Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773–1892 (review)

In this book, Colleen Glenney Boggs makes a startlingly powerful and original case for “the intrinsic transnationalism of American literature” (3). While other critics consider transnationalism primarily as a spatial or political phenomenon, Glenney Boggs focuses our attention on evidence of linguistic variety in the pages of American works themselves: a significant angle so far overlooked by those who habitually equate national print culture with monolingualism. She persuasively argues that American texts have always been multilingual and that “the practice of linguistic translation” actually helped rather than hindered American authors in their quest for artistic innovation (3).

In her study of the ways in which “American writers conceptualized and practiced translation as American literature” (6), Glenney Boggs investigates the work of several authors whose commitment to translation demonstrated both their linguistic flexibility and their belief in the value of intercultural dialogue. Phillis Wheatley and Charlotte Forten Grimké used translation to question the monolingual white culture from which they were excluded as African-Americans and to carve out distinctive literary spaces of their own. James Fenimore Cooper endowed his fictional hero Natty Bumppo—traditionally read as a hyper-nationalized “American Adam”—with a talent for translation, but restricted such multilingual privileges to white figures in his novels. Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—the first American comparatist—all envisioned an American literature that benefited imaginatively from cross-cultural conversations initiated in translation. In contrast, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe argued for a monolingual American literature that was “self-referential” in its “linguistic exceptionalism” (13, 10): a cultural system that defied translation even as it depended upon a multilingual reading public for its survival.

As Glenney Boggs incisively observes, the fact that a monolingual concept of national literature eventually won out—and definitively so, as only “‘3 percent of books published in the United States . . . [are] translations, compared with 40 to 50 percent in Western European countries’”—must not prevent us from understanding “the profound relevance of and engagement with translation that historically informed American literature” (149). With the help of her provocative, expansive, yet theoretically grounded work, that important process has already begun.