The introductory essay toThe CollectedWorks ofLangstonHughes, Vol. 16, TheTranslationexamines the coextensive relationship thatLangstonHughes’swriting hadwith thatofwriters fromthree differentparts of theworld—Spanish poetand dramatistFedericoGarcíaLorca, Cuban poetand essayistNicolasGuillén, andHaitian poet and novelist JacquesRoumain.①Theirworks areconjoined by the“poeticsofmarginalization,”or the aesthetic processof linking cultures inwhichspecific literary communities have experienced some form ofexclusion from the dominantdiscour-ses ofWestern literature. The above-mentioned essay is the pointofdeparture for further study in-to the conceptofcultural transfer through literary translation.
That is, a creativewriterwho trans-lates aspires to findsameness inmeaningbetween the literaturewritten in his source language, orthe one from which he translates, and the literature of the target language, or the one intowhichhe translates.②Moreover, awriter ofAfrican ancestrywho becomes a translator often desires toportray asimilarity ofexperiencebetween his ownworks and those of similarly-positioned authors.Hughes’s translations ofLorca’sBodasde sangre (BloodWedding), Guillén’sCuba Libre, andRoumain’sGouverneursde laRoseé(MastersoftheDew) provide abundantexamplesof theAmer-ican poet’s twin objectives of(1) achieving effective cross-cultural transference and (2) illustra-ting the aesthetic expression of corresponding experience(s). Ghanian literary criticKwaku Gyasi articulates the problematic of contemporaryAfrican litera-ture in terms of language and its relation to the act of translation. According to that scholar, weneed“... to examine how translation functions as a critical aswell as a creative activity inAfr-ican literature.”③He continues:“In this context to‘translate’means, literally,‘to carryacross’and this implies allother formswhich carry the prefix trans-. Italsomeansnotonly trans-portation or transmission or transposition but also transformation and transmutation, for all theseactivities take placewhen theAfricanwritersetsouttowrite in aEuropean language.”④In shor,tGyasi brings to ourattention the fact that“... linguistic-based translation theorieshave shortcom-ings and therefore are not very applicable or relevant toAfrican texts.”⑤There is a parallel be-tween the problematic faced by Langston Hughes and the poets he translated from French andSpanish intoEnglish and by thewriters ofwhichGyasi speaks. African Diaspora authors likeHughes, Guillén andRoumain insertoral traditions from their re-spective cultures into written literature just as continentalAfrican writers transpose oral genresfrom their cultures sifted through indigenous languages into European modes—primarily Englishand French, butoccasionally Spanish and Portuguese. Since Lorca is notofAfrican descen,t onemight considerhim an oddity in this equation, but for the fact that out of hiswriting emerges amarginalized perspective either from the fictional gypsy culture he creates or from his own issueswith achieving a viable (for him) sexual identity. An analysis of one scene from Lorca’sBloodWedding, one poem from Guillén’sCuba Libre, and one metaphorical passage from Roumain’sMasters oftheDew, whichHughes translated in 1938, 1944, and 1947, respectively, illustratesthe global dialogue among authors from specific cultura,l linguistic, and aesthetic formations.Furthermore, an understanding of the transformative processHughes utilizes to connect theworkso，英语论文网站，英语论文题目 |
