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

Colleen Glenney Boggs’s primary object in this book appears to be absolving the writers who embodied the emergence of literary nationalism (or a national literature) in the nineteenth century of recent charges from revisionist or “postnational” scholarship by refashioning them as champions of translation and proponents of literary transnationalism. Rather than blowing the entire framework of monolingualism and literary nationalism out of the water, Boggs proposes a happy marriage of “nationalism” and “transnationalism” both in the nineteenth-century world of letters and in today’s world of constantly shifting scholarly paradigms. Specifically, Boggs’s central claim is that late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “American writers conceptualized and practiced translation as American literature, and vice versa, that they understood American literature as a form of writing that was always in translation” (6). Americanists, Boggs says, have failed to understand that some of the foremost writers of the early national and antebellum period—Wheatley, Cooper, Fuller, Whitman, and Stowe—regarded their own multilingual and transnational practices as the hallmarks of American literary nationalism. To be in translation was to be American.

Notwithstanding Boggs’s laudable intentions of recentering translation and multilingualism in American literary history, her book ultimately reinforces the teleology she criticizes. Thus, transnationalism, translation, and multilingualism become mere functions of the exceptional literary genius of seminal American writers rather than the results of the vibrant exchange of writers and texts among the manifold linguistic and ethnic groups moving through the Atlantic world. With the exception of a chapter on Margaret Fuller and a brief excursus on Longfellow, the book’s perspective never steps outside of the literary minds of English-speaking American writers and thus lacks the multidirectional viewpoints essential for accomplishing a transatlantic methodology. For a study of transnationalism and translation, Boggs’s book contains surprisingly few analyses of actual translations, their production and dissemination across the Atlantic, and their work in mediating and negotiating between different constituencies. More properly entitled “The Transatlantic Imaginary of American Literary Nationalism,” this book subsumes the encounter with difference once again in a supposedly intrinsic American embrace of pluralism.

This is a book I wanted to appreciate very badly—not only because its pronouncements on translation and literary multilingualism are close to my own work and experience, but because it seems to boost the wave of hemispheric or transnational early American scholarship that has transformed our profession in the last 10 to 15 years. Yet for me the fundamental conceptual flaw of this book is Boggs’s twofold insistence on examining “how national American writers understood their literary practice” (6; emphasis added) and on focusing primarily (or rather exclusively) on “writings in English” (2). On the surface, the authors who hitherto inhabited F. O. Matthiessen’s monolingual pantheon of the “American Renaissance” are the prime target for the kind of “methodological intervention . . . through an inquiry into language” (5) that Boggs tries to accomplish. Rather than working to recover lost literary voices and their interaction or competition with English-speaking authors in America and across the Atlantic, Boggs understands “the transatlantic as a methodology that focuses on the multilingual dimensions of texts that show us how international national American literature has always been” (5). While I agree that American literature “has always been” international, I believe Boggs bases this claim on assumptions that are problematic for two reasons: on one level, if American literature received its multilingual character from the interest in and practice of translation among English-language writers such as Cooper and Whitman, then the multitude of non-English or bilingual authors and texts are mere window-dressing. While the writers Boggs analyzes fashioned themselves in conversation with the languages and literatures of Europe (and potentially with the forgotten “mother tongue” of Africa—in the case of Wheatley—or the fading languages of America’s native inhabitants—in the case of Cooper), they apparently did not see their work as part of a vibrant domestic culture of non-English publication and translation.

On another...