Longfellow Institute, Johns Hopkins Press Expand the Frontiers of American Literature

By Marvin Hightower

Gazette Staff

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 -- The Longfellow Institute Anthology of Literature of the United States -- 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 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 being brought back into print by the Institute are Lorenzo Da Ponte's poetry written in Italian and English; Victor Séjour's "Le Mulâtre" ("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/.