The poet Langston Hughes used to be a tireless global traveller and a prolific translator, editor, and marketer. Translations of his personal writings traveled much more greatly than he did, incomes him adulation all through Europe, Asia, and particularly the Americas. In The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Vera Kutzinski contends that, for writers who're a part of the African diaspora, translation is greater than only a literary perform: it's a truth of lifestyles and a manner of pondering. concentrating on Hughes's autobiographies, translations of his poetry, his personal translations, and the political lyrics that introduced him to the eye of the notorious McCarthy Committee, she exhibits that translating and being translated-and frequently mistranslated-are as very important to Hughes's personal poetics as they're to figuring out the historic community of cultural family members referred to as literary modernism.

As Kutzinski maps the trajectory of Hughes's writings throughout Europe and the Americas, we see the awesome volume to which the translations of his poetry have been in dialog with the paintings of alternative modernist writers. Kutzinski spotlights towns whose position as assembly locations for modernists from around the world has but to be absolutely explored: Madrid, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico urban, and naturally Harlem. the result's a clean examine Hughes, now not as a solitary writer who wrote in one language, yet as a global determine on the middle of a world highbrow and inventive formation.