"What exactly constitutes American literature? Harvard professors
Marc Shell (OVERDUE; ART AND MONEY) and Werner Sollors (THEORIES OF
ETHNICITY; BLACKS AT HARVARD; MULTILINGUAL AMERICA) offer a unique
and fascinating twist with THE MULTILINGUAL ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE: A READER OF ORIGINAL TEXTS WITH ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS.
They say that American literature doesn't include only material
written in English--it includes a Lenape epic, WALAM OLUM; it
includes Omar Ibn Said's African-American narrative in Arabic; it
includes Victor Sejour's French story "Le Mutatre." Twenty-nine
works are here, in languages ranging from Russian and Yiddish to
Welsh and Norwegian, along with English translations, reminding us
of America's polyglot roots."
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An 1830s African-American slave narrative written in Arabic.
Dafydd Morgan, the only American immigrant novel published in
Welsh. The Native American epic, Walum Olum, in the Lenape
language. Theodor Adorno's dream transcripts, in German. A short
story about the politics of abortion in working-class Chinatown.
"Lesbian Love," a surprisingly explicit chapter from an 1853 New
Orleans novel. A haunting 1904 ballad, "The Revenge of the
Forests," that is one of the first expressions of radical
environmentalism in the United States.
Largely ignored in the debates over canon and multiculturalism
in America, indigenous American works written in languages other
than English have over time disappeared from view.
The first anthology of its kind, The Multilingual Anthology of
American Literature brings together American writings in diverse
languages from Arabic and Spanish to Swedish and Yiddish, among
others. Presenting eachwork in its original language with facing
page translation, the book provides an important complement to all
other anthologies of American writing, and will serve to complicate
our understanding of what exactly American literature is.
American literature appears here as more than an offshoot of a
single mother country, or of many mother countries, but rather as
the interaction among diverse linguistic and cultural
trajectories.
Consider that Cotton Mather spoke half a dozen languages and
wrote in both Spanish and Latin. Or that the first short story
known to have been written by an African American (and reproduced
here) was written in French. Not only a literature of immigration
and assimilation, American multilingual literature participates in
the larger literary tradition which too often marginalizes authors
who complicate the fit of authorship, citizenship, and
language.
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