The Worlds of Langston Hughes The Worlds of Langston Hughes Modernism and Translation in the Americas V ERA M. K UTZINSKI C O R N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Ithaca & London Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2012 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kutzinski, Vera M., 1956– The worlds of Langston Hughes : modernism and translation in the Americas / Vera M. Kutzinski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5115-7 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-8014-7826-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967—Translations—History and criticism. 2. Hughes, Langston, 1902–1967—Appreciation. 3. Modernism (Literature)—America. I. Title. PS3515.U274Z6675 2013 811'.52—dc23 2012009952 Lines from “Kids in the Park,” “Cross,” “I, Too,” “Our Land,” “Florida Road Workers,” “Militant,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Laughers,” “Ma Man,” “Desire,” “Always the Same,” “Letter to the Academy,” “A New Song,” “Birth,” “Caribbean Sunset,” “Hey!,” “Afraid,” “Final Curve,” “Poet to Patron,” “Ballads of Lenin," “Lenin,” “Union,” “History,” “Cubes,” “Scottsboro,” “One More S in the U.S.A.,” and “Let America Be America Again” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Electronic rights worldwide and UK/Commonwealth, S. African and Irish print on paper rights for these poems and for materials from Langston Hughes’s autobiographies are granted by Harold Ober Associates Inc. Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable- based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my extended family, acá y allá vii contents Acknowledgments ix Chronology of Travels, Translations, and Other Key Publications xi Abbreviations xvi Introduction: In Others’ Words: Translation and Survival 1 1 Nomad Heart: Heterolingual Autobiography 15 2 Southern Exposures: Hughes in Spanish 56 3 Buenos Aires Blues: Modernism in the Creole City 86 4 Havana Vernaculars: The Cuba Libre Project 132 5 Back in the USSA: Joe McCarthy’s Mistranslations 184 Afterword: America/ América /Americas 221 Appendix 241 Notes 257 Bibliography 311 Index 339 ix acknowledgments This book has been a long time in the making, and the debts of gratitude I have incurred along the way are plentiful indeed. Even if I could recall them all accurately, it would be impossible to do them justice in writing. I do, however, want to single out those friends and colleagues who were generous enough to comment on my many drafts: Elizabeth Barnett, Hu- bert Cook, Paula Covington, Roberto González Echevarría, Detlev Eggers, Kathleen de Guzmán, Amanda Hagood, Justin Haynes, Robert Kelz, John Morell, Chris Pexa, Kathrin Seidl-Gómez, Daniel Spoth, Aubrey Porter- field, José María Rodríguez García, and Lacey Saborido. For invaluable help with locating translations of Hughes’s poetry, I want to thank Paula Covington, Curator of the Latin American Studies Collection at Vander- bilt, Jim Toplon, Director of Interlibrary Loan Services at Vanderbilt, and Laurie N. Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian at the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. Very special thanks go to Giorleny Altami- rano Rayo, mi hermanita, and to the ever-faithful EE-gor. Without their mostly gentle but insistent prodding this book would likely never have been completed. Ange Romeo-Hall and Jamie Fuller did a splendid job copyediting my manuscript, and I am grateful to them for saving me from embarrassing infelicities. I thank Kitty Liu for making sure that everything kept moving along apace. Last but by no means least, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Peter Potter for his thoughtful feedback, his choice of engaged and helpful readers, and his unwavering support for this project over the past few years. Earlier versions of chapters 2 and 4 were published as “ ‘Yo también soy América’: Langston Hughes Translated,” in American Literary History 18, no. 3 (2006): 550–78, and as “Fearful Asymmetries: Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén and Cuba Libre” in Diacritics 34, nos. 1–2 (2004): 1–29. I thank Random House for the permission to reprint lines from Hughes’s poems and Harold Ober Associates Inc. for granting the electronic rights to excerpts from Hughes’s poetry and prose. The materials from the Langston Hughes Papers, part of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, are also quoted with the permission of the Estate of Langston Hughes. Passages from the Alfred A. Knopf correspondence at Beinecke Library are reprinted with the permission of Random House Inc., and citations from the poems X Acknowledgments of Nicolás Guillén are reproduced with the permission of the Fundación Nicolás Guillén. Finally, I wish to thank both Yale University and Vanderbilt for giving me the time I needed to complete this book, and the Martha Rivers Ingram Chair for providing funding for research materials, research assistance, and permissions fees. Vera M. Kutzinski Nashville, February 2012 xi 1902 James Langston Hughes born in Joplin, Missouri (February 1). 1903 Moves to his grandmother’s home in Lawrence, Kansas. Parents separate, and James Nathaniel Hughes emigrates to Mexico. 1908–9 Starts school in Topeka, Kansas, where he lives with his mother, Carrie Mercer Langston Hughes, and then is returned to his grandmother’s in Lawrence. 1915 Stays with the Reeds in Lawrence after his grandmother’s death, then joins his mother and her second husband in Lincoln, Illinois. 1916 The family moves first to Cleveland, Ohio, where Langston begins high school, then to Chicago. Langston remains in Cleveland. 1919 Spends the summer with his father in Toluca, Mexico. 1920 After graduating from Central High in Cleveland, Langston returns to Toluca to live with his father. Spends weekends in Mexico City. Teaches at Luis Tovar’s business institute near the end of his year-long stay. Sails from Veracruz back to New York City. 1921–22 “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” appears in The Crisis. Enrolls at Columbia University, only to withdraw after a term. Breaks with his father as a result. Moves to Harlem and works odd jobs. 1923–25 Signs on to the Africa-bound freighter West Hesseltine in June 1923. Visits Accra, the Azores, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Lagos, the Belgian Congo, Guinea-Bissau, French Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Angola. Sails to Europe on another freighter, the McKeesport, in December and again in February 1924. Visits chronology of travels, translations, and other key publications xii Chronology Rotterdam and stays in Paris until August, traveling to northern Italy, finally returning to the USA via Genoa on the West Cawthon. Arrives back in Manhattan in early November 1924. 1925 “The Weary Blues” wins Opportunity ’s poetry contest. Lives in Washington, D.C. 1926 Publishes The Weary Blues and “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Enrolls at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. 1927 Publishes Fine Clothes to the Jew. Meets Charlotte Mason Osgood, who becomes his patron. Travels through the South of the USA with Zora Neale Hurston. First brief visit to Havana. 1928 Fernández de Castro publishes his first Hughes translation in Social. 1929 Graduates from Lincoln University. 1930 Publishes Not Without Laughter. Second visit to Havana (February–March). Breaks with his patron. Translations of Hughes’s poems appear in Contemporáneos (Mexico City), Sur (Buenos Aires), Revista de La Habana, and El Diario de la Marina (Havana). Nicolás Guillén also publishes his interview with Hughes in El Diario de la Marina. 1931 Together with Zell Ingram, embarks on a trip to the Caribbean (April–May). Stops over in Havana, Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haitïen, and Santiago de Cuba. Returns to Miami in July. Rafael Lozano publishes a selection of Hughes’s poems in Crísol. Poetry reading tour of the South of the USA. Visits Scottsboro Boys in jail. 1932–33 Publishes Scottsboro, Limited and The Dream Keeper. Travels to Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco. Leaves for Moscow in June 1932 and spends fourteen months in the Soviet Union. Visits Tashkent, Samarkand, Bokhara, Ashgabat, Merv (Turkmenistan), and Permetyab (central Asia). Returns to Moscow in January 1933. Departs for Vladivostok in June, then returns to the San Francisco via Kyoto, Tokyo, and Shanghai. Takes up residence in Carmel in August. 1934–35 Publishes The Ways of White Folks. Labor unrest in California. Travels to Mexico on the occasion of his father’s death and stays for several months in Mexico City. Returns to the USA Chronology xiii and joins his mother in Oberlin, Ohio. Visits New York. His play Mulatto opens on Broadway. 1936 Wins a Guggenheim Fellowship. Ildefonso Pereda Valdés publishes Antología de la poesía negra americana in Santiago de Chile. 1937 Spends summer in Paris for the League of American Writers. In August travels to Valencia, then on to Madrid, as a war reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American. Leaves Madrid for Barcelona in mid-November. Returns to the USA via Paris at the end of the year. 1938 Publishes A New Song. Rafael Alberti publishes his Hughes translation in El Mono Azul. First visit to UK in September 1938. 1939–41 Takes up residence in California again, mainly in Carmel, and spends some time in Chicago. Publishes The Big Sea. Moves back to New York in December 1941. 1942–43 Begins to write a weekly column for the Chicago Defender in November 1942. Dudley Fitts publishes his Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry. Gastón Figueira publishes his translations of several Hughes poems in Nueva Democracia, Sustancia, and Aurora. 1944–45 Under surveillance by the FBI. The Big Sea appears in Buenos Aires as El inmenso mar in a translation by Luisa Rivaud and in Rio de Janeiro as O imenso mar in a Portuguese translation by Francisco Burkinski. Ortíz Oderigo publishes a translation of Not Without Laughter ( Pero con risas ), also in Buenos Aires. 1947 Publishes Fields of Wonder and Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain. Vacations in Jamaica. 1948 Back in Harlem. Publishes Cuba Libre: Poems by Nicolás Guillén. Several poems appear in translation by Manuel González Flores in El Nacional. 1949 Teaches in Chicago for three months. Hughes and Arna Bontemps publish The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949. Tomás Blanco publishes his Hughes translations in Asomante. xiv Chronology 1950 Publishes Simple Speaks His Mind. González Flores includes Hughes translations in Una pareja de tantas. 1951–52 Hughes publishes Montage of a Dream Deferred, Laughing to Keep from Crying, and his translation of García Lorca’s Romancero gitano as Gypsy Ballads. López Narváez includes translations of Hughes’s poetry in El cielo en el río (Bogotá). Publishes Poems from Black Africa, Ethiopia, and Other Countries. 1953 Testifies twice before the McCarthy Committee in late March. Poetry translations by Figueira appear in the Revista Iberoamericana. Pereda Valdés’s Antología is reissued in Montevideo. Toruño publishes the anthology Poesía negra in Mexico. 1954 Gáler publishes a translation of the play Mulatto in Buenos Aires. 1955 Gáler publishes his translation of Hughes’s novel Laughing to Keep from Crying ( Riendo por no llorar ). Florit publishes Antología de la poesía norteamericana contemporánea. Hughes is also included in Oswaldino Marques’s Videntes e sonâmbulos: Coletânea de poemas norte-americanos (Rio de Janeiro). 1956–57 Publishes I Wonder As I Wander. Gáler publishes Poemas de Langston Hughes. Hughes’s poems are included in Gandelman et al., Negros famosos a America do Norte. Hughes publishes The First Book of the West Indies and Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. 1959 Publishes Selected Poems. Gáler publishes his translation of I Wonder As I Wander ( Yo viajo por un mundo encantado ). Fidel Castro visits New York City. 1961–62 Inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Visits Africa twice. Publishes Ask Your Mama. Xavier Villaurrutia’s earlier translations of Hughes’s poems are reprinted in Mexico in Nivel. Ernesto Cardenal publishes translations of Hughes’s poems in Antología de la poesía norteamericana. 1964 Publishes New Negro Poets, U.S.A. Alfonso Sastre publishes another Spanish version of Mulatto. Chronology xv 1965–66 Tours Europe for nearly two months for the U.S. State Department. Vacations in Tunis. Travels to Dakar, Senegal, to be honored at the First World Festival of Negro Arts. Visits other African countries, including Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Sudan. 1967 Dies in New York City (May 22). José Luis González publishes his Hughes translations in Siempre! El inmenso mar is reprinted in Havana. The Panther and the Lash appears posthumously. 1968 Ahumada publishes Yo también soy América. Poemas de Langston Hughes in Mexico City. 1970 Martins publishes Poemas de Langston Hughes in João Pessoa, Brazil. 1971 Bansart’s students include translations of Hughes’s poems in their anthology Poesía negra-africana. (Chile) Rivaud publishes excerpts from The Big Sea as Renacimiento negro. 1972 Ruiz del Vizo includes translations of Hughes’s poems in Black Poetry of the Americas. 1973 Gary Bartz and NTU Troop debut their version of I’ve Known Rivers in Montreux. 1994 Random House publishes The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. 1998 Fraile Marcos publishes Langston Hughes: Oscuridad en España/Darkness in Spain in León, Spain. 2003 Several of his translations are reprinted in volume 16 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. 2004 Cruzado and Hricko publish Langston Hughes: Blues in Valencia, Spain. Reprint of Let America Be America Again with a preface by John Kerry. xvi abbreviations BS The Big Sea CL Cuba Libre: Poems by Nicolás Guillén CP Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel ) CR Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews (ed. Letitia Dace) Essays Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs (ed. Christopher de Santis) IM El inmenso mar (Hughes, trans. Luisa Rivaud) IW I Wonder As I Wander LHP The Langston Hughes papers are part of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. I reference materials from this collection by box and folder number. Life The Life of Langston Hughes (Arnold Rampersad) Poemas Langston Hughes. Poemas (ed. and trans. Julio Gáler) PT Public testimony of Langston Hughes, Thursday, March 26, 1953 ST Secret testimony of Langston Hughes, Tuesday, March 24, 1953 USA Abbreviations used to distinguish the United States of America from other countries in the Americas and from other United States. See note 11 in the introduction for further explanation. TWB The Weary Blues YT Yo también soy América. Poemas de Langston Hughes (ed. and trans. Herminio Ahumada) Yo viajo Yo viajo en un mundo encantado (Hughes, trans. Julio Gáler) 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N In Others’ Words Translation and Survival A text lives only if it lives on [ sur-vit ], and it lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslatable. —Jacques Derrida, “Living on / Border Lines” Home’s just around the corner there— but not really anywhere —Langston Hughes, “Kids in the Park” Langston Hughes is inextricably woven into the fabric of contemporary culture. Most people in the Americas and in Europe recognize his name. Maybe they have read a poem or two in an anthology. In the United States of America, more than half a century after his death in 1967, Hughes has a firm hold on the popular imagination, so much so that even the occasional politician resorts to lines from his poems. His handsome face adorns books, greeting cards, and a commemorative thirty-four-cent postage stamp. On satellite radio’s Real Jazz station, we can listen to Gary Bartz’s version of “I’ve Known Rivers” from the 1973 Montreux Jazz Festival. For anyone who prefers lighter fare than Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), there is The Great Debaters (2007). In this Oprah-produced biopic, the labor activist and teacher Melvin B. Tolson, played by a Denzel Washington intent on upstaging Robin Williams, fervently recites lines from “I, Too” to his rapt students at Wiley College. In 1959, LeRoi Jones admitted, “I suppose, by now, Langston Hughes’s name is synonymous with ‘Negro lit- erature.’ ” 1 Even today, in an age when we hear much about the end of the book as we know it, almost all of Hughes’s books are in print, many of them in new editions. 2 Yet what do we really know about Langston Hughes? Thanks to the good offices of his biographers, notably Faith Berry and Arnold Rampersad, we have much information about Hughes’s life, even though, as I show in the pages that follow, the record is not altogether complete. 3 What we 2 The Worlds of Langston Hughes understand less well is exactly how certain aspects of Hughes’s lived experi- ences relate to his writing. Hughes’s poems and his two autobiographies, The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder As I Wander (1956), present themselves to us in plain language as if they were wholly transparent and self-explanatory. The more we read Hughes, however, the more it becomes apparent that they are not. In my case, the growing sense that those of us who write about literature for a living have not yet given Hughes his due became the starting point for this book. As my title suggests, Langston Hughes moved in different worlds and, I argue, had not one life but many. What I mean by this is that Hughes lived and wrote in more than one idiom and that his writings have enjoyed active lives in others’ words, that is, in languages other than English. Although we think of Hughes as writing in English, I show that his poetics are plurilin- gual. Because his autobiographies and his verse, to which I largely limit my- self here, weave in and out of a host of cultural geographies and languages, translation quickly emerges as vital to all of Hughes’s literary pursuits. T RANSLATION AS M ETAPHOR AND L ITERARY PRACTICE A passionate traveler for most of his life, Hughes spent time in Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, central Asia, and the Far East. Almost always, he carried in his luggage copies of his books to give away to those he met along the way. And if he did not carry them himself, he sent them by mail in numbers large enough to consume much of his royalties. Such generosity contributed in no small measure to the worldwide circulation that his writ- ings enjoyed during his lifetime and well beyond. Hughes’s poems, novels, short stories, and autobiographies also traveled by other means. 4 Having survived their author and taken on lives of their own, many of Hughes’s texts live on in French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Uzbek, and Yiddish. It is their journeys into other tongues, most notably Spanish, that I track in this book, along with the routes of literary works whose afterlives Hughes himself similarly ensured. I demonstrate that reading the Spanish versions of his poems and autobiographies alongside his English texts gives us access to layers of meaning we may otherwise overlook. By the same token, Hughes’s own translations from Spanish into English are always in conversation with his other writings. They also grant us valuable insights into his work as editor, anthologizer, and marketer. The sense in which I use translation combines the act of moving oneself ( translatio ) with that of leading or carrying someone or something across some sort of divide ( traductio ). 5 Neither sense is reducible to bridging dis- tances between diverse linguistic spaces by finding equivalents for foreign words and sentences in one’s own native idiom. In fact, the metaphor of Introduction 3 the bridge, one of the key metaphors for translation, is highly suspect. 6 The problem is that translation’s expected respect for differences among cultural codes obscures the fact that it posits, and relies on, the very separation of what it purports to bridge. As a result, an understanding of translation as an act of bridging linguistic and cultural differences may well end up so- lidifying those very differences. Steven Ungar’s remarks on the work of the Maghrebian writer Abdelkebir Khatibi point to an alternative. Translation, as he has described it, is less “a process leading to transparency in the tar- get language than . . . a confrontation in which multiple languages square off against each other and meet without merging . . . without a reconciling osmosis or synthesis .” 7 Translation need not, however, be confrontation; it can be, and often is, respectful, noncompetitive play. What I am after are more precise ways of talking about such mergings and more nuanced metaphors to articulate an idea and a practice of translation that is at once performative and transformative. Studying translation requires exceedingly close readings, a courtesy that has not always been extended to Hughes. It is inattentiveness to detail that has bedeviled Hughes’s legacy at the hands of those who have dismissed his writings as “simple,” even “shallow.” This is a trend in Hughes scholar- ship that I vigorously contest throughout. Even though academic readers are now increasingly highlighting his “portentous ambiguities made out of simple language” and his “expert manipulation of colloquial or ‘plain’ lan- guage,” I agree with Jeff Westover that Langston Hughes remains “easily the most critically neglected of all major modern American poets.” 8 With this book, I hope to contribute my share to remedying this situation. H UGHES AND /IN T RANSLATION In no small measure, the Spanish translations of his work made Hughes the best-known USAmerican poet in the Hispanic Americas since Whitman and Longfellow. 9 Given Hughes’s many personal connections to Mexico and Cuba, it is perhaps predictable that Spanish would be the one language into which his writings have been translated the most since the late 1920s. While some of those translations have appeared in Spain, the vast majority of them were published in the Hispanic Americas, particularly, and perhaps oddly, in Argentina in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. I say “oddly” because Argentina is not a country known for its population of African descent in the way that, say, Brazil is. 10 This substantial archive of literary translations consists not only of Hughes’s poems but also of his autobiographies, short stories, and novels. Neglected, this archive is part of a historical geography defined by artistic innovation, political conflict, and ideological contestation: the early-to-mid-twentieth-century Americas. 11 The African diaspora, black in- ternationalism, and modernism are three popular abstractions created to