2016/09/23 by Vera M. Kutzinski · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · #German Colonialism and Identity Studies #Translation Studies and Practices #Cultural History and Identity Formation
paper · doi:10.1080/14788810.2016.1214798
openalex publication_date 2016/09/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Translators negotiate relative distances and proximities within a fluid space that simultaneously separates and connects languages. In this essay, I examine mid-twentieth-century German-language translations of Langston Hughes’s poetry as they straddle the transnational and translinguistic area of the Atlantic Ocean in an attempt to break the silences that the post-war tabooization of the word Rasse (race) had produced. Hughes’s German translators, I argue, used this transarea to create a discursive space within which to address, albeit stealthily, the racialization not of Jews but of “persons of color.” In these translations, we can glimpse the beginnings of a critique of domestic racisms which still awaits full exploration.