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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 Léon Damas, and two by Jacques Roumain-we enhance our understanding of Hughes's transnationalism, his contribution to the rise of PanAfricanism, 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 selfconception 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 Sédar Senghor, one of the principal theorists of Négritude (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...