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Chapter 20 - Translating Blackness

Langston Hughes in Italy

from Part II - The Global Langston Hughes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2022

By
Cristina Lombardi-Diop
Edited by
Vera M. Kutzinski  and
Anthony Reed
Vera M. Kutzinski
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
Anthony Reed
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
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Summary

This chapter examines the Italian translation of Langston Hughes’s poetry of the late 1940s and 1950s against the grain of Hughes’s life experience in Italy in the summer of 1924, as evidenced in The Big Sea and the letters written during this time. It argues that the work of translation reflects Italy’s fascist racial thinking, which makes the poet’s Blackness either obscurely picturesque or altogether invisible. Hughes’s own reading of Italy, in turn, makes Blackness historically visible by uncovering the rhetorical illusion that plagued both the conventional view of African American poetic expression as folkloric and the conventional view Italy as idyllic.

Keywords

Italian translationfascist ItalypicturesqueBlack MediterraneanThe Big Sea
Type
Chapter
Information
Langston Hughes in Context , pp. 213 - 222
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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