"And bid him translate: Langston Hughes's translations of poetry from French," by Alfred Guillaume

African American Review, Fall, 2007 by Anita Patterson

Translation, in recent years, seems to have suffered a decline in its reputation within scholarly debates. Once revered as a mark of high intellect and transcultural communication, it is now being considered in light of its broader, far more negative ramifications as a cultural practice burdened by the fraught legacy of ethnocentric nationalism and empire (Venuti 61). Recent work on translation by Susan Bassnett and others has shown that this domesticating standard can destroy the cherished uniqueness of local cultures, reminding us that nationalist pressures towards linguistic conformity in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere have threatened to sap emergent writers of their individuality. At the same time, however, we should recognize the many ways that translation has also proven to be historically essential for the development of modern and modernist poetics; and that as a boundary-crossing encounter, translation is, at best, a stimulus to refreshing, new influences. A successful translation need not be an exact reproduction, or equivalence, of the text being translated; it may also involve a reinterpretation, or even invention, of other literatures for the translator's own society and generation.

Although comparatively little has been published about Langston Hughes's practice of translation, it is clear that it played an important role in his formation as a poet, and leads us to some surprising findings about the constellation and character of his influences. Looking closely at Hughes's forgotten translations of poems in French--one by Louis Aragon, three by Leon Damas, and two by Jacques Roumain--we enhance our understanding of Hughes's transnationalism, his contribution to the rise of Pan-Africanism, the volatile interplay of influences among writers of the Harlem Renaissance and other avant-garde movements in the US, Europe, and the Caribbean, and Hughes's own emerging self-conception as a New World poet.

Our first selection, Hughes's translation of a revolutionary poem, "Magnitogorsk," by Aragon, raises the possibility that Hughes was influenced by French Surrealism as well as by the late Symbolist, Guadeloupean Creole poet St.-John Perse, a possibility that was once remarked by Leopold Sedar Senghor, one of the principal theorists of Negritude (Gates x). If through the practice of translation, Hughes absorbed the influence of Aragon, he would also have taken on the influences of Surrealists as well as Perse. Aragon was, after all, one of the founding members of the Surrealist group and, like other Surrealists, his poetics derived, in part, from the influence of Perse's Eloges ("Car c'est de l'homme" 576-77). In 1933, Hughes first met Aragon and his wife in Moscow and, hearing Aragon recite his revolutionary poem "Magnitogorsk," Hughes was inspired to translate it. Litterature internationale published the translation, Hughes's first from French, later that year.

Aragon's connections with Surrealism were politically fraught by the time he wrote "Magnitogorsk." It is telling and apt that Hughes selects for translation a poem published after Aragon's break with the Surrealist movement: Aragon joined the French Communist Party in 1927, and turned increasingly toward Marxism and socialist realism shortly after a trip to the USSR in 1931. Still, to say that Hughes's stylistic relationship to Aragon's Surrealism is indirect does not mean we should deny its historical role in the development of his transnational modernism. The 1930s were a time when Hughes, Aragon, and other avant-gardists were forging ties across national, racial, and cultural boundaries in a common front against the growing threat of Fascism. Furthermore, there are many reasons, in addition to the eloquent simplicity of Aragon's style, that Hughes would have been drawn to this poem. The substitution of human for divine agency in the story of creation, Aragon's reference to the conquest of masters, his ardent celebration of people who till the earth, and his poem's figurative questioning of racial distinctions are all in keeping with Hughes's worldview. Perhaps most important, Aragon's poem shows the influence of Baudelaire, a poet to whom Hughes was, like Aragon, profoundly indebted. Baudelaire wrote numerous poems about love and dusk or "les tenebres," as a trope that suggests the erotic beauty of blackness; and, as Hughes himself observed in a January 1926 essay published in Crisis, the image of dusk purpling to night outside his windows in Montmartre summoned up associations with Baudelaire (Essays 31).

Although Hughes's translation is literal, for the most part, he has also made meaningful formal changes by selecting and reordering Aragon's original. Aragon's poem is composed of eight sections, but Hughes selected only two of these for translation. In Aragon, these two parts are titled, respectively, "Hymne" and "1930," but in Hughes the lyrics are untitled and merged--and this conjoined form has the effect of drawing our attention to Aragon's elaboration, and careful revision, of a quintessentially Baudelairean trope: the metaphor of blackness, the color of dusk in the village, as an evocation, not of race, but rather of the hope, ability to survive, and latent power of downtrodden working people.