“Don’t try to make me believe they’re interested in me in South America”: Reflections on Translation and Transnationalism

In this article, I want to examine briefly some connections between transnational networks, translation, and multilingualism in modernist magazines.[1] To start, let’s consider the following instances of translated work found in a more or less random selection of modernist magazines: Richard Wright’s Black Boy in Les Temps modernes (1947); F. T. Marinetti’s “Wireless Imagination and Words at Liberty” in Poetry and Drama (1913); Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in Sur (1935); poems by Léopold Sédar Senghor in Black Orpheus (1957); and Claude McKay’s Banjo in Légitime Défense (1932) (fig. 1). One could, of course, continue to cite examples of translated works in little magazines almost ad infinitum but this brief snapshot should illustrate the argument I want to propose here: that the terms translation and transnationalism are intrinsically connected, much as the idea that modernism and its magazines are entwined. If, as Robert Scholes and Cliff Wulfman have suggested, modernism began in the magazines, once we look inside the pages of most magazines we find translated material that tells a tale of transnational networks of exchange, influence, and debate.[2]

Fleshing out the examples cited above demonstrates how practices of translation and transnational networks were at the heart of many modernist periodicals. It is fascinating, for instance, to find that Le Temps modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre’s influential French magazine of intellectual and political debate should serialize a translation by Marcel Duhamel of Wright’s memoir Black Boy (1945) between 1946–47 (in one superb issue from February 1947 we find Wright nestled between Sartre’s acclaimed essay “What is Literature?” and an excerpt from Simone De Beauvoir’s philosophical work on moral ambiguity).[3] Wright, who moved to Paris in 1946, had already published a short story, “Le Feu dans la nuée” (“Fire and Cloud”), in the first issue of Les Temps modernes. For Sartre, publishing Wright’s trenchant critiques of racial politics in the United States was part of the magazine’s oppositional stance towards American capitalism and the incipient Cold War. When published in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama in 1913 Marinetti’s manifesto, along with translations of his poems, marked one of his earliest appearances in a British magazine.[4] Though Poetry and Drama is not a magazine normally associated with the European avant–garde, publishing Futurist poetry in translation was part of Monro’s desire to modernize poetry in Britain by learning from foreign literature. Monro had met Marinetti in Italy and promoted several of his talks in London, including one at Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. Thus, in his introduction to the material by Marinetti and other Futurists translated in the magazine Monro stated, somewhat surprisingly, that “we claim ourselves, also, to be futurists” and claimed that both modernizing English poets and the Futurists were “at war with tradition.”[5] In this way Monro gestures towards a shared transnational impulse to modernize poetry in the early twentieth century. Woolf’s feminist essay was her first work to be published in Latin America, being translated by Jorge Luis Borges in Victoria Ocampo’s important Argentine magazine, Sur, between 1935–6.[6] Ocampo had first read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own when in Paris, on the advice of Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop; Ocampo then met Woolf in London in 1934 and they corresponded for several years after, revealing a transnational exchange between Paris, London, and Buenos Aires.[7] When Ocampo told Woolf about her translation plans for A Room, Woolf replied: “Don’t try to make me believe they’re interested in me in South America” (Lee, Woolf, 661). Despite Woolf’s surprise, the frequent appearance of translated work in modernist magazines testifies to the many complex forms of transnational alliance, influence, and connection that infused periodical culture in this period. That readers would be interested in Woolf in South America was thus very typical of how interest in writers spread around the globe by means of little magazines.

In the final two examples cited above we discern another tangled network of translation and transnationalism. The translations from French to English of three poems by Senghor in the first issue of Ulli Beier’s Nigerian magazine, Black Orpheus, in 1957, was part of a broader editorial vision that aimed to bring the writers of the black diaspora to the attention of African readers dominated by colonial systems of culture (fig. 2).[8] As Beier’s editorial argued: “It is still possible for a Nigerian child to leave a secondary school with a thorough knowledge of English literature, but without even having heard of such great black writers as Léopold Sédar Senghor or Aimé Césaire.”[9] Because such writing is often not in English, continues Beier, “Black Orpheus tries to break down . . . language barriers by introducing writers from all territories in translation.”[10] In the same issue there was a report on the famous World Congress of Black Writers, held in Paris in 1956, and organized by Alioune Diop, the editor of the most important postwar magazine of the Francophone black diaspora, Présence Africaine, begun in Paris in 1947. Black Orpheus explicitly hoped to follow the model of Présence Africaine in “bringing together authors writing in different languages” for a “fruitful exchange of ideas.”[11] It is also worth noting that another translated connection across periodicals is articulated in the very title of Beier’s magazine, as Black Orpheus was taken from a 1948 article by Sartre in Les Temps modernes, “Orphée Noir,” which introduced work by five poets, including Senghor and Césaire; and, in turn, excerpts from Sartre’s essay were also published in Présence Africaine in 1955. Here we see the significant role played by the print culture of periodicals in emphasizing translational exchanges across national boundaries, part of a strategy to further what Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora describes as “the transnational contours of black expression.”[12] Edwards presents an excellent account of the final example cited above, the translation of an extract from Claude McKay’s major novel of the Harlem Renaissance, Banjo, in Légitime Défense, a single issue magazine published in Paris in 1932 by a group of radical students from Martinique.[13] Légitime Défense contained an explosive mix of Marxist critique, anti–colonial discourse, and European surrealism. In addition to the excerpt from Banjo it also published a polemic by Étienne Léro on the Scottsboro case in Alabama.[14] As Lori Cole notes, in drawing upon both Marx and André Breton (the title of the magazine was adapted from a 1926 essay by Breton) Légitime Défense “appropriated Communist and Surrealist rhetoric for the purposes of initiating a Caribbean literary and political consciousness.”[15] Légitime Défense was part of a group of magazines edited by students from French colonial territories who came together while studying in Paris, including Césaire and Senghor, magazines which included Revue du monde noir (1931–32), L’Etudiant noir (1934–35), and Tropiques (1941–45). The “contours of black expression” in these magazines thus crossed multiple geographies, critiquing the Parisian colonial metropole, as well as the perceived stagnant colonial culture of the Caribbean and Africa, while also reaching out to form transnational alliances with emerging anti–colonial voices in African literature and black writers and artists in the United States. In such examples, then, we see not just the importance of the translation of literary works but also the translation of particular forms of cultural politics across magazines and national borders.

These brief glimpses of how translated works powered the transnational networks of modernist magazines suggest many fascinating stories remain to be explored further, work that will reveal new patterns of influence and exchange around world–wide expressions of modernism. When considering modernist magazines and the development of periodical networks from the end of the nineteenth century onwards we thus see that transnationalism and translation belong together, as two fundamental features marking what Eric Bulson has termed the “world form” of the little magazine.[16]

Rebecca Walkowitz has recently argued for the existence of a group of contemporary novels that she describes as “born translated,” meaning works which use translation as an essential feature of their construction and often appear to be “written for translation”; in such texts, writes Walkowitz, translation “is not secondary or incidental to these works. It is a condition of their production.”[17] It is tempting to ponder whether we can extend Walkowitz’s theory to the category of modernist magazines, understanding these as print forms in which translation is also a “condition of their production.” That is to say, little magazines are sites in which translated works of modernism are almost essential to their form, demonstrating that a magazine published in Argentina is networked to cultural production in London or Paris, and that Spanish–speaking readers in Buenos Aires are indeed interested in reading work by Anglophone modernists. Another aspect of the “born translated” form of such magazines can be identified in publications from the 1920s that were deliberately produced as multilingual. For example, Veshch. Gegenstand. Objet (1922) was a trilingual magazine (Russian, German, French) edited in Berlin by two exiled Russian constructivist artists, El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg (fig. 3). The trilingualism of the magazine drew partly upon Ehrenburg’s many years in Paris, where he mixed in avant–garde circles around Picasso and Apollinaire, and partly upon the cultural infrastructure of the sizable Russian émigré population in Berlin in the 1920s.[18] In Paris, the American Harold J. Salemson published Tambour (1929–30), a magazine unlike many of the other expatriate American publications of the time based in the city (such as Gargoyle, This Quarter, or transition), since Tambour was published roughly half in French and half in English. Away from cosmopolitan European cities perhaps a more unusual location for a multilingual magazine in the 1920s was that of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Here Norman Macleod published The Morada (1929), a magazine that published works of international modernism in English, French, and German, drawing upon the Parisian networks of editorial board members such as Harry Crosby and Charles Henri Ford. By refusing to translate cultural material these magazines both foreground national linguistic differences as a constitutive feature of their production, as well as reminding readers (whether monolingual or not) of the transnational diffusion of modernism and the avant–garde by the mid–1920s, and of the fact that no single language group or nation had a monopoly on modernist expression.[19] 

Cover of Veshch. Gegenstand. Objet, March-April 1922.

In another historical moment the prominence of translation and multilingualism in a set of European magazines appearing soon after the end of World War II tells a quite different story about “born translated” publications. In bilingual magazines such as The Gate/Das Tor (English/German, 1947–49), Adam International Review (English/French, relaunched 1946), and Two Cities (English/French, 1959–64) we explicitly see bilingualism positioned as a tool to heal post-war divisions, especially across the landscape of a ravaged Europe (fig. 4). In the first issue of The Gate, for instance, Gilbert Murray argues:,

If civilization is to recover, if Europe is ever again a world centre of humane art and thought, we much shake ourselves free from the passions and prejudices and even the just resentments of war. If the material world is in ruins, there is a world of the mind, a world of music, art, letters, and philosophy, which has never been the property of one nation alone but is the right meeting place for men of thought and good will, irrespective of nationality.[20]

In such statements we see how these magazines—along with many others such as The London Magazine (1954–61), Arena (1949–52), Das Goldene Tor (1946–51), Die Wandlung (1945–4), La NEF (1944–51) or La Table Ronde (1948–69)—sought to develop what Marjet Brolsma and Lies Wijnterp term a “European space” of periodicals, which “functioned as transnational platforms where ideas of Europe” were reconstructed after the trauma of war.[21] Translations of work from multiple European languages featured heavily in these magazines, indicating how periodicals might work to repair networks across borders— both linguistic and political—severed by the war. Encountering T. S. Eliot in Das Goldene Tor, Heinrich Böll in The London Magazine or La Table Ronde, or George Lamming in Les Temps modernes or Merkur, illustrates how these magazines too can be considered as "born translated”, and emphasizes how the publication of material that crossed linguistic borders was essential to their transnational cultural and political aspirations.[22]

One final aspect of the issue of translation and transnationalism that bears more investigation is whether we need to widen the idea of translation from just works in magazines to the material form of the periodicals themselves. That is to say, there are clearly aspects of the little magazine format—size, coloring, typography, layout, structure and so on, what I have elsewhere termed their periodical codes—that are born ready to be translated into new locations.[23] For example, as Jason Harding notes, T. S. Eliot’s magazine, The Criterion (1922–1939), was thus clearly modeled on the French monthly review Nouvelle Revue française (NRF), to which he was then London correspondent (figs. 5–6).[24] This modeling was clearly more than a matter of shared intellectual interests, as a simple comparison of the two covers indicates how the periodical codes of The Criterion and the NRF are strikingly similar:

In terms of typeface, layout, and perhaps most importantly use of color, we are looking here at a translation of one textual object into another, with only a few differences, such as the use of italics in the French title, and a slight difference in how author and title are presented. The coding in both magazines signifies the high intellectual seriousness of the periodical, which reinforces the employment of the term “review” (revue) in both magazines.  Eliot indicated that the magazine should have no illustrations or adverts and “be simple and severe in appearance. . . . I wish to make it primarily a critical review” (Harding, “The Idea,” 348). In so doing, Eliot not only aligned The Criterion with the classical severity of the French review, he also distanced his periodical from other contemporary British magazines of modernism that employed illustrative covers or advertising material such as Art and Letters or The Adelphi. It is interesting to note, however, that the material form of the NRF had already been translated into a little magazine in Italy. Eric Bulson notes how the cover design of Il convegno, started in Milan in 1920 by Enzo Ferrieri, was also modeled on that of the NRF (Bulson, Little Magazine, 134). Such translations of the material form of magazines across national boundaries are a simple way of signaling to readers the shared intellectual visions of diverse productions; as Bulson argues of the identification of Il convegno with NRF, it was an example of a shared cosmopolitanism in the two magazines, one that was dependent “on the construction of collaborative networks that would allow nations to communicate with one another” after World War I (Bulson, Little Magazine, 134). The “born translated” form of these little magazines was thus a crucial component of their transnational aspirations.[25]

In his important analysis of the geographies of modernism and “modernism at large” from 2005, Andreas Huyssen called for transnational work that tracked how the “travelling and distribution of cultural products is always specific and particular, never homogenously global.”[26] To do so would involve engaging more intensely with the “promises and vicissitudes” of translation, noted Huyssen, since “translation in its broadest linguistic and historical sense poses the major challenge to any reassessment of the geographies of modernism in a global sense” (Huyssen, “Geographies of Modernism,” 15). Much more work has been done on modernism and translation since that challenge was issued, but, as this brief discussion has indicated, there remains many interesting issues still to be explored when considering the role of translation in the transnational periodical field of modernism.