From 1968 to 1969 the Argentine modernist Juan Gelman invented and translated into Spanish a contemporary from the United States, named Sidney West, who wrote about small-town mid-American life. Traducciones III: Los poemas de Sidney West (Translations III: The Poems of Sidney West) is a pseudotranslation—a text disguised as a translation that in fact has no corresponding original. While most critics identify Gelman's recourse to pseudotranslation as a personal undertaking, this essay examines the experiment for the first time within the inter-American Cold War context of the 1960s, locating pseudo/translation as an in/subordinate poetic protocol particularly well equipped for intervening in the soft-power mechanisms of US cultural imperialism—in ways that are both treasonous and collaborative. This essay recovers the anti-imperialist politics of the West poems, expands conversations on translation in Gelman's poetry, and proposes pseudo/translation as a new, bifocal mode of reading for texts that forge cross-cultural contact.

This essay examines connections between the materiality of language and the impulse to translate through the hybrid series Cuadernos de lengua y literatura (2000– ; Language and Literature Notebooks) by the Argentine writer Mario Ortiz. These books confront historical trauma through a study of materials and processes that generate language in their author's domestic environment. I read Ortiz to argue that a task of translation consists of tracing how words function through ways in which their original meaning breaks down. Their function is revealed through the tasks the translator carries out to create the new linguistic object of the translated text. This essay revisits a key image from Walter Benjamin's “The Task of the Translator,” the broken vessel, through broken vessels in Ortiz's work, as well as recent materially focused translation scholarship. I conclude that the material specificity of language intervenes in the lives of readers, writers, and translators to respond to grief.

The poet Langston Hughes was central to mid-century transnational exchanges and Cold War translation. This essay examines the poet's centrality through a new lens, presenting a case study on Czech translations of Hughes's poetry between 1950 and 1963 that draws on archival materials, especially the correspondence between Hughes and one of his Czech translators, Jiří Valja; paratexts; and analysis of translations. The essay shows how Hughes's poetry was translated into Czech against the backdrop of Cold War publishing politics and aesthetic norms, how the translations of Hughes's work operated in these contexts, and how Cold War translation emerged as a specific site of inquiry with its own challenges, contacts, and practices.

How do we as scholars of transnational US literary studies understand W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) outside the historical and racial context of the United States? Anyone familiar with the text will agree that it primarily focuses on the unique condition of African American existence or, as Du Bois himself puts it, “the strange meaning of being black” at the turn of the last century. But to what extent is this “black” experience historically, nationally, or even racially bound? An exploration of the impact of the Chinese translation of Souls in 1959 China reveals that the fluidity of historical, national, and racial boundaries goes beyond the limits of mere cultural negotiations. Situated in the critical formation of Afro-Asian engagements during the Bandung era and Du Bois's visit to China in 1959, Souls was pivotal to China's reassertion of what it means to be “black” on the global stage of proletariat revolution.

This piece acknowledges the MLA's many initiatives in support of translation while also advocating for even greater visibility for translation as a mode of combatting language injustice in disciplines across the university. Translation offers opportunities for inclusiveness, information sharing, and collaborative knowledge production across linguistic, social, economic, and geographic divides. It also offers a form of hands-on apprenticeship in intellectual and scholarly rigor for undergraduate and graduate students alike. And by translating the texts of colleagues writing in other languages, scholars working in languages of the Global North can help further goals of language justice and access by facilitating exposure to and for other traditions of knowledge production. This piece proposes that, instead of treating translation as a threat to an individual's academic viability, we embrace translation as a means of increasing the vitality and equity of our intellectual communities.