Invading the American Canon: Translators of Russian Literary Fiction, 1863-1984

(Hardback)

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Through case studies of migr 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 Weiner, and Nathan Haskell Dole. Throughout the 1900s these translators made Russian literature, from Nobel prizewinners like Solzhenitsyn to obscure migrs like Mark Aldanov, accessible to American readers. Some literary translators were also publishers, like Nicholas Wreden (1901-55), at different times a bookseller at Scribners, 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 migr 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 Wredens 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 the University of Exeter.

Author Bio

Muireann Maguire is Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. She is the author of Stalin's Ghosts: Gothic Themes in Early Soviet Language (2021), and co-editor of Translating Russian Literature in the Global Context (forthcoming, 2024) and Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature (2021). She is also an active freelance translator from Russian to English.