NEWS: Longfellow Institute Series in American Languages and
Josef J. Barton (texbart@merle.acns.nwu.edu)
Fri, 3 May 1996 14:10:38 -0500
LONGFELLOW INSTITUTE, JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS EXPAND THE FRONTIERS OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE by Marvin Hightower
So you think you know your American literature?
Better think again!
That enormous field is about to expand toward new
horizons in response to a major project involving Harvard's
Longfellow Institute and the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Yesterday, the Institute and the Press threw a book party
at Adams House marking the appearance of the first book in the
Longfellow Institute Series in American Languages and
Literatures.
It was no accident that diplomats from several consulates
in Boston joined the festivities. For the project's first fruit =D1
The Longfellow Institute Anthology of Literature of the United
States =D1 is a unique multilingual work that stakes out the vast
and virtually uncharted terrain now opening up to scholars and
literary buffs throughout the world.
The Longfellow/Hopkins project marks the first systematic
attempt to republish historically, aesthetically, and culturally
significant works written in what is now the United States and
published in languages other than English. Because most of these
works have never before appeared in English translation,
traditional English-based American literary scholarship has
accorded them little or no attention.
Each volume will reproduce the original text on one page
and an English translation on the other. Except in the anthology
that opens the series and a few later trilingual volumes, the
series will generally use a bilingual format.
Amerindian languages, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French,
German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and some
40 other languages will appear in the 50-volume series over the
coming decade. Volumes will range in length from 90 to several
hundred pages; prices, from about $10 to $60. The anthology will
probably sell for $60 in hardback but will eventually appear in a
less costly paperback.
The originators, codirectors, and general editors of the
project are Marc Shell, a Professor of English and of Comparative
Literature and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow; and
Werner Sollors, the Henry B. and Anne M.
Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of
Afro-American Studies.
Inspired by the national debate preceding the 1993 North
American Free has accorded them little or no attention.
Each volume will reproduce the original text on one page
and an English translation on the other. Except in the anthology
that opens the series and a few later trilingual volumes, the
series will generally use a bilingual format.
Amerindian languages, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French,
German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and some
40 other languages will appear in the 50-volume series over the
coming decade. Volumes will range in length from 90 to several
hundred pages; prices, from about $10 to $60. The anthology will
probably sell for $60 in hardback but will eventually appear in a
less costly paperback.
The originators, codirectors, and general editors of the
project are Marc Shell, a Professor of English and of Comparative
Literature and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow; and
Werner Sollors, the Henry B. and Anne M.
Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of
Afro-American Studies.
Inspired by the national debate preceding the 1993 North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Sollors and Shell teamed
up with Romance Languages and Literatures Professor Doris Sommer
to lead a seminar on the continent's literary prospects in a
world of heightened interaction among English-, French-, and
Spanish-speaking populations.
This experience prompted Shell and Sollors to launch a
permanent vehicle for studying the neglected non-English literary
heritage of the U.S. Backed by a Mellon Foundation grant, they
established the Longfellow Institute here in 1994 and began
operating under the grant this term. Each man brings a special
cultural perspective to his work: Shell hails from French Canada;
Sollors, from Germany.
"We converged on the United States as a territory in
which Marc's language interests and my ethnic interests could
combine very fruitfully, because it turns out that there is a
large body of literature in all kinds of languages that hardly
anybody has looked at in the last 50 to 70 years," Sollors says.
"For example, there are texts in French and Arabic that the usual
rundown of American history or of Afro-American Studies has
largely ignored."
One example in the anthology dates from 1831, when
51-year-old Omar Ibn Said recounted his capture in Africa at age
37, his subsequent slavery in the Carolinas, and his conversion
from Islam to Christianity. With Arabic and English on facing
pages, this selection dramatically illustrates Shell's contention
that the anthologized works "do not look like what we often think
of as American literature."
And thereby hangs a strange tale: amid all the recent
debates on multiculturalism, the nation's long history of
linguistic diversity has barely gotten a word in edgewise, the
professors explain, despite abundant though oft-obscured evidence
of its magnitude.
"A Philadelphia publisher's catalog from the 1790s, for
example, devotes 20 pages to works in English and the remaining
50 to works in Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish,"
Sollors points out. Similarly intensive non-English publishing
periods dot the literary landscape, and for decades on end,
certain regions of the country produced fewer English-language
publications than works in other languages.
By republishing parts of this linguistic heritage, the
Longfellow Institute has chosen to promote what Shell calls "the
civil rights of language" to give forgotten parts of the American
conversation a much-deserved second hearing.
"Sometimes we find books that no one has looked at for a hundred
years or so, and some of these are really astonishing works of
literature."
Shell has discovered "tremendous enthusiasm for this
project" around the globe. Through electronic mail, Sollors and
Shell regularly correspond with an ever-growing band of
international specialists working in multilingual ethnic-American
literatures, drawing on their skills as both researchers and
translators. Equally crucial to their success have been the
riches of the University Library and the help of many Harvard
reference librarians.
Several publishers outside the U.S. have expressed
interest in the project, and the Institute is still exploring
various electronic vehicles for the rapid international
distribution of its work, Shell adds. "There is often as much
interest, say, in Wales in Welsh-American language publications
as there is here," not least because until this century, British
policies had long suppressed native Welsh culture.
As the Longfellow Series liberates more and more texts
from the dark recesses of the world's libraries, departments of
American literary studies everywhere had better brace themselves:
plenty of well-polished notions are going to rattle right off
their pedestals.
"We have been told, there is no Finnish-American-language
literature!" Shell says, with mischief in his eye. "To the extent
that one believes it's not there, it's not there! But the moment
one begins to look, the number of items is phenomenal."
Similarly, says Sollors, "there is a familiar
generalization that American literature doesn't have many novels
of manners. But there are quite a few American novels of manners.
They just weren't written in English." One of these, Die
Geheimnisse von New Orleans (The Mysteries of New Orleans) by
Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein, will appear in the Longfellow
Series next year in a first-ever English translation by Professor
Steven Rowan, of the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
Serially published in a New Orleans German-language
newspaper in 1854-55, this Gothic tale hangs lots of local dirty
laundry on the line and includes an explicit lesbian love scene
at a time when Americans writing in English dared not touch the
subject, Sollors says.
Among the many other texts to be brought back into print
by the Institute are Lorenzo da Ponte's poetry written in Italian
and English; Victor Sejour's "Le Mulatre" ("The Mulatto"), the
first African-American short story, published in French in 1837
and translated by Andrea Lee; an early Spanish-language novel
from New Mexico; a collection of Chinese-language works edited by
Longfellow Institute Fellow Xiao-huang Yin; and a sampling of
Navajo poetry.
Literature as an art form is not the sole focus of the
project, however. The anthology includes important secular
documents such as a 1740 petition from indigenous Massachuset
people to the Great and General Court of the Bay Colony, asking
that the newcomers observe established treaties and curb
expansionist tendencies. "The General Court accepted petitions in
the Massachuset language," Sollors says.
Journals, letters, and other everyday documents offer new
ways of tracing the Americanization of immigrants and the
inculcation of ethnic and racial attitudes, Sollors adds. "You
see the subtle ways in which some immigrants recognized
themselves, for example, as being Norwegian, which they didn't
know when they were in Norway." Similarly, writing home from
19th-century America, a Swedish-born maid cites the legal
freedoms of white people.
Besides running the Longfellow Series, Sollors and Shell
are constantly setting up visits by international scholars and
encouraging more students to enter the emerging field, for which
new doctoral fellowships are available.
"I always find that students know more languages than is
generally assumed of them," Sollors says, "but they atrophy
because there isn't really much use put to them. Even in
Comparative Literature, it is becoming more and more acceptable
to work with English translations only, which is regrettable."
Nevertheless, Shell believes that the Longfellow Series
has emerged at a propitious time. Earlier in this century,
departments of English and American literature continued
"19th-century attempts to express the culture of the country as
an English-language culture. To that extent, one can't blame them
for overlooking other languages and literatures. That was their
job. "I think now the country is ready and anxious to reassess
its linguistic diversity. Until this time, we haven't really come
to terms with the fact that Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and
others, no matter what else they were doing, tended to define not
only an American literature but also an anglophone literature. In
a larger perspective, the Institute's work in the non-English
languages and literatures of what is now the United States will
help us to understand that process of American literary history."
"Yet," Sollors adds, "many of the major English-language
writers of the 19th
century have been more multilingual and attentive to language
difference than some 20th-century Americanists," which is one
reason that the Institute has been named after poet-linguist
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who pioneered in Comparative
Literature at Harvard.
"Beyond that," says Shell, "the project reopens the
debate that began in the 1770s as to whether the American
language is English or a language other than English. And because
history isn't finished, we don't know what the American language
will be in 200 years, and we don't know what American literature
will be!"
Additional information on the Longfellow Institute is available
on the World Wide Web at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lowinus/.