains of spirituals and the air of
jazz]. Hughes’s poetry—in Piquion’s words the “soeur des spirituals, du jazz, et de blues” [sister
of sprituals, jazz, and the blues]—also carries with it the Marxist “souffrances des masses
opprimées” [suffering of oppressed masses] and the essentialist “grand rire du Nègre” [the grand
laughter of the black]. This, in turn, makes the poet (somewhat curiously) “l’un des plus grans
réalistes des temps actuels, l’un des initiateurs de la poésie de demain” [one of the greatest
realists of the current age, one of the originators of the poetry of tomorrow] (64, 65).
The purpose behind Piquion’s oscillating figurations of Hughes as a proletarian poet and
as a racial (or essentialist poet) is laid bare in the chapter’s concluding gesture. Piquion, in a
characteristically Francophone fashion, accounts for Hughes’s poetics by offering both an
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English citation and a (somewhat transgressive) French translation of Hughes’s “The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain” that—in conjunction with his divergent but strategic framings of
Hughes’s literary production and inheritance—transforms the anti-assimilative call by linking it,
retrospectively and anachronistically (in Hughes’s context but not in Piquion’s contemporary
one), to Marxist revolution:
Nous autres, artistes nègres, qui créons maintenant, nous avons
l’intention d’exprimer notre individualité à peau noir sans crainte et sans
honte. Si les blancs sont contents, nous nous en réjouissons. Nous savons que
nous sommes beaux. Et laids aussi. Le tambour crie et le tambour rit. Si le
peuple de couleur est satisfait, nous en sommes hereux. Si les uns et les autres
ne sont pas contents, peu nous importe. Nous bâtissons nos temples pour
l’avenir, convaincus de leur solidité et nous nous tenons au sommet de la
montagne, en pleine liberté. (65-66)
We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our darkskinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are
glad. If they are not, it does not matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly
too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased
we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build
our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the
mountain, free within ourselves.
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If we employ the interpretive hermeneutics constructed by Piquion’s chapter to read
Hughes’s seminal (more so, arguably, in the Francophone world than in the U.S.) manifesto, we
end up with a mixed bag of primitivism, racial essentialism, Marxism, and anti-assimilative
sentiments both racial and socio-political. Hughes’s primitivist and anti-assimilative “tomtom”—prefigured by Piquion’s essentialist “tam-tam” that comprises a key aesthetic fount for
spirituals engendered by class conflict—acquires Marxist associations. Hughes’s decidedly
Negro and quasi-religious “temples for tomorrow”—when prefaced by Piquion’s argument that
Hughes combines the essentialist “grand rire du Nègre” with a Marxist cognizance of the
“souffrances des masses opprimées” to create “la poésie de demain [my emphasis]”—become far
less racially denominational and far more politically charged. The list goes on and on, but the
pattern remains the same. Piquion’s fusion of leftist thought and racial essentialism repeatedly
endows Hughes’s anti-assimilative tract (not to mention his “blues” poetry) with Marxist weight.
Moreover, Piquion’s translation decisions add a uniquely leftist Haitian dimension to Hughes’s
tract. Whereas Hughes speaks on behalf of “We young Negro artists” who “intend to express
our dark-skinned selves [my emphasis],” Piquion invokes a “nous” [we] which is both “nègre”
and “autres” [other] that seeks to express an identity which does not reference the potential for
difference in the artistic collective, “notre individualité [my emphasis] à peau noir” [our blackskinned identity]. This, in turn, suggests a solidarity (and essentialism) that extends beyond race
to class, as Piquion’s translation can easily be read as a tract that reflects Haiti’s trifurcated
color/caste system. Whereas Hughes’s racial map consists of “white people,” race-proud
Negroes, and globally inclusive “colored people,” Piquion’s consists of defiant “Négres” (or the
others), “blancs,” and assimilated “peuple de couleur.” Hence, Piquion’s hegemonic collective is
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easily read as one unconcerned with the opinions of Haitian society’s top two tiers, a far cry from
the resonances of Hughes’s purely racial division.
Piquion continues his attempt to fuse Hughes’s multiple personae (his status as both race
and “social” poet) in the chapters that follow, struggling to offer his reader a cohesive portrait of
a revolutionary writer. His arguments are brief and seldom convincing, but his selection and
ordering of the poems anthologized is demonstrative of his project as a whole. Piquion
repeatedly offers a translation of a political, “radical,” (where radical now extends to Hughes’s
blues verse) or, in Piquion’s words, réaliste poems on the heels of his translations of Hughes’s
race-conscious or primitivist verse (which Piquion dubs as raciste): the anti-imperialist “Voix de
L’Ethiop” [“Call of Ethiopia”] is placed immediately after “Moi Aussi” [“I Too”]; the tale of the
exploitation of “Ruby Brown” follows the memories of slavery contained in “Les Histoires de
Tante Sue” [“Aunt Sue’s Stories”]; and a series of primitivist and/or race-proud poems including
“Nuit d’Été” [“Summer Night”], “Danse Africaine,” “Poème” [“Poem: For the African boy after
the manner of Gaughin”]; “Notre Pays” [“Our Land]; “Chanteur Ambulant” [“Mintrel Man”];
and “Le Nègre” [“Negro”] culminates with the Mayakovskian “Un chant nouveau” [“A New
Song”]. Similarly, a sequence comprised of “Mon peuple” [“My People”]; “Mulâtre”
[“Mulatto”]; and “Chant d’une Jeune Fille Noire” [“Song for a Dark Girl”] culminates with
Piquion’s first offering of a blues poem, Eugene Jolas’s “Chant d’un Pauvre Gars” [“Po’ Boy
Blues”]. The selections continually present the reader with a movement from race consciousness
to class consciousness that is figured both as a progression and, given Piquion’s alternating
presentation, as a simultaneity. The scant (unconvincing) arguments that connect the poems
attempt to perform the same work. For example, “Le Négre” [“Negro”] is characterized as a
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vision of race pride spanning from “l’époque des Pharaon et des César jusqu’à nos jours, dans
l’ère capitaliste” [“the epoch of Pharaoh and Cesar to our day, in the capitalist era”].
Nevertheless, Piquion’s point remains the same: race and revolution (at least in Hughes’s case)
go hand in hand.
The equivalence Piquion seeks to establish, from his professed “essentiellement
révolutionnaire” point of view, between Hughes the réaliste and Hughes the raciste finds a
curious culmination in his chapter titled “Le Poète Révolutionnaire” [The Revolutionary Poet].
The chapter offers translations of Hughes’s benchmark revolutionary poetry—“Prospectus pour
le Waldorf Astoria” [“Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria”], “Lettre à l’Académie” [“Letter
to the Academy”] and Aragon’s “Bonjour Révolution” [“Good Morning Revolution”]—but (as
opposed to his other chapters) no commentary or analysis to link the poems together. This
absence of commentary lays bare Piquion’s somewhat private agenda (contained in his missive
to Hughes), and allows Hughes, the poète révolutionnaire, to speak, through Piquion, for
himself. Nevertheless, Piquion is careful—in his brief prefatory remarks—not to undermine his
pan-revolutionary portrayal of Hughes. He figures the révolutionnaire quality of this particular
body of verse largely in aesthetic terms (with an eye to style rather than content), as the by
product of a poetic persona that is “dure, amére, lapidaire” [hard-hitting, bitter, and pithy] (97).
And he employs a vocabulary of slavery (which is now also a somewhat coded Marxist
vocabulary) to introduce the sequence. It is a “coup de fouet” [lash of the whip] that strikes a
blow against the “maîtres” [masters] (97).
As do most anthologies of Hughes’s poetry, Piquion’s devotes a sequence of translations
to Hughes’s body of poetry that is dedicated to descriptions of the sea and of ocean-going life.
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However, this sequence stands apart from all others because it not only serves to culminate
Piquion’s translations of Hughes’s poetry but also represents a desire to tie Hughes to Haiti and
Haiti to Hughes.1 The introduction characterizes the sequence as the byproduct of a composite
Hughes whose raciste, réaliste, and revolutionnaire poetic(s) have endowed him with the
capacity not simply to write the lyric but to write the “lyrique viril” [virile lyric]. This fertile
poetic is composed of “sentiments communs” [common feeling], “l’orgueil de race” [race pride],
“les joies et les misères quotidiennes de ses congénèrs” [the quotidian joys and miseries of his
like], and—quite tellingly—“l’amitié” [friendship], suggesting that Hughes virile lyrics have the
capacity to impact (to metaphorically impregnate) his ilk and friends, separated by the sea but no
longer by language, in Piquion’s Haiti. Piquion’s translations—“Mer Calme” [“Sea Calm”],
“Long Voyage” [“Long Trip”], “Charme de la Mer” [“Sea Charm”], and “Mort d’un Vieux
Marin” [“Death of an Old Seaman”]—find their English language counterparts in Hughes’s
sequence “Waterfront Streets” (published in The Weary Blues) and are far from revolutionary.
However, it is the historical and symbolic importance of the Atlantic to American descendents of
former slaves that allows Piquion’s final sequence to gesture towards both a commun identity
and solidarity (une amitié) between Hughes and his congénèrs.
The virility of Hughes’s poetic production and of Piquion’s translations was a subject of
key importance to both men following the publication of “Un chant nouveau.”
92
I emphasize, here, Piquion’s translations of Hughes’s poetry because the volume as a whole concludes with
translations of Hughes’s “Too Much of Race,” a lengthy but banal history of Hughes’s activities in leftist arenas
(particularly in Spain and the Soviet Union) titled “Le Nègre dans le Conflit International,” a description of Popo
and Fifina, and a translation of one of Hughes’s Simple Stories.
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While Hughes sought to enlist Piquion to translate more of his poetry, sending both a
copy of The Dream Keeper (1932), The Big Sea (1940) and a series of missives dating from May
8, 1940 to June 7, 1941 promising more to come, Piquion looked to Hughes to provide “Un chant
nouveau” with an English reading audience. In a letter dated July 16, 1940, Piquion informed
Hughes, once again, of the enormous popularity of his anthology in Haiti, and appealed to
Hughes’s sense of reciprocity and friendship to slyly solicit a translation from Hughes himself:
“Mon cher Hughes, je compte beaucoup sur vous pour que “Un chant nouveau” soit lu aux EtasUnis avec autant d’enthusiasme qu’en en Haiti” [My dear Hughes, I count on you to let “Un
chant nouveau” be read in the United States with as much enthusiasm as it is in Haiti].
Hughes’s response to Piquion’s request is demonstrative of a poet who was more than
happy to allow Piquion’s revolutionary conception of both him and his verse to flourish
throughout the Francophone world, but wary of allowing his revolutionary persona and readings
to come home to roost. Indulging Piquion’s (somewhat essentialist) sense of racial solidarity and
the anthologist’s vanity, Hughes—after ignoring several follow-up missives—bilingually wrote
to Piquion and conveyed his gratitude as well as some bad news inside the cold frame of a
business letter:
Hollow Hills Farm
Monterey California
June 7,
1941
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M. Rene [sic] Piquion
Port au Prince,
Haiti
Vous m’avez fait l’honneur de ecrire [sic] mon premier [sic]
biographie et je vous remerce [sic] beacoup [sic]! C’est tres [sic] interesant
[sic]—meme [sic] a [sic] moi meme [sic]—et je suis tres [sic] content que cet
livre est ne [sic] en Haiti, pays de sang noir comme le notre [….]
[You have done me the honor of writing my first biography and I
greatly thank you for it! It is very interesting—even to myself—and I am very
happy that this book was born in Haiti, a country of black blood like ours.]
I hope the book the book has a wide reading in Haiti and other French
speaking communities. It is, as I suppose Mr. Bontemps wrote you, not an
easy matter to get a book translated and published in English unless the author
is a very well known European name. Translations from Latin America are
very, very few indeed, shamefully enough. And unfortunately yours appeared
just a few weeks before my own autobiography was published. And I am not
famous enough to have two books about myself on the market at once.
Hughes’s gratitude goes hand in hand with a somewhat curious assertion of both a racial
and racially nationalist solidarity with Piquion which also serves to distance himself from an
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anthology (and radical persona) “born” in Haiti. He wishes the volume success in “French
speaking communities,” but disallows for the possibility of an English translation, citing—in
addition to a verifiable reluctance of U.S. publisher to finance translations—the release of his
own (decidedly apolitical) autobiography as a dooming factor. Hughes’s second argument vis-àvis the translation of “Un chant nouveau” becomes quite curious (indeed spurious) when one
recalls Hughes’s request for a Haitian translation of The Big Sea. Hughes is not famous enough
to have “two” books about himself on the U.S. market at once, but nevertheless envisions a
potential success for the two contemporaneous volumes on Haitian soil.
Hughes’s reluctance to see “Un chant nouveau” published in English can be attributed to
a variety of factors that include and go beyond his career-threatening persecution by certain
elements of the religious-right and the precursors of the Second Red Scare. One of these factors
can be gleaned from Hughes’s return address. Hughes’s comfortable refuge on the Hollow Hills
Farm estate was facilitated by the generosity of his friend and patron Noël Sullivan, an everincreasing devout Catholic and, owing to his devotion, a staunch critic of communism
(Rampersad, Life II, 7). Although Sullivan’s love for Hughes repeatedly allowed him to see past
their political differences, it is hard to imagine a hounded Hughes completely unafraid of
alienating his only life-line with an English language translation of Piquion’s anthology.
Hughes’s poor French may have also played a role. The poet relied heavily on others (friends,
critics, and friends who were critics) to evaluate the quality of his works’ French translations,
and while some were generous in their evaluation of Piquion’s anthology, Mercer Cook—
Hughes’s confidante and initial link to négritude’s “Big Three”—was not among them.
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Cook’s review of “Un chant nouveau” appeared in Phylon in the journal’s fourth
quarterly issue, attacked Piquion’s study-anthology on fronts both literary and political—many
of which Hughes was likely unaware—and set in motion a tellingly furious, but largely one
sided, series of missives wherein Piquion’s ardent defense of his work is never echoed by
Hughes. Cook—who was, among other things, an eminent critic of Haitian literature, Professor
of Romance Languages and Literatures in Atlanta and later Howard University, and an ardent
assailant of communism (at least in its Stalinist incarnation)—begins his review by charitably
noting that it is only proper that “one of our most cosmopolitan authors” should first be
anthologized in a “foreign tongue” (390). However, he quickly abandons this generous stance,
characterizing Piquion’s book as two books: “one an enthusiastic appreciation of Langston
Hughes, the other an ardent plea for communism. The result is a hodge-podge that does justice
neither to poetry nor propaganda” (390). This assignation of communist propaganda to
Piquion’s volume represents, in and of itself, sufficient reason to explain Hughes’s reluctance to
see the book in English, but Cook does not stop there. He goes on to note several (minor) mistranslations and errors in historical fact (the greatest being Piquion’s claim that no whites aided
the abolition movement), and also points to the lack of literary analysis in the book: “nothing is
said of his choice of words, figures of speech, or rhyme scheme; little attention is paid to meter”
(390). Given that the “Big Three” who frequented Cook’s Parisian salon repeatedly refer to
Hughes’s specifically literary language (paying special attention to meter)—often in sweeping
essentialist terms not unlike Piquion’s—as the very embodiment of négritude, this critique (as
we shall see further) is far from a simple quibble. Nevertheless, Cook’s most damning critique
is, arguably, the assertion that Piquion—in his chapter “Le Négre dans le Conflit International”
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[“The Negro in the International Conflict”]—lauds the Nazi-Soviet aggression pact (Piquion, in
line with countless others, lauds Soviet pacifism), and that the Haitian would have his readers
and Hughes follow in the footsteps of Hitler and Stalin (which Piquion may be said to suggest
implicitly but does not assert). Since Hughes had outspokenly condemned Hitler for many years
and would, in the years to come, cite the pact as the reason for his rejection of communism,
Piquion’s assertion (as Cook framed it) represents yet another facet of the text that must have
bothered Hughes to no end.
Piquion was quick to write Hughes in the weeks that followed, and repeatedly asserted
that Cook had, in essence, misconstrued the intention of his volume. He even went so far as to
publish a defense of the book titled “Curte Mise au Point” [“A Succinct Point”] (mailing a proofcopy to Hughes) that figures the task of the translator/anthologist in quite intriguing terms, as one
that consists in transforming and reshaping the existing conceptions of an author and his oeuvre
in order to create a new vision of both for the reading public. Therein (echoing the sentiments he
privately conveyed to Hughes), he asserts that Cook’s quibbling with his translations and his lack
of literary analysis is beneath the esteemed intellectual and beside the point:
Ce n’est pas un livre à pretension historique, ni un livre à tendance
spécifiquement littéraire. Ce n’est pas non plus l’oeuvre d’un écrivain de
langue anglaise ou d’un écrivain noir américain.
“Un chant nouveau” n’a pas échapper aux défauts inhérents à sa
nature. Il contient des erreurs de traduction, des exagérations volontaires.
Que m’importe la générosité d’une poignée de blancs en faveur du Nègre […]
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“Un chant nouveau” exprime à sa manière [my emphasis] l’immense
douleur noire, le cri de révolte, l’hymne d’allégresse contenus dans la poésie
de Hughes et à sa race.
This is neither a book with historical pretensions nor a book that has a
specifically literary tendency. It is neither the work of an author writing in
English nor of a black American writer.
“Un chant nouveau” does not elude the flaws inherent to its nature. It
contains errors in translation and willful exaggerations. What do I care about
the generosity of a handful of whites aiding the Negro [….]
“Un chant nouveau” expresses the immense black pain, the cry of
revolt, and the hymn of joy contained in Hughes’s poetry and in his race in its
own manner.
Piquion’s defense—which concludes with an avowal of his anti-fascist and anti-Nazi
politics—of “Un chant nouveau” both sidesteps and addresses Cook’s critique. His volume does
indeed contain “erreurs de traduction” and “exagérations volontaires,” but both are figured as
inherent to the work’s nature. Piquion’s grouping of these two inherent elements thwarts what,
at first glace, appears to be an instantiation of the platitude that all translations are flawed insofar
as it highlights the willful misprison inherent not in works like his, but in his work specifically.
He unabashedly claims Hughes, anthologized in translation, as his own. His book is neither the
work of an English language writer nor that of a black American writer, but one that expresses
Hughes and his poetry in its own way—linguistically, politically, historically, and nationally. As
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he boldly asserts, why should Piquion and his Haitian audience care about a handful of charitable
American whites? In short, Piquion asserts that the work of “Un chant nouveau” and (via
extension) the work of an anthologist-translator consists in constructing a poet anew for a new
audience. With this in mind, Piquion’s request for a translation becomes all the more daunting.
How is Hughes to make Piquion’s vision of Hughes not his own, but rather the basis for yet
another Hughes?
It is indeed hard to fathom the impact that Piquion’s polemic had on Hughes, whose
translation techne—at this point in time—was maniacally meticulous, but Hughes’s laissez-faire
approach to Piquion’s endeavor is suggestive of a poet-translator whose view of translation’s
exchange extended beyond language to praxis, of a poet who was willing to be translated into
different languages differently. Nevertheless, the archival evidence suggests that at least one of
Cook’s critiques hit home. His silence speaking louder than words, Hughes chose not to reply to
Piquion’s repeated objection to and protestations over Cook’s review. Rather, some six months
after Piquion posted his defense (in the very letter informing him that his book would not receive
an English language translation), Hughes intimated that it was he who solicited Cook’s
opinion—informing Piquion that he had given copies of the book “to friends, teachers of French,
critics”—and, moreover, that he did not wholly disagree with his friend’s assessment. Hughes
confirmed receipt of his letters, but quizzically, coldly, and tellingly wrote: “I trust you have
received a copy of Phylon.”
The trust that Hughes placed in Piquion—one that endowed the poet with the recompense
of an essentialist, Marxist, and anti-assimilative incarnation in the Francophone world—resulted
not only in the first and last French language anthology of his “revolutionary” verse, but also
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gave rise to a vision of Hughes marked by many tenets associated with early formulations of a
narrative looming large on the horizon: namely, that of négritude. This vision, in no small part,
was engendered by the very man who had “missed the point” of Piquion’s anthology, Mercer
Cook. Long after the dissolution of his Parisian salon, Cook continued to hold great literary
sway with Léon-Gontran Damas, Léopolod Sédar Senghor, and with Hughes, and facilitated a
plethora of translations and exchanges between the men (literary, philosophical, and material)
that are figured by many critics (and participants) as part and parcel of the movement. In fact,
Cook would eventually befriend even Piquion himself, assisting the latter as he compiled his
literary history Manuel de la négritude (1965) which, among other things, figured Cunard’s
triumvirate of Hughes, Guillén, and Roumain amongst the precursors (and progenitors) of the
movement. And although Cook’s review (and anti-communist sentiments) may have played a
role in denying English reading audiences access to Piquion’s Marxist and raciste readings of
Hughes’s verse, it was the ultimately the advent of World War II that relegated “Un chant
nouveau” to a temporary Haitian grave, and doomed Hughes’s wish for it to be widely
disseminated among “French speaking communities” that now fell under the sway of a Vichy
controlled French colonial empire and its Nazi censors.
A Reluctant Father: Sédar Senghor, Hughes, and Négritude
It is beyond the scope of this chapter (and, indeed, this dissertation) to offer either a
definition for the ever-evolving concept of négritude or to provide a full account of the role
played by Hughes in its formulation and propagation. Rather, my purpose here is to lay the
groundwork for an argument that seeks to account for the reasons why Hughes—a figure tied, in
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some way, to almost every facet and figure of the literary movement—was never explicitly
anthologized as a négritude poet. These reasons are, in part, the outgrowth of the manner in
which Hughes’s verse was translated and disseminated by négritude’s “Big Three,” and are also,
in part, the result of Langston Hughes’s long-standing reluctance to be associated with a
movement that, nonetheless, saw him as a father-figure. Perhaps most intriguingly, they are the
result of Hughes’s conception of négritude vis-à-vis translation, the outgrowth of the poet’s
refusal to be translated as a négritude poet precisely because he saw the work of négritude and
the work of translation as one and the same.
Since Senghor was quickly drafted and taken prisoner in the war’s opening moments and
Damas—despite the strongly anti-assimilative line to which he gave both poetic and political
voice in his articles and with Pigments (1937)—decided to join the sad remainder of the French
army (the FFL), the responsibility of propagating both Hughes’s Francophone personae and the
global literary phenomena which those personae helped to give rise fell to the poet who, six
years earlier, gave négritude its slippery name, Aimé Césaire. Having been exposed to Hughes’s
verse (as was Senghor) in the salons of the Nardal sisters and in those of René Maran and Mercer
Cook, Césaire founded Tropiques with his wife Suzanne in Vichy controlled Martinique in 1941.
The Césaires’ now seminal journal, as Lilyan Kesteloot notes, was confronted at its outset by
two nearly fatal factors: the fact that the editors were cut off from French books, magazines, and
intellectual life, and had to fill the journal almost entirely with local talent (including works by
the Césaires and by the very generous René Menil [Etienne Léro’s partner in Légitime Défense]);
and by the fact that the extreme censorship, emanating from Vichy, which gave rise to this
cultural isolation was also firmly entrenched in Martinique (Kesteloot 237).
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The Césaires overcame these obstacles by publicly professing allegiance to their Vichy
representatives, pledging to confine their journal’s publications to the nonpolitical realm of
“folklore,” and boldly (but quietly) dedicating themselves to the publication of subversive
articles presented in an “allusive style” which managed to elude the censors for quite some time
(Kesteloot 237). In the process, the Césaires became Langston Hughes’s next (albeit
undercover) publishers in the Francophone world. This feat was in line with their larger
objectives for the journal which Césaire, according to noted scholar Thomas Hale, saw as an
instrument “to communicate, among other things, the significance of African American literature
to a public largely unaware of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro” (1093). Hughes’s
wartime Antillean persona would have to forsake Piquion’s révolutionnaire open air, but
endured because the Césaires refused to let the inspirational and influential leftist figure fall from
Francophone revolutionary radar. The result was a revolutionary Hughes offered to the Antillean
public on the sly, a (seemingly) essentialist race poet whose verse—as born, censored, and (most
of all) subversively read in French translation—continued to lay the building blocks for both the
poetic production of the “Big Three” and for a plethora of revolutionary négritude poets yet to
come. In the second edition of Tropiques, Césaire published his “Introduction à la Poésie Nègre
Américaine” [Introduction to Black American Poetry]. The article cleverly manipulates and recontextualizes both Hughes’s early and explicitly “radical” poetry, and creates a fusion—not
wholly unlike Piquion’s—that nevertheless was intended to avoid posing a threat to fascist
censors while keeping Hughes’s anti-assimilative and revolutionary personae alive in French
translation:
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C’est au cri que l’on reconnait l’homme. Au cri fils aîné de la vie, ou
plutôt la vie elle-même qui sans diminution, sans renonciation, d’un libre et
imprévisible movement s’incarne dans l’immédiateté de la voix. Et voici crier
le poète nègre:
“Nous crions parmi les grate-ciels
Comme nos ancêtres
Criaient parmi les palmiers d’Afrique,
Car nous sommes seuls
Et nous avons peur.”
C’est dire que le maître-sentiment du poète nègre est un sentiment de
malaise, mieux d’intolérance. Intolérance du reel parce que sordide; du
monde parce qu’encagé; de la vie parce que détroussée au grand chemin du
soleil:
“I speak in the name of the black millions”
Et sur le fond lourd des angoisses, des indignations rentrées, des
désespoirs longtemps lûs, voici monter et siffler une colère, et l’Amérique, sur
le lit ébranlé de ses conformismes, s’inquiète de quelle atroce haine ce cri est
la deliverance:
“I speak in the name of the black millions”
La noire cour de miracles est debout. (37-38)
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It is in the cry that one recognizes the man. The cry of life’s oldest
son, or rather of life itself—without reduction, without a relinquishment of
free and unpredictable movement—is embodied in the immediacy of the
voice. And here is the cry of the black poet:
“We cry among the skyscrapers
As our ancestors
Cried among the palms of Africa
Because we are alone
And we’re afraid”
This is to say that the chief feeling of a black poet is a feeling
of unrest, or better said intolerance. Intolerance for the real because it’s
sordid, for the world because it’s encaged, for life because the great path to
the sun has been stolen:
“I speak in the name of the black millions”
And over the heavy depths of anxiety, of sunken indignation,
and of longtime disappointments, an anger mounts and hisses, and America,
on the weakened bed of its conformity, gets worried about the horrific hatred
for which this cry is the relief:
“I speak in the name of the black millions”
The black court of miracles is standing.
Césaire surreptitiously figures Hughes—by means of anonymous (and slightly
inaccurate) citation—as “the black poet” whose primal (and covertly communist) cry not only
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allows for the recognition of the (militant and degraded) American “nègre,” but also represents
his key feelings and mitigated source of relief. Drawing upon (or at least echoing) Hughes’s
early French dissemination, Césaire first quotes Hughes’s primitivist (and, in certain French and
Francophone aesthetic regimes, anti-assimilative) “Afraid” in French translation, figuring it as
nothing less than the incarnation of black American life. He is careful to omit a translation of
Hughes’s penultimate line, “It is night,” and, in so doing, arguably affords Hughes’s fear a
greater domain, one capable of encompassing “l’homme” it incarnates. The poet’s “peur” is
cleverly qualified as a sentiment of “malaise”—a word that denotes unease and the (decidedly
more political) notion of unrest—and then linked to a decidedly metaphysical “intolerance” that
avoids specific referents while alluding to primitivism’s famous “cage of civilization.” Césaire
then re-contextualizes the first line of Hughes’s “A New Song”—“I speak in the name of the
black millions”—divorcing it from its revolutionary call for a “Worker’s World” to revolt and
arise and, simultaneously, infusing it with anti-assimilative connotations that are, in turn,
bolstered by the invocation of a heterogeneous “black millions” possessed of multiple tongues
and peoples. The self-proclaimed (yet anonymous) representative voice is the “noire cour de
miracles” in session, a forum in and of itself that seeks magically to redress the anxiety,
indignation, and disappointment of an America weakened by assimilation.
Césaire’s dizzying array of essentialist, primitivist, anti-assimilative, and recontextualized revolutionary associations and assertions lays bare the complex agenda that
informs his essay as a whole. This agenda seeks to preserve Hughes’s “radical” persona in
French translation while simultaneously painting the anonymous writer—who in Césaire’s
polemic comes to represent the voice of all black poets—in non-threatening and essentialist
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terms which, given the aesthetic regime in play, also surreptitiously serve to comprise the
language of independence and revolt. Feeding a (not exclusively) fascist conception of race,
Césaire does not allow for the possibility of differing difference. The expansive cry defines the
man, and the man’s expansive cry defines the collective. This collective, painted by Hughes in
essentialist and exotic colors, is tied together and to its ancestors by fear, by a legacy of
disempowerment emphasized by the fact that Hughes’s “nous” is also paradoxically alone, “nous
sommes seuls.” However, this collective—as Césaire frames matters—also presents the reader
with a potent and poetic pan-African solidarity that his essentialism rhetorically serves to foment.
The “poète nègre” is bound to his identical brethren by a shared “intolerance” and a potentially
revolutionary “malaise,” but the grand collective engendered seemingly poses little threat
because its energies are directed towards essentialist and exotic phantoms (incarnate in the cage
of civilization and a great causeway to the sun) and relegated solely to the realm of speech. The
poet speaks in the name of black millions, but his protest is, at best, metaphysical, and, at worst,
atavistic. Likewise, the collective’s mounting anger finds its deliverance not on an earthly plain,
but in a courtroom of miracles built by the divine power of language. Time and time again,
Césaire’s article augments and diminishes the power of the black collective it invokes, be it local
or international, by using essentialist and primitivist language to frame it in anti-assimilative
terms while employing the very same discourse to downplay (and relegate to the ethereal) any
potential threat the collective poses to the forces that now rule and censor it.
Césaire’s successful evasion of Vichy censors created a Francophone persona for Hughes
that retained his anti-assimilative—and therefore, given the aesthetic regime in play,
communist—politic, but did so at the cost of inventing phantoms or anonymous menaces with
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which this politic was unconcerned. And while these menaces may have proven non-threatening
to the real menace at hand, the result was a figuration of Hughes that obfuscated the explicitly
revolutionary dimension of Hughes’s oeuvre that Piquion and his Haitian Renaissance sought to
illuminate. Hughes’s Francophone persona—the tellingly anonymous persona of the poète nègre
par excelence—was now more than ever tied to an essentialist concept of race, to a quasimystical conception of the power of the African utterance, and to the notion that black literature
was inherently a littérature engagée (albeit with phantom forces). And these ties, ties that did,
would, and continue to bind, helped to link Hughes with a plethora of concepts that, in Senghor’s
hands, would comprise the backbone of his early articulations of négritude. As noted critic W.F.
Feuser notes, the “closeness” of Senghor’s assessment of African-American literature
(exemplified in a number of his essays) to his “various definitions of Negritude poetry” is so
striking that even the “slightest doubt” that Hughes’s poetry “influenced Francophone poets with
its ideas and rythms” is absurd (296).
Senghor’s first essay to address the work of his longtime literary hero, “Trois Poètes
Négro-Américains” [Three Negro-American Poets] (1945), frames Hughes’s poetic production
with an eye to tie Hughes to Africa, and—insofar as it forgoes any mention of Hughes’s
explicitly political poetic production—testifies to the fact that Hughes’s early French
dissemination, albeit redefined and recontextualized, continued to constitute the material from
which his Francophone persona was forged. Senghor begins his discussion of Hughes by
qualifying him as “le plus célèbre poète contemporain” [the most famous contemporary poet],
but then tellingly offers a citation of the decades old “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
that focuses on Hughes’s invocation of “tam-tams” in order to draw the poet closer to Senghor’s
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Africa (33). Senghor continues along these lines when he asserts that Hughes’s poetry, like that
of many of his Harlem Renaissance counterparts, is “essentielment non-sophistiqée, comme sa
soeur, l’africaine” [essentially unsophisticated like its African sister]. Although imbued with a
certain pan-African solidarity, this assertion radically de-politicizes Hughes’s poetic production
in order to place it inside an essentialist framework that Senghor will later qualify as a new form
of humanism. And it is only logical that Senghor’s race-proud humanism—one that seeks to
afford the world’s black population a place at the global table and is embodied in the alluvial
term négritude—finds it poetic champion not in the Hughes who wrote “A New Song,” but in
the bard of the blues who inhabited the Parisian salons once frequented by négritude’s chief
champion.
In a lecture delivered in 1950, Senghor further de-politicizes Hughes by celebrating his
verse as an ideal vehicle for négritude while simultaneously asserting that the thematic content of
Hughes’s poetry matters little in the equation. Senghor begins his commentary on Hughes’s
négritude with his partial translation of Hughes “Genius Child,” qualifying it—by way of
introduction—as an exemplar not only of the race’s genius, but also as a poem whose every word
is fascinating, dyonisiaque, barbarous, and monstrous:
C’est le chant de l’enfant de genie.
Chantez-le doucement, car le chant est sauvage,
Chantez-le aussi doucement que vous le pourrez jamais,
Ou le chant s’echappera de vos mains.
Personne n’aime l’enfant de genie…
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Tuez-le et laissez laissez son âme errer sauvagement.
C’est Langston Hughes qui chante.
Ce qui est remarquable, c’est que cette pointe extreme du
sentiment racial soit à ce point sublimée. Ne sont pas le plus «nègres» les
poèmes où l’on proclame sa «négritude». La Négritude réside, plus que dans
le mots, dans la qualité singulière de l’émotion et du style. (119)
This is the song of the genius child.
Sing it softly for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can—
Lest the song get out of hand. (1-4)
Nobody loves a genius child. (11)
Kill him—and let his soul run wild! (12)
This is Langston Hughes who sings.
What’s remarkable is that this extreme point of racial feeling is at this
point sublimated. It’s not in the most “black” poems where one proclaims his
“negritude.” Négritude resides more in the singular quality of emotion and
style than it does in words.
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Senghor’s assessment of Hughes’s poem—a poem that easily takes on added primitivist
resonance in translation given the literal translation of wild as sauvage—is a curious one insofar
as it grounds itself largely in the semantic content of the poem, paying little (if any) heed to style.
The poem can be qualified as barbarous and monstrous only because the persona calls for the
death of the genius child, and dyonisiaque only because the song and the child’s soul are “wild.”
Moreover, Hughes’s sing-song “style”—especially with regards to his use of form and rhyme—
and the unique irony it carries is an element largely lost in translation. The poem is, for Senghor,
an extreme manifestation of racial feelings (or emotion), but this intense racial sentiment,
revealing Freud’s impact on Senghor, is sublimated. In fact, it is only when one accepts the
surrealist interpretation of Freud’s subconscious world of children and primitive instincts as, in
part, a call to re-evaluate so-called primitive peoples (a notion explored in our second chapter)
that Hughes’s poem can be cast as an extreme yet sublimated manifestation of racial sentiment.
The aesthetic regime that greeted Hughes twenty years earlier again comes to the fore, but it is
now “sublimated” as a matter of style and emotion. Senghor’s relegation of “Négritude” to these
arenas proves liberating in some respects—Hughes does not need to confine his poetry to black
themes in order to manifest his négritude—but it is also remarkably confining. If he is to make
recourse to his “style” and his “emotion,” Hughes and his verse cannot escape Senghor’s vexing,
elastic label. In short, all of Hughes’s poetry—in Senghor’s formulation—becomes racial
poetry.
Despite his position at the center of négritude’s growing storm, Langston Hughes
remained silent on the topic throughout the forties. This silence can be hypothetically attributed
to a number of factors including: Hughes’s continued desire to distance himself from the left, his
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distrust of racial essentialism, his domestic political persecution, his work as a propagandist
during the war, and his professed desire to distance his poetry from both race and politics.
However, it should in no way be attributed to his ignorance (or dismissal) of the powerful
literary movement on the rise and of the key literary personages at play therein.
Quite to the contrary, Hughes continued to prove himself a poet “in the know” by
publishing translations of both (selections from) Césaire’s Cahiers d’un Retour au Pays Natal
and three translations (of his own) of Damas’s verse in the anthology he co-edited with Arna
Bontemps titled The Poetry of the Negro (1948). Further testifying not only to the fact that
Hughes was “in the know” but also to the fact that he was “in the loop,” Hughes’s archival
correspondence reveals ongoing relationships: with Césaire, in letters that date from 1948, but
allude to prior correspondence as well as to the fact that Hughes followed the poet’s career from
afar; with Damas, in missives that date from 1946 and testify to Damas’s unsuccessful attempt to
translate Hughes’s Shakespeare in Harlem as well as to a similarly abortive attempt (to be
discussed later) to anthologize Hughes’s work; and with Senghor, in letters dating from 1950, the
first of which reminds Hughes of their prior meeting in the company of Damas, and tellingly
praises Hughes for his decades old Fine Clothes to the Jew and The Dream Keeper.
Hence, Hughes’s silence on the subject of négritude—both in public and in his private
letters—was a strategic and political one born out of a desire to avoid addressing the potentially
Red-hot topic, and this avoidance, despite an accumulating pressure to speak out on the matter,
would continue for years to come. Long after he announced his retirement from political poetry
to Louise Thompson and published his decidedly race-conscious Shakespeare in Harlem (1942),
Hughes continued to be hounded by The Special Committee on Un-American Activities, J.
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Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I., and a host of other right wing factions (Rampersad, Life II, 90-99).
Hughes’s support of the war effort—as much an act of self-preservation and anti-fascism as
patriotism—was even turned against him because it included support, incarnate in poems like
“Stalingrad 1942,” for the Soviet Union.1 Poems like this one, in turn, re-attracted the U.S. left
to Hughes, and while he indulged his former comrades on a few occasions, he was cognizant of
the threat inherent in the attraction and was always quick to retreat (Rampersad, Life II, 90-99).
The pressure from the right had an obvious impact on Hughes’s poetic production, prompting
him to go so far as to qualify (not-unfairly) his Fields of Wonder (1947) as a purely “lyric”
collection unconcerned with matters of race or politics (Rampersad, Life II, 120). Given
Césaire’s decision to join the communist party in 1945, Damas’s flirtation with communism and
life-long avowal of socialism, Senghor’s socialist affiliations, and the fact that all three men, by
1948, were not simply famous in the literary world, but were also elected political figures of high
stature in the U.S. allied French colonial empire, Hughes’s decision to forgo commentary on
their quasi-essentialist, Marxist, and culturally and politically anti-assimilative (not to mention
pro-independence) ideology is nothing if not logical given his political state of affairs.
Moreover, given that négritude ideologies and poetics referenced (for the most part) Hughes’s
early verse, a laissez faire approach was not only safe on the domestic front, but helped to
cement, albeit in new terms, a Francophone persona with which the world was well acquainted.
The politics of Hughes’s poetry disseminated in French translation spoke (via the logic of a
French aesthetic regime) for themselves, and these politics—while attractive to the “Big
Three”—were quite dangerous to a poet speaking on U.S. soil. In short, Hughes’s silence vis-àvis négritudewas the result of his attentiveness to the Francophone translation, dissemination,
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and interpretation of his early verse and of his unwillingness to carry his Francophone personae
home.
Shaping Anthologies: Divergent Versions Divergent Visions
Langston Hughes’s investment in (and attention to) the translation and dissemination of
his verse in the Hispanic world—as well as to the Spanish American personae that these
activities engendered—not only parallels his interest in his Francophone incarnations, but also
bears witness to an awareness of the multiply inflected receptions of his poetry in different
literary arenas governed by different political, cultural, and aesthetic regimes. Hughes’s close
involvement and collaboration with Julio Galer, the Argentine translator who published the first
Spanish language anthology of Hughes’s verse for Buenos Aires’s Editorial Lautaro in 1952,
testifies to both this investment and this awareness. The guidance and material aid that Hughes
afforded Galer reveal a poet cognizant of his (largely cemented) leftist persona in Spanish
America as well as a poet aware of the specifically Spanish-American race narratives that
positioned him, as a progenitor of the poesía negra movement, in terms quite apart from those
that helped to frame him as a precursor of négritude poetics. Moreover, Hughes’s collaboration
with Galer lays bare, once again, a poet who was more than happy to promote divergent visions
of his work and of himself in different literary arenas, a poet actively engaged in creating a
globally schizophrenic persona and literary legacy.
Langston Hughes’s vigilance vis-à-vis his Spanish language translation and
dissemination can be gleaned from a number of his missives—including his letter to Nancy
Cunard that makes mention of the “Valdés” anthology (discussed in our third chapter)—that
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repeatedly testify to the special heed he paid to translations of his poetry published in Spanish
language anthologies. In a letter to Blanche Knopf dated August 5, 1940, Hughes sought to
enlist Knopf’s help in securing a Spanish translation for his autobiography, and, in the process,
revealed that he was far more acquainted with the popularity of his work in Spanish translation
than was his own publisher:
So far I have forgotten to mention to you the fact that there may be
some sales and translation possibilities for The Big Sea in Latin America.
Many of my poems and several of my short stories have appeared in
translation down there, and I am in two Latin American anthologies of Negro
verse in Spanish.
Hughes points to his extant popularity in Latin America presumably in the hope that it
will induce Knopf to see the financial benefits inherent in providing The Big Sea with a Spanish
reading audience, and tellingly punctuates this plea for a wider Latin American dissemination in
Spanish by alluding to the fact the his work has not simply been translated, but twice
anthologized. Hughes’s logic mirrors the logic of both Piquion and (albeit anachronistically)
Seghers insofar as he assigns the anthology a preeminent place in securing both fame and a type
of literary consecration for the authors or author anthologized therein. He does not point to the
fact that his poems have been translated in several of Latin America’s most important literary
journals—including Contemporáneos, Sur, Social, Repertorio americano, and La Nueva
democracía—as evidence of his bankable fame, but rather to his inclusion in two anthologies of
Negro verse.
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The role that Hughes assigns the anthology is drawn into relief further when one
considers the fact that—with Marcos Fingerit’s Yo también soy América [I Too Am America]
(1944) still four years from publication—Hughes had yet to appear in two anthologies of “Negro
verse in Spanish,” and that his false assertion may have been intended to serve multiple agendas
informed by his fine attunement to a global literary map. Certainly, Hughes’s exaggeration (or
lie) represents a strategic attempt to secure a wider readership for his work which relies on the
logic that the anthology, above all other literary vehicles, authoritatively testifies to an author’s
bankable place within a foreign literary pantheon. However, Hughes’s misdirection can also be
seen as an attempt to lead the Red-wary Knopf away from his leftist legacy—as it was embedded
in avant-garde Latin American literary journals and in Pereda Valdés’s unnamed anthology—
and towards a politically non-descript opportunity to afford Latin American audiences a glimpse
at his “Negro” work, work that—in the case of The Big Sea—largely avoids the political fray. In
this sense, Hughes’s stretch of the truth is representative of his far reach, one which includes an
understanding of the complexities involved in promoting his work throughout the Americas.
Hughes’s conception of the work of the anthology in regard to his fame and literary
legacy in Latin America, in hindsight, represents more than a sales tactic or a political maneuver.
Rather, it proved to be an astute assessment of the Latin American literary landscape which—
arguably because of the preeminent role played by avant-garde Latin American literary journals
in the dissemination and location of Hughes’s verse in leftist (and larger) contexts—had thrice
anthologized Hughes’s verse when Julio Galer first contacted him in 1948. Galer worked as a
Professor of English in Córdoba, Argentina and occupied a place decidedly apart from the
vanguard of Buenos Aires. He was largely ignorant of Hughes’s Latin American persona as it
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had been developed in journals and periodicals, and—confirming Hughes’s view of the seminal
importance of anthologies—had happened upon Hughes’s work while pouring through
collections of verse and prose written by black authors from the U.S.:
Córdoba (Arg. Rep.) 21-4-48
My dear Mr. Hughes:
I am an Argentine Professor of English and I have specialized in
translations.
Since I read Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro-Literature and
was captivated by it, I began reading everything I could lay my hand on
belonging to your literature. But the material at my disposal is here, as you
can easily imagine, very scarce. I read, however, besides Calverton’s
anthology, the one by Watkins, Cullen’s “On these I stand” [sic], Du Bois’
‘Dusk of dawn” [sic], Johnson’s Along the way” [sic], Washington’s Up from
slavery”, [sic] Wright’s Native son” [sic] and “Uncle Tom’s children”. [sic]
From your production I read: The big sea” [sic] and “Field of wonder”, [sic],
besides what I could gather from several anthologies.
I started translating your poems some time ago and I’ve showed them
to several editorial houses in Buenos Aires. One of them has promised me to
publish an anthology of your poems [sic]. In Spanish, of course [….]
If you answer this letter I’ll be very glad to send you some of my
translations and to forward you any information you might want. Of course, I
shall need your help and constant advice to make this anthology the success it
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deserves to be. You see, Mr. Hughes, I do not undertake this heavy task just
for commercial reasons. I do not make my living translating but teaching.
But I want to put at the disposal of the Spanish Speaking public your
wonderful poetic production. Up to now they only know you as a novelist:
“El inmenso mar” and “Pero con risas.” In my opinion the translator has
something of the apostle because, like him, his mission is to spread the holy
word, in this case, the holy word of beauty and knowledge.1
Galer figures the anthology as both the source of inspiration for and the goal of his
apostolic project, a project that consists in disseminating Hughes’s “holy word” among a Spanish
speaking public. His missive speaks to—as do Césaire’s and Senghor’s early figurations of
Hughes—the all important, but often overlooked, role played by material access to literary works
in the construction of poetic personae both foreign and domestic. Testifying to the
heterogeneous spaces occupied by Galer’s “Spanish Speaking Public,” Hughes’s Argentine
persona is not that of a poet, but—owing to translations published by Argentine houses of The
Big Sea (1940) [El imenso mar (1946)] and Not Without Laughter (1930) [Pero con risas]—
largely that of a novelist. This status is not only without its irony, but also bears witness to the
interwoven incarnations of Hughes’s oeuvre and Hispanic personae as they existed (and exist) in
the Spanish speaking world. This is the case because Luisa Rivaud, the translator of The Big
Sea, informed Hughes—in a letter dated February 20, 1946—that she was a Spanish refugee who
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Although Hughes’s poetry does not appear in Watkins anthology, Calverton’s would have provided him with “I,
Too,” “Song for a Dark,” “Mulatto,” and “Weary Blues,” all of which appear in translation in Galer’s anthology.
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had undertaken the translator’s task as the direct result of the admiration she gained for Hughes
in the course of observing his actions and reading his poetry during the Spanish Civil War. In
short, the availability of Hughes’s radical poetry, in a Spanish context, helped to facilitate the
availability of his autobiography in an Argentine literary arena, but the Hughes made available to
Argentine readers necessarily lacked the poetic and political weight he held in other Hispanic
contexts.
Galer’s letter tellingly makes no mention of Hughes’s political legacy. Instead, he
confines his apostolic (yet decidedly Platonic) mission to the dissemination of the “beauty” and
“knowledge” contained in Hughes’s poetic production, a production of which he self-professedly
knows very little. In so doing, Galer reveals himself to be an anthologist who is also somewhat
of a blank slate upon which Hughes—whose “help and constant advice” are figured as essential
to the anthology’s success—can, in essence, inscribe his own Argentine poetic legacy and selffashion his Argentine (and potentially Spanish American) persona. The intellectual thirst of
which Galer boasts may be great, but his knowledge of African-American poetry and prose (a
knowledge limited not by curiosity but by scarcity) would have undoubtedly struck Hughes as
ridiculously scant. Likewise, his knowledge of Hughes’s poetry and poetic personae is limited to
what can be gleaned from Hughes’s, somewhat unrepresentative, “lyric” (and politically wary)
Fields of Wonder (1947) and from several anthologies with which—given Hughes’s
attentiveness to his Latin American dissemination—we can assume the poet was well aware.
These anthologies, in turn, would not only afford Hughes and Galer a familiarity with Hughes’s
previously translated and anthologized poems, but would also provide each man with a
knowledge of how Hughes’s poetry had been framed for Spanish American consumers not
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simply of Hughes’s verse, but of “Negro verse” produced throughout the Americas.
Nevertheless, Galer was a translator and anthologist who lacked the knowledge base necessary to
provide an authoritative (or even informed) anthology of Hughes’s verse for the Argentine
reading public. And yet, for a U.S. poet looking to forge his own legacy in Spanish translation,
Galer’s ignorance made him the perfect man for the job. He was a willing apostle awaiting
Hughes’s word, and a literary figure (as was Hughes) whose work and status did not threaten
Perón’s censors. The word handed down from the poet on high was nevertheless, from the
outset, a dangerous one that paid little heed to the hounds on Hughes’s domestic front. Rather,
Hughes’s collaboration with Galer—the poet’s most extensive with any of his translators to
date—resulted in a self-conscious fashioning of Hughes and his poetic production that: pays
heed to the Spanish American critical discourse that already surrounded his verse, seeks to
augment these discourses with new poems that fit into old frames, and results in a collection that
(like Pereda Valdés’s) figures Hughes’s poetic and political growth as one that begins with
Hughes’s poetic concerns about race and culminates with verse exemplifying his leftist classconsciousness.
Hughes was quick to respond to Galer’s request for permission and help, and (before
replying to Galer’s letter of inquiry) sent copies of “Freedom’s Plow,” “Freedom Train,” “I
Dream a World,” The Weary Blues, The Dream Keeper, and of Shakespeare in Harlem—works
that all speak to Hughes’s familiarity with both his Spanish American persona and his Spanish
language dissemination—on May 2, 1948. This familiarity can be gleaned not from the fact that
the texts Hughes provided Galer afforded the latter with a truncated panorama of the raceconscious poetry that Hughes published prior to his “lyric” Fields of Wonder, but from the fact
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that these works contain the majority of his poems published in the three Spanish language
anthologies of Negro verse that preceded Galer’s endeavor: Pereda Valdes’s Antología de la
poesía negra americana (1936), Marcos Fingerit’s Yo también soy América [I Too Am America]
(1944), and Emilio Ballagas’s Mapa de la poesía negra americana [Map of American Poesía
Negra] (1946). These anthologies, in turn, present the reader with three overlapping
hermeneutics for interpreting Hughes’s poetry and poetic growth that were not unfamiliar to the
poet, with three discursive regimes that are all, quite tellingly, given credence by the thematic
content of the poems that Hughes sent individually. The premium placed on inter-racial
cooperation as a means for democratic or economic uplift in all three poems complements Pereda
Valdés conception of a “universal” and class-conscious Hughes, and also enhances Ballagas’s
argument—no doubt informed by Fernando Ortíz’s idea of transculturación—that poesía negra
americana is best understood in light of “consideraciones de mestizaje e interculturación”
[crossbreeding and cross-cultural considerations], as a New World hybrid of African-American
themes and European languages and forms (8-13). Likewise, Hughes’s selection of individual
poems affords legitimacy to the interpretive frame assigned to his verse by Fingerit’s
anthology—a volume that subsumes an entire history of African-American verse under the last
line of Hughes’s “I Too”—because the volume’s preface, written by Luis Berti, asserts that
Hughes (who is once again figured as the most “universal” of African-American poets) owes his
poetic success not to an African Renaissance in America, but rather to his unparalleled capacity
to fuse his “vieja” [old] racial inheritance with European “modernos modos de conocimiento”
[modern modes of knowing] (36-38). Hence, Hughes’s initial offerings testify to both a poet
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well aware of his Spanish American persona, and also to a poet eager to fit Galer’s project into
the reigning aesthetic regimes surrounding his poetic production in the Hispanic world.
Hughes’s letter of consent reached Galer well before his shipment of books arrived, and
offers ample evidence of a poet reaching out to his translator with an opportunistic leftist hand.
Hughes begins his letter of May 3, 1948 by relating that he is “delighted” by Galer’s project, but
quickly segues into a discussion of his love for the practice of translation in general, informing
Galer that he translated García Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads and Roumain’s Masters of the Dew. He
thus aligns himself with Galer as a fellow translator while simultaneously betraying a fidelity to
socialism and communism incarnate (more or less) in the authors he has chosen to translate.
Hughes then links his experience as a translator to his self-presentation, one that paints him as a
world citizen attuned to the heterogeneity of race-relations in the Americas. He coyly informs
Galer that while he is eager to see his work in translation, he has his doubts as to whether or not,
“some of the more delicate nuances of race relations as known in America (USA) might not be
clear to South American readers (We do such strange funny things here).” Qualifying himself
and both an insider and an outsider, Hughes is both a reliable source for any questions Galer
might have concerning the “strange funny things here,” and a worldly poet endowed with an
international perspective on the U.S. “race problem.” He is also a poet familiar with the nuances
of race relations in South America (conceived, here, in hopelessly homogeneous terms), and—
insofar as he is both a translator and a Spanish speaker—a poet attuned to the nuances of the
Spanish language. Boasting his linguistic competence while alluding to fidelity in a new context,
he goes so far as to inform Galer that, “I would be happy to go over all your Spanish versions of
my poems.” Hence, Hughes’s letter of consent is also an affirmative reply to Galer’s letter of
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invitation. He is happy to bring Galer’s project to a successful conclusion, and more than
qualified to do so. Galer’s collaborator is also his fellow hispanohablante, translator, world
citizen, and may even be, as his references to García Lorca and Roumain intimate, Galer’s fellow
traveler. In short, the political facets of Hughes and his verse which he sought vigorously to
keep behind closed doors on his domestic front serve, once again, as nothing less than an olive
branch to his Latin American translator.
On May 14, 1948, Galer responded to Hughes’s missive and shipment by quickly posting
Hughes a series of his translations—the vast majority of which find their corresponding source
texts in Fields of Wonder—that soon saw publication in prominent Argentine literary journals
and, in the process, frustrated Hughes’s leftist expectations of his Argentine translator. Not only
did Galer fail to heed Hughes’s implicit suggestion—incarnate in his shipment of books—to
mine his previous poetic production for the purposes of the anthology (translating only “Passing
Love” and “April Rain Song” from his newly arrived edition of The Dream Keeper), but his
selection of texts painted a decidedly apolitical picture of the poet, one that was a far cry from
any of Hughes’s prior Latin American personae. In fact, Galer’s Hughes was a poet whose chief
concerns were love and loss, a hopeless romantic who first came to life in the 1948 June and July
editions of Calbagata, Continente, Tiempo Vivo, and Orientación where he was represented by:
“Uno” [“One”], a stark, unrhymed meditation on loneliness; “Deseo” [“Desire”], a loosely
rhymed deft meditation, painted in erotic and quotidian colors, on the constitutive roles played
by absence and presence in the phenomena of desire; “Sueño” [“Dream”], an instantiation of the
perennial poetic preoccupation with the relationship between death and desire; “Hombre”
[“Man”], a brief narrative sketch of maturation that figures the process as one accompanied by a
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loss of romantic innocence; “Canciones” [“Songs”], a poem that figures the coupling of two
lovers as a song without words; “Cancioncilla” [“Little Song”], a brief, rhyming poem that
explores the interconnection of loneliness, the loss of dreams, and the workaday world; “Luna
Nueva” [“New Moon”] a poem wherein the new moon represents a newfound love; “Canción de
la lluvia abrileña” [“April Rain Song”], a romantic and erotic celebration of lovers drenched by
Spring rain; “Amor pasajero” [Passing Love], a brief rhyming meditation on fleeting love; and
by “El tren de libertad” [Liberty Train], the only overtly political poem that Galer chose to
translate from the materials Hughes afforded him. In short, Galer’s first publications of
Hughes’s poetry resulted in a body of work and the creation of a poetic persona that were quite
apart from the visions of Hughes afforded by either the Latin American anthologies in which
Galer discovered his work or by Galer’s newfound booty of Hughes’s previous poetic
production. Perhaps more to the point, this new persona was not to Hughes’s liking, and
prompted the poet to take an active role in the composition of Galer’s anthology. If Galer would
not create Hughes’s leftist Hispanic persona anew, then Hughes would do it for him.
Hughes quickly (and with his characteristic subtlety) set about the task of transforming
his translator’s mindset, and took advantage of every opportunity Galer afforded him to mold the
anthology with a radical hand. Within days of receiving a copy of Calbagata, Hughes responded
to Galer’s request for the “best pieces of criticism on your work”—a request intended to aid him
in the composition of the anthology’s prefatory essay—by sending Galer both a copy of “My
Adventures as a Social Poet” (1947), an essay that (as we’ve seen) forefronts translation in order
to entrench Hughes inside an American left, and a stock biography that carries the telling
annotation “from files” on June 17, 1948. Taking advantage of the fact that Galer’s second letter
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had informed him—in response to Hughes’s invocation of García-Lorca, Roumain, and a
common bond amongst translators—that he recently met Nicolás Guillén and knew Hughes to be
his translator, Hughes not only critiqued Galer’s choice of texts by making recourse to his own
experience as a fellow translator, but also informed Galer that he was Guillén’s fellow traveler:
The translations which you sent me I like very much. It is regrettable
that it is difficult to carry over rhymes in another language, but I know how
impossible that often is. In a few of Guillen’s [sic] poems I was able to find
equivalent English rhymes.
I am glad you met Guillen [sic]. He is lots of fun and I have had many
enjoyable days with him in Havana and in Madrid during the bombardeo.
Hughes expresses a “like” for Galer’s translations that could not be offered in terms more
vague. He makes no mention of Galer’s translation decisions nor does he directly address his
choice of poems. Rather, he immediately segues into a remark (or perhaps, better said, a
platitude) concerning the difficulty of translating rhyme which, in Proustian fashion, leads to a
visceral remembrance of radicalisms past. Hughes thus coyly moves from the realm of the polite
to the realm of the political, and, in so doing, implicitly critiques Galer’s likable choice of poems
by firmly entrenching both himself and his artistic production in leftist history and soil.
Given the fact that only three of the poems Galer sent to Hughes are rhymed, Hughes’s
lament not only calls a strange attention to itself (suggesting an open-ended critique of the
unmentioned), but also strikes the reader as more of an attempt to guide Galer’s future choice of
poems than a legitimate expression of regret. This guidance, as Hughes framed matters, came
from an experienced and sympathetic veteran of the game who was unafraid to flaunt his
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revolutionary colors. It was more than welcomed by Galer who, in his letter of the fourteenth,
pledged—in the course of requesting a copy of (the out of print) Fine Clothes to the Jew
(1927)—to translate poems in accordance with Hughes “will,” and promised to forsake “those
poems” that “you do not want […] to be translated.” Galer’s fidelity to Hughes’s vision of
himself was rewarded, and the poet not only provided Galer with nearly all the materials he
requested, but also indulged Galer’s thirst to translate his recent verse. Slanting the anthology
away from the realm of the strictly “lyric,” Hughes sent Galer manuscript copies of several
poems contained in his, yet to be published, One Way Ticket (1949). However, Hughes was still
loathe to cede control to Galer, and—drawing attention to the preferences of his guiding hand—
informed the translator that he did not send the collection’s “almost untranslatable” poems
composed “in rhymed dialect,” but rather just “enough to get the general flavor of the book.” In
short, Hughes generously gave with one hand, and carefully guided with the other. Galer was
welcome to Hughes’s poems both published and unpublished, but restricted from those that the
experienced translator deemed unsuitable for Spanish language publication.
Galer was quick to pick up on Hughes’s desire to be painted as a “social poet,” and not
only heeded his advice and guidance, but also actively began to investigate Hughes’s leftist
legacy. Shortly after receiving Hughes’s selections from One Way Ticket (a volume that Arnold
Rampersad aptly characterizes as Hughes’s “vigorous return to the urban folk material in which
Hughes generally reveled”), Galer wrote Hughes to inform him that it was “wonderful to notice
how your mood changed from “FIELDS OF WONDER” [sic] to this last volume” on July 12,
1948 (Rampersad, Complete Vol. 2, 9). Galer stopped short of explaining why Hughes’s change
in mood was wonderful to note, but implied that the change was more of a happy return than an
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evolution by relating that his observations had been confirmed by “Córdova Iturburu, who met
you in Paris in 1937 in a Congress of Writers.” Iturburu had, in turn, edified the translator by
linking the “note of hope” in Hughes’s new manuscripts to a similarly hopeful note which not
only characterized Hughes’s wartime poetic production, but was also “common to a great
number of liberal writers all over the world.” In short, the arrow of intent behind Hughes’s
invocation of the bombadero in Madrid had struck dead center, and Galer began to see Hughes’s
past and present literary production in an international revolutionary light.
Galer’s new perspective, albeit convenient, was not a simple matter of a translator
bending to a poet’s (more or less explicit) will. Quite to the contrary, his conversation with
Iturburu incited an almost insatiable drive to know the revolutionary poet with whom he was
collaborating better. In a series of missives spanning from July 12, 1948 to September 15, 1948,
Galer—seeking to enhance the leftist bent of both his anthology and his prefatory essay—asked
Hughes to provide him with: information concerning Hughes’s involvement in the Spanish Civil
War, an account of his sojourn through the Soviet Union, and copies of Hughes’s most “radical
verse.” In fact, Galer seems to have gone too far in this last respect. Prompted by his research
on Hughes and on Hughes’s presence abroad, Galer asked for copies of “Advertisement for the
Waldorf Astoria,” “Letter to the Academy,” “Elderly Leaders,” “Ballads of Lenin,” “Goodbye
Christ,” and “Good Morning Revolution.”1 Given the fact that Hughes had long been hounded
by the U.S. religious and political right for composing these poems (as well as by the left for his
renunciation of “Goodbye Christ”), it comes as no surprise that Hughes ignored Galer’s request,
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and sent only a copy of “Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria.”1 In short, while the “social
poet” fought hard for the preservation of his identity, he was largely unwilling—even in foreign
language translation—to forsake his leftist middle ground in order to republish his explicitly
communist verse.
Galer’s request nevertheless seems to have struck a sympathetic chord with Hughes, and
caused the poet—now arguably convinced that Galer’s fidelity extended to both semantic and
political realms—to guide less and collaborate more. Indeed, the correspondence between Galer
and Hughes dating from 1949 to 1952 is marked by a series of friendly, helpful exchanges.
Galer’s questions were promptly answered (a rarity for Hughes), and Hughes’s requests were
indulged. For example, Hughes asked Galer to translate some of his “Be-Bop” poems contained
in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), but on November 9, 1948 graciously let Galer—who
was intensely frustrated by the task—off the hook, downplaying Galer’s failure with the playful
remark that Be-Bop “is a kind of musical forerunner of the atom bomb.” Hughes also provided
Galer with unpublished manuscripts (one of which, “Árbol,” finds its only publication in Galer’s
anthology).1 Hughes even mitigated his refusal, albeit in service of his overall agenda, to
provide Galer with the radical selection of poems for which he asked by supplying him with
poems that, in terms of thematic content, approximated those which he censored: “Christ in
Alabama” mitigated his denial of “Goodbye Christ,” “Park Bench” drew class lines as sharply as
“Letter to the Academy,” and “Stalingrad 1942” celebrated the Soviet Union in terms just as
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Hughes’s willingness to supply this poem is arguably the result of the fact that it was included in The Big Sea and
therefore already translated into Spanish by Luisa Rivaud.
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“Arbol” reads: “Tengo miedo / De ese árbol / Sin hojas / En la noche / contra el cielo. / Quiero llorar.”
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forceful as those employed in “Ballads of Lenin” or “Good Morning Revolution.” The
collaboration was, in fact, so successful that Hughes—in a letter dated February 29, 1949—goes
so far as to refer to the anthology as “our book.”
Hughes’s close collaboration with Galer resulted in the successful publication of the
largest anthology of Hughes’s verse to date, Poemas (1952), a collection of eighty-three poems
that were carefully selected— as were the uncollected poems that Hughes first shipped to
Galer—to complement the aesthetic and discursive regimes surrounding Hughes’s poetic
production in the Americas. Selections from six volumes of Hughes’s poetry—The Weary Blues
(1926), Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927), The Dream Keeper (1932), Fields of Wonder (1947),1
One Way Ticket (1949), Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)—were strategically mined and
presented in chronological order (grouped together by volume) with an eye to provide grist for
the mills of: poesía negra critics, like Ballagas and Fingerit, whose analyses of Hughes’s poetic
production tended to focus on both the use of African-American musical forms in his verse and
the (sometimes concomitant) issue of mestizaje or transculturación; Marxist critics, like Pereda
Valdés, whose analyses not only tended to paint Hughes’s poetic growth as a function of his
increasing commitment to communism or socialism, but also figured his early poetic production
as demonstrative of his commitment to portraying the proletariat; and a litany of critics who fell
in-between these two poles whose analyses, like Piquion’s, tended to paint Hughes’s poetry as
equally informed by his fidelities to his race and to the left. For example, Fine Clothes to the
Jew was economically mined to please all camps: Galer’s ambitious (and largely successful)
translations of both the rhyme and rhythms of Hughes’s “blues verse”—as embodied in “Blues
del pobre muchacho” [“Po’ Boy Blues”] and “Blues de la añoranza” [“Homesick Blues”]—
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afforded aficionados of poesía negra a heretofore unseen Spanish language glimpse at Hughes’s
use of traditional Afro-American musical forms in his poetry; critics with an eye to mestizaje and
transculturación were not only afforded poems that spoke to the issue of miscegenation like
“Mulato” [“Mulatto”] and “Ruby Brown,” but were also presented with “Jazz band en un cabaret
de Paris” [“Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret”], a poem that, in part, figures the New World art
form as a cross-cultural (and racial) hybrid; and Marxists were served a feast of exploitation
embodied in both the poems already mentioned as well as in “Salivaderas de bronce” [“Brass
Spittoons”] and “Sirviente” [“Porter”]. Without fail, Galer and Hughes highlighted the facets of
each volume that best served the discursive and aesthetic regimes surrounding Hughes’s poetic
production in the Americas, going so far as to imbed volumes lacking in one aspect with
compensatory poems taken from elsewhere—the rather apolitical Fields of Wonder, for example,
was imbedded with the Marxist “Vagabundos” [“Sharecroppers”]. The end result was an
anthology that not only kept all of the Latin American discourses that surrounded Hughes well
fed, but also testified to collaborators keenly aware of Hughes’s Spanish American poetic
personae and, once again, to a Hughes who was more than happy to have multiple Latin
American incarnations.
Despite the fact that Poemas was constructed with an eye to please several potential
audiences and critical camps, the anthology as a whole presents the reader with a portrait of
Hughes’s poetic production and political growth that closely mirrors the one painted by Pereda
Valdés. This progressive portrait is heavily marked by Hughes’s fingerprints, and bears the
imprints of both his missives to Galer and of his careful dissemination of his own verse. The
anthology is largely devoid of translations of Hughes’s rhymed poems, and Galer’s prefatory
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essay, “Langston Hughes el poeta y el hombre” [Langston Hughes the Poet and the Man], figures
Hughes’s life and poetic production in terms of a progressive leftist awakening. Tellingly
focusing his attention on the verse and translations that arose from Hughes’s experiences in
Spain and the Soviet Union, Galer not only downplays the importance of Hughes’s “obras más
eminentemente líricas” [most eminently lyrical works], but actually concludes his essay with a
citation from (and translation of) the final paragraph of “My Adventures as a Social Poet” (1121).1 The anthology itself concludes not with a selection from one of Hughes’s volumes, but
rather with a carefully chosen selection of radical poems (discussed, in part, above) that begins
with “Banco de Plaza” [“Park Bench”] and concludes with “Stalingrado 1942” [“Stalingrad
1942].
It is in the selection of this final poem that we see one of the happy accidents of interAmerican exchange, for it was Galer’s desire to yoke Hughes to Pablo Neruda—as he does in his
prefatory essay by mentioning Stalingrad’s poetic treatment in the work of both “nuestro
Neruda” [our Neruda] and Hughes—that most likely accounts for the anthology’s conclusion
(19). In a letter dated July 22, 1949, Galer happily informed Hughes that Poemas was to share
its release date with “Canto General de Chile.”1 Galer’s Hughes (a poet of love and loss in
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Galer frames the citation as an answer to the question: How could a poet be so “dulce y lírico” [sweet and lyrical]
and also write poetry that is so “violenta” [violent]? He then provides the following translation, “Yo no puedo
escribir exculsivamente sobre las rosas y la luna porque a veces a la luz de la luna mis hermanos ven una cruz
ardiendo y un círculo de oscuras capuchas. A veces a la luz de la luna se vé un cuerpo Moreno colgando, linchado,
de una cuerda pero no hay rosas en su funeral…” [“That is why I cannot write exclusively about roses and
moonlight—for sometimes in the moonlight my brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansmen’s hoods.
Sometimes in the moonlight a dark body swings from a lynching tree—but for his funeral there are no roses.”]
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Unbeknownst to Galer, Neruda had, for some eighteen years, been revising Canto General de Chile into Canto
General.
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Fields of Wonder who was transformed into a revolutionary inside the pages of Poemas) had
found his South American counterpart in the poet who had progressed from Veinte poemas de
amor y una canción desesperada [Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair] (1924) to España
en el corazón [Spain in My Heart] (1937). In fact, one could argue that Neruda’s poetic growth
provided Galer with a familiar template that helped him to construct the Argentine Hughes that
the poet so desired. However, a recession amongst Argentine publishing houses delayed the
appearance of Poemas for three years and caused Editorial Lautaro (perhaps intimidated by
Perón’s censors) to lose Canto General (1950) to the Mexican house Talleres Gráficos de la
Nación, leaving Galer only Stalingrad to tie the two poets together.
Despite the recession, Poemas sold very well, and prompted Editorial Lautaro to both
publish a second edition a year later and to solicit more work from Hughes. For his part, Hughes
was enthused not by the anthology’s financial success (he made close to nothing owing to the
devaluation of the Argentine peso), but because a wide selection of his poetry had been made
available in Spanish for the first time. On July 19, 1952, Hughes (true to form) wrote to Galer
and—after offering one sentence of praise dedicated to Galer’s translations—wished “our book”
a “wide circulation in the Spanish speaking world.” Betraying both his awareness of his Spanish
American popularity and his desire to augment that fame, he urged Galer to make sure that
Editorial Lautaro “arranged to have it distributed in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and other
countries where my poems are widely known.” And happily, for Hughes, the question of an
English version of the anthology never arose.
While Poemas attracted scant attention and weak praise in the United States, the
anthology’s financial success was closely paralleled by the critical praise it received from
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Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, the volume was not without its South American detractors, and
their critiques bear witness both to the nearly impossible task undertaken by Hughes in
attempting to gauge a level of radicalism appropriate for a heterogeneous (politically, racially,
culturally, nationally) South American audience as well as to the potent legacy of Hughes’s
“radical” verse vis-à-vis its inspirational impact on the generation of black South American
writers who followed in his (and Nicolás Guillén’s) wake. Alma T. Watkins’s brief review of
Poemas, titled “Blues in Spanish,” appeared in the fourth quarterly issue of Phylon in 1952, and
comprises the sole critical response to Galer’s volume published in the U.S. It offers a lukewarm
assessment of Poemas that focuses —as do most translation reviews that stem from this period
(and from ours)—largely on, for lack of a phrase less abhorrent, what is “lost in translation.”
Although Watkins does offer Galer vague praise for his ability to catch “the poet’s dream,” she is
less generous in regard to his translations of Hughes’s blues “lyrics,” arguing that Galer’s
translations fail to capture the “‘lilt’ and the ‘sway’” of the musical form (351). This criticism is
somewhat curious given Watkins’s assertion that these qualities are impossible to translate, but it
is nevertheless echoed by her comments concerning Galer’s translations of “jazz poems” wherein
she mitigates Galer’s failure by asserting that “the expression of jazz is peculiarly individual,
belonging to the inventors and inheritors of this type of music” (352). In short, Galer fails to
adequately translate Hughes’s musical verse not because he lacks competency, but because he
isn’t a Negro from the United States.
Watkins’s criticisms and quasi-essentialist assumptions strike her reader as particularly
out of place given the fact that she begins her review by praising Poemas as “an excellent
example of intercultural relations,” but this paradox detracts little from her concluding assertions
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that Galer’s translations preserve the “lyrical beauty” of Hughes’s poetry and (more to the point)
that the poems picked by Galer and Hughes represent a “choice selection” (352). Her review is
thus as much of a defense as it is an attack, and while her negative evaluations do evince a
certain cultural chauvinism, this paradoxical chauvinism is actually crafted with an eye to defend
Hughes from a right-wing increasingly hungry for his blood. In fact, Watkins imbues her review
with several paradoxes that come to comprise a sub-textual agenda and political bent which lean
slightly to the left of center. She is enthused by the potential of “inter-cultural relations,” but
nevertheless asserts that certain elements of U.S. African American art and culture are
untranslatable and the sole providence of their “inventors or inheritors.” She devotes seventyfive percent of her review to a criticism of Galer’s incorporation of Hughes’s jazz and blues
verse, but nevertheless finds the anthology’s selection of poems “choice.” These seemingly
paradoxical assessments lay bare Watkins’s agenda, one that seeks to obfuscate the potentially
dangerous political aspects of Poemas by focusing attention, albeit negative, on the two
dimensions of Hughes’s poetic production that were (and are) the least politically threatening to
his U.S. readership. In other words, Watkins attacks Galer’s translations of Hughes’s blues and
jazz verse in order to avoid discussion, for example, of Galer’s translations of “Christ in
Alabama” or of “Stalingrad 1942.” Leftist poems like these are tellingly left anonymous but
qualified as well chosen, suggesting that Watkins approved of the anthology’s political content,
but feared to endorse this content explicitly. Given the fact that Phylon’s founder, W.E.B. Du
Bois, had just been indicted, tried, and acquitted of the charge that he was an "unregistered
foreign agent," Watkins caution is not only understandable, but exemplary of the intimidating
political climate in the U.S. vis-à-vis leftist radicalism in 1952. The very climate from which
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Hughes sought refuge by publishing and propagating his radical poems in exclusively foreign
contexts also engendered Watkins’s, somewhat unfair, but largely protective critique. And if
Watkins’s judgment is to be afforded a degree of confidence, then it does indeed appear that
Hughes gauged the political atmosphere of his home-front quite well: his fellow citizens (and
sympathizers) were ready to embrace neither Hughes’s radical poetry nor Langston Hughes the
black radical.
The critical and commercial success afforded to the tempered radicalism of Poemas in
Argentina speaks, arguably, to Galer’s and Hughes’s astute perception of the country’s political
climate. Poemas was neither ardently socialist nor pro-capitalist, and succeeded in carving out a
middle ground that Hughes the Marxist and Hughes the forefather of poesía negra could both
occupy. This in-between ethos finds a close cousin in the country’s reining ideology of the day,
as Peronismo was advertised as a supposed third way, or middle ground, between socialism and
capitalism by Juan Perón and by the members of his Partido Justicialista.1 The pro-labor and
pro-union sentiments contained in poems like “El tren de libertad” [“Liberty Train’”] and
“Obreros Camineros de Florida” [“Florida Road Workers”] well complemented the fact that
Perón owed his presidency, in large part, to the support of labor organizations like (his own)
Confederación General del Trabajo de la República Argentina [The Republic of Argentina’s
General Confederation of Labor]. Similarly, poems like “Peones” [“Sharecroppers”] and “El
sur” [“The South”]—which detail the cruel realities and harsh existence of agrarian life while
idealizing an industrialized North—were no doubt music to the ears of a regime completing its
own “Five Year Plan.” Even poems that professed religious doubt or spoke to religion’s
cruelty—like “Profecía del domingo a la mañana” [“Sunday Morning Prophecy”] and “Cristo en
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Alabama” [“Christ in Alabama”]—were not censored by a regime whose poor relationship with
the Church culminated in the 1955 Catholic nationalist coup which forced Perón into exile.
Indeed, one or all of these factors may have played a key role not only in the success of the
anthology, but also in its success with Argentine critics writing in heavily censored newspapers
that were often loathe to publish book reviews for fear of the reprisal visited on many of the
country’s artistic dissidents.1
Whatever the case may be, Galer and Hughes had gauged Argentina’s literary and
political climates quite well, and the former (who was quite eager to translate more of Hughes’s
work) was more than willing to relay news of success—in the form of forwarded newspaper
clippings and, more often, in anecdotes contained in his letters—to the poet who had already
playfully dubbed him “my official Argentine translator.”1
In a series of letters that began with the anthology’s publication in June of 1952 and
continued over the course of the next sixteen months, Galer continually conveyed Argentina’s
critical acclaim—in a publishing atmosphere that Galer qualified as unfriendly to book reviews
in general—for the anthology. Hughes had been well reviewed by Clarín—in Galer’s
estimation, “the most widely read newspaper” in Buenos Aires—as well as by a host of key
journals and newspapers that not only celebrated the appearance of the volume, but continued to
fuel its sales.
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Perón silenced his critics from the art world, for the most part, by exiling them.
Hughes so dubbed Galer in a missive dated June 17, 1948. Galer went on to publish Hughes’s hit play Mulato
[Mulatto], his autobiography Yo viajo por un mundo encantado [I Wonder as I Wander], and the short story
collection Cosas de blancos [The Ways of White Folks].
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381
Testifying to the fact that Hughes’s leftist Hispanic persona followed him on its own just
as often as he helped to feed it, La razón—the first periodical to praise Galer’s volume—
solicited its review from one of the country’s newly displaced inhabitants and Hughes’s old
friend, Rafael Alberti. In a letter dated July 28, 1952, Galer wrote Hughes to inform him that
the anthology had enjoyed a “very warm reception” in “La Razón,” but admitted to a slight
disappointment because Alberti’s review “was written before the book actually was.” Galer’s
slight disappointment provides the present argument with still more evidence of how Hughes’s
radical verse and persona left an indentation on the Hispanic literary arena that was indeed hard
for the poet (had he been willing) to escape. The man who played a key, if not the largest, role in
locating Hughes’s Spanish persona—the persona most responsible for entrenching Hughes
among the left in Spanish America—was now helping to secure a place for him in Argentina.
Moreover, Alberti was either so ensconced in the aesthetic regime of the Spanish Civil War or so
confident in his knowledge of “the real” Hughes that he reviewed his book without even reading
it. Alberti’s review, as does Rivaud’s missive, bears witness to the fact that although the
Hispanic literary world was indeed heterogeneous, word (and sometimes people) still spread fast.
Indeed, word sometimes not only spread fast, it also pursued, lingered, and endured.
Not Left Enough
The resiliency of Hughes’s revolutionary persona was, in fact, so strong that the
anthology was dismissed as politically tepid by Hughes’s Colombian friend and literary heir
Manuel Zapata Olivella, an often times overlooked novelist whom Richard Jackson has labeled,
“the dean of Black Hispanic writers” (Jackson, Hispanic Canon, 51). Writing from a Bogotá that
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was long besieged by La Violencia and currently under the dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla,
the famous member of the prominent Zapata Olivella family informed Hughes that he was
disappointed by the anthology on February 27th 1954:
[H]e tenido noticias tuyas, aparte de los libros que me enviabas, por
algunas publicaciones hecho en español sobre tu obra. La última fue de una
Editoral Argentina, por cierto bastante mala como la mayor parte de las
traducciones que hacen de tus libros al español. Además, esta última
colección, tiene el grave inconveniente de no publicar tus poemas de
indignación por la humiliación del hombre y de nuestra raza, pero como
siempre publicaron El tren de la Libertad [sic], lo cual revela aun cuando en
parte, tu poesía combativa.
I’ve had news of you, apart from the books that you’ve sent me, from
some publications written in Spanish about your work. The last one was from
an Argentine publishing house, fairly poor, by the way, like the majority of
the Spanish translations they’ve made of your books. Moreover, that last
collection, has the serious drawback of not publishing your poems of
indignation about the humiliation of man and of our race, but as usual they
published Liberty Train [sic], which reveals, although in part, your aggressive
poetry.
In the eyes of Zapata Olivella—whose He visto la noche [I’ve Seen the Night] documents
both his relationship with Hughes and Hughes’s role in the awakening of his radical race
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consciousness—Galer’s anthology can seemingly do no good. It represents neither Hughes’s
combativa race poetry (concerning the humiliation of nuestra raza) nor Hughes’s Marxist verse
(engaged with the humiliation of man), and this failure is, in Zapata Olivella’s opinion, typical of
Spanish language translations of Hughes’s work. However, Zapata Olivella’s objections to the
anthology rest on rather shaky ground. As we have seen, Galer’s anthology not only offers its
reader a panorama of Hughes’s “race” poetry that ranges from the self-affirming “El negro”
[“Negro”] to the more that combativa “Cristo en Alabama” [“Christ in Alabama”], but also
offers ample grist for the mills of Marxist critics by providing poems like “Un aviso para el
Waldorf Astoria” [Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria”] and “Stalingrado 1942” [“Stalingrad
1942”]. Moreover, given that Galer was the first to provide a Spanish language translation of
“Liberty Train,” Zapata Olivella’s quip speaks more to a tendency among Hughes’s translators to
focus on his radical poems that emphasize racial cooperation in the interest of the proletariat than
it does to a generalized avoidance (or an avoidance on Galer’s part) of Hughes’s combativa
poetry. In this sense, “Liberty Train” and Hughes’s poems with similar thematic content only
can be said to partially reveal Hughes’s aggressive side insofar as they are not manifestations of
solely black rage—a topic of chief interest to Zapata Olivella whose He visto la noche caries the
subtitle “La raíces de la furia negra” [The roots of black rage].
It would seem that, for Zapata Olivella—who ends his missive by crediting Hughes with
turning him into a radical, “me has convertido en un militante” [you’ve converted me into a
militant]—no Hughes was militante enough and that, in essence, Hughes’s revolutionary
Hispanic persona had actually outgrown his radical poetic production. This point is crucial
because given the limited availability of Hughes’s work in Latin America (in English or
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Spanish), Hughes’s persona and fame were, arguably, almost as influential as his work itself on
the cadre of black writers—both Hughes’s contemporaries and the generation that followed in
his wake—who claim and claimed him as an influence. This cadre stretches across South
America, and—as Richard Jackson has amply demonstrated both in his book Black Writers and
the Hispanic Canon (1997) and in his article “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Black
Hispanic Writers” (1981)—includes (to name but a few): Pilar Barrios, the poet laureate from
Uruguay where, in the 30’s and 40’s, Hughes was a household name; Barrios’s countrywoman
and fellow poet Virginia Brindis de Salas; Nelson Estupinán Bass, a musical-folk poet from
Ecuador; Peru’s Nicomedes Santa Cruz, who also poeticized and politicized folk forms; and, of
course, the Colombian novelist and poet Manuel Zapata Olivella (Jackson, Shared, 91). Each of
these writers was, in Jackson’s apt estimation, bound to (and heir to) Hughes’s proletarian
concerns with the black masses, concerns that many may have first encountered not in
publications of Hughes’s verse (in either English or Spanish), but rather (and perhaps only) in the
course of literate conversation, in a prefatory essay to a journal or volume containing mention (or
translations) of Hughes’s verse (like those written by Fernández de Castro, Rafael Alberti, or
Pereda Valdés), or simply by way of an off-the-cuff reference to Hughes’s fame (Jackson,
Shared, 92). In short, Hughes’s Latin American revolutionary black persona had become a selfsustaining entity of sorts by the time Galer’s anthology appeared in print, a persona that made
itself known despite its scant instantiations in print, an incarnation that would, in the end, outstrip
and outlast the social poet himself.
Constructing Personae: Multiple Literary Heirs
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The Hughes that Galer offered to the Spanish American reading public and the ones that
Piquion, Césaire, and Senghor provided to the French are all deeply invested in the production of
race-conscious and revolutionary verse, but nevertheless differ in several telling respects. And it
is arguably this difference that not only allowed Hughes to serve as a forefather to multiple
literary cadres and movements, but also accounts for Hughes’s willingness to be framed in the
variety of aesthetic and discursive regimes of which he was well aware. The balanced, yet
progressively Marxist, Hughes constructed in Poemas is a far cry from the poet who is always
(and simultaneously) raciste, realiste, and revolutionnaire in the pages of Un chant nouveau.
Likewise, both the Hughes who serves as an exemplar for all black American poets in Césaire’s
Tropiques and the poet whose emotion and style represent the very essence of Senghor’s early
articulations of négritudestand firmly inside an essentialist and, at times, primitivist light from
which Hughes had taken great pains to distance himself after his break with Charlotte Osgood
Mason in 1930. Nevertheless, it was precisely Hughes’s awareness of his Hispanic and
Francophone personae, his willingness to let others independently (or with his aid) construct
these personae, and his silence concerning the discrepancies inherent in each of these
embodiments that ultimately afforded Hughes his incredible wealth of poetic progeny. In other
words, Hughes’s participation—active (in, for example, Galer’s case) and passive (in Alberti’s or
Senghor’s)—allowed for the creation of multiple visions of Hughes informed by a wealth of
competing and overlapping ideologies and agendas, and his refusal to embrace or denounce these
visions allowed them to coexist in relative harmony and to inspire poets from, often times,
radically different camps and cadres. Adherents to the tenets of négritude, poesía negra, and
popular front poetics could all look to Hughes as either a forefather or comrade in arms precisely
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because there was no definitive Hughes. Hence, Hughes’s penchant for encouraging multiple
visions and versions of both himself and of his verse in globally diverse literary arenas can be
said to lay bare his desire to be as influential as possible, to be—as he told Guillén years
earlier—“el poeta de los negros” in a heterogeneous world where “los negros” could not be
represented by a single voice.
The dangers inherent in both Hughes’s attempt to gauge appropriate levels of radicalism
for his international audiences and in his allowance for (and promotion of) multiple and differing
incarnations of his poetic voice materialized with a vengeance on his domestic front precisely
because the political atmosphere in a United States gripped by the Second Red Scare did not
allow for polyphony. The poet, his persona, and his poetry were all considered one and the same
when Langston Hughes was summoned before Joseph McCarthy’s infamous House UnAmerican Activities Committee on March 27, 1953. And although Hughes’s now renunciation
of communism and atheism before McCarthy has been characterized repeatedly as an act of
heroism, of obscene obeisance, and of rampant opportunism, it has not been noted that Hughes’s
testimony—both a defense and an admission—stakes its ground, both surreptitiously and overtly,
on two key concepts: that the reception of literary works is context dependent; and that the
equation of poet, poetry and persona—an equation that, as we’ve seen, would have proven
prohibitive for Langston Hughes’s wide dissemination in the Hispanic and Francophone
worlds—is a dangerous, ludicrous, and ultimately untenable one.1
It has long gone without mention that Hughes—despite the fact that he was terrified by
Joseph McCarthy and by his rabid attack-dog Roy Cohn—began his five page statement to the
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infamous committee with a riff on the opening paragraph of nothing less than “My Adventures
as a Social Poet”:
Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and
snow must lead a very quiet life. Seldom, does their poetry get them into
difficulties. Beauty and lyricism are really related to another world, to ivory
towers, to your head in the clouds, feet floating off the earth.
Unfortunately, having been born poor—and also colored—in
Missouri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning. Try as I might to float
off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and
right back on earth I would land. A third-floor furnished room is the closest
thing I have had to an ivory tower.
Some of my earliest poems were social poems in that they were about
people’s problems—whole groups of people’s problems—rather than my own
personal difficulties, but when one writes poems of social content there is
always the danger of being misunderstood. As Mr. Archibald MacLeish,
Pulitzer prize winner, formerly librarian of Congress, said before the senators,
“One of the occupational hazards of writing poetry is running the risk of being
misunderstood.” (Rampersad, Life II, 213-214)
Hughes begins his statement by qualifying himself, first and foremost, as a poet. This
qualification, in turn, affords him the license (at least in his eyes) to address McCarthy’s
committee both as a witness providing testimony and as a poet testifying to the nature of his
poetry and of poetry in general. He highlights this dual aspect of his uncomfortable position not
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simply by figuring his subpoena as the byproduct of literary (mis)interpretation (as one of the
inevitable “occupational hazards of writing poetry”), but also by offering a statement—one that
is, in essence, a quasi self-citation—that serves as testimony only insofar as it is either
misunderstood or endowed with new meaning by the context at hand. The very text that the
“social poet” wrote to distance himself from the Communist Party and to yoke himself to an
inter-American left now comes to serve as evidence to combat charges of un-American activity,
but this defense depends upon the committee’s acceptance of Hughes’s statement as evidence
representative of his true convictions. In other words, if the committee is inclined to ignore
Hughes’s sworn self-identification as a poet and to assess his written statement based on its truth
value, then the witness and the witness’s words can, in essence, be equated. However, if the
committee is to take Hughes at his sworn word and to accept him as a poet, then any such
equation is fraught with risk because it depends on the assumption that a poet and a poet’s words
are one and the same. And this, it would seem, is exactly the point that Hughes, albeit
surreptitiously, attempts to make. He has been brought before McCarthy because of his verse,
but the relationship between him, his poetic personae, and the verse to which they give voice
should not be considered analogous to the relationship between witness and testimony as it is
generally conceived. With this in mind, the charges made against Hughes appear rather
ludicrous, and he chooses to emphasize the absurdity of these un-American charges by drawing
the malleability of literature and literary interpretation into stark relief not only by offering
literature as testimony, but also—in offering a riff on his leftist essay—by demonstrating the
extreme degree to which the reception of his words depends upon individual readers and
contexts. Leftist manifesto becomes patriotic defense when afforded the proper context and
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audience. There is always the potential, as Hughes relates, that a poet may be “misunderstood.”
Hughes’s testimony depends upon this fact.
Given the fact that Hughes obviously assumed that McCarthy and Cohn were not regular
readers of Phylon, he most likely thought that his reference to “My Adventures as a Social Poet”
would pass unnoticed, but his opening statement to the committee is nevertheless replete with
seemingly stock phrases that: reframe the apolitical as political, transform the innocent into the
virulent, invoke texts and political personages in support of his cause, and (above all) highlight
the instability of literary and semantic meaning. For instance, Hughes begins his statement by
separating himself and his poetic production from ethereal “ivory towers” that, at first glance,
come to represent the realm of the apolitical, the poetic world afforded to wealthy poets lucky
enough to be unconcerned with the material one. However, by tying himself to his fellow poet
Archibald MacLeish—the man for whom the term “fellow traveler” was coined—who was not
only a virulent (and public) critic of McCarthy but also the author of The Ivory Tower (1917),
Hughes transforms what, as testimony, serves as a rather innocuous reference to that with which
he is unconcerned into a remark that, as literature, invokes an intertext and (more importantly) an
author that condemn the proceedings as a whole. Testimony and literature cross paths, and
Hughes point is, once again, reinforced: the man before the committee may indeed be compliant
but the poet is anything but. Likewise, Hughes’s remark that he was “stuck in the mud from the
beginning” serves, at first glance, as an oblique condemnation of racial and economic inequality
in the U.S. and of white “ivory” privilege. However, when one remembers that the terms “mud,”
“communist mud,” and “mud-slinging” were common parlance in McCarthy’s Red Scare
discourse and in that of his political opposition, Hughes’s oblique remark concerning his position
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in U.S. society becomes the very reason behind the committee’s subpoena. Like Robeson before
him, Hughes is just another mud person being put into his muddy place thanks to the justice
afforded by McCarthy and Cohn. Moreover, the words of Hughes the poet-witness continue to
be governed by two sets of guidelines—those surrounding communist inquests and those
surrounding interpretations of poetry—and adhere brilliantly to both. Hughes’s testimony (when
read as testimony) rebukes the notion that his poetry about “groups of people’s problems” is
intended to foment communism, and his testimony (when read as literature) rebukes both the
committee as a whole and the false equation, between poet and verse, which drives its present
mission.
On the heels of his opening paragraph, Hughes continues to stake his defense on the
grounds that poets, their poetic personae, and their poetry cannot be equated. A poet may speak
in his own voice, in someone else’s, earnestly, or satirically. Hence, the charges of Un-American
activity leveled against him—charges that find their roots in the content of his poetry and in the
character of his poetic personae—not only lack a sound foundation, but also lack a real world
defendant. Hughes is thus being “dragged though the mud” for crimes committed by imaginary
criminals:
I have written many poems characterizing many different kinds of
people and expressing many varied ideas, some seriously, some satirically,
some ironically. For instance, in my books of poems, Shakespeare in Harlem,
there is a poem called “Ku Klux” in which a Klansman speaks. But I am not a
Klansman. In The Weary Blues there is a poem called “Mother to Son” in
which an aged mother speaks. But I am not an aged mother. In Shakespeare
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in Harlem there is a poem called “Widow Woman” in which a woman
laments the loss of her husband. But I am not myself a widow-woman,
although I used the pronoun “I” to characterize the woman, and it is my poem.
(Rampersad, Life II, 213-214)
Hughes’s much unappreciated humor differentiates poet, persona, and poetry with lines
that could not be more starkly drawn. To designate Hughes a communist on the basis of the
verse he wrote that contains communist content would be just as ridiculous as labeling him a
“Klansman,” “aged mother,” or “widow woman.” Hughes thus turns the committee’s logic
against itself, and, in so doing, once again demonstrates the malleability of poetic language and
the specific contexts appropriate to literary criticism. They are not only varied, serious, satiric,
or ironic, but also radically unstable with regards to meaning and purpose. Hughes’s incarnation
of a Klansman in “Ku Klux” can no longer be said to serve the sole purpose of denouncing the
organization by giving voice to one of its terrifying, imaginary members because, in the face of
Cohn and McCarthy, this persona also serves to bolster Hughes’s argument that his political
convictions do not necessarily correspond to the politics of his poetry. Poetic content can be
transposed to serve different ends. At the same time, Hughes suggests that the relationship
between persona and verse (especially in regard to thematic content) is reciprocal; each gives
birth to the other. Hughes incarnates an “aged mother” in order to offer content that
convincingly purports to be motherly advice, and the same can be said for his “Klansman” and
“widow-woman” personae. The persona fits the idea (or sentiment) and vice versa. And it is
this malleability—in combination with the conflation of testimony and literature that Hughes
offers in his initial paragraphs—which allows for a reading of his opening statement as still more
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surreptitious, still more subversive. Hughes, the witness-poet, creates personae that give voice to
ideas and sentiments as a matter of professional course and convenience. His occupation
demands that he create the right persona for the right occasion, and this, in turn, affords the
sworn poet-witness something akin to the ultimate disclaimer. Just as Hughes argues that his
creation of a Klansman does not make him a Klansman, so too may he—in a similar vein—argue
that his creation of a semi-cooperative poet-witness (who, following the covert logic of his
opening polemic, cannot be held accountable for the truth value of his testimony) represents little
more than another instance where persona and content were crafted to suit the occasion.
Whatever the case may be, Hughes refuses to let the pronoun “I” be reduced to a singular entity.
Hughes’s oeuvre contains multiple “I’s” written by an “I” who is singular in body, but multiple
in its poetic and international incarnations in anthologized translation. His is an “I” of poetic
polyphony incapable of being summed up by the “I” that McCarthy and Cohn persecuted and
sought to ruin.
Hughes’s testimony, in spite of the unstable ground it occupies, provided McCarthy’s
committee with the answers it wanted to hear. Hughes denied ever being a member of the
Communist Party, publicly regretted his former support for the Soviet government, and agreed
that his radical works should be taken off U.S. embassy shelves (and, in so doing, helped the
government to destroy the majority of his foreign language translations). Moreover, as Arnold
Rampersad notes, Hughes’s rhetorical tour de force was seen as a betrayal of black leftist
Americans who—like Paul Robeson, Dashiell Hamett, and Doxy Wilkerson—had suffered dire
consequences for their refusal to answer McCarthy’s questions (Rampersad, Life II, 219). In
short, to testify to McCarthy was to collaborate with his cruelty, and Hughes’s appearance was,
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for many, unforgivable. Nevertheless, Hughes had, in essence, saved his career by facing the
committee. He had also used his testimony as a means to convey his profound respect for
religion and the religious, dismissing “Goodbye Christ” as “a very young, awkward poem”
(Rampersad, Life II, 215). As Rampersad frames matters, “For Langston, the long, rugged
public road away from radical socialism had at last come to an end” (Rampersad, Life II, 222).
Race and Radicalism in Colonial and Cold War Contexts
While Hughes’s long, public road away from radicalism (and largely from politics in
general) may indeed have come to an end on his home soil he was nevertheless still revered as
both a radical and a revolutionary throughout the Hispanic and Francophone worlds—most
notably, by the adherents to négritude. Hughes would thus look abroad to preserve his radical
legacy. Just twenty days before he received the subpoena he had long dreaded, Hughes wrote to
Damas to give his consent for the latter to prepare a French anthology of his verse for Pierre
Segher’s “Poètes d’Aujourd’hui” series. The sometimes socialist Damas had begun translating
Hughes’s work in 1946 (with an abortive effort to translate Hughes’s and Bontemps’s Bon Bon
Buddy), and seemed the natural choice for the job. Not only had the enfant terrible of La
négritudepublicly professed his poetic debt to Hughes, but—as Senghor would testify in his
eulogy for Damas—it was he, of all the “three musketeers,” who “knew best the poems and the
poets of the Harlem Renaissance” (Racine 74). Moreover, although Hughes had come to know
Damas through Mercer Cook, the two poets held another friend in common, René Piquion, and it
was to this leftist fraternity that Hughes appealed in his letter of consent on March 1, 1953.
Betraying a desire for yet another “radical” anthology of his verse to be published abroad,
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Hughes—on the heels of wishing Damas success in his translations—related that the poet, who
had recently paid a visit to Hughes’s Harlem, should “come back soon,” as “René Piquion has
just arrived en route to Haiti.” Hughes’s concluding remark speaks both to the growing
friendship between Hughes, Damas, Piquion and Cook, and to an implicit suggestion that
Damas’s anthology would, at the very least, benefit from Piquion’s critical eye, and, at most, find
a helpful template in “Un chant nouveau.” In short, a defiant Hughes (now humbled at home),
looked to old friends to preserve the radical legacy that he himself had strategically dismissed
before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Pierre Seghers, however, had something radically different in mind, and—for reasons that
can only be speculated—dropped Damas from the project, and assigned François Dodat the task
of preparing an unassisted bilingual anthology of Hughes’s verse for Seghers’s Autour du Monde
series. The result was Poèmes (1955), an anthology devoid of any content stemming from
politics, radicalism, or contemporary events that did not speak directly to the “race problem” in
the U.S. Its preface, written by Dodat, introduced the anthology’s thirty-five poems in terms that
largely corresponded to (and framed) its selections. Hughes was painted, first and foremost, as a
black poet who gave musical voice to U.S. black culture and consciousness. And although
Dodat figured Hughes as an heir to Sandburg, Whitman, and even Shakespeare, he did so not
with an eye to put the poets on equal footing, but rather to justify Hughes’s use of quotidian
speech in poems whose content mattered little:
Ainsi cette poésie est presque toujours essentiellement orale, mimée,
chantée, parfois confidentiellement et parfois aussi hurlée. Il ne s’agit pas de
poésie écrite où le choix et la rareté des images importent plus que le sens, a
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musicalité, et l’élan propre du vers. Nous sommes loin des métaphores
raffinés d’un Ezra Pound ou d’un T.S. Eliot et de tous ceux qui ont conservé
au milieu de l’étourdissant appareil de la vie américaine la nostalgie d’un
occidentalisme teinté de culture élizabéthaine ou symboliste. Langston
Hughes ferait plutôt songer à Carl Sandburg et à l’école de Chicago tant par
l’usage adroit qu’il fait du langage quotidien que par son souci de réalisme.
In this regard, this poetry is almost always essentially oral, mimed,
sung, sometimes in confidence and sometimes howled as well. It concerns
itself less with written poetry where the choice and the rarity of symbols
matter than it does with its sense of musicality and the verse’s own force.
We’re far from the refined metaphors of Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot and from all
those who’ve conserved inside the deafening apparatus of American life the
nostalgia of an Occidentalism tinted with Elizabethan or symbolist culture.
Rather, Langston Hughes causes us to think of Carl Sandburg and the Chicago
school because of his skillful usage of quotidian language and for his realist
concern.
Dodat’s praise for poetry that is essentiellement oral, mimed, sung (sometimes in
confidence and sometimes not) invokes the atmosphere of an antebellum Southern plantation,
where slaves were prized for their skills in the arts of mimicry (as with the cakewalk), legally
confined to an oral culture, and forbidden religious gatherings (which happened nonetheless)
where spirituals and sorrow songs were howled in private. Given Dodat’s comments, it comes as
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no surprise that his anthology includes: “Les histoires de Tante Suzanne” [“Aunt Sue’s Stories”],
wherein the legacy of slavery is handed down orally from aunt to nephew; “Un Pierrot noir,” a
poem whose persona is a black mime; and three “blues verse” translations, “Le Blues du
désespoir” [“The Weary Blues”], “L’amour recommence” [“Love Again Blues”], and “Le Blues
du pays” [“Homesick Blues”]. In true essentialist fashion, Dodat invokes (and translates)
Hughes’s use of music to paint him as more of a force of nature than a poet. Indeed, it is force,
nature and musicality—an “inéspuisable faculté” [inexhaustible faculty] among blacks in
Dodat’s estimation—that drive Hughes’s primal poetry, as refined symbols of the type employed
by a Pound or Eliot find no place in a poetry free from the taint of Western culture, and yet,
curiously enough, grounded in realism. Yet, it might be said that Dodat unwittingly calls to
mind the influence of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” on Hughes’s verse, undermining the primal
and realist “howl” he wishes to evoke.
Dodat’s preface repeatedly presents the reader with a portrait of the poet that is either
marked by racial essentialism or that figures him as a pacifist seeking to give voice to his
oppressed race (in the U.S.). The points articulated in this preface are, in turn, mirrored by
translations of verse that, in turn, come to serve as testimony in support of Dodat’s arguments.
For instance, Dodat asserts that Hughes’s race constitutes the base of his poetic production and
aspirations: “Le fait qu’il est noir, qu’il en ait toujours conscience, et qu’il en soit fier semble
bien être le point de depart de son lyrisme” [The fact that he’s black, of which he is always
conscious, and of which he is proud very well seems to be the point of departure from his
lyricism]. He then supports this argument by beginning his anthology with two essentialist
poems: “Proème” [“Proem” or “Negro”], wherein the persona explores the achievements and
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victimization of his race across generations; and “Le Noir parle des fleuves” [“The Negro Speaks
of Rivers”], wherein the persona’s soul “grows deep” upon recognition of his racial and
historical heritage.
Likewise, Dodat claims that the “variés” [various] and constitutive themes of black
poetry consist in: “la misère, la solitude, la mort, et le persécution” [misery, solitude, death, and
persecution]. This bleak assessment is, in turn, bolstered by the majority of poems contained in
the anthology, poems that speak to the persecution of the black population in the United States:
the primitivist “Avoir peur” [“Afraid”]; the bloody “Terre du Sud” [“The South’]; the selfexplanatory “Ku Klux” [“Ku Klux”] and “Chanson à lyncher” [Lynching Song]; “Le Bleu
Bayou” [“Blue Bayou”] and “Silhouette” [“Silhouette”], also poems concerned with lynching;
“Le manège” [“Merry Go-Round”], a poignant portrait of Jim Crow as seen through the eyes of a
child; and “Les blancs” [“The White Ones”], a poem wherein the persona speaks about the love
he holds for whites and the hate that they hold for him.
Hughes is thus figured—both in Dodat’s preface and in his choice of texts—as decidedly
race-proud, but nevertheless victimized. Moreover, the poet who defiantly raised his fist against
this victimization is curiously absent from the anthology. And while Dodat may dub Hughes
“Poète Lauréat Noir” [Black Poet Laureate], this acclaim is a far cry from the appellation Hughes
craved in Cuba, a world away from the militant “el poeta de los negros.” In the militant’s stead,
stands Dodat’s pacifist, a poet committed to universal brotherhood, a peaceful solution to the
“race problem” in the U.S., and a brighter future:
L’avenir est un pays tout proche à portée de main fraternelle où toutes
les races pourront enfin se coudoyer sans crainte et sans haine. Il semble que
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cette belle leçon que sans amertume cet «homme de couleur» donne aux
blancs, finira bien un jour par triompher de leurs tenaces préjugés, et ce jourlà le «frére obscur» pourra s’assesoir à la table commune et le passé «cette
chose au nom crépusculaire » aura cede la place à «l’aube-aujourd’hui»1
Alors l’Amérique aura peut-être enfin trouvé son âme… et relégué
dans les greniers de son histoire l’exaspérant «problème noir»
The future is a land within reach of the fraternal hand where all races
can finally mix together without fear or hate. It seems that this beautiful
lesson that this “man of color” gave, without bitterness, to whites, will well
come to fruition one day, triumphing over their longstanding prejudice, and on
that day, the “darker brother” can seat himself at the common table and the
past “a night gone thing” will have given way to “dawn-today.”
Then, America will perhaps finally find its soul… and relegate the
exasperating “race problem” to the attics of its history.
Citing “I, Too” (“darker brother”) and the optimistic “Youth” (“a night gone thing” and
“dawn today”), Dodat uses Hughes’s own words in translation to characterize the decidedly nonrevolutionary poet as an agent in the struggle against (specifically) U.S. prejudice. Hughes’s
race-pride is overshadowed by the fraternal hand he extends to all races without qualification or
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The phrase “homme de couleur” is difficult to translate, as it does not simply mean a man of color. Rather, it was
a term intended to substitute for both noir and négre, and remains the preffered racial designation amongst blacks in
France and the Francophone world.
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bitterness. The “fear” from which Hughes prophesized the Negro artist would free himself (from
atop his temples of tomorrow) is now transposed onto a vision of inter-racial cooperation. Far
from a radical, this incarnation of an assimilative Hughes waits patiently for the day when
America will peut-être find its soul, and, in finding it, somehow magically relegate the “race
problem” to its history. Dodat further highlights this pacifism and patience—perhaps with an
eye to Hughes’s avowal of a deep respect for religion—by including three Christian poems, all of
which can be characterized as strictly devout, in the anthology’s penultimate moments: “Le Jour
du jugement” [Judgement Day], “Mon Seigneur” [“My Lord”], and “Le Ciel” [“Heaven”].
The largely apolitical panorama of Hughes’s work that Poèmes offers its readers may
seem, at first glance, to be heavily informed by Hughes’s appearance before the McCarthy
committee. The poet who had finally walked “the long, rugged public road away from radical
socialism” was eventually provided with an anthology that reflected this distancing. However,
Hughes’s archival correspondence reveals that his participation in the construction of Poèmes
was strictly limited to his initial consent. Hence, if Seghers and Dodat were, in essence, doing
Hughes a favor by forgoing the publication of Hughes’s radical verse (much of which was in the
public domain), it was not at Hughes’s bidding. Rather, several factors—including Dodat’s
personal outlook on racial prejudice (particulary vis-à-vis translation), the political climate in
France and in its colonies, the longstanding Francophone aesthetic and discursive regimes
surrounding Hughes’s verse, and the anticipated reception of the collection by the increasing
wave of adherents to négritude—all seem to have played a part in the non-revolutionary
anthology.
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On March 12, 1955, Dodat wrote to Hughes to inform him that he had not only published
an “anthologie” of his verse, but that he also—laying bare the agenda behind his selection of
texts—viewed Poèmes (and translation in general) as an instrument to combat racial prejudice
both in the U.S. and “across borders”:
Heine said about those [sic] poetry translations that they were “bottled
moonshine” and I agree with him but there is no other way for poets to cross
over our silly borders and language curtains. As it is [sic] I consider that it
has been a great honour for me to introduce you into this country as a poet and
a great poet and it will be a very great pleasure if I know you are not
disappointed. It may ennoble you to know that I have always been a great
admirer of Mallarmé who was one of my predecessors as a teacher in the
“Lycée.” And it is in keeping with your feelings that a “white” brother poet
should translate your poems, and if I have done a bit of fighting on your side
to conquer racial prejudice, then I shall feel proud of it. And I know that
racial prejudice is not only to be found in America, it is quite as prosperous in
our colonies and probably in all other countries where there are what “they”
call “racial minorities.” It is a wonder that “Christians” can tolerate it!
Dodat makes deft reference to Heine—who, like Hughes, is considered a musical poet (as
his poetry was set to music by a plethora of leider composers) and whose works were also
subject to political persecution, burned by Nazis on Belin’s Bebelplatz in 1933—in order to
acknowledge that his is a distilled Hughes (“bottled moonshine”) and to figure this process of
distillment as a means by which linguistic and implicitly dangerous nationalist borders may be
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crossed.1 The reference to Heine is, in turn, complemented by Dodat’s professed admiration for
Mallarmé, an admiration that serves to qualify the translator not simply as a lover of poetry, but
also as the right man to “introduce you into this country as a poet.” He is a lover of poetry who
possesses an acute sense of the French poetic landscape, the perfect judge to determine how
Hughes should be distilled for the French reading public in the context of their canon. Given the
fact that this letter constitutes the first instance of communication between Dodat and Hughes, it
is unclear as to what the former is referring when he mentions Hughes’s “feelings that a ‘white’
brother should translate your poetry.” Nevertheless, the statement speaks both to Dodat’s
decision to confine his choice of texts largely to poems with racial themes and to his conception
of translation as a means to build bridges and to combat racial prejudice. In Dodat’s estimation,
it is only fitting that a volume designed to “conquer racial prejudice” should be translated by
Hughes’s “white brother.” Moreover, this conquest is to occur on multiple fronts. Dodat sees
the French language anthology, quite curiously, as “a bit of fighting on your side,” but also—
speaking more to the issue of the volume’s target audience—acknowledges racial prejudice in
“our colonies.”
Dodat’s references to racial prejudice and Christian tolerance in “our colonies” implicitly
invokes the Algerian War of Independence which the F.L.N. had launched a year earlier, and
provides us with an additional rationale to explain the absence of revolutionary, radical, or anticolonial verse in Poèmes. The collection that, according Pierre Seghers, was proposed by Louis
Aragon (a staunch supporter of Algerian independence) and taken up by Damas in 1951,
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apparently turned away from militancy once the guerilla campaign had actually begun.1 In this
light, Dodat’s decision to offer the French reading public a vision of Hughes that figured
patience, racial cooperation, and pacifism as hallmarks of the poet’s ethos and poetic production
can be seen as a decision motivated by the desire to please an audience that, in 1955, held little
tolerance for revolt. Dodat’s Hughes thus stands as an exemplar for a peaceful and patient
approach to the matter of independence, as a figure that—in the interest of universal
brotherhood—had forsaken the independence afforded him atop the mountain. On the other
hand, Dodat’s Hughes can be seen as a type of moral admonition to a French public that was
(and is) hardly free of racial prejudice against North Africans, as an attempt to humanize a
population separated by “silly borders” that had already fallen victim to French atrocities and
war crimes.
While the French Fourth Republic’s desire to hold onto its colonies provides ample
justification for Dodat’s choice of texts, France’s position in the Cold War also helps to explain
the absence of “radical” or communist verse from Poèmes.
Although the official beginning of the Cold War in France dates from the May 1947
crisis (during which Paul Ramadier excluded communist ministers from the government), anticommunism reached new heights in France when the French Communist Party (PFC) declared
itself in favor of an independent Algeria in 1954. Nevertheless, virulent anti-communist
sentiment had been brewing in France since the end of World War II, and—just as was the case
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Seghers confessed to Hughes that he had been exposed to his poetry by Louis Aragon in a letter dated November
30, 1955.
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in the U.S.—the hysteria of France’s red scare extended to a preoccupation with U.S. writers of
African descent. For instance, in his 1948 article “Il y a deux littératures américaines,” [There
are Two American Literatures], Jean Kanapa—in a subsection of the article titled “Littérature «
noire » et bombe atomique” [Black Literature and the Atomic Bomb]—offered the prescient
commentary that unless “éditeurs honnêtes tels que Pierre Seghers” [honest publishers like Pierre
Seghers] held the reigns, “Il serai trop dangerereux de diffuser l’oeuvre de Langston Hughes” [It
would be too dangerous to disseminate Langston Hughes’s oeuvre]. The Second Red Scare in
the U.S. found a close cousin in France, and the omission of Hughes’s communist verse from
Poèmes speaks as much to the anti-communism incarnate in France as it does to that on
Hughes’s homefront. Moreover, Kanapa’s characterization of Seghers suggests that the
publisher played as much of a role as did Dodat in offering his public a Hughes devoid of
revolutionary preoccupations.
Poèmes: Reaction Mixed
Poèmes received a surprisingly mixed reception both in France and the Americas, and
was both warmly received and roundly rejected by poets and critics of négritude. This mixed
reception was no simple matter of taste, but rather the result of the fact that the content of
Poèmes spoke differently to different aspects of the movement as well as to the multiple
geographies and strains of thought which informed it. Chief among these strains of thought were
Marxism, racial essentialism, and the anti-assimilative conception of primitivism and race-pride
vis-à-vis the aesthetic and discursive regimes surrounding Hughes’s poetic production in France
and the Francophone world. For his part, Hughes remained uncharacteristically silent on the
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matter of Dodat’s anthology, and—contrary to his wont—neither thanked Dodat for the
anthology nor solicited further translations from him, suggesting that the poet was less than
happy with his latest French incarnation.
In the 1956 February-March edition of Présence Africaine, René Depestre—the
Haitian born critic, communist, and négritudepoet—published a lukewarm review of Dodat’s
anthology which praised the translator’s skills but criticized his omission of Hughes’s
revolutionary verse. Framing Hughes as a négritude poet, Depestre assesses the collection’s
successes and failures, in large part, with respect to its adherence to the chief strains of négritude
elaborated above and, in so doing, lays bare the complex ideological web informing the critical
reception of Hughes’s poetic production in the Francophone world. Depestre’s review begins by
situating Hughes in the pantheon of the world’s most celebrated negritude (and negritud) poets,
and departs from Piquion’s critical lexicon by characterizing Dodat’s racially-charged choice of
texts as réaliste:
François Dodat «traducteur excellent» fait dècouvrir à travers une
trentaine de poèmes un aspect important du don réaliste de Langston Hughes.
Célèbre dès l’âge de vingt-cinq ans aux Etats-Unis, Langston Hughes n’est
pas inconnu de l’Afrique et de l’Europe. Il est avec Nicolás Guillén, Aimé
Césaire, Léopold Sedar [sic] Senghor l’un des plus grands poétes négres
vivants. (106)
François Dodat “translator excellent” has revealed in some thirty
poems an important aspect of Langston Hughes’s realist gift. Famous from
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the age of twenty-five in the United States, Langston Hughes is not unknown
in Africa and Europe. He is, along with Nicolás Guillén, Aimé Césaire, and
Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the greatest living black poets.
Depestre paints Hughes as a member of an internationally known cadre of black poets
whose trans-Atlantic fame, in terms of geography, mirrors that of the triangular trade. In so
doing, Depestre not only yokes Hughes to two of the founders of négritude, but also implies a
pan-African solidarity among four writers whose poetics (while similar in some respects) differ
radically from one another. Césaire’s surrealism, Hughes’s realism, Guillén’s folk, and
Senghor’s Whitmanesque catalogs are put on an equal par, and the result is an implied
international brotherhood of great black poets whose négritude serves as the cultural cutting edge
of a nascent (in terms of its theorization) African Diaspora. The essentialist underpinnings of
Despestre’s implication are, in turn, repeatedly emphasized throughout his review. He figures
Hughes as both “un fils authentique de l’Amérique noir” [an authentic son of black America]
and—in terms that mirror Senghor’s essentialist assessment of Hughes’s négritude—as a link
between an ancestral Africa and the New World: “Il a chanté l’Afrique, l’Afrique mère
malheureuse du malheureux Harlem, l’Afrique, maman bien-aimée de tous les ghettos où nos
espoirs sont entourés de barbelés” [He has sung Africa, Africa the miserable mother of miserable
Harlem, Africa, the well loved mama of all the ghettos where our hopes are surrounded by
barbed wires] (165, 166). Hughes, his fellow poets, the inhabitants of Harlem, and the
downtrodden of all ghettos find a maternal common bond in Africa, and while this essentialism
is, in some senses, par for the négritude course, it is striking insofar as it is implicitly linked to
what Depestre labels as Hughes’s realist vision of the world. Hughes is both a realist and a
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négritude poet. His poems may speak of Harlem and racial injustice in the U.S., but they are
nevertheless African offspring. In short, racial essentialism, pan-Africainism, and the struggle
against prejudice and oppression collide in the “realist gift” that Dodat offers the French reading
public.
Depestre’s praise for Dodat’s réaliste translations is offset by his criticism that Poèmes
ignores Hughes’s revolutionary verse. This criticism is no simple lament over the limited scope
of the volume, but an attempt to redress what Depestre sees as a one-sided mischaracterization of
the multi-faceted Hughes and his equally complex poetic brethren. On the heels of a brief
citation (offered in anonymous translation) from “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria,”
Depestre rhetorically questions, “Pourquoi M. Dodat n’a-t-il pas dans sa preface soufflé mot de
ce Langston Hughes-là” [Why doesn’t Monsieur Dodat breathe a word about this Hughes in his
preface?] (166). He then speaks both to his position in the Americas and to the critical debt he
owes Piquion by citing Pereda Valdés’s Marxist assessment of Hughes’s poetic growth to
support the argument that Poèmes is devoid of an essential part of Hughes’s poetic production
(166). The short shrift afforded Hughes by this omission extends to his fellow poets in race and
arms, as Depestre’s international cadre of black poets is tied together both by racial concerns and
a shared commitment to the proletarian cause. The neglect of the latter thus proves destructive to
a collective whose multiple fidelities work in tandem to provide it with its identity. With this
duality in mind, Depestre is also careful to avoid assigning Pereda Valdés’s arguments too much
weight. They are but part of the picture: “Loin de moi l’idée de limiter l’inspiration de Hughes à
ce seul aspect revendicatif” [Far be it from me to limit Hughes’s inspiration to this one aspect of
protest].
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Depestre draws his review towards its conclusion by asserting that the absence of
Hughes’s revolutionary verse from Poèmes is the indirect result of his political persecution at the
hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and, in the process, highlights the
degree to which the global political climate and the discursive regimes that surround Hughes’s
poetic production in the Americas bleed into one another to create a vision of the poet informed
by multiple traditions, fidelities, worldviews, and (last but not least) literary frames and
instantiations. Depestre, perhaps loathe to imply a direct connection between McCarthy and
Dodat, begins his penultimate paragraph with the rather off-the-cuff observation that, “Depuis
quelque temps on a peu nouvelles de Langston Hughes” [There’s been little news of Langston
Hughes for some time]. Depestre then links this absence, temporally, to Hughes’s appearance
before the committee, but is careful to avoid the claim that the committee succeeded in silencing
the poet. In fact, Depestre makes a mockery of any such notion, asserting that “notre
merveilleux Langston Hughes” [our marvelous Langston Hughes]—the author of “The Negro
Artist and the Racial Mountain” (a citation of which ends the review)—could never be cowed by
“ce froid tribunal de terreur et de folle” [that cold tribunal of terror and madness] (167).
Depestre’s characterization of the tribunal as “cold” invokes the Cold War and also suggests that
a marvelous, anti-assimilative Hughes will survive both in the wake of the committee and the
madness of the era at hand. In other words, Depestre figures “notre merveilleux Hughes”—a
figure who is Marxist, réaliste, and (in line with the dictates of the Francophone aesthetic regime
that greeted his work) anti-assimilative—as a poet whose inevitable triumph will be a function of
both the Revolution’s inevitable triumph and his necessarily multi-faceted négritude. Pereda
Valdés’s awakened Marxist, Etienne Léro’s anti-assimilative exemplar, and Piquion’s
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révolutionnaire coalesce across time, space, and language to create a Hughes whose resilient
persona—a fusion of various personae engendered by multiple discursive and aesthetic regimes
surrounding the poet’s work in the Americas—both survives through and evolves with the
historical and political eras it encounters. Time marches on, and since the world’s Hughes is
possessed of multiple and divergent personae that stem from equally diverse camps and
instantiations, so too does the poet, even in publications where critics, like Depestre, find him
poorly represented.
The discursive regimes surrounding Hughes poetic production were, in some instances,
as rigid as they were pliable. Testifying to this rigidity as well as to the heterogeneity of
Hughes’s reception by adherents, practitioners, and propagators of négritude, Alioune Diop (the
fourth man in the “Big Three”) held Poèmes in wildly different esteem than did Despestre. The
founder and editor in chief of négritude’s largest organ (of the day) Présence Africaine, Diop,
who had repeatedly and unsuccessfully solicited Hughes for essays, wrote the poet a month
before he published Depestre’s article to convey his joy over the anthology’s appearance and to
ask the poet for yet another article on the question of racial authenticity and writing:
Cher Monsieur,
Nous avons salué avec une grande joie la paustion chez P.
Seghers, de votre recuil traduit en français.
Nous étions géné que le chantre de la misère et de la gandeur
du drame négro-americaine ne pût être bien connu en France et en Afrique
française. Nous publions un poème de vous et en Avril l’un de nous parlera
de votre livre, tandis qu’un autre concacrera une etude à votre génie poétique.
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In nous plairait aussi qu’avant le Ier Février, nous recevions de vous la
premiére réponsnsnégro-américain à notre enquête sur “la poésie nationale
chez le peuples noirs.” Pour vous le nationalisme ne pose pas les mêmes
problèmes que pour l’Afrique colonisée. Mais outré que vous avez une
esthétique poétique personelle, vous devez avoir un problèmé de l’authenticité
ou du realism de la poésie négro-americaine. Un poètre noir peut-il
s’exprimir comme un blanc en toute circonstance aux U.S.A.? N’ya a t-til
une sensibility de themes, un rhythme une tradition poétique, plus propres aux
nègres qu’aux blancs aux U.S.A.? [….]
Nous serions fiers de vous publier et de faire advantage connaitre aux
jeunes Africains, celui que je tiens pour le plus aunthentique poéte nègre des
U.S.A. que je connaisse.
Dear Sir,
We’ve welcomed the Seghers publication of your collection translated
in French with great joy.
We were disturbed that the song of misery and of the grandeur of
black American tragedy could not be well known in France and in French
Africa. We published a poem of yours in April, and one of ours will speak of
your book, while another will be dedicated to a study of your poetic genius.
We would also be very happy if we could receive from the first
response to our inquiry into “black nationalist poetry” from you by February
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1st. Nationalism doesn’t pose the same kinds of problems for you as it does
for colonized Africans. But since you have your own personal poetic
aesthetic, you may have a problem with the authenticity or realism of black
American poetry. Can a black poet express himself as a white poet in all
circumstances in the U.S.A.? Is there not a sensibility of theme, of rhythm, a
poetic production, which is more black than it is white in the U.S.A..? […]
We would be proud to publish yours and to make more known to
young Africans he who I take to be the most authentic black poet in the
U.S.A. I know.
Diop’s letter is embedded with a paradox that renders his compliments somewhat mute
insofar as he praises Hughes as “celui que je tiens pour le plus authentique poéte nègre des
U.S.A. que je connaisse” on the heels of asking Hughes to define what constitutes, if it indeed
exists, authentic black poetry. Moreover, the very language of praise Diop employs speaks
either to the narrow scope of Dodat’s anthology or to Diop’s desire to see Hughes narrowly, and,
perhaps, to both. Dodat’s slim volume of thirty poems, whose mere length excludes it as
representative of Hughes oeuvre, is for Diop, the long awaited song of U.S. blacks too long
denied young Africans as translated from the pages of their most authentic representative.
Exactly what constitutes this authenticity is, as Diops’s questions demonstrate, open to debate on
multiple fronts: how can a poet have a personal style and be culturally authentic? How can
authenticity be judged from such a small sample unless Hughes himself has come to set the
standard for black authenticity? How does poetic opportunity impact poetic output vis-à-vis
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race? Are there poetic qualities which can truly be said to more comfortably inhabit a particular
racial province?
Questions like these, speak to the heart of négritude itself and would be directed at
Hughes for the rest of his life, and while the poet may have avoided answering them for the next
eight years, they nevertheless testify to the status of forefather he held in négritude poetics as
well as to the central role he played in keeping négritude a somewhat fuzzy concept. So long as
the dean of négritudewould neither fix its meaning into place nor refute the validity or
authenticity of its suppositions, theorizations, or instantiations, the concept remained malleable
without running the risk of becoming an empty variable. This is a notion akin to the anti-fascist
articulation of race to which Hughes gave voice in Paris just prior to his entry into Spain. They
also testify to the enormous, indeed determining, impact that both Hughes’s early dissemination
and the paucity of translations offered in its wake had on determining Hughes’s long term
legacies in French and Francophone arenas. Diop’s assertion that Dodat’s translations of
Hughes’s (largely early) poems constitute an authentic portrait of the poet himself provides
evidence of the large degree to which the selection of texts in Poèmes reified Hughes’s early
French translation and incarnations, and—in this sense—also helps to explain Diop’s praise for
the volume. In other words, if négritude was in part inspired by Hughes’s early verse as
interpreted inside a Francophone aesthetic regime, then a recapitulation of that verse to one of
the movement’s adherents quite easily could be welcomed as Hughes’s authentic song.
Hughes’s refusal to provide Diop with an article is in line with his early avoidance of
discussing négritude for fear of the political danger its Marxist strains posed on domestic soil,
and in keeping with his wariness concerning iterations of racial essentialism. And despite the
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international attention it would no doubt have brought his career, Hughes’s archived
correspondence reveals that he not only avoided the topic, but that he refused a plethora of
invitations to discuss the matter in public and in print. An exchange of letters between Diop and
Hughes in early June of 1961 proves to be typical of the fashion in which Hughes shirked the
issue. After being repeatedly asked by Diop to write an essay on “Le négritude de Langston
Hughes” [Langston’s Hughes’s Negritude], Hughes, in a letter dated June 24, 1961 responded by
recommending that Diop contact either Arthur P. Davis, who had written “excellent articles on
my writing in the past,” or Mr. James Emmanuel “who knows my work quite well, and is a
specialist in Negritude as well.” Time and time again, Hughes—despite his personal
relationships with the “Big Three”—either declined to speak about his négritudeor managed to
assign the job to someone else. However, he also did nothing to discourage being associated
with négritude, and this suggests either a quiet complicity on his part to be so associated or yet
another instance of him encouraging his foreign personae to run wild. Indeed, Hughes may have
done more to foment négritude by remaining silent on the topic than he could have by writing
about it.
Self-Anthologizing Poet of the Black Condition
Hughes may have found négritude too dangerous of a topic for public discussion, but the
body of his poetic production considered to be his most “authentic” by the figures at the center of
the movement (like Sédar Senghor and Alioune Diop) also constituted the least politically
threatening aspect of his oeuvre on U.S. soil in the 1950’s. It is therefore no shock that when
Knopf granted Hughes the opportunity to anthologize himself (to forge his English language
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persona anew) between the covers of Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1959), Hughes
heavily mined his early poetic production for poems that were réaliste in Depestre’s eyes, raciste
in Piquion’s, and (most likely) safe from a dying Red Scare in his own.1 Still reeling from his
encounter with Cohn and McCarthy and still coveting the N.A.A.C.P.’s Spingarn Medal that had
long eluded him, Hughes decided to omit all of his poems that were tinged with Red ink without
being prompted to do so by Knopf (Rampersad, Life II, 292, 295).1 Moreover, he departed from
the organization of earlier anthologies of his verse—like Galer’s and, to a lesser extent,
Piquion’s—which implied a poetic or political awakening (or even a chronological progression).
In the words of Arnold Rampersad, Hughes chose instead to echo “Whitman’s evolving attempt
at organic harmony in the several editions of his Leaves of Grass,” and organized his selection of
poems into sequences or “thematic and chromatic clusters,” hoping to propose “a single
transcendent song of himself as a major American singer, and to confirm his standing as the
central poet of the black condition in America” (Rampersad, Life II, 395).
Rampersad’s assessment of the intent behind and organization of Selected Poems is
remarkably apt, but nevertheless overlooks two key factors that helped to inform and guide
Hughes in the composition of his self-anthology. Namely, that Hughes’s supposed attempt to
forge a “single transcendental song of himself” was, in light of the active role he played in the
creation of multiple and multiply inflected instantiations of his voice throughout the hemisphere,
more of an attempt to articulate a vision of himself as the “central poet of the black condition in
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Hughes’s break with Walter White’s N.A.A.C.P. in the 1930’s came to a slow but sure end, beginning with his
first attempts to distance himself from radical socialism while simultaneously aligning himself with the organization.
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America” for a specifically U.S. audience than it was an attempt to create a transcendental
Hughes. Moreover, his decision to organize Selected Poems into sequences (or “thematic and
chromatic clusters”) was not only par for his own poetic course—as the overwhelming majority
of his volumes of poetry are so organized—but was also somewhat of a standard operating
procedure vis-à-vis the anthologies (and translations) of single authors that Hughes himself had
compiled. The Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (1957) and Cuba Libre (1947), Hughes’s and
Ben Carruthers’s politically sanitary anthology of Nicolás Guillén’s poetry, were both presented
to their readers in thematically organized sequences of Hughes’s creation. In other words,
Hughes’s “transcendental” vision was, in large part, informed by his political assessment of a
specifically U.S. literary landscape, his vision of how he could best fit into this landscape as the
central poetic voice of black America, and by his own work as a translator and anthologist.
Selected Poems thus presents the reader with both Hughes’s essential Hughes and a look at a
strategic writer lurking in the background, with a poet-anthologist whose political acumen and
years of experience anthologizing his own work in foreign language translation (as well as that
of others in English) greatly affected both how he anthologized himself and his overall
conception of the anthology as a literary format endowed with the tremendous capacity to
augment the malleability of its subject and to simultaneously cement its subject’s identity.
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes contains two hundred and sixty-eight poems taken
from The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes to the Jew, Shakespeare in Harlem, Fields of Wonder, OneWay Ticket, Dear Lovely Death and Montage of a Dream Deferred, and represented the largest
collection of Hughes’s poetry published to date.1 Nevertheless, the anthology presents itself to
the reader as neither a collection of Hughes’s “greatest hits” nor as a panorama of his poetic
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career. Rather, Hughes redistilled his previous poetic production with a strategic eye to create
thirteen sequences that highlight specific aspects of African-American life and experience for a
U.S reading public enmeshed in the increasing momentum of the Civil Rights Movement. For
instance, the sequence “Magnolia Flowers” is composed of seventeen poems that draw the
brutality, economic exploitation, sexual politics, and racial terrorism of the South in stark relief,
while “Name in Uphill Letters” provides eighteen poems that speak largely to the condition of
African-Americans (and that of their descendants) who left the South as part of the Great
Migration only to find political and economic injustice ready to welcome them in the North.
Hughes also fashioned sequences that simultaneously addressed key aspects of black life in the
U.S. and rehabilitated his besmirched U.S. persona. The profound respect for religion and the
religious that Hughes professed before Cohn and McCarthy—in an era where the majority of the
black community still found the center of its cultural life in the church—was given voice and
shape in the anthology’s second sequence, “Feet of Jesus,” wherein Hughes’s verse and personae
do not simply speak to Christian themes, but rather to specific incarnations of African-American
Christianity and the role they play in the black community.
Hughes was quick to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Selected Poems to
revisit several themes prominent in his early poetic production (and in French translation) that he
had since come to see through new eyes, and, in so doing, to refashion the poetic persona that
first accompanied him into the limelight. For example, the anthology’s first sequence, “AfroAmerican Fragments,” presents the reader with poems, like “Danse Africaine,” that exemplify
the primitivist verse which enthused Charlotte Mason and Etienne Léro but which had grown
distasteful to Hughes by 1930. However, the poet, of a new mind in 1959, is careful to frame
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these poems (in terms of the ordering of his sequence) with others that not only undermine their
primitivist assumptions about African-Americans and Africa, but that also represent a rather
mainstream vision of an ancestral Africa that was generally considered, by blacks in the U.S., to
be a world apart (in the multiple senses of the phrase) from them, their experience, and the lives
they lived in a (legal or de facto) Jim Crow nation. In fact, the anthology’s first poem, “AfroAmerican Fragment,” both emphasizes this distance, “So long, / So far away / Is Africa,” and
calls into question any assumption of a primitivist connection between its Afro-American
persona and the continent separated from him by an ocean and a sea of distance and time,
“Through some vast mist of race / There comes this song / I do not understand, / This song of
atavistic land / Of bitter yearnings lost / Without a place—” (1-3, 15-19). The connection to
times past that Hughes’s early verse figured as little more than a function of his African blood is
augmented and overshadowed, between the covers of Selected Poems, by poems that link present
and past in terms and via pathways that would have been familiar and plausible to his U.S.
readership. For instance, Hughes precedes “Danse Africaine” (and its primitivist invocation of
tom-toms beating in the blood of a nightclub dancer) with “Aunt Sue’s Stories”—a poem
decidedly more representative of the relationship between the average Afro-American and his
ancestral history—in which a child learns of life under slavery through the oracular history
imparted to him by his aunt. Hence, Hughes’s self-anthology refashions and rearticulates the
themes and thematic thrust of his early verse, but nevertheless does not deny the reader a view,
albeit meticulously crafted, of the poetry that made him famous. Moreover, his poetry and
personae are granted the opportunity to evolve both with him and with the contemporary
moment: primitivism is rearticulated in line with Hughes’s evolving notion and dismissal of the
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concept; and a sequence of religious devotion is crafted with an eye to appeasing McCarthy and
the largely religious African-American community in the U.S., in part, alienated by Hughes’s
“Goodbye Christ.”
The Strategic Crafting of Anthologies and a New Conception of Translation
While Selected Poems does indeed constitute Hughes’s definitive work (or transcendental
song) for a great many of his critics, it is nonetheless but one collection in a series of
strategically crafted anthologies of the poet’s verse that were compiled with specific intents and
audiences in mind. Hence, it is no idle speculation to assume that Hughes’s previous experience
forging both his personae abroad (as well as those of the authors whose work he compiled in
translation) affected how he anthologized himself and others. Moreover, the experience of
creating multiple anthologies of both his own verse and that of other poets arguably transformed
his translation praxis and his vision of the translator’s task. The very same man who wrote
Dudley Fitts a letter of self-admonishment on October 25, 1941 for composing “adaptations” for
“the sake of the ear and smooth reading” instead of accurate “translations”—in spite of his
ongoing maniacal drive to provide English readers with an authoritative “fool proof” translation
of García Lorca’s Romancero gitano—bitterly defended the great license he took while
translating Gabriela Mistral’s verse in 1957 from a charge leveled by Edwin Honig that he
should have attempted to render “the poetry more exactly.” In a public rebuttal of Honig’s
critique printed in the Saturday Review, Hughes confessed to his imperfections as a translator
and laid bare his new vision of translation:
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I would be the last person to claim perfection for my translations, but
my hope is that they might stimulate other more competent translators to
render the same poems into our tongue…. So fine a poet as she was deserves
many translations. (Rampersad, Life II, 282)
Hughes figures translation as an ongoing (and potentially never-ending) process wherein
imperfect translations of fine poets’ verse may stimulate other translators—who may be “more
competent” but are nonetheless, like Hughes, incapable of perfection—to produce still more
translations of the same poems, notably, into the same language. Indeed, Hughes asserts that
“fine” poets inevitably merit multiple translations—that they, in fact, “deserve” them. Hughes
assessment of the ongoing task of the translator suggests a belief on his part that no single
translation or translator can afford a reading public (be it English, French, Spanish, etc.) a
definitive view or version of a poet’s verse, and it is demonstrative of the impact that was made
on Hughes’s conception of translation by the sight of his own poetry translated multiply into
several tongues in the service of a plethora of agendas. Just as Hughes, in practice, had
encouraged multiple translations of his poetry which gave rise to a variety of instantiations of his
poetic personae, so too does he now, in print, promote the idea that the works of all great poets
merit such treatment. His belief in perfect translations—as exemplified in his quest for an errorfree translation of Romancero gitano—gives way to a new vision that figures translation as a
type of life’s blood requisite for the survival of literary works in a global arena. Even an
incompetent translation of a foreign language poet is of value insofar as it may stimulate others
with more competence to pen better translations that, in turn, serve better to acquaint a given
reading public with an author writing in a foreign language. Hughes’s quest to be or find an
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ideal translator is subsumed by a faith in translation that figures the craft as an integral
component of world literature in general, as the means by which deserving authors and their
works are (multiply) consecrated.
The line of thought that informed Hughes’s 1957 remarks concerning Selected Poems of
Gabriela Mistral also informed the N.A.A.C.P.’s decision to award Hughes its highest honor, the
Spingarn Medal, in early 1960. This decision, in turn, not only speaks to the strategic success of
Hughes’s self-anthology, which was constructed with an eye to win to the organization’s
acclaim, but also to the premium that the N.A.A.C.P. placed on translation in regard to the
perception of the Civil Rights Movement abroad. Indeed, the selection committee’s award
citation does not praise Hughes for his status as the “central poet of the black condition in
America,” but rather—in terms that strangely echo those of Filatova and Alberti—for being,
“generally recognized in America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South America as a major
American writer considered by many to be the poet laureate of the Negro race” (Rampersad, Vol.
10, 13). Hence, in an ironic twist of fate, Hughes won the medal he had so long coveted both for
his radicalism-free, civil-rights minded Selected Poems, and for his plethora of leftist,
communist, and anti-assimilative personae forged abroad in translation. The selection committee
thus celebrates him (in terms that would have undoubtedly provoked discomfort in the poet) as
the poet of the “Negro race” as conceived in a global framework and not, simply, as a voice of
the black American condition. Hughes’s relationship with the organization had come full circle:
the poet who had been radicalized anew by his trips to Cuba and who, as a result of this new
political stance, distanced himself from the organization because of its repudiation of
Communism during the Scottsboro trials, now was to be celebrated for the high regard he held—
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in large part as a Marxist—in the Hispanic and Francophone worlds. Nevertheless, to assert that
Hughes’s return to the bosom of the N.A.A.C.P. was unrelated to the publication of Selected
Poems would be a gross overstatement. Not only did the volume provide the organization’s
selection committee with a selection of poems it could readily embrace, but it allowed Hughes’s
friends and supporters—from whom Hughes actively sought support for his nomination—a work
around which to rally (Rampersad, Life II, 292).
Cementing Hughes’s U.S. Persona
The chief accomplishment of Selected Poems arguably lies neither in its acclaim nor in its
facilitation of the happy re-marriage between Hughes and the N.A.A.C.P., but rather in the fact
that the persona fashioned between its covers came to represent, in most U.S. circles, the
Langston Hughes. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find mention of a leftist or radical Hughes in
the variety of textbooks, encyclopedias, and literary histories published in the U.S. that make
mention of his name. Rather, the Hughes—the bard of Black History Month—is a poet whose
chief concerns are racial equality, civil rights, and a romanticized musical Harlem. It would
seem that Selected Poems performed its work of literary consecration on Hughes’s domestic
front quite effectively, but it is nevertheless worth noting that the Hughes who inhabits high
school textbooks—just like Piquion’s, Galer’s, and Dodat’s—is a Hughes consciously
constructed to suit ends both literary and political. He is as much (if not more) a product of the
McCarthy committee and the political climate in the United States in 1953 as he is a
representative of the sum total of his poetic designs.
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The Hughes consecrated by Selected Poems in the U.S. naturally differs from other
instantiations of his poetic personae that were molded by divergent (and overlapping) political
climates, social movements, and aesthetic and discursive regimes. Nevertheless, the impact of
Selected Poems extended beyond U.S. borders, as it became somewhat of a template for
anthologizing the poet to which—as we now come full circle—François Dodat turned, in part, to
fulfill the promise of Fame that he and Seghers made to Hughes in 1963. However, as we have
come to see, Hughes was no longer the laissez faire poet who granted Piquion almost unlimited
license with his verse. Instead, he was a poet with extensive experience anthologizing his work
in multiple languages and literary arenas who took every advantage afforded him to mold his
foreign language personae. Hence, when Dodat set about the work of compiling his second
anthology of Hughes’s poetry (which contains eighty-three poems) and its seventy-one page
preface, he found in Hughes not simply a collaborator, but a poet whose extensive relationships
and collaborations with French translators and scholars helped to create the very materials that
Dodat would draw upon to complete his vision of Hughes. In short, the composition of Dodat’s
Langston Hughes (1964) was informed by three key factors: Hughes’s choice of texts for
Selected Poems, the evolving post-colonial French political climate which was also, albeit
differently, charged with race politics and Cold War concerns; and by French scholarly visions
of Hughes and his verse that the poet had a hand in creating.
On June 11th 1963, Dodat wrote to Hughes to inform him of Seghers’s decision to include
the poet in the “Les Poètes d’Aujourd’hui” series, to relate his plans for the proposed anthology,
and (once again) to frame his undertaking as one informed by the desire to combat racial
prejudice. Contrary to his actions (or lack thereof) some eight years previous, Hughes was quick
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to respond, and in a letter dated June 18th 1963: offered Dodat his long overdue thanks for
Poèmes; responded to Dodat’s mention that the proposed anthology would include “a selection
of yours [sic] more typical or shorter poems” by promising to send “my newest poems, ASK
YOUR MAMA” and, more to the point, by relating that despite the fact that his earlier books
were “unavailable,” Dodat could find “most of the poems they contained […] in my SELECTED
POEMS (Knopf)”; and, prompted by Dodat’s news that the anthology would include “a
biographical and critical account,” referred the translator to “LES POETES NEGRES DES
ETATS UNIS by Jean Wagner.” Hughes’s reply is indicative of his overall conduct (and of his
overall conducting) vis-à-vis his collaboration with Dodat and the composition of Langston
Hughes. He is gracious, forthcoming, and eager to aid Dodat in any way he can. He is also
strategic in the aid he provides (directing Dodat’s choice of texts by limiting his access strictly to
Ask Your Mama (1961) and Selected Poems) and the critical sources to which he refers Dodat.
He neglects to mention that he had not only provided Wagner with tactical access to his work,
but that he had also—in a series of missives dating from April 2nd 1958 to June 30, 1961—given
Wagner answers to his numerous questions, and, in so doing, helped to shape Wagner’s criticism
of his work.1 Moreover, given that Wagner’s seminal study approaches the black poets of the
United States with an eye to illuminate the religious dimensions and inspirations of their poetry,
Hughes’s instructions not only lead Dodat to a vision of Hughes that he helped to inform, but
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The same can be said for Raymond Quinot’s study (which also contains numerous translations of Hughes’s
poetry) Langston Hughes ou L’Etoile Noire [Langston Hughes or the Black Star], as Hughes—in a letter dated June
18th 1964—referred Dodat to the largely apolitical work that, in a manner akin to his relationship with Wagner, he
had helped to guide to its fruition.
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also to a vision of the poet that emphasized a dimension of his poetry which he had long tried to
recuperate (as he did in Selected Poems).
Time and time again, Hughes responded to Dodat’s and Seghers’s questions and requests
with a strategic eye to, in essence, stay on the safe side of the political spectrum, and his input
proved to be enormously influential. Not only does Dodat’s preface reflect Hughes vicarious
input (his prefatory remarks, for instance, place a Wagnerian religious frame around Hughes’s
work that was absent from his 1955 foreword), but—with the exception of one poem contained
in Ask Your Mama, several unpublished poems that Hughes submitted at Seghers’s request, and
two poems published in Phylon (of which Pierre Seghers also requested copies)—every poem in
Langston Hughes that was not contained in Poèmes can be found in Selected Poems. Moreover,
eleven of the thirteen unpublished poems that Hughes allowed Dodat to translate speak to either
religious themes or—placating Dodat’s desire for a volume that would combat prejudice—racial
injustice.1 Although nine of these poems would eventually see English language publication, it
is indeed telling that the poems which Hughes chose to augment Dodat’s selection emphasize the
very aspects of his poetic production that he either sought to recuperate or set center-stage in
Selected Poems.1 Nevertheless, this congruence should not be understood simply as an effort to
fashion similar visions of the poet on both sides of the Atlantic, but rather as Hughes’s attempt to
feed two separate audiences eager to see him in a particular light for distinct and overlapping
reasons. In this instance, his inclusion of unpublished religious poems speaks less to his
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The two poems that never saw English language print carry the French titles “La Bible” [The Bible] and “Un
esclave” [Slave].
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domestic persecution and more to the fact that his gospel-play Black Nativity was an enormous
hit with French audiences. In short, Hughes remained highly cognizant of his divergent and
evolving foreign language personae, feeding each (when he could) as he saw fit.
Evolving Personae in French Translation
Dodat’s selection of texts, construction of poetic sequences, and prefatory framing of
Hughes’s verse were, of course, all informed by the need to offer the public a vision of Hughes
that would sit well with readers of French. These readers had either been subject to or witnessed
dramatic changes in France and the Francophone world since 1955. The Algerian conflict had
hastened the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and with the rise of the Fifth, the French colonial
empire had drawn its last breath. By 1960, the French government—with Charles de Gaulle at
the helm—had held a series of local referendums which resulted in the independence of its
former colonies save for a few overseas départments [territories] (largely located, curiously
enough, in the Antilles) that chose to remain a part of France. As a result, France’s longstanding policies of cultural and national assimilation loomed even larger on the domestic front,
as French citizenship for those born apart from the Continent came to be seen increasingly as a
matter of choice, and anti-assimilative colonial fervor succumbed to an (albeit vexed)
nationalism in Africa’s newly independent states and elsewhere. Négritudealso transformed, as
its humanist rallying cry for cultural autonomy became increasingly intertwined with
articulations of nationalist and continental identities.
Two of the four sequences that organize Dodat’s selection of eighty-three poems speak to
all of these developments in one way or another, and, in so doing, present the reader with a
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slightly new Hughes intended to suit a dramatically new France. Indeed, the very titles of
Dodat’s sequences figure Hughes in terms that, often unexpectedly, lay bare interpretive frames
both old and new for his verse. The title of the collection’s first sequence “Il bat son tambour”
[He Beats His Drum] seems to evoke Hughes’s primitivist (or musically based) poetry, but the
poems contained therein are nothing of the sort, and instead present the reader with “lyric”
poems from Fields of Wonder and selections from The Weary Blues that are neither primitivist
nor race-proud. This seemingly paradoxical sequence, however, appears decidedly less so when
one realizes that a post-colonial, assimilative France (endowed with a plethora of citizens of
African descent) would find scant value in the notion of primitivism. Moreover (and tellingly),
not a single mention of an Africa just lost is contained in this sequence so primitively framed.
Likewise, the anthology’s fourth and longest sequence “Le mot nigger” [The Word Nigger] not
only introduces the “race problem” with racial vocabulary unique to the U.S., but also confines
itself to poems in Hughes’s oeuvre that address racial injustice and pride as they are incarnate in
a specifically U.S. context. Hughes’s poems that take up the theme of racism in general are,
quite logically, excluded from a volume intended to appeal to a French population who had
found their answer to the race problem (which so vexed Dodat in 1955) in a policy of
assimilation that was all the more easily implemented in a post-colonial environment. The
anthology’s second and third sections—“L’un Etait Noir” [The One Was Black] and “Blues”
[Blues]—may not refashion Hughes but they nevertheless speak to times present and past: “L’un
Etait Noir” stems from the concurrent popularity of Hughes’s Black Nativity in France,
presenting its readers with both poems that take African-American Christianity as their theme
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and with unpublished excerpts from the gospel-play itself, while “Blues” offers a brief selection
of Hughes’s “blues verse” as well as three poems that use the musical form as a theme.
Hughes and Négritude: Center and Periphery
Despite the fact that Langston Hughes, which confines the poet inside racist U.S. borders
is largely apolitical, contains no mention of négritude and makes only brief and tangential
reference to Africa, it was nevertheless marketed as an anthology of négritude poetry by
Seghers—even if the volume did not directly address the issue, Hughes’s négritude was still its
chief selling point. For his part, the poet had recently broken his silence, albeit briefly, on the
issue of négritudein the foreword to his anthology Poems from Black Africa (1963), a fact that
did not go unnoticed by either Léopold Sédar Senghor or Alioune Diop. Hence, when Diop
learned (most likely from Seghers) that Hughes had agreed to visit Paris to promote Langston
Hughes in late October of 1964, the two publishers joined forces and organized a small
conference—at the heart of the promotional weekend—where Hughes was to give a lecture on
the topic. On October 6, 1964, Seghers wrote to Hughes to inform him of the collusion and the
upcoming event:
Le Cercle de Présence Africaine vous inviterait à présider un réunionconférence où on vous demanderait de parler du problème de “la négritude
aux U.S.A.”. […] Vous y recontriez de très nombreux intellectuels africaines
et tous les amis du mouvement de Présence Africaine que prèside Alioune
Diop. La conference pourrait être donnée en anglais, si vous le souhaitiez.
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The Présence Africaine circle would like to invite you to preside over
a meeting/lecture where they’ve asked you to speak about the problem of
“negritude in the U.S.A.” […] You will meet a number of African
intellectuals there and all the friends of the Présence Africaine movement
which Alioune Diop chairs. The lecture can be given in English if you so
wish.
Once again, Diop (through Seghers) had come to Hughes for an explanation of his vision
of négritude, and, once again, the poet refused, backing out of the commitment at the last
moment. Hughes’s refusal to lecture on “négritude aux U.S.A” is particularly striking given his
increasing interest in African literature and his friendship with many members of the “cercle” to
which Seghers refers, including Senghor (now president of Senegal), Césaire, and Damas.
Moreover, Hughes had received private praise for his thoughts on négritude from Senghor
himself and had accepted the latter’s invitation to attend the first World Festival of Negro Arts in
Dakar (to be held in 1965) where, in essence, he had implicitly agreed to serve as an emblem of
the movement.
Hughes’s refusal to lecture on “négritude aux U.S.A” and acceptance of Senghor’s
invitation are, somewhat paradoxically, more easily understood in light of the two laudatory
missives he received from the Senegalese President. These letters not only testify to Hughes’s
association with and espousal of the alluvial concept, but also offer an explanation as to why he
would be willing to address the topic of négritude and yet loathe to speak about its presence/role
in the U.S. Namely, that Hughes—despite the essentialist dimension that Senghor sometimes
ascribed to the concept—conceptualized négritude, at this point in time, in local terms, as a
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(largely) thematic dimension of African poetry written in French. Nevertheless, Hughes was
quick to accept President Senghor’s invitation (dated June 20, 1963) to the Dakar festival, an
invitation which informed Hughes that no festival intended to illustrate the creative contributions
engendered by négritudecould proceed without him:
I think you know of my deep interest in and espousal of negritude. For
me, this festival will be a means of illustrating, as an entity, the unique
creative contribution of the Negro race to universal channels of thought and
understanding. […]
As a writer whose work is known and loved by millions, and as an
outstanding literary spokesman for Negro-Americans, you have enriched the
legacy of everyone. No festival claiming to represent Negro arts would be
complete without your presence.
Senghor’s missive frames the first World Festival of Negro Arts as a festival intended to
highlight the artistic contributions of the “Negro race” as “an entity,” and suggests that this racial
monolith is possessed of a unique and universally valuable creativity. This creativity and its
contributions “to universal channels of thought and understanding” are implicitly tied to
Senghor’s espousal of négritude, suggesting that, for the Senegalese president, the universal
contributions of the monolith and his new brand of humanism are, if not one in the same,
hopelessly intertwined. One can only imagine the discomfort that this first paragraph must have
provoked in a Hughes who had been combating the notion of a global, monolithic “Negro Race”
as well as iterations of racial essentialism ever since his sojourn through the Soviet Union.
However, Senghor quickly shifts gears (back and forth) from the universal to the personal when
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he refers to Hughes as “a writer” and a spokesman for “Negro Americans” who, in the course of
carrying out this specific function, has enriched the “legacy of everyone.” Hughes is, here,
painted in deceptively non-essentialist colors. His art and his voice are not universal. He is
neither representative of a monolithic “Negro Race” nor of “Negro Americans.” Rather, he is
the latter’s representative (or “spokesman”), and his words are universal only insofar as they
have enriched the global population’s collective history (or “legacy”), a legacy that knows no
racial boundaries. Moreover, Senghor avoids equating Hughes with his fellow Negro artists, as
Hughes’s presence—although a requisite for a “complete” festival—is implicitly figured as
individual and distinct, as one that adds to the global panorama of black artists but is not
emblematic of it. It is thus easy to see how Hughes could accept Senghor’s invitation to be, in
essence, the festival’s standard bearer with a clean conscience. He may answer to Senghor’s call
not as a négritudepoet, but as a black U.S. poet whose work is beloved by millions, and he may
attend the festival not as the spokesman for Negro Americans, but as a spokesman for a
population to which he belongs. In short, although Hughes may be (and actually was) the
“poster-boy” for Senghor’s celebration of negritude’s artistic achievements, he needn’t be a
spokesman of or for a movement that he saw as distinctly French-African. And it is this final
point that harmonizes the seeming contradiction between Hughes’s refusal of Diop’s invitation
and his acceptance of Senghor’s.1 In short, whereas Diop asked Hughes to deliver an
inconceivable lecture (for Hughes) on the role of a concept entrenched in French-African poetics,
Senghor had simply asked Hughes to speak for himself in a French-African arena.
Nevertheless, the letter that Senghor sent to Hughes after the poet had accepted his
invitation to Dakar helps to explain further Hughes’s refusal to provide Diop with the lecture he
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so craved, and provides still more evidence which suggests that Hughes’s vision of négritude,
albeit an evolving one, conceived of the movement (at the moment) as a French-African one of
which he was not a part. Moreover, the timing of the arrival of Senghor’s letter—which was the
only piece of correspondence concerning négritude that Hughes received in the interim between
his acceptance of Seghers’s and Diop’s invitation and his refusal to lecture on “négritude aux
U.S.A.”—suggests that Senghor’s words of praise for Hughes’s understanding of négritude
were, curiously enough, the very motivation behind Hughes’s refusal to publicly address the
issue. On September 19, 1963, Senghor wrote a letter that praised Hughes’s Poems from Black
Africa, its preface, and the defense and nuanced understanding of négritude contained therein:
Encore qu’elle soit courte, votre Introduction [sic] est admirable. Elle
situe bien le problème et définit exactement les différences que existent entre
la Poésie africaine de langue française et cele de langue anglaise.
Je vous suis particuliçèrement reconnaissant de défendre notre concept
de Négritude, qui n’est, au demeurant, pas l’ensemble des valeurs de
civilisation du Monde Noir.
Even though it is short, your Introduction [sic] is admirable. It well
situates the problem and defines the differences that exist between African
poetry written in French and African poetry written in English.
I am particularly grateful to you for defending our concept of
Negritude, which is not, in fact, the sum total of the values of Black World’s
civilization.
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Senghor praises Hughes’s prefatory remarks as an apt defense of “notre” concept of
négritude, and, in so doing, undermines the praise he affords Hughes’s well situated
differentiation between African poetry written in French and African poetry written in English.
This is the case because the differentiation that Hughes makes hinges on the fact that African
poets writing in English (and, in fact, Hughes himself) cannot be said to pen “variations of
négritude—a word that French speaking writers have coined to express a pride in and a love of
the African heritage, physically, spiritually, and culturally” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 508). The
exclusions Hughes implicitly makes are not based on essentialist notions of language and culture,
but rather on the fact that négritude, as he sees matters, is a term that (in the literary realm)
applies to the work of French language African poets of color who “create mosaics of blackness
against the palm trees within a large and (to non-Africans) exotic framework of cultural
nationalism, seldom tending towards miniatures, seldom reducing the framework of oneself”
(Rampersad, Vol. 9, 509). English language poets of Africa are not enjoined from such
expressions of négritude, but tend, as a matter of course, to be “somewhat less concerned with
color, personal or in landscape, and are more centered in self than race, their I less the I
equivalent to We of the French poets” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 509). Hughes, however, cannot write
poems that express négritude because the concept, as he (referencing Sartre) frames matters,
depends upon “black Africa’s concentration on the rediscovery of self,” and this self, of course,
does not include Hughes (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 509). Hence, Senghor’s “notre”—if this “notre”
refers to Hughes and Senghor’s circle—includes Hughes in a collective to which, in his eyes, he
cannot belong unless he subscribes to a monolithic conception of race that would see him as
African because he is possessed of African ancestry, a notion that had long been an anathema to
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the poet. On the other hand, if Senghor’s “notre” refers exclusively to French language African
poets, Senghor’s praise would not only obfuscate the “variations of negritude” (the heterogeneity
of the French speaking African population) to which Hughes refers, but would also exclude
Hughes from the collective whose notion of négritudehe supposedly defends. Whatever the case
may be, a lecture on “négritude aux U.S.A.” would be—following the logic of Hughes’s
evolving understanding of negritude—an ethically vexed contradiction in terms.
Hughes’s choice to distance himself from the négritude fray affected the reception of
Langston Hughes, as his decision not only removed him from the cultural and political cutting
edge of the nascent post-colonial moment, but also drew attention to the fact that the anthology
was constructed with an eye to appease a decidedly different French reading public than the one
that had received Poèmes warmly. Hence, the praise that Diop (and others) afforded Dodat’s
first attempt to anthologize Hughes was not echoed by André Laude in his review of Langston
Hughes which Diop published in his Présence Africaine in the second trimester edition of 1965.
Rather, Laude figured the new, politically-safe Hughes presented between the covers of Dodat’s
second anthology as a bourgeois political centrist whose time had passed:
[L]’oeuvre de Langston Hughes s’inscrit dans le contexte des efforts
menés aux Etats-Unis en vue de la conquête des droits civils depuis l’aparition
de la N.A.A.C.P. Il appartient à cette génération dont relèvent des leaders
tells que Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, membres d’une
« elite »
culturelle, produits « bâtards » de la société blanche américaine. Mais la roué
de l’histoire tourne: de nouvelles voix se sont faites entendre (James
Baldwin), de nouveaux leaders se sont dresses sur la misère grouillante de
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Harlem (Malcolm X). Ils n’ont pas les tabous, certaines illusions «
humanistes » de leurs aînés. Leurs nuits sont hantées par les images de la
revolution algérienne, de Cuba socialiste. Ils se découvrent frères de tous les
opprimés, de tous les damnés de la terre. (277)
Langston Hughes’s oeuvre fits into the context of high profile efforts
in the United States directed to gain civil rights since the appearance of the
N.A.A.C.P. He belongs to that generation which came under leaders like
Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, members of a cultural “elite,” “bastard”
products of white American society. But the wheel of history turns: once
again voices make themselves heard (James Baldwin), once again leaders are
rebelling about a Harlem swarming with misery (Malcolm X). They don’t
have the taboos or certain “humanist” illusions of their elders. Their nights
are haunted by images of the Algerian revolution, of a socialist Cuba. They
see themselves as brothers of all the oppressed, brothers of all the wretched of
the earth.
Laude’s review lays bare the success of Hughes’s efforts both to distance himself from
radical socialism and to align himself with the Civil Rights Movement by strategically
anthologizing his poetry in Selected Poems and Langston Hughes. The very same writer whose
poetic maturation was figured, by Pereda Valdés, as a process that led him to a “solidaridad con
todos los explotados del mundo” [solidarity with all the world’s exploited] is reviewed by Laude,
via Dodat’s anthology, as little more than a forefather to a more radical generation of leaders
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who have made all the oppressed and wretched of the earth their brethren. Laude also relegates
Hughes to the era of the colonial empire. The poet who, in the course of compiling and
promoting Langston Hughes, shied away from the cultural cutting edge of Africa’s newly
independent nation states is now, somewhat fittingly, denied the company of those whose dreams
are haunted by images of the Algerian revolution and a socialist Cuba. He is a world away from
the “We” of négritude, a bastard member of a compromised black social “elite” which is overly
invested in high profile civil rights struggles and lacking in Marxist credentials and commitment.
Indeed, it would seem that Laude is either possessed by an intense desire to strip Hughes of his
radical stripes or is completely unaware of the fact that a radical Hughes ever existed. There is
perhaps no better testimony to the power of the anthology vis-à-vis literary consecration than
this: not only is Hughes, once again, made anew in the anthologizing process, but his radical
slate is wiped clean and his history is washed away, leaving, in Laude’s case, only Langston
Hughes to speak for Langston Hughes.
Laude’s Hughes, owing to the auspices of Hughes and his translators/anthologists, was
nevertheless but one of many, and as sales of Langston Hughes slumped, the négritude
movement—where Hughes’s place in the limelight remained unsullied—continued to be the
global literary rage. Indeed, Hughes’s literary consecration in the Francophone arena would not
be a function of his anthologization, but rather of his embracement by the poets and propagators
of négritude, an embracement that came to a certain culmination at the first World Festival of
Negro Arts in Dakar at 1965. Despite the company of many of the world’s greatest artists,
Hughes’s fame and presence—in the words of Arnold Rampersad—left “a mark probably
unmatched by any single presence other than that of the president of Senegal himself” (Life II,
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400). Moreover, Hughes was celebrated by the president himself when, during a private party,
Senghor recited two of Hughes’s poems. Although Hughes, owing largely to the auspices of
Mercer Cook (now the U.S. ambassador to Senegal), was well aware of Senghor’s admiration for
him, the festival, these events, and the delight Hughes took from both arguably played a key role
in his re-conceptualization of négritude.1 Although Diop and Senghor could not make an
adherent out of Hughes, they nevertheless prompted the poet to give the topic a second thought.
Hughes on Négritude and Négritude as Translation
Hughes offered this second thought in his “Black Writers in a Troubled World” (1966),
an essay that offers its reader a distinctly Hughesian take on négritude and frames the concept in
a manner akin to Hughes’s conception of translation and of the anthology. Just as each
translation of a poem and each anthology of a poet made poem and poet anew as part and parcel
of the ongoing project of world literature and literary consecration, so too, for Hughes, did
négritude constitute a process wherein artists, like translators, offered (in a never-ending series)
their own instantiations of black art and culture, remaking and reworking their cultural
inheritance in a process that helped them not only to better understand themselves, but also their
brethren in an heterogeneous African Diaspora. In other words, Hughes achieves his aims
through a series of displacements: not only through a deft deployment of shifts between an “I”
meant to stand for the individual, an “I” meant to speak for the collective, and a people
115
Cook wrote Hughes to inform him of Senghor’s admiration of August 6, 1964 and (after the festival) on February
24, 1966.
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contextualized and re-contextualized, but also by layering the voices of these personae and
people with an eye to the aesthetic regimes in which each are created, read and re-read. In the
end, he makes the leaps between individual and shared consciousnesses through language
itself—the embedded traditions it sustains, retains, and transforms—or, perhaps better said,
through language as translation:
Now, the subject of the colloquium: What is the function and
significance of African Negro art in the life of the people and for the people?
This is where négritude comes into play. Négritude, as I have garnered from
Senegal’s distinguished poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor, has its roots deep in the
beauty of the black people—in what younger writers and musicians in
America call “soul” which I would define this way: Soul is a synthesis of the
essence of Negro folk art redistilled—particularly the old music and its flavor,
the ancient basic beat out of Africa, the folk rhymes and Ashanti stories—
expressed in contemporary ways so definitively and emotionally colored with
the old, that it gives a distinctly “Negro” flavor to today’s music, painting, or
writing—or even to merely personal attitudes and daily conversation. Soul is
contemporary Harlem’s negritude, revealing to the Negro people the beauty
within themselves. I once tried to say this in a poem [….]
In addressing the intentionally polyvalent “subject of the colloquium,” Hughes speaks to
multiple entities and identities—art, the people, the people as subjects, soul and négritude—by
employing rhetorical strategies that highlight the relationship between the individual and the
collective which will come to comprise one of the chief tenets of his argument. Négritude is
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both rooted in the collective “beauty of the black people,” and is also something that, in
Hughes’s words, “I have garnered from Senegal’s distinguished poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor,”
an individual’s concept passed across language and culture to another individual. Hughes, then,
highlights the shift in consciousness and context that provided him with a translation of his
“garnered” understanding by pointing to “what younger writers and musicians in America call
‘soul’.” He deepens and draws in greater detail the way that his own self and self-understanding
filter and give meaning to these comparative collective frameworks, relating “I would define
[soul in] this way.” Hughes’s definitions are indeed re-articulations of old aesthetic strategies
made new, the “old game” of the negro vogue and the “old game” of the incorporation of folk
forms into proletarian art designed to draw in and draw out the people’s revolutionary potential
in solidarity and similarity. Yet, as is his wont, Hughes makes recourse to the revolutionary
potential and productivity of solidarity in order to reflect on solidarity’s revolutionary potential
in a mirror image. In Hughes’s definition, négritude finds a second face in “soul”: “Soul is
contemporary Harlem’s négritude, revealing to the Negro people the beauty within themselves.”
In a particularly striking manner, Hughes simultaneously creates equivalence and forefronts the
geographical and temporal markers that forge the complex relationship between the two notions.
He complicates this gesture still further by reaching back into his own oeuvre to his first
published poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (originally dedicated to the Pan-Africanist Du
Bois), to the first time he “tried to say this in a poem”:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world
and older than the flow
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of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers
I bathed in the Euphrates
when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo
and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile
and raised pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi
When Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans,
and I’ve seen its muddy bosom
turn all golden brown in the sunset
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Hughes’s citation presents the reader with a purposeful anachronism that works on
multiple fronts. He subtly presents himself as both a forefather to contemporary conceptions of
négritude and as poet whose works still speak to the present moment. He embeds his poem in
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the flow of time to highlight how old poems gain new meanings when new knowledge
frameworks and aesthetic regimes articulate concepts like “soul” differently, and also chooses a
poem that speaks to this age-old theme in its rich use of the Classical figuration of the river as a
quintessential metaphor for the passage of time. And, by choosing a poem so enthralled with rewriting (or, perhaps, re-distilling) the Whitmanesque American voice, he provides ample
justification as to why Negro is placed in shock quotes. Hughes makes it possible to read change
in the recourse to “Negro folk art.” Just as the Classical foot can never twice touch the waters of
Heraclites’ river and Hughes’s poem requires multiple personae to know multiple rivers (that
nevertheless coalesce in one soul), négritude is “Negro folk art” that has been—as is the case
with Hughes and his multiple instantiations in a plethora of anthologies—“redistilled” and
“expressed in contemporary ways so definitively and emotionally colored with the old.”
Moreover, this “old” involves a vexed, inherited poetic language riddled with a history that
cannot and should not forget its inheritance as it has been passed down and re-instantiated in
violent displacements, colonialism, and education—as it has been given over to the very
subjectivity Hughes wishes to articulate. Indeed languages’ inheritance, too, “has its roots deep
in the beauty of the black people.” Hughes, he says, did not simply say, but rather “tried to say.”
He figures inherited relations as (at least) linguistic, racial and geographic and the hope-filled
approach to them as asymptotic.
Translation Gives Birth to a Global Community
Although the approach to these relations and this inheritance may prove to be
asymptotic, the endeavor—the attempt to redistill or re-instantiate—is, for Hughes, the
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constitutive paradox of forming and perpetuating an heterogeneous African Diaspora that
conceives of itself as such. This global community is not only engendered by translation, but,
insofar as translation is always ongoing, it is also involved in a process (or practice) of perpetual
evolution wherein each articulation of the collective is both individual and a part of an
interwoven fabric:
If one may ascribe a prime function to any creative writing, it is, I
think, to affirm life, to yeah-say the excitement of living in relation to the vast
rhythms of the universe of which we are a part, to untie the riddles of the
gutter in order to closer tie the knot between man and God. As to Negro
writing and writers, one of our aims, it seems to me, should be to gather the
strengths of our people in Africa and the Americas into a tapestry of words so
strong as the bronzes of Benin, the memories of Songhay and Mele, the war
cry of Chaka, the beat of the blues, and the Uhuru of African freedom, and
give it to the world with pride and love, and the kind of humanity and
affection that Senghor put into his poem To the American Troops when he
said:
You bring the springtime of peace
And the hope at the end of hope….
Down flowing streets of joy, boys play with
dreams.
Men dance in front of machines,
and, astonished, burst out singing.
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The eyelashes of students
are sprinkled with rose petals.
Fruit ripens in the breast of the virgins.
And the hips of the women—oh how sweet!—
Handsomely grown heavy.
Oh, black brothers,
warriors whose mouths are singing flowers—
Delight of living when winter is over—
You I salute as messengers of peace!
That is Senghor. To this I affirm, how mighty it would be if the black
writers of our troubled world became our messengers of peace. How
wonderful it would be if:
Les homes dansent devant leurs machines
et se surprenent à chanter.
Les paupières des écolièrs sont pétals de rose,
les fruits nurissent à la poitrine des vierges,
Et les haunches des femmes—oh, douceur—
généreusement s’alourdissent
Frères noirs, guerriers dont la bouche
est fleur qui chante—
Oh! Délice de vivre après l’hiver—
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je vous salue comme des messagers de paix.
By attributing his English language translation of Senghor’s poem (which was dedicated
to none other than Mercer Cook) to the Senegalese president and claiming the source-text as his
own affirmation, Hughes figures translation as a means not only by which one gives voice to an
Other separated by language (and by time), but also—as the poem’s sentiments are said to be
shared—as a means by which black writers may “gather the strengths of our people in Africa and
the Americas into a tapestry of words” in the hopes of propagating a decidedly African Diasporic
community and peace.
Literature in translation is therefore not simply a vehicle through which one may express
what has not been expressed in the maternal tongue, a healthy outside injection of intellectual
input, but also an exchange of identity in the pursuit of understanding. Hughes gives voice to
Senghor and Senghor gives voice to Hughes; négritude’s process of re-distilling and synthesis
marches on. Hughes provides a list of similes for this tapestry that is punctuated at the end by a
translation, “Uhuru of African freedom.”1 Hughes notably provides a somewhat transgressive
translation of Senghor’s poem—dividing, for instance, Senghor’s “Les paupières des écolièrs
sont pétals de rose” into two lines “The eyelashes of students / are sprinkled with rose petals”—
and reaffirms the connection that he sees between translation and négritude; no two
instantiations are alike and no two are unrelated. And all are threads that, when tied together,
afford communion. Yet still, as Hughes implies, some threads must be undone to achieve social
justice. Hence, translation must be carefully done to avoid flaws in the communal tapestry, but
this care is not one akin to the pursuit of perfection embodied in Hughes’s quest to translate
Romancero gitano. Rather, it is a faith in community akin to Hughes’s newfound faith in
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translation as an ongoing process and integral part of both the project of world literature and panAfricanism.
Fathering Multiple Personae and Poetic Movements
Regardless of how Hughes felt about the movement, it would canonize and consecrate
him in the Francophone world to a far greater extent than did Dodat’s anthology. The antiassimilative Hughes—whose primitivism, in the context of this aesthetic regime, also made him
a Marxist—would not fade from view. In fact, this anti-assimilative incarnation of Hughes
would grow to, nearly, legendary proportions, and come to be considered, by many, as the
forefather of black in the Americas. Perhaps no piece of evidence better testifies to this fact than
Léon Gontran-Damas’s “Nouvelle some de poésie: presentation afro-américaine” [New Epitome
of Poetry: Afro-American Presentation], wherein—after providing a citation of (of course) “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”—he enumerates the black poets and black poetry
movements that, in his eyes, Hughes’s manifesto both liberated and inspired:
C’est que, pour avoir retenu le message lancé par Langston Hughes,
qui devait être repris tour à tour par Palès Matos, à Porto-Rico, Nicolas
Guillen [sic], à Cuba, Jacques Roumain, à Port-au-Prince, Claude McKay, à la
Jamaïque, Cabral, à Saint-Dominique, Solano Trindade, au Brésil, De Brot
[sic], à Curaçao, et Albert Helman, à Surimane [sic]. Et last but not least, par
Césaire, à la Martinique, Senghor, au Sénégal, et par moi même, dans la
mesure où – quelque haïssable que soit le moi – je ne pouvais avec mon pays,
la Guyane, rester sourd à ce langage tambourine dans la nuit, les jeunes Afro-
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Américains du Nord, du Centre et du Sud, poursuivent d’un pas résolu et
ferme le chemin trace. (354)
It’s that, by having accepted the message launched by Langston
Hughes, which has been taken up by Palés Matos, in Puerto Rico, Nicolás
Guillén, in Cuba, Jacques Roumain, in Port-au-Prince, Claude McKay, in
Jamaica, Cabral, in Santo Domingo, Solano Trindade, in Brazil, De Brot [sic],
in Curaçao, and Albert Helman, in Surinam. And last but not least, by
Césaire, in Martinique, Senghor, in Senegal, and by me, to the extent that—
however detestable mine is—I can’t be in my country, French Guyana, and
remain deaf to that drum language in the night, the young Afro-Americans of
the North, of the Center and of the South, continue a resolute and steady pace
in the road’s footprints.
The enfant terrible of the négritude movement figures Hughes as a forefather not only to
the “Big Three,” but also as the precursor/progenitor of poesía negra in Cuba (Guillén), negrista
poetics in Puerto Rico (Palés Matos), and to a host of other poets—whose work actually comes
before and after that of Hughes—throughout French-America, Spanish-America, DutchAmerica, and Lusophone-America. Hughes is nothing short of the poetic father of all things
black in the Americas and in post-colonial West-Africa, a poet in whose tracks all other black
poets follow. Tellingly, it is to the anti-assimilative Hughes first greeted by French and
Francophone critics to which Damas alludes, invoking the primitivist “drum language” of the
night as well as his own perennial dissatisfaction with his native French Guiana whose
445
assimilative aspirations had been, in part, the source of Damas’s perennial sardonic
dissatisfaction with French colonialism. In short, Hughes had blazed a trail still smoldering in
the context of négritude poetics, and it is this version of Hughes, this instantiation of persona,
that constitutes his consecrated place in the Francophone literary pantheon and, in Damas’s
opinion, accounts for the majority of black poetic production in the Americas in the twentieth
century.
Across Borders: Hughes in an International Arena
While Damas’s assertions present the reader with a certain amount of hyperbole,
Langston Hughes was the most translated living U.S. author the day before he died on May 22,
1967, and this status does indeed bolster Damas’s claims concerning a Hughes who was
enormously influential across borders and languages. A multiple Hughes made for multiple
founts which nourished diverse poets and poetic traditions. However, the Hughes consecrated
inside the U.S., France, and the Francophone world was a far cry from the one consecrated in
Latin America where his location in leftist circles—a process begun by Fernández de Castro—
went relatively unchallenged throughout the course of his lifetime. After his work with Galer,
two of Hughes poems—“El Negro” [“Negro”] and “Domingo” [“Sunday by the
Combination”]—appeared in Eugene Florit’s Antología de la poesía norteamericana
contemporánea [Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry] (1955) and the journals Nivel
and Revista Internacional de poesía [International Journal of Poetry] republished translations of
six of Hughes’s poems in 1961 and 1963 respectively. However, the largest publication of
Hughes’s poetry in Spanish after Poemas was also the last anthology dedicated to his work
446
abroad, and this anthology testifies to how firmly Hughes’s work and persona were entrenched in
leftist discursive and aesthetic regimes in Spanish America.
Langston Hughes did not live to see Yo también soy América (1968), an anthology of his
collected poems translated in Spanish by H. Ahumada with a preface by Andrés Henestrosa, but
he did spend his final days eagerly anticipating its arrival. As Edward J. Mullen relates, “[i]t is
not surprising that Hughes felt strongly about the 1968 publication [….] Ernesto Mejía Sánchez
said Hughes ‘considered that undertaking to be the highpoint of his career, on a par with the
publication of his Selected Poems’” (Mullen Langston Hughes in the Hispanic World and Haiti
16).1 Mejía Sanchez’s suggestion of equivalence bares witness not only to Hughes’s insatiable
desire to be multiply translated and to possess multiple personae abroad, but also speaks to the
fact that Hughes, at the time of his death, was still quite comfortable with his Spanish American
instantiations. Moreover, it demonstrates that Hughes saw his “career” not as the sum total of his
literary production, but as the sum total of his literary reception in a global arena. This, in turn,
provides still further testimony that, for Hughes, writing and translating were, as he told Guillén
in 1930, equally integral parts of becoming “el poeta de los negros,” two sides of the same coin
in the process of adding to the project of world literature.
Ahumada’s anthology does not depart from either the logic or structure of Galer’s
anthology insofar as its choice and ordering of texts implies a Marxist progression from a raceconscious Hughes to a class-conscious one, paying heed (as does nearly all of Hughes’s Spanish
American dissemination) to his poems concerning miscegenation and religion. Testifying to the
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There is no evidence to suggest that Hughes aided in the construction of this anthology.
447
fact that there was more than one Hughes claimed by more than one cadre of writers and
intellectuals, Henestrosa titles the volume’s preface “Un poeta negro amigo de México” [A
Black Poet Friend of Mexico]. True to form, the anthology begins with a hodge-podge of
Hughes race-proud verse, a selection of some of his “blues poems,” and a smattering of
religiously-themed poems, but draws towards its conclusion by offering some of Hughes’s most
radical-socialist verse, including: “Trabajadores en uncamino de Florida” [“Florida Road
Workers”]; “Banque del parque” [“Park Bench”]; “Canto a Tom Mooney” [“Chant for Tom
Mooney”]; “Canto al día de mayo” [“Chant for May Day”]; “El canto de España” [Song of
Spain]; “Carta abierta al sur” [“Open Letter to the South”]; “Una nueva canción” [“A New
Song”], “Union” [“Union”], and “Dejad que américa vuelva a ser américa” [“Let America Be
America Again”]. With these poems, Ahumada’s and Henestrosa’s anthology anthologizes more
of Hughes “radical” poetic production, with the arguable exception of Piquion’s (whose
anthology sees almost everything in a revolutionary light), than any other anthology of Hughes’s
poetry published to date. It would seem that Fernández de Castro’s introduction and Marxist
framing of Hughes to and for the Mexican artistic community held just as fast as Hughes’s antiassimilative incarnation in the Francophone arena. In short, while Hughes was consecrated—
with Selected Poems and the Spingarn Medal—as a civil rights poet on his homefront, it was his
early Marxist personae and verse (as received by strikingly divergent aesthetic and discursive
regimes) that provided the material for his literary consecration in the Hispanic and Francophone
worlds.
448
Chapter 4: Works Cited and Consulted
Ballagas, Emilio. Mapa de la poesía negra Americana. Tucumán: Editorial Pleamar, 1946.
Berti, Luis. Introduction. Mapa de la poesía negra Americana. Tucumán: Editorial Pleamar,
1946.
Bontemps, Arna. Introduction. Un chant nouveau. Port-au-Prince: Impimerie de l’État, 1940.
Césaire, Aimé. “Introduction à la poésie nègre américain.” Tropiques, No. 2, July, 1941: 37-42.
Cook, Mercer. “Langston Hughes, Un Chant Nouveau.” Phylon, Vol. 1, No. 4, 4th Quarter,
1940: 390-391.
Cunard, Nancy, ed. Negro. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Company, 1970.
Damas, Léon-Gontran. “Nouvelle some de poésie; présentation afro-américaine.” Présence
Africaine, No. 57, December 15,1965: 353-356.
Depestre, René. “Deux poètes d’ajourd’hui.” Présence Africaine, No. 6, February-March, 1956:
165-167.
Diop Alioune. “To Langston Hughes.” 6 January 1956, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Dodat, François. Avant-Propos. Poèmes. Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1955.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 12 March 1955, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” June 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 11 June 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
449
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 11 June 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Feuser, W.F. “African American Literature and Negritude.” Comparative Literature, Vol. 28,
No. 4, Autumn, 1976: 289-308.
Fingerit, Marcos, ed. Yo también soy américa. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Grifo: 1944.
Galer, Julio. Introduction. Poemas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Lautaro, 1952.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 21 April 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 14 May 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 12 June 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 15 September 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 22 July 1949, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 28 July 1952, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Hale, Thomas A. “From Afro-America to Afro-France: The Literary Triangular Trade.” The
French Review, Vol. 49, No. 6, May, 1976: 1089-1096.
450
Hughes, Langston. “Black Writers in a Troubled World.” The Collected Works of Langston
Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De
Santis. Columbia ad London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. Introduction. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1957.
--. Langston Hughes. Présentation par François Dodat. Trans. François Dodat, Paris: Éditions
P. Seghers, 1964.
--. Poemas. Trans. Julio Galer, Buenos Aires: Editorial Lautaro, 1952.
--. Poèmes. Trans. François Dodat, Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1955.
--. “Greetings, Good Neighbors.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on
Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia ad
London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “My Adventures as a Social Poet.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays
on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia ad
London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1959.
--. “Ten Ways To Use Poetry in Teaching.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9,
Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed. Christopher C. De Santis.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
--. “To Léon-Gontran Damas.” 26 September 1946, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
451
--. “To Léon-Gontran Damas.” 1 March 1953, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To François Dodat.” 18 June 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Alioune Diop.” 24 June 1961, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Dudley Fitts.” 25 October 1951, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Blanche Knopf.” 5 August 1940, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Julio Galer.” 2 May 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Julio Galer.” 3 May 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Julio Galer.” 17 June 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Julio Galer.” 9 November 1948, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Julio Galer.” 29 February 1949, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Julio Galer.” 19 July 1952, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
452
--. “To René Piquion.” 8 May 1940, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To René Piquion.” 7 June 1941, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Pierre Seghers,” 20 June 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Jean Wagner.” 28 September 1958, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Jean Wagner.” 30 June 1961, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Jean Wagner.” 12 April 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. Yo también soy América. Trans. H. Ahumada. Mexico City: Organización Editorial: Novaro,
S.A., 1968.
Jackson, Richard. Black Writers and the Hispanic Canon. New York: Twane Publishers, 1997.
--. “The Shared Vision of Langston Hughes and Black Hispanic Writers.” Black Literature
Forum. Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn, 1981: 89-92.
Kanapa, Jean. “Il y a deux littératures américaines.” Les Lettres françaises, February 5, 1948: 3.
Kesteloot, Lilyan. Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude. Trans. Ellen
Conroy Kennedy. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1991.
Laude, André. “Langston Hughes par François Dodat.” Présence Africaine, No. 54, 2nd
trimester, 1965: 275-277.
453
Pereda Valdés, Idelfonso. Antología de la poesía negra americana. Santiago de Chile, 1936.
Piquion, René. “Curte Mise au Point.” Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. Manuel de la négritude. Port-au-Prince: H. Deschamps, 1966.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 30 June 1940, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 16 July 1940, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. Un chant nouveau. Port-au-Prince: Impimerie de l’État, 1940.
Racine, Daniel, ed. Léon-Gontran Damas, 1912-1978: Founder of Negritude, A Memorial
Casebook. Washingston D.C.: University Press of America, 1979.
Rampersad, Arnold. Introduction. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 2, The
Poems: 1941-1950. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2001.
--. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 2:1941-1967, I Dream a World. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Rivaud, Luisa. “To Langston Hughes.” 20 February 1946, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Roumain, Jacques. “To Langston Hughes.” 1931, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--.. “To Langston Hughes.” 1932, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
454
Seghers, Pierre. “To Langston Hughes.” 18 April 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 6 October 1964, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Liberté 1: Négritude et Humanisme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
--. “Trois Poètes négro-américaines: Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes.” Poésie
45, No. 23, February, 1945: 32-33
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 20 June 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 19 September 1963, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Wagner, Jean. Les Poètes Nègres des Etats-Unis. Paris: Libraire Istra, 1962.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 2 April 1958, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
--. “To Langston Hughes.” 4 March 1961, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
Watkins, Alma T. “Blues in Spanish.” Phylon, Vol. 13, No. 4, 4th Quarter, 1952: 351-352.
Zapata, Manuel Olivella. “To Langston Hughes.” 27 February 1954, Langston Hughes Papers,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven.
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Conclusion
Langston Hughes’s reading public was only offered a small window into his evolving
conception of translation on four brief occasions. This fact is indeed surprising given both the
amount of time that he dedicated to translating works from Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese,
and Uzbek, the little financial compensation he received for his efforts, and his penchant for
referring to himself as a translator.1 His public silence on the matter of translation can easily be
conceptualized as the natural response of an essayist whose audience and U.S. publishers were
decidedly uninterested not only in the topic, but also—as Hughes informed Piquion—in reading
new works (especially those written in Latin America) in translation. It can also be seen as part
and parcel of Hughes’s overall reticence to speak about his creative process and, in turn, the role
played by translation in it.1 Whatever the case may be, his published commentaries on
translation assign the craft several intertwined functions. Two of the four published
commentaries that Hughes made on translation—his characterization of writing as but a mode of
translation presented in Conversación con Langston Hughes (1930) and his assertion that
translation constitutes a useful pedagogical tool for teaching the art of poetry contained in his
“Ten Ways to Use Poetry in Teaching” (1951)—explicitly link translation to the creative process
of writing “original” poetry. Hughes would also link translation to international community
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Although Hughes did not shy away from addressing the ideals, goals, and limitations surrounding the literary
production of African-Americans, the notoriously shy poet rarely went so far as to speak explicitly about his own
creative process.
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building by positing that an increase in the publication of Spanish American texts in English
translation would foment inter-American dialogue and exchange in his “Greetings, Good
Neighbors” (1945).1 And in regard to his translation techne, Hughes addressed the topic only
once (and in largely negative terms) in his preface to Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (1957),
writing, “I have no set theories of translation. I simply try to transfer into English as much as I
can of the literal content, emotion, and style of each poem” (Rampersad, Vol. 9, 494). This claim
proves to be both true and false. As I have argued throughout this dissertation by making
recourse to his correspondence and to close readings of the translations that he wrote, Hughes did
not have “set theories of translation,” but rather sets of theories of translation. Each of these
theories informed and transformed his poetic production and his vision of the role played by
translation in fomenting various internationalisms. Indeed, as Hughes’s conception of translation
changed over the course of his life, so too did the nature of his verse and the contours of his
internationalist vision. The three entities were, for the poet, inextricably bound to one another
despite the fact that all were in constant and concomitant flux.
Hughes’s conception and praxis of translation both evolved and, in a sense, came full
circle over the course of his lifetime. The New Negro poet saw his art as a means to translate
(albeit metaphorically) the shared inheritance of unwritten African-American creative production
(oral, musical, etc.) into the realm of literature in 1930. And, in 1966, the poet of négritude—or
to be more precise of “soul”—viewed the slippery concept as something akin to his 1930 vision
of translation (or writing), as the process of redistilling folk-art. In the interim, however,
Hughes’s views on the purpose, nature, and ideal praxis of translation underwent shifts both
subtle and dramatic. His penchant for composing playful and domesticating translations in order
457
to foster a mutual understanding between communities of color in the Americas that was
decidedly calé, gave way to an ethically driven conception of translation. This conception prized
collaborative literal translations as the best way to avoid limiting the poetic potential of the
source text in translation and the ethical pitfalls of speaking for the Other. The translator became
a type of medium when faced by the ethical imperative to maintain “difference in unity,” and
transgressive translation in the service of bridge-building now represented more of a peril than a
source of potential. Nevertheless, as Hughes acquired an increasing familiarity with the task of
the translator—by continuing his own work translating and by seeing his work multiply
translated—his faith in literal translation gave way to an arguably more mature vision. This
vision figured translation not only as an on-going process whereby the polyvalence of poetry was
to be illuminated by multiple translations of the same poem as composed by different translators,
but also as a constitutive component in the project of world literature that performed the work of
literary consecration in addition to the work of literary exchange. Hughes’s personal drive to
forge ties between diverse communities through transgressive or literal translation was replaced
by a faith in world literature in general, by a belief that fine poets would be translated and retranslated in diverse ways according to the agendas and cultures of the translators who prized
their work. In short, translation continued to be a tie that bound, but this process of binding was
as varied as the world community was heterogeneous.
I have argued throughout this dissertation that Langston Hughes’s translations of poetry
affected his own poetic production by focusing on how his poetic palette was enriched both by
what he could and could not translate. Just as Regino Pedroso’s easily-translatable agit-prop
verse revealed new poetic horizons to Hughes, so too did certain dimensions of Mayakovsky’s
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and García Lorca’s verse—which proved impossible to translate (for Hughes)—prompt him to
integrate elements of foreign prosody and poetic invention into his “original” verse. In the
course of making these arguments, I have confined my observations largely to Hughes’s
engagements with Pedroso, García Lorca, Mayakovsky, Louis Aragon, Nicolás Guillén and, to a
very small degree, with Emi Sao [Xiao San] and Gabriela Mistral. These poets were not selected
because they represent the only (or even the chief) instances where Hughes’s translations
affected his poetic production. Rather, they were chosen with an eye to elucidate the role that
translation played in Hughes’s radical poetic production and reception, on the bodies of verse
that (as I have also argued) are most responsible for the creation of Hughes’s enduring radical
reputation and personae in the Hispanic and Francophone worlds. Nevertheless, Hughes chose
to translate a plethora of poets and poems (catalogued in the appendix which follows), and one is
hard-pressed to find an instance where Hughes’s poetic palette was not enriched by these
engagements.
In a similar vein, I have confined my observations vis-à-vis the impact of Hughes’s
translations on his original literary production to the realm of poetry. This decision was made
because poetry was the genre that traveled most easily in translation during the era and in the
arenas that concern this dissertation. Moreover, it would be impossible to investigate in detail—
in the confines of a study such as this one—the instances where Hughes’s short stories, plays,
and gospel operas also reflect the impact of his work as a translator. Indeed, an entire booklength study could be dedicated to elucidating the impact composing the unpublished manuscript
Troubled Lands (1935) had on Hughes’s career as an author of short fiction. Another potential
future scholarly project that would address Hughes’s relationship to translation might dedicate
459
itself to illuminating the significant affect that translating Lorca’s Bodas de sangre [Blood
Wedding] had on Hughes’s subsequent dramatic production. The structure of Hughes’s Do You
Want To Be Free? is unprecedented in Hughes’s dramatic oeuvre, bares Lorca’s imprint, and was
composed immediately after Hughes’s return from Spain. In addition to these projects, one
might also fruitfully explore Hughes’s Simple Stories in light of his engagement with Don
Quixote, the book Hughes turned to in order to better his command of Spanish in 1935. And
given that many of the poets that Hughes translated also were translators of Hughes’s verse, one
could dedicate several book length studies to illuminating the impact that translating Hughes had
on many of the 20th century’s great poets.
In examining the translation and dissemination of Hughes’s poetry in the Hispanic and
Francophone worlds (as well as in France and the Soviet Union), I have offered a number of
observations on how and why international black radicalism traveled in translation from 19301968. I have explored the context dependence of Hughes’s radicalism in order to point out that
what constitutes “radical” poetry differs greatly from one literary arena to another, and to
illuminate the fact that both translation decisions and the literary frames assigned to translations
play a determining role in the realization of what is radical. Hughes’s first outpouring of radicalsocialist verse may have followed on the heels of his first trip to Cuba, but his poetry in Spanish
language translation—owing to the auspices of Fernández de Castro—served the interests of
international Communism well before the Harlem Renaissance crashed alongside Wall Street in
1929.1 In a similar vein, the early primitivist poetry that so enthused Hughes’s Park Avenue
460
patron became, in translation, a paradigm for Marxist (anti-assimilative) artistic production and
négritude poetics in the Francophone world. Poetry recast in translation takes on added (and at
times unexpected) dimensions, resonance, and meaning. In order to articulate how these
transformations occur, I have set forth the notion of an aesthetic regime. By mapping how
Hughes’s poetry was interpreted inside different aesthetic regimes as it traveled in translation, we
can begin to come to terms not only with how black radicalism traveled in translation, but also
with how translation engendered black radicalisms and internationalisms.
Given the extent to which a culture’s aesthetics are intertwined with and informed by its
socio-political environment, the positing of any aesthetic regime always begs for an analysis of
the factors that helped to give it shape. This shaping is rarely straightforward or willed, but—as
we have seen—often operates as does a chaos system wherein the flap of a butterfly’s wings may
engender a hurricane. It was certainly not Freud’s intention—when he reflected on the
relationship between so-called primitive cultures and the unconscious—to provide Francophone
literary critics with a rationale to frame Hughes’s primitivist verse as Marxist or antiassimilative. The unexpected (and, often times in Hughes’s case, expected) cultural and
intellectual collisions that allow literary critics informed by diverse aesthetic regimes to interpret
121
Traditionally, the stock market crash is considered to mark the end of the Harlem Renaissance. However, this
date places Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) outside the movement. For many, this is
reason enough to rethink the timeframe of the movement.
122
As discussed in the second chapter, aesthetic regime is a term to denote the aesthetic
criteria against which works of art are measured in the confines of a given culture
(national, international, local, etc.).
461
poetry in radically different fashions may even stem from the difficulty of translating a single
word. In the context of U.S. parlance in 1929, the opening line of Hughes’s “Proem”—“I am a
Negro”—constituted, owing to the capital “N,” a mild assertion a race-pride. In postrevolutionary Mexico, “Soy un negro” read as either a simple statement of fact (barring the
presence of a racist interlocutor) or as a distancing from the ideal Mexican subject-citizen and his
mestizaje. And in colonial Martinique, the difference between the self-identifications “Je suis
noir” and “Je suis nègre” could represent the difference between an assimilated French citizen
and a Marxist revolutionary. The radical content of the poem (or lack thereof) which follows
this line—in all its translations and permutations—alters and differs according to the dictates of
the aesthetic and discursive regimes within which it is interpreted.
Instances where the translation of a single word dramatically altered the reception of
Hughes’s poetry were by no means rare. More often than not, the production of divergent poetic
meaning engendered by multiple translations of his poetry was a function of both the contours of
the aesthetic regimes that greeted his verse and the place and reputation held by Hughes’s
foreign born personae in the context of those regimes. Throughout the course of this dissertation
I have argued that these regimes were both rigid and malleable. On the one hand, they
transformed in step with worldwide and local developments both literary and political. The fall
of the French colonial empire, for example, transformed the status of négritude poetics in
Francophone aesthetic regimes from an expression of cultural autonomy to an expression of
nationalist sentiment and solidarity. On the other, they constituted rigid frames that entrenched
the reception of Hughes’s poetry and personae according to the first impressions that they made.
The disintegration of French colonialism may have transformed Hughes’s poetry from an
462
expression of anti-assimilative sentiment into an exemplar of nationalist pride for newly
independent African states, but he was still defined (albeit in new terms) by his early verse, its
race-pride, its primitivism, and his perceived militancy. Be they malleable or rigid, a
comparative exploration of the international reception of Hughes’s poetry that takes the role and
nature of these regimes into account also reveals how global developments, such as the Cold
War, affected literary communities and production in similar and different ways. To investigate
these similarities and differences is to investigate both the contours of literary and world history.
Hughes’s quest to be considered “el poeta de los negros” quickly came to fruition in the
Soviet Union and the Hispanic and Francophone worlds, but the poet soon came to see that the
appellation carried with it a perilous ethical burden that he was loathe to shoulder. He not only
recoiled in the face of efforts by figures like Lidiia Filatova and Rafael Alberti to position him as
a revolutionary spokesman for either a worldwide “black race” or for the entire black population
of the Americas, but also turned to translation to help him compose poetry designed to
undermine the notion that a homogeneous “black race” even existed. Nevertheless, matters
changed as Hughes’s poetry and personae increasingly flourished in French and Spanish
translation and allowed multiple instantiations of his voice—created anew by different
translators occupying diverse spheres—to speak differently to a heterogeneous black reading
public. A Langston Hughes possessed of multiple voices could indeed speak to and for a black
international community engaged in the ongoing process of redistilling his voice. It is perhaps
for this reason that Hughes was more than willing to occupy the seat of honor at Senghor’s world
festival of négritude in 1965.
463
Hughes was well consecrated as a world-class poet by the time his life came to an end in
1967, but this “one,” as we have seen, was actually composed of many different literary arenas
consecrated Hughes and his verse in a variety of fashions with regards to the portions of his
oeuvre considered to be most representative of his poetic legacy. It is for this reason, that
Langston Hughes can be better known (and perhaps only known) in translation: as “el poeta de
los negros,” the “Poète Lauréat Noir,” and the “Dean of Black Letters.” The list goes on and
on…
464
Works Cited and Consulted in the Conclusion
Hughes, Langston. Introduction to Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. The Collected Works of
Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. ed.
Christopher C. De Santis. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002
465
Appendix
Black Radicalism in Translation: Langston Hughes’s Translations and Translators in the
Hispanic and Francophone World
A chronology of Hughes’s translations into and from Spanish and French
1921
466
"Mexican Games," Brownie's Book
Jan. 1921 trans. Hughes
"In a Mexican Ciy" The Brownie's Book
April, 1921 trans. Hughes
"The Gold Piece: A Play That Might
Be True," The Brownie's Book
July, 1921 trans. Hughes
1923
Hughes' "A Black Pierrot,1923
1926
Hughes' preface for "A page of West
Indian Poetry Crisis
Hughes' "A Black Pierrot" published
in Les Continents July 15, 1925
467
1927
TWB 1926 HUGHES
The Weary Blues. New York: Knopf.
1928
FCTTJ 1927 HUGHES
Fine Clothes to the Jew. New York: Knopf
1929
Hughes' "Yo Tambien" Social
trans. Fernandez de Castro
Hughes' "Po Boy Blues" in Anthologie
de la nouvelle poesie americaine
ed. & trans. Eugene Jolas
1930
Hughes" "Je suis un negre,"
"Les Presque Blancs," and Dieux
Nouvelles Litteraires Nov. 30
trans. Louis Pierard
468
Hughes' "Cabaret," "Jeune Danseuse
Nue," "Lamentation Pour Les Hommes
au teint fonce," "La Peur," "Moi
Aussi," and "Une mere a son fils"
Blue: Revue Politique et litteraire 6/20
trans. Franck Schoell
1931
Nicolas Guillen's "Black Woman"
(Mujer Negra) Opportunity August 1930
trans. Hughes
Regino Pedroso's "Fraternal Greetings
to the Factory" New Masses Aug. 1930
trans. Hughes
Nicolas Guillen's "Once Beloved"
(Piedra Pulida) New York Herald
Tribune August 24
469
Hughes drafts for Guillen's "Cane,"
"Airplane," "Madrigal," "Blade" (Chevre)
and "Once Beloved"
Hughes' drafts of Pedroso's "The
Conquerors," "Salute to a Comrade
of Kuo Min Tang," "Dawn," and "Heir"
Hughes drafts Francisca's "Thirteen
Poems"
Nicolas Guillen's "Once Beloved"
published in Books Aug, 1930
Hughes' "Yo Tambien…", "Los
Blancos" and "Soledad"
Diario de la Marina April 30, 1930
trans. Fernandez de Castro
Hughes' "Yo Tambien…", "Los
Blancos," "Soledad," and "Luna de
470
Marzo" La Revista de la Habana
1930
Hughes' "Les Histoires de Tante Sue,"
"A La Bien Aimee Noir," "Poeme
pour un panneau decoratif," "La peur,"
and "Epilogue (Moi Aussi)"
Les Cahiers Libres 10/15/30
trans. F. L.
1931
Nicolas Guillen's "Black Woman"
(Mujer Negra) Opportunity August 1930
trans. Hughes
Regino Pedroso's "Fraternal Greetings
to the Factory" New Masses Aug. 1930
trans. Hughes
Nicolas Guillen's "Once Beloved"
(Piedra Pulida) New York Herald
Tribune August 24
471
Hughes drafts for Guillen's "Cane,"
"Airplane," "Madrigal," "Blade" (Chevre)
and "Once Beloved"
Hughes' drafts of Pedroso's "The
Conquerors," "Salute to a Comrade
of Kuo Min Tang," "Dawn," and "Heir"
Hughes drafts Francisca's "Thirteen
Poems"
Nicolas Guillen's "Once Beloved"
published in Books Aug, 1930
Hughes' "Yo Tambien…", "Los
Blancos" and "Soledad"
Diario de la Marina April 30, 1930
trans. Fernandez de Castro
Hughes' "Yo Tambien…", "Los
Blancos," "Soledad," and "Luna de
472
Marzo" La Revista de la Habana
1931
Gustavo Urrutia's "Negro Tourists in
Cuba" Crisis Feb. 1931 trans. Hughes
Nicolas Guillen's "Madrigal"
Opportunity March, 1931
Gustavo Urrutia's "The Students of
Yesterday" Crisis April, 1931 trans.
Hughes
Regino Pedroso's "Alarm Clock"
(Perro mi fiel…) Poetry Quarterly
Spring, 1931 trans. Hughes
Nicolas Guillen's "Wash Woman"
Poetry Quarterly Spring, 1931
trans. Hughes
Gustavo Urrutia's "Our Elegant
473
Servitude" Opportunity Oct, 1931
trans. Hughes
Miguel de Unamuno's "To Nicolas
Guillen" Epiphany
Jacques Roumain's "Guinee" and
"When The Tom-Tom" in Haiti Journal
on July 4th and December 30
respectively: trans. Hughes
Jacques Roumain's "Guinee" and
"When The Tom-Tom" Crisis 1931
December. Trans. Hughes
Hughes' "Ardella," "Cruz," "Yo
Tambien," "Alegria," "Cancionera,"
"Placera," "Soy un negro," "Puerto,"
"Soledad," and "El negro habla de los
rios" Crisol 27 (March) and in
Repertorio Americano 22 (April)
474
trans. Rafael Lozano
Gustavo Urrutia's "Negro Tourists in
Cuba" Crisis Feb. 1931 trans. Hughes
Nicolas Guillen's "Madrigal"
Opportunity March, 1931
Gustavo Urrutia's "The Students of
Yesterday" Crisis April, 1931 trans.
Hughes
Regino Pedroso's "Alarm Clock"
(Perro mi fiel…) Poetry Quarterly
Spring, 1931 trans. Hughes
Nicolas Guillen's "Wash Woman"
Poetry Quarterly Spring, 1931
trans. Hughes
Gustavo Urrutia's "Our Elegant
Servitude" Opportunity Oct, 1931
475
trans. Hughes
Miguel de Unamuno's "To Nicolas
Guillen" Epiphany
Jacques Roumain's "Guinee" and
"When The Tom-Tom" in Haiti Journal
on July 4th and December 30
respectively: trans. Hughes
Jacques Roumain's "Guinee" and
"When The Tom-Tom" Crisis 1931
December. Trans. Hughes
Hughes' "Ardella," "Cruz," "Yo
Tambien," "Alegria," "Cancionera,"
"Placera," "Soy un negro," "Puerto,"
"Soledad," and "El negro habla de los
rios" Crisol 27 (March) and in
Repertorio Americano 22 (April)
trans. Rafael Lozano
476
1932
Hughes' "Appel a une creation
nouvelle," "Poeme," "Danse Africaine,"
"Nous avons peur," "Variation de reve"
"Desillusion," "Un Pierrot noir,"
"Fatigue," "Chant de la Vierge noire,"
"Le petit mendiant," and "Epilogue."
Nouvel Age No.12
trans. Eone Louis
Hughes' "Moi Aussi"
La revue de monde noire No. 6
trans. Paulette Nardal
DLD 1931 HUGHES
Dear Lovely Death. (Amenia, N.Y.: Troutbeck Press.
The Negro Mother 1931 HUGHES
The Negro Mother and Other Dramatic Recitations.
New York: Golden Stair Press.
477
1933
SL 1932 HUGHES
Scottsboro Limited. New York: Golden Stair Press.
1934
Nicolas Guillen's "Two Weeks"
Opportunity, March 1933
trans. Hughes
Aragon's "Magnikogorsk"
International Literature 4 pp. 82-83
trans. Hughes
Aragon "A Hand Organ Begins to Play
in the Courtyard" "unpublished"
Hughes' "Carta a los camaradas del
Sur" trans. E. Delgado and "Yo
Tambien" trans. Anon. Octubre 3
August
478
1935
Hughes's translations of Jacques
Roumain's "When the Tom-Tom Beats"
Guillen's "Cane" and "Black Woman"
Pedroso's "The Conquerors" and "Until
Yesterday" (A Chine Mood) are
published in Cunard's Negro
1936
Hughes drafts Troubled Lands
translations, including Fernandez de
Castro's Introduction. And stories by
Munos, Marrero, Torriente, Alatorre,
Ramirez, Valenciano,del Valle,
Rodriguez, Campobello, Salazar Mallen
Salinas, Mancisidor, de la Cabada,
Escobedo, Gonzalez, Arzubidi, Calvo,
Fabila, Icaza
Hughes drafts translation of Xavier
479
Villarutia's "Lope de Vega and the
Mexican, Ruiz de Alarcon"
1937
Hughes' "Siempre lo mismo," "Union"
and "Mulato", trans Idelfonso Valdes;
Hughes' "Ardella," "Cruz," Yo Tambien"
"Alegria," "Soy un negro," "Puerto,"
and "El negro habla de los rios" trans.
Rafael Lozano; and Hughes'
"Canto de una muchacha negra," trans.
C. Caprario in Antologia de la poesia
negra Americana ed. Idelfonso
Pareda Valdes
Hughes' "El Waldorf Astoria" and
"Buenos Dias, Revolution" Nueva
Cultura trans. Miguel Alejandro
1938
Hughes drafts a translation in Spain of
480
Jose Moreno Villa's "Front"
Hughes begins translating Garcia
Lorca's Romancero Gitano
Hughes' "Yo Tambien," "Yo soy negro"
"Estoy haciendo un camino" and
"Hombre convertidos en Hombres"
El Mono Azul trans. Rafael Alberti
Hughes' "Ruge China" Ayuda
18 Sept 1937 trans. Lino Novas Calvo
Hughes' "Ruge China" Repertorio
Americano Nov 6, 1937
trans. Lino Novas Calvo
1939
Hughes drafts Garcia Lorca's
Blood Wedding (37/38)
481
Nicolas Guillen's "Soldiers in Ethiopia"
in New Times & Ethiopia News Jan.
dated November 1937. trans. Hughes
Hughes' "Cruz," "Yo Tambien Canto"
La Nueva Democracia August 1938
trans. Mauricio Mgdaleno
ANS 1938 HUGHES
A New Song. New York: International Workers Order,
1940
Anthony Lespes' "The Stokers," "Taxi"
and "Chansonette" adapted by Hughes
for Marianne Oswald
1941
Nellie Campobelllo's "I" and "Advice"
in Direction 1 (May, 1940)
482
Hughes notes indicate that Guillen's
"Two Weeks" and "Once Beloved"
have been published by the NY
Herald Tribune, his "Blade" in Fantasy,
"Sabas" in Negro Quarterly
The Big Sea. HUGHES. New York: Knopf, 1940.
1942
noted as published "High Priced Now,"
"High Brown," "Wake for Papa
Montero," "Maracas," "Sabas,"
"Little Ode to a Cuban Negro Boxer"
"Don't Know No English," High Priced
Now," "Thick Lipped Cullud Boy,"
"Last night Somebody called me darky
Langston Hughes' "Peur" and "I Speak
in the name of the black millions"
appear in Cesaire's Tropiques 7/1941
No. 2
483
trans. Aime Cesaire
Arna Bontemp's "Introduction: Meet
Langston Hughes" in Un Chant
nouveau. Ed. Rene Piquion
Hughes' "Toujours la meme chose,"
"Union," "Va, Moise," "Bonnes
nouvelles," Toutes les creatures du
seigneur ont des ailes," "Crucifixion,"
"Chant de revolte," "La creation,"
"Le negre parle de ses rivieres,"
"Moi aussi," "Voix de l'Ethiopie,"
"Les histoires de Tante Sue," "Ruby
Brown," "Nuit d'Ete," "Danse africaine,"
"Poeme," "Notre pays," "Chanteur
ambulant," "Le Negre," "Un chant
nouveau," "Mon peuple," "Mulatre,"
"Chant d''une jeune fille noire,"
"Chant d'un pauvre gars," "Prospectus
pour le Waldorf-Astoria," "Negres,"
484
"A tous," "Joyeux Noel," "Lettre a
l'Academie," "Bonjour, revolution,"
(trans. Aragon),
"Mer calme," "Long voyage," "Charme
de la mer," "Mort d'un vieux marin,"
in Un Chant nouveau. Trans. Rene
Piquion
1943
Nicolas Guillen's "Blade" and "Cane"
Fantasy 8/27/42
Hughes translations of: Roumain's
"When the Tom-Tom Beats,"
"Guinea;" Guillen's "Execution," "Dead
Soldier," "Cantaliso in a Bar," and
"Wake for Papa Montero;" Pedroso's
"Opinion of the New Student,"
Campobello's "I," "After You,"
," and "Route"
485
Hughes' "Puedes agarrar el viento,"
"Yo Tambien," "No fuist nunca junto al
rio," "Cancion de una muchacha
negra" Sustancia: Revista de Cultura
Superior (July 1942)
trans. Gaston Figueira
SIH 1942 HUGHES
Shakespeare in Harlem. New York: Knopf.
1944
Nicolas Guillen's "Federico" Poetry:
Latin American Issue (May, 1943
trans. Hughes
Hughes' "Dixie y los pueblos de color"
Ultra 13
trans. Anon
Hughes' "Los Blues que estoy
tocando" Antologia del Cuento Norte-
486
Americano ed. Franulic
trans. Anon
Hughes' "Puedes agarrar el viento" and
"No fuiste nunca junto al rio" La Nueva
Democracia (Feb)
trans. Gaston Figueira
Hughes' "Cancion de la lluvia abrilena,"
"Alegria," and "Amor Pasajero"
Tiempo Vivo July-Dec 1943
trans. Julio Galer
Hughes' "Yo Tambien," "Cancion de
una muchacha negra" Aurora 9/1943
trns. Gston Figueira
Hughes' "Tambour," "Nostalgie Blues,"
"Traversant Le Jourdan," "Blues,"
"Chanson pour une fille noire" in
Fontaine 27-28/1943
487
Trans. Jean Wahl
JCLS 1943 HUGHES
Jim Crow's Last Stand. Atlanta: Negro Publication Society
of America.
1945
Hughes' El Inmenso Mar 1944
trans. L. Rivaud
1946
Collaborates with Covarrubias on the
unpublished, "Ballad of the Death of
Enrique Lopez" July 1945
Jacques Roumain, "Damned Nigger"
1945 (unpublished)
Hughes' Pero con risas 1945
trans. Nestor Oderigo
488
Senghor's Introduction to "Trois
poetes negro-americaines: Countee
Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston
Hughes." Poesie. 45:23/ Feb 1945
1947
Nicolas Guillen's "High Priced Now,"
"High Brown," "Wake for Papa
Montero," "Maracas," "Sabas,"
"Little Ode to a Cuban Negro Boxer"
"Don't Know No English," High Priced
Now," "Thick Lipped Cullud Boy,"
"Last Night Somebody Called me
Darky," "My Gal," "Curujey,"
"No sirrie!," "Pass On By," "Quirino,"
"Wsh Woman," "Blade," "Cane,"
"Guadaloupe," "Chop it With the Cane
Knife," "Blues", "Song in a Havana
Bar," "Sightseers in a Courtyard,"
"Two Kids," "Execution," "I don’t know
Why," "Soldier, Learn to Shoot,"
489
"Dead Soldier," "Soldiers in Ethiopia,"
"That Kind of Soldier, Not Me,"
"Reveille," "Arrival," Words in the
Tropics," "Mark," "New Woman,"
"Airplane," "Proposition," "Two Weeks,"
"Madrigal," "Barren Stone,"
"Down the Road," "The Fourth
Anguish," "Moment With the Muse
of Garcia Lorca," "Song of the Bongo,"
"The Grandfather," "Heat" and "Ballad
of the Two Grandfather" are
performed in Katherine Dunham's
"Cuban Evening"
Hughes' "Yo Tambien," "Negro,"
"Poema," "Preludio a Weary Blues,"
"Canto de una joven negra" in
Mapa de la poesia negra americana
trans. E. Ballagas
Hughes' "El arado de libertad"
490
America: Tribuna de la Democracia 52
trans Manuel Gonzalez Flores
Marcel Beaufils' Intro to Christ noir
1948
Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew
1947 (w/cook) including "The Simidor's
Song" trans. Hughes
Cocteau, "Amities Noirs" trans. Hughes
(unoublished)
FOW 1947 HUGHES
Fields of Wonder. New York: Knopf.
1949
Nicolas Guillen's Cuba Libre trans.
Hughes
(+drafts that date from 1930)
491
Hughes' "El tren de libertad"
Orientacion June 16 1948
trans. Galer
Hughes' "Uno," "Deseo," "Sueno,"
"Hombre," and "Canciones in
Clabagata June 1948
trans. J. Galer
Hughes' "Cancioncilla," "Hombre,"
"Luna Nueva," and "Uno"
Continente July 15, 1948
Hughes' "Cristo en un negro,"
"Amada muerte encantadora,"
"El arado de libertad"
El Nacional 76 Sep 12, 1948
trans. Manuel Gonzalez Flores
Maurice Breton. Anthologie de la
poesie americaine.
492
incl. poems by Hughes
1950
Hughes' translations for his and
Bontemps The Poetry of the Negro:
Pedroso's "Opininos of the New
Chinese Student;" Guillen's "Cane,"
"Sightseers in a Courtyard," "Dead
Soldier," "Wake for Papa Montero,"
"Two Weeks," "Proposition," snd
"Barren Stone" (aka Once Beloved)
Pierre Dalcour 's"Verse Written in the
album of Mademoiselle;" Armand
Lanusse's"Epigram"
Damas' "Reall I Know," "Trite Without
Doubt," and "She Left Herself One
Evening"
Hughes' "Salon de Baile en Harlem,"
"Sirviente negro," "Estrellas"
Asomante5 Apr-Jun
trans. Tomas Blanco
493
OWT 1949 HUGHES
One-Way Ticket. New York: Knopf.
1951
Regino Pedroso's "Dawn" Phylon
trans. Hughes
E. Cary. "Trois cent trente ans
d'esclavage." Europe. 50 (Feb. 1950)
incl. Hughes' "Le noir," "Le negre parle
des fleuves," "Le matelot," "Rues qui
vont vers le port," "Entrée de vieillesse,"
"Simplement pour cela," "Quand
Suzanna s'habille de rouge," and
"Ceux qui marchent avec l'aube."
1952
Garcia Lorca's "Gypsy Ballads" The
Beloit Poetry Journal, Fall 1951
Hughes' Llegada de la vejez" and
494
"El negro" Alcandara 1
trans. Concha Zardoya
Montage 1951 HUGHES
Montage of a Dream Deferred. New York: Holt.
1953
Hughes' Poemas
trans. Julio Galer
see attachment 1 for contents
1954
Hughes' "Los Blues que Estoy
Tocando" Antologia del cuento
americano contemporaneo
ed. Francisco Rojas Gonzalez
Hughes' "Yo Tambien" in Poesia Negra
Ensayo y antologiau
trans. Toruno
495
Hughes' "La balada del casero"
Poesia de America 5 (Jan-Feb 1953)
trans. Manuel Gonzalez Flores
Hughes' "Blues del pobre muchacho"
Aurora September 1953
trans. Gaston Figueira
1955
Senghor's "To the American Troops"
for an African Treasury trans. Hughes
(volme edited with introduction by
Hughes.)
Hughes drafts "Five African Poets"
manuscript, collection includes:
Senghor's "To The American Troops"
Diop's "Those Who Lost Everything"
Rabearivelo, Jean Joseph's "Flute
Plers"
F.E. Fiawoo's "Soliloquy on Death
496
J.B Danquah's "Foolish Child"
Hughes' "Mulato, Drama en dos partes"
trans. Galer
1956
Hughes' "El negro," "Domingo"
"Yo Tambien" Antologia de la poesia
norteamericana contemporanea
trans. Eugene Florit
Hughes' Riendo por no llorar 1955
trans. Galer
1957
Anon, "An old verse from a Puerto
Rican Christmas Card" (unpublished)
trans. Hughes
Hughes' "Variation d'un reve," "Croix,"
"Le negre parle de fleuves,"
497
"Jazzonie."
Trans. Alain Bosquet in
Antologie de la poesie americaine
des origines a nos jours.
Hughes' "Waldorf Astoria," "Moi Aussi"
"Je suis un Negre" in Depestre's
"Deux Poetes D'aujourd,hui"
trans. Dodat (Feb-March)
I Wonder As I Wander. HUGHES. New York: Rinehart.
1958
Gabriela Mistral, Selected Poems of
Gabriela Mistral trans. 1957
Jean Vincent "Songs of Haiti"
manuscript. Trans. Hughes. July
1959
LHR 1958 HUGHES
498
Langston Hughes Reader. New York: Braziller.
1960
Hughes' Yo viajo por un mundo
encantado
trans. Julio Galer
Hughes' " Le poete au bigot," "La
charrue de la liberte," and an extract
from Simple Takes a Wife.
Trans. Renaud de Jouvenel in
Europe 358-359 (Feb-Mar 1959)
and "Preface" by translator
SP 1959 HUGHES
Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf.
1961
Hughes' An African Treasury includes
Hughes' intro and translations of:
Senghor's "To the American Troops"
499
Birago Diops's "Forefathers"
Rabearivelo's "Flute Players"
1962
Hughes' "La balada de Harry Moore,"
"La balada del casero," "Abordando
el tren de libertad"
trans Manuel Gonzalez Florida
"Yo Tambien," "El negro habla de
los rios"
trans. Xavier Villarrutia
Nivel 31 July 25, 1961
Hughes' "Negro," "My Lord," "Pride,"
and "Trumpet Player" as bilingual
inserts. Trans.?
in "Langston Hughes." Informations
et Documents. 135 (Jan 15 1961)
AYM 1961 HUGHES
Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. New York: Knopf.
500
1963
Langston Hughes' (in French) "The
Negro Speaks of Rivers," "Poem-For the Portrait of an African boy in
the Manner of Gaughin," "Lament for
Dark Peoples," "Black Seed," "Our
Land," "Liars," "Motherland," "Poem,"
"When Sue Wears Red," "Excerpts
from Negro Artist and Racil Mountain,"
"Lenox Avenue: Midnight," "Sport,"
"Juke Box Love Song," "Trumpet
Player: 52nd St.," "Harlem Dance
Hall," "Minnnie Sings Her Blues,"
"To a Black Dancer in the Little Savoy,"
"Stars," "Dancers," "Cabaret," "Jazz
Band in a Parisian Cabaret," "Minstrel
Man," "The Jester," "Me and My
Songs," "To Midnight Nan's at Leroy's,"
"Nude Young Dancer," "Poeme
d'Automne," "Blues Fantasy,"
501
"Warning," Harlem Night Club,"
"The Cat and the Saxaphone," "Hey!"
"Hey! Hey!," "Beale Street Love," "Bad
Man," "Evil Woman," "Po' an' black,"
"Misery," "Black Gal," "A ruined Gal,"
"Death of Do Dirty," "Six Bit Blues,"
"Blues Fantasy," "Bound No'th Blues,"
"West Texas," "One Way Ticket,"
"Gypsy Man," "Po Boy Blues,"
"Evenin' Air Blues," "Homesick Blues,"
"Prize Fighter, "Brass Spitoons,"
"Union," "Ballad of Rooosevelt,"
"Ballad of a Man Who's Gone," "Park
Bench," "Pride," "A New Song," "Open
Letter To The Souuth," "Always the
Same," "One more S in the U.S.A.,"
"Goodbye Christ," "A New Song,"
"Moan," "Feet o' Jesus," "Fire,"
"Angels' Wings," "Sinner,"
"Communion," "American Heartbreak,"
"Dreams," "The Dream Keeper,"
502
"Water Front Streets," "Freedom's
Plow," "As I Grew Older," "Let America
be America Again," "Harlem,"
"Deffered," "Island" "The White Ones,"
"The South," "Magnolia Flowers,"
"Georgia Dusk," "Democracy,"
"Merry-Go-Round," "Refugee in
America," "Ask your Mama" (dedication," "Ask Your Mama" "Summer
Night," "Puzzled," "Passing,"
1963
cont. in Jean Wagner's Les Poetes
Negres des Etats Unis." Spring 1963
trans? Jean Wagner?
Hughes Poems from Black Africa
Hughes' into and translations of:
David Diop's "Those Who Lost
Everything" and "Suffer, poor Negro"
503
Hughes' "Oh, amor de estrellas sobre
la calle de harlem" Revista
Internacional de poesia
trans. Ariel Canzani
Hughes' "Danse," "Les bas fonds,"
"Sandy" from Not Withough Laughter
"Histoire de blancs" and "Sandy"
in Anthologie de la litterature negroafricaine. Ed. Leonard Sainville.
trans. Anon?
1964
Hughes Poems from Black Africa
Hughes' into and translations of:
David Diop's "Those Who Lost
Everything" and "Suffer, poor Negro"
Hughes' "Oh, amor de estrellas sobre
la calle de harlem" Revista
Internacional de poesia
504
trans. Ariel Canzani
Hughes' "Danse," "Les bas fonds,"
"Sandy" from Not Withough Laughter
"Histoire de blancs" and "Sandy"
in Anthologie de la litterature negroafricaine. Ed. Leonard Sainville.
trans. Anon?
1965
Hughes' "Manege," "Sortilege de la
mer…," "Soledad," "Nuit de Samedi"
"Chant Nocturne de Harlem," "Ballade
du Tuer," "Blues triste" "blues des
sans travail," "Prospectus du
Waldorf Astoria," "Les travailleurs de
la route de Floride," "Une Maman du
Sud Chante," "Croix," "Je ne vous hais
pas…," "Epilogue," "Gardien des
Reves,""Peur," "Pendant que je
viellis," "Fantasie en pourpre,"
505
"L'Amour," "Quand Suzy Porte du
Rouge," "Jeune Fille Negre," "FiftyFifty," "Lendemain de la Veille,"
"l'endormi,""Si, j'avais de la petite
monnaie…," "Notre Pays,"
in Langston Hughes ou L'Etoile Noire
author and trans. Raymond Quinot
Langston Hughes' "Moi Aussi"
in "Poesie Americaine" in Lettres
Francaise 9/10/1964
trans. Dodat
article by Rene Lacote
Hughes' "The Negro artist and the
racial mountain (excerpt)," Le Blues du
pov-gacon," "J'vais marcher ver la
cimitere/ Derrieremon amie, Miss Cora
Lee…" "Je suis en train de faire une
route…"Chant de la Terre," "Notre
Pays," in Senghor's Liberte 1 Negritude
506
et Humanism
trans and author- L. Senghor
Hughes' Langston Hughes par Dodat
Seghers
1966
Hughes' "Youth" in Damas' "Nouvelle
some de la poesie; presentacion
americaine" Presence africaine
31-Dec
Langston Hughes' Langston Hughes
par Francois Dodat
see attachment 2 for contents
1967
Hughes' La Poesie Negro-Americaine
editor, includes intro and translations:
Pierre Dalcour's "Verse Written in the
album…."
Armand Lanusse's "Epigram"
507
Hughes' "Moise brun clair descendit
dans la terre Egypte" in Rene Lacote's
"La poesie negro americaine" Lettres
francaises. No. 1129
trans. Sim Copans
14-Jun-67
TPATL 1967 HUGHES
The Panther and the Lash. New York: Knopf.
trans. Concha Zardoya
Hughes' "Mestizaje,"
trans. E. Ballagas
"Yo Tambien" and "Tiovivo"
trans. Jose Luis Gonzalez
El negro habla de los rios
trans. Xavier Villarrutia
Siempre: Presencia en Mexico 729
508
1969
Hughes' Yo Tambien
trans. Ahumada
Jacques Trevert, "Bandit,
VouYou! Voleur! Chenepan"
(La chaud a l'enfant) trans.
Hughes n.d
Hughes' "Lettre a L.academie"
and "Bomjour Revolution"
trans Aragon, likely after meeeting
him in Moscow in January 1933
509
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