American literature is literature written in English, right? That’s at least what the common European practice of saying “translated from the American” implies. Yet is this still true in a “multicultural” age? After all, English has not been the only “American language” in which literature of the United States has been written. In fact, the first people who were called “Americans” were, of course, the original inhabitants also known as “Indians” who have used a great variety of non-Indo-European languages. And the European settlers who called them Americans (following the mapmakers’ honoring of Vespucci) or Indians (after Columbus’s mistake) and who settled in the areas that are now the United States wrote not only in English, but also in Spanish, French, and Dutch. After them, and this is a well-known story, came waves and waves of immigrants who used such languages as Gaelic, Welsh, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Flemish, Basque, Portuguese, Italian, virtually all Slavic and Baltic languages, Yiddish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Armenian, Farsi, Hindi, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and dozens of other languages.
The quantitative dimensions of the multilingual literature that has resulted from this history are mind-boggling. For example, Widener Library at Harvard University alone has over 120,000 non-English imprints that were published in the United States. And the US Post Office, that inspected the foreign-language press during World War I, assembled a sixty-page index to well over 2,000 American newspapers and periodicals in languages ranging from Ruthenian to Syrian, Bohemian to “Spanish-Jewish” (Ladino), Tagalog-Visayan to Rumanian, Polish to Bulgarian, as well as in many bi- and trilingual formats (such as Spanish-Portuguese, Polish-Latin, German-Hungarian or Danish-Norwegian-Swedish) and in Esperanto. The files of the National Archives, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress, the American Immigration Archives and the shelves of numerous other libraries and research institutions are well-stocked with non-English materials; and exploring the histories of such polyglot publishing centers as Philadelphia, New Orleans, or New York alone could keep whole teams of readers busy.
Many libraries offer scholarships to students and teachers; and among the many texts to be uncovered and studied are not only works of interest to sociologists of immigration, linguists, and cultural historians, but also novels, plays, short stories, and poems—the aesthetic merit of which can only be assessed after a careful examination of the sources and comparisons with the anglophone canon. Yet ironically, just as the interest in “diversity” has intensified in connection with American multiculturalism, Americanists have become more monolingually anglophone than ever. As a result there are many areas in which we know less now than did literary historians at the beginning of the century. The older histories still covered such fascinating texts as the Leni-Lenape Indian epic Walam Olum, Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Italian-language laments from New York, the New Orleans francophone writings by Michel Séligny and Victor Séjour, or Reinhold Solger’s German-language novel of manners and of business life, Anton in Amerika. Yet in the course of this century such works, some of which have never been translated into English, have tended to disappear from public memory, and contemporary anthologies of American literature do not include them—perhaps with the single exception of the new Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay, which presents a translation of Séjour’s short story “Le Mulâtre.” Such exceptions aside, the rule still seems to hold that American multilingualism is the blind spot of Cultural Studies, American Studies, and various other national literary studies alike.
It is this state of affairs which prompted my colleague Marc Shell and me to stimulate new research in the vast, facinating, yet neglected area that we first called by the somewhat awkward acronym “LOWINUS” (Languages Of What Is Now the United States). Later we founded the Longfellow Institute (honoring the polyglot founder of Comparative Literature at Harvard) and began a series of seminars, accompanied by a fellowship program for students and teachers, and bringing them together with each other, with archivists and translators, and with bilingual American writers like Stratis Haviaras or Tino Villanueva. Among the fellows have been Orm Øverland (Bergen), Hana Wirth-Nesher (Tel Aviv), Caryn Cossé Bell (University of New Orleans), Steven J. Kellman (University of Texas, San Antonio), Xiao-huang Yin (Occidental College), Rachel Rubin (University of Masschusetts), and Gönül Pultar (Bilkent University, Ankara). Our seminar meets in Harvard’s Child Library (within Widener Library) where we are also building up a collection of books out of Harvard’s own holdings and out of donations. Marc Shell, numerous Longfellow Institute fellows past and present, and I have spoken about the project in various universities of the United States as well as in Holland and France, Poland and Canada, Mexico and Norway, Germany and Italy. Workshops and panels were also organized, with international participation, at the European Association for American Studies, the American Studies Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association; and the Modern Language Association officially established a new Discussion Group on Non-English Literature of the United States in (with meetings scheduled at each annual convention for five years). And so far, the Longfellow Institute has received grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, from Harvard University, from the French government (for francophone texts) and from the TransCoop Foundation (for German-language literature).
At this stage, the project also needed to be accompanied by new publications, and Johns Hopkins University Press agreed to publish a series starting with the pilot volume, The Longfellow Anthology Of American Literature, a collection of multilingual texts that are presented with English translations on facing pages. New York University Press took on the first new collection of essays in the field, Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, And The Languages Of America (ISBN 0-8147-8092-X). Many other volumes of primary and secondary literature will follow. Excerpts of texts uncovered by the project have also appeared in various journals (ranging from Antioch Review to Kcoma), and the popular American academic journal Lingua Franca carried a detailed account of the Longfellow Institute by Daniel Zalewski in December 1996. More information can be found on the world wide web page at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lowinus/.
I believe that we are just at the beginning of what may become a major reexamination of American literature and history in the light of multilingualism. Located at the intersection of American Studies and Comparative Literature, this is a good and promising field, and ideal for international and interdisciplinary cooperation. Students and professionals who know languages other than English are likely to find it intellectually rewarding to enter the study of multilingual America at this time.
* Professor Werner Sollors is the Chair of the History of American Civilization Program at Harvard University, and co-founder of the Longfellow Institute.