Invading the American Canon - (Literatures, Cultures, Translation) by Muireann Maguire (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Through case studies of émigré literary translators and editors, this open access book traces how Russian literature kindled the American imagination in the 20th century.

In the 19th century, American literature was invaded by great Russian novels, including the works of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, and others, all mediated, translated, and sometimes even discovered by devoted freelance translators like Isabel Hapgood, Leo Wiener, and Nathan Haskell Dole. Throughout the 1900s these translators made Russian literature, from Nobel prizewinners like Solzhenitsyn to obscure émigrés like Mark Aldanov, accessible to American readers. Some literary translators were also publishers, like Nicholas Wreden (1901-55), at different times a bookseller at Scribner's, an editor at E.P. Dutton and a publishing executive at Little, Brown. His style was so well-regarded that Hemingway wished he wrote in Russian so that Wreden could translate him. He was also a lumberjack, a trainee naval officer and an émigré who fled Russia in 1920 to become a naturalized American citizen. Uniquely, as a translator and as a publisher, Wreden helped determine which Russian novels the American public would read.

This book tells Wreden's story. It also reconstructs, using archival sources, the lives of other extraordinary translator-publishers like Thomas Seltzer, Bernard Guilbert Guerney, and Carl Proffer, who, with his wife Ellendea, ran Ardis Publishers, the firm that brought Soviet writing to the US. Invading the American Canon tells the history of the translation of Russian literature in America and its changing critical reception over a hundred turbulent years.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by a European Research Council Horizon 2020 Starting Grant (grant agreement no. 802437)

Review Quotes

"This book is an important contribution to the field of translator studies and to the history of the translation and reception of Russian literature in the United States from the Civil War through the halcyon days of Ardis Publishers ... Thoroughly researched and vividly written." --The Russian Review

"This is a ground-breaking study of the forces that brought Russian literature to the American public. Maguire takes her readers behind the scenes, introducing a cast of diverse, unforgettable characters: writers, translators, editors, publishers, agents, booksellers, critics, and scholars. Sometimes collaborating, sometimes clashing, they navigated daunting obstacles in a decades-long process that changed American literature. Featuring a lively, engaging style, this book represents a significant contribution to literary and translation studies, and, importantly, to the ever-evolving, ever-fraught American history of immigration." --Carol Apollonio, Research Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Duke University, USA

"This is an engaging and authoritative history of Russian literature in translation in the United States, and how Russian literature came to occupy such a central place in the American canon of translated literature. Maguire anchors her story on the remarkable career of Nicholas Wreden, and as her account shows, given Wreden's outsized role in popularizing Russian literature, it is puzzling that this is the first time his story has been told." --Ronald Meyer, Harriman Institute and Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University, USA

"Maguire's meticulously researched, informative and comprehensive study creates an impressive account of translation history of Russophone literature in America while also paying attention to translators' literary taste, ideological beliefs, and networks. This book provides a broad understanding of Russophone literary history in its global context. Insightful and engaging, Invading the American Canon will be of significant interest to scholars and students specializing in translation studies, Russian Studies, comparative literature, and cultural history." --Alexandra Smith, Reader in Russian Studies, University of Edinburgh, UK

"This marvelous contribution to the emerging field of Translator Studies, written by a sensitive British scholar during her research stay at Princeton and dedicated to Princeton's fireflies, vividly captures the paradox that translators' lives and artistic strategies - when considered within broad historical and cultural contexts - are no less important or interesting than the works they translate and bring to their respective audiences. In a way, Muireann Maguire discovers and materializes a new world (in the New World) of "invisible" translators who sought to create (make, unmake, and remake) the flavor and meaning of Russian literature for American readers across different historical periods. Pushkin once called translators the 'post-horses of Enlightenment.' Invading the American Canon shows that they are more like modest but beautiful fireflies in the dark night who, in Frost's words, 'achieve at times a very star-like start.'" --Ilya Vinitsky, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA

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