THE LONGFELLOW INSTITUTE
TONGUES UNTIED: Translating American Literature into English
by Daniel Zalewski
So you think you know American lit? Well, wait until
you start flipping through
the Longfellow Anthology of American Literature, due in bookstores next
fall. Search for your favorite Robert Frost poem, and you'll come up empty;
Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather are also missing in action. Even
Longfellow didn't make the cut. In place of all the usual suspects, you'll
encounter strangers: Lorenzo Da Ponte, Julian Czupka, Dorothea Dahl. Edited
by Harvard English professors Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, and published
by Johns Hopkins University Press, this parallel-universe collection will
offer up more than 1,000 pages of virtually unknown work.
So what's the joke? Who are these people?
The folks collected in the Longfellow Anthology are American writers, to be
sure, but with a difference:
All wrote-or write-in languages other than English. Currently being
compiled, the burgeoning anthology already contains over twenty languages
within its borders. (For those of us lacking UN-level language skills,
English translations will appear alongside the original texts.)
The collection is the debut project of Harvard's Longfellow Institute,
a new foundation dedicated to repealing the unwritten law that says English
is the official literary
language of the United States.
The institute, which Shell and Sollors launched two years ago with
funds from the Mellon Foundation, is still in the start-up stage-there's no
office space, only a Web page run by Sollors's son-but it's already got
several tricks up its sleeve.
In addition to the anthology, Shell and Sollors are signed up to edit a
fifty-volume series of novels and poetry for Johns Hopkins-all in bilingual
editions, bien sûr. When the series is complete, over forty languages will
be represented. The series, says Shell, will offer both "completely unknown
works" and "critical editions of out-of-print classics," such as O.E.
Rølvaag's 1927 Norwegian-language tale of immigrant farm life, Giants of
the Earth. ("We don't want to overwhelm people with fifty texts, each found
in somebody's basement," Shell explains.) Rest assured, though, the series
will contain plenty of surprises, including Henry Edward's 1869 five-act
play, Mordecai and Haman, a retelling of the Biblical tragedy of Esther
in-you guessed it-Welsh verse.
Shell and Sollors came up with the idea for the institute three years ago
while team-teaching a comp lit seminar at Harvard entitled "NAFTA
Literature." Says Shell, "We realized that nobody had ever taken
non-English texts seriously in the American academy. They were dismissed as
curios." As Sollors puts it, "Most American literature anthologies ask
readers to bow their heads and reflect on all the voices that have been
silenced, but they don't actually offer anything to read."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is the project's patron saint, explains Sollors,
because the poet (and Harvard professor) was "an ardent translator, and one
of the first-and last-scholars to approach American literature from a
comparativist perspective." Indeed, American intellectuals didn't always
stop their ears when non-English
voices spoke. Benjamin Franklin
published the country's first German-language newspaper, the Philadephische
Zeitung (at least two-fifths of colonial Pennsylvania spoke German). Mark
Twain, for all his bluster about the "awful German language," actually
wrote several short pieces in German, including a comic one-act play,
"Meisterschaft." But during World
War I, Theodore Roosevelt began to insist that Americans "have but one
language.... That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence."
As Shell sees it, "1914 was a watershed year for American xenophobia." From
that point on, he says, non-English texts didn't just fall out of favor:
They stopped being read.
At least in this country, that is. Many of the anthology's
selections, Shell and Sollors report, were actually suggested by foreign
scholars. "We've learned that a Swedish professor of American literature is
far more likely to know about this kind of material than is a homegrown
Americanist," explains Shell, who was himself born in Quebec and grew up
"reading all the Franco-American
classics." Sollors, who was born in Germany, says, "We continue to receive
reports of unknown treasures from scholars in Taiwan, Cyprus, and other
unexpected places." After all, who would have thought that New Jersey's
current chief meat inspector, Seyfettin Bascillar, is considered a master
of Turkish poetry by appreciative critics in Ankara? Shell and Sollors have
had a selection of the 66-year-old poet's work translated into English for
the first time.
The Longfellow Anthology contains multitudes, from an 1831 slave narrative
written in Arabic and set in Fayetteville, North Carolina (in which the
slave, Omar ben-Saeed, half-heartedly disavows his allegiance to Muhammad)
to Chinese-language poetry first scrawled on the walls of Angel Island, an
immigrant internment center in California. The technicalities of building
this Tower of Babel at times left the two editors, who collectively speak a
dozen languages, tongue-tied. "How can Werner or I truly evaluate
a Welsh manuscript? Or a Turkish poem?" asks Shell. "One must
ultimately rely on the judgment of others." (Luckily, the duo has had a lot of help in the translation
department from a small cadre of multilingual
grad students.) It's also been a
challenge prepping the original manuscripts-many of which appeared in serialized form in non-Anglophone
newspapers-for the printing press. "Many of these works are written
in Americanized dialects of High Polish or what have you," says Shell.
"Pennsylvania Dutch, for example, is this bizarre mix of antique Dutch and
American slang terms. It's driving the copy editors crazy."
The anthology selections, as diverse as they are, share some common themes.
Many challenge the assimilationist thrust of American political
culture. A Norwegian prose allegory, "To the Golden Gate," tells of a
Minnesota farmer's fight to drain his property of what he sneeringly calls
the "Yankee swamp." Similar derisions are expressed by Lorenzo Da Ponte,
the librettist of the Mozart operas Don Giovanni and Le Nozze de Figaro,
who migrated to the United States from Italy in 1819. Never finding the
riches he hoped for in New York (though he did become Columbia College's
first chair of Italian), Da Ponte composed a bitter bilingual poem, Storia Americana (1835), in
which the narrator lurches from Italian to English in an attempt to show
how life in America "sucks the heart's
fountain" and scrambles one's identity. In a similar vein, Polish writer
Julian Czupka expressed hope that his grim 1897 short-story collection
Obrazki z Ameryki ("Pictures from America") would encourage Poles not to
try their luck in the New World: "I would like," he wrote, "for my Pictures
to be
distributed in Europe and to restrain the desire to emigrate.... Compared
to America's misery, the poorest existence in Poland is a real paradise."
While many of the authors in the collection were fluent in English, they
apparently found a kind of imaginative freedom writing in a more familiar
tongue. "For some," explains Sollors, "it's a sort of community code
language, a way of venting negative feelings and discussing taboo topics."
For example, although Peppino (1897), the picaresque tale of an immigrant
shoe shiner, was published in both French and English, the expurgated
English version lacks the exposé of child labor that makes the French
edition so affecting. (The Longfellow Anthology will include a translation
of the French.) Even in modern times, non-Anglophone newspapers in the U.S.
harbor literary secrets: One
fascinating anthology selection is
Pan Xiujuan's 1979 Chinese-language story, "Abortion," in which a group of
San Francisco sweatshop workers bluntly discuss how having additional
children threatens their already tenuous economic survival.
Perhaps the boldest use of a non-English tongue is Victor Séjour's chilling
short story, "Le Mulâtre" ("The Mulatto"). Written in New Orleans in 1837, it is,
Sollors excitedly reveals, "the first known African-American work of
fiction"-not to mention a baroque revenge fantasy. The story focuses on
a slave, who, after witnessing his wife's rape by his master, incites a
plantation revolt and chops off his master's
head with an ax. (Séjour himself was
a member of the free black class in
New Orleans.) This bloody scenario presages the violent acts central to
such twentieth-century works as William Faulkner's Light in August and
Richard Wright's Native Son.
But compared to the "milder and more familiar New England abolitionist
script" that reigned during the 1830s, says Sollors, "Séjour was taking a
lot of risks." Tellingly, Séjour chose to publish his creation not in
Louisiana but in Paris, in a journal called Revue des Colonies; that
decision, suggests Sollors, "may
have cost him a wider American
audience, but allowed him to stay true to his vision."
Other anthology selections are oddities that don't fit into
any particular literary tradition.
Eusebio Chacón's Tras la tormenta
la calma ("The Calm After the Storm"), the first New Mexican novella, is
one such square peg. According to co-translator Doris Sommer, a Spanish
professor at Harvard, the 1892 novella has "less in common with Latin
American fiction of the period than
with Spanish Golden Age drama.
The whole piece is imbued with
a baroquely theatrical sense of honor. And yet it's not a play, but this
kind of intense prose poem." Set in Santa Fe, Chacón's story focuses on the romantic
rivalry between two suitors: an honor-bound traditionalist named Pablo and an Anglophile schemer named
Lorenzio-who reads Byron's Don Juan for inspiration.
"A lot of this material looks strange when placed in the
context of Henry James or Theodore Dreiser," says Shell. "With most of
these works, you're simply not going to experience the jolt of
familiarity."
On the other hand, readers of the Longfellow series's first full-length
publication, The Mysteries of New Orleans-a novel written by an exiled
Bavarian baron named Ludwig von Reizenstein-may be jolted out of
their chairs. (The novel is set for
publication in 1998.) A succés de
scandale when it was first serialized in the German-language newspaper
Louisiana Staats-Zeitung in 1854 (the same year Thoreau published Walden),
von Reizenstein's erotic opus begins with a little cross-dressing-a woman sneaks out on the town in her lover's clothes,
whereupon he pursues her in drag-and keeps getting wilder from there. The
novel, which kicked a tale
by Alexandre Dumas off the
Staats-Zeitung's front page, represents an American take on the literary
fad that swept Europe after Frenchman Eugène Sue published The Mysteries
of Paris in 1842; like Sue's feuilleton, Reizenstein unravels a conspiracy
plot that exposes the sordid panorama of city life. (In this case, the
conspiracy
is, believe it or not, a worldwide slave rebellion plotted by a mysterious
stranger named Hiram.) The book, which Sollors half-jokingly calls a "novel
of manners," is perhaps most singular in its rhapsodic depiction of lesbian
love, which the radical Reizenstein portrays as a sublime political act
equivalent to a slave revolt; the novel includes a steamy bedroom scene
that makes all the hubbub about TV's Ellen seem quaint. Amid the multiple
murders and sexual shenanigans-Reizenstein gives his Hungarian villain,
Lajos, a taste for necrophilia-it's easy to lose sight of the fact that
this Southern Gothic creation is, as Sollors mildly puts it, "one of the
first urban American novels," one that portrays antebellum New Orleans in
all its Creole complexity, with everyone from German-American aristocracy
to Caribbean prostitutes crossing paths (not to mention genders). And
you've wondered where Anne Rice got all
her crazy ideas.
Reizenstein's novel, like many of
the Longfellow texts, is lucky to have seen the light of day. Soon after
publishing it, the baron came to regret his fictional indulgences, and
abandoned fiction for a career selling
birdcages. His name disappeared from literary history. Fortunately,
translator Steven Rowan, a history professor
at University of Missouri-St. Louis, was hot on Reizenstein's trail. In the
past five years, he's examined an entire
tradition of Mysteries titles by various hands, beginning with The Mysteries
of Philadelphia; Cincinnati, or, the Mysteries of the West; and The
Mysteries of St. Louis. Rowan eventually stumbled across the only known
complete
copy of Reizenstein's text at the Historic New Orleans Collection. "They're
amazing artifacts," he says
of the books in this genre. "They're definitely odd, but they really give
you a flavor for what these cities
were like during the early nineteenth century. And the idea uniting
them-that urban life is somehow always tied up with criminality-well,
that's a very contemporary theme."
The Longfellow scholars aren't the only ones digging around
the tangled roots of American lit.
Arte Publico Press's Recovery Project series, headquartered at the
University of Houston, has been publishing
forgotten Chicano texts for five years now. And New Mexico University Press
puts out a Native American fiction series. But the Longfellow project is
distinctive in this movement-for, as Sollors puts it, "we've tried to steer
away from motivations of ethnic pride." For Sollors, the author of Beyond
Ethnicity (1986), a comparative study of American immigrant literature, the
Longfellow Institute projects should help shift discussions of
diversity away from ethnic identity
and toward a renewed appreciation
of language itself. As Sollors writes
in his introduction to the anthology,
"The absence of 'language' as a variable in the so-called multiculturalism
debate may have contributed to
the dominance of racial over linguistic identifications of authors and
texts." The result of this lapse has
been dramatic, he says. "It's amazing.
If you look at the MLA's bibliography on Chinese-American literature, it
only mentions works in English.
We're hoping this project can help
change what we mean when we talk about difference in America."
Skeptics might argue that American scholars, in their obsession with
reclaiming "lost voices," have taken one too many trips to the literary
lost and found. If the works included in the Longfellow collection are
really so
special, shouldn't they have somehow found their way to fame, much like
Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish tales? Shell and Sollors admit that some of
the selections are essentially curios-chosen more for their historical
fascination than for their literary merit.
But Shell believes that the American canon has plenty of elbow room for
non-English texts. "Name one good American play written in the nineteenth
century," he challenges. "You can't. Well, we now know of several splendid
American plays written in languages other than English." Shell, in fact,
rather enjoys poking fun at pieties
surrounding the American canon. "Even when it comes to fiction and poetry,"
he says, "a lot of non-
Anglophone stuff easily surpasses the likes of Mr. Washington Irving.
Let's face it, it's not hard." While
Shell doesn't think he's yet found
"a Polish Dickens scribbling away in Pennsylvania," he's still looking.
A lot depends on having the right attitude, Shell believes. "Take Alexis
de Tocqueville," he says, by way of example. "We don't find it at all
strange that one of the greatest treatises on American government and
democracy was written in French, but that's because the author went back
home to write his book. Well, good for him. But what if he had stayed?
Would we then recognize it for what it is? That's the kind of question
we're trying to raise."
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