The writer as notional translator: Langston Hughes and his transcultural racial interpretation of the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

This chapter departs from the concept of cultural translation posited by Laura Izarra as well as Walter Benjamin’s notion of translation as an expression of meaning and significance rather than an actual transposition of words and phrases. With that in mind, it analyzes some of Hughes’s poems such as “Letter from Spain” or “Dear Folks at Home,” articles like “Negroes in Spain” and the few Spanish poems of the Civil War that he translated into English. All these demonstrate how Hughes draws parallelisms between his own experience of racial conflict in the USA and the role that race played in the Spanish struggle, and show that Hughes’s literary production became a real transcultural and transnational phenomenon.