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. 41 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. 42 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). 69 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 70 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 71 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. 72 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; 73 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 74 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” 75 (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 76 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. 77 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: 78 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 79 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 80 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. 81 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 82 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 83 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 84 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. 85 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 86 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 87 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. 88 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]. 89 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 90 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 91 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 92 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.” 93 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 94 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 95 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. 96 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 97 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 98 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 99 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 100 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 101 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 102 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. 103 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. 104 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. 105 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 106 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 107 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 108 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 109 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 110 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” 111 (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 112 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: 113 “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 114 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, 115 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. 116 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 117 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 118 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 119 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). 120 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. 121 “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, 122 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, 123 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 124 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 125 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. 126 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 127 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, 128 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 129 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, 130 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). 131 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 132 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 133 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 134 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 135 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. 136 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. 139 --. “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. 140 --. “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. --. “To Langston Hughes,” 6 May 1930, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and 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. 143 --. “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. 144 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 145 “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 146 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 147 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 148 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, 149 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. 150 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.62 151 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 152 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 153 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 154 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. 155 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 156 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 157 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 158 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 159 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. 160 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 161 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 162 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 163 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 165 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 166 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 167 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”). 168 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 169 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 170 “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”] 171 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, 172 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 68 176 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). 177 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. 178 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. 179 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. 180 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) 181 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 182 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 183 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 184 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 185 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 186 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 187 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. 188 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 189 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 190 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 191 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. 192 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 193 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, 194 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:73 195 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. 196 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 197 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, 198 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 199 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 200 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 201 “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 202 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). 203 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, 204 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 205 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 206 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 207 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 208 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 209 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.” 210 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. 217 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 76 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. 220 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 221 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 222 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 223 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 224 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. 225 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. 227 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 228 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 229 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 231 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 232 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. 80 233 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 234 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 235 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- 236 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 237 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.” 82 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. 238 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 239 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 240 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 241 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, 242 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) 243 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 244 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. 245 --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) 246 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 247 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 248 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 249 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 250 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 251 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 252 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. 253 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, 254 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 255 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) 256 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: 257 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. 258 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 259 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 260 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”? 261 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. 262 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 263 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. 264 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 265 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 266 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, 267 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, 268 “‘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 269 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: 270 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 271 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. 272 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 273 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. 274 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 275 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 276 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 277 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 278 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 279 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, 280 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 281 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. 282 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 283 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 284 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 285 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 286 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. 287 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 86 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. 288 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 289 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 290 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.” 88 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.” 291 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 292 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. 293 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 294 “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— 295 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 296 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 297 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 298 hearts. Red heart, green heart, yellow heart, black heart, white heart, no heart beat but a syncopated rhythm in Hughes’s poetic revolution. 299 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. 300 --. “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. 301 --. 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. 302 --. “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. 303 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. 304 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 305 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 306 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 307 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 308 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 309 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 310 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. 311 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 312 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 313 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 314 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 315 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 316 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 317 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, 318 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 319 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. 320 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, 321 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 322 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 323 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. 324 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 325 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 326 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 327 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. 328 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) 329 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) 330 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 331 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 332 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 333 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. 334 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 335 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 336 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. 337 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. 338 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 339 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 340 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. 341 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” 342 [“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 […] 343 “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 344 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 345 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 346 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). 347 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: 348 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) 349 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 350 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 351 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 352 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 353 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… 354 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. 355 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 356 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. 357 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, 358 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 359 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. 360 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 361 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 362 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 94 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. 363 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 364 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 365 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 366 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 367 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 368 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 369 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 370 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 371 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, 372 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 96 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. 97 “Arbol” reads: “Tengo miedo / De ese árbol / Sin hojas / En la noche / contra el cielo. / Quiero llorar.” 373 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”]— 374 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 375 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 99 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.”] 100 Unbeknownst to Galer, Neruda had, for some eighteen years, been revising Canto General de Chile into Canto General. 376 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 377 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 378 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 379 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 380 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. 102 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]. 103 381 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 382 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 383 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 384 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 385 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 386 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 387 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 388 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 389 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 390 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 391 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 392 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, 393 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, 394 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 395 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 396 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 397 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 398 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 105 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. 399 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. 400 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 401 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, 402 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 107 Seghers confessed to Hughes that he had been exposed to his poetry by Louis Aragon in a letter dated November 30, 1955. 403 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 404 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 405 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 406 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]. 407 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 408 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. 409 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 410 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 411 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 412 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 413 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 109 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. 414 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 415 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 416 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 417 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: 418 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 419 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— 420 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. 421 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 422 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 111 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. 423 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 113 The two poems that never saw English language print carry the French titles “La Bible” [The Bible] and “Un esclave” [Slave]. 424 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 425 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 426 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. 427 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 428 (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 429 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 430 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. 431 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 432 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 433 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 434 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, 435 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. 436 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 437 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 438 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 439 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 440 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. 441 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— 442 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 443 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- 444 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 117 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. 455 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 119 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. 456 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 458 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 Bibliography Acton, William. Prostitution. Ed. Peter Frye London: MacGibben and Kie, 1968. Adorno, T.W. Aesthetic theory. Trans. C. Lenhardt. Ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedmann.: London and Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984. 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. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/ Library of Liberal Arts, 1999. Annisimov, Julian. “Kinship.” Trans. Langston Hughes. ts., Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven. Anon. “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’.” 510 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. Ballagas, Emilio. Mapa de la poesía negra Americana. Tucumán: Editorial Pleamar, 1946. Bassnett Susan, ed. “Introduction.” Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Berti, Luis. Introduction. Mapa de la poesía negra Americana. Tucumán: Editorial Pleamar, 1946. The Bible. |url: |http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/new-testament/john_1/1.asp Bontemps, Arna. Introduction. Un chant nouveau. Port-au-Prince: Impimerie de l’État, 1940. 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. Carpentier, Alejo. “Retrato de un dictador” Octubre, No. 3, Octubre-Agosto, 1933. Césaire, Aimé. “Introduction à la poésie nègre américain.” Tropiques, No. 2, July, 1941: 37-42. Cobb, Martha K. “Redefining the Definitions in Afro-Hispanic Literature.” College Language Association Journal. No. 23, December, 1979: 148. Cook, Mercer. “Langston Hughes, Un Chant Nouveau.” Phylon, Vol. 1, No. 4, 4th Quarter, 1940: 390-391. 511 Cunard, Nancy. Negro. New York: F. Ungar Publishing Company, 1970. --. “To Langston Hughes.” 5 March 1937, Langston Hughes Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University, New Haven. Curbelo, Jesús David. “Para una historia de traducción en Cuba.” Histal, January, 2004. Damas, Léon-Gontran. “Nouvelle some de poésie; présentation afro-américaine.” Présence Africaine, No. 57, December 15,1965: 353-356. 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. Delgado, Emilio. “Nota.” Octubre, No. 3, Octubre-Agosto, 1933. --. “Carta a los camaradas del Sur.” Octubre, No. 3, Octubre-Agosto, 1933. Depestre, René. “Deux poètes d’ajourd’hui.” Présence Africaine, No. 6, February-March, 1956: 165-167. Djian, Jean-Michel “Aimé Césaire: une longue amitié.” Jeune Afrique, No. 11, 2006: 30-37. 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. 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