"Gained in Translation": Building the African Diaspora Through Linguistic Transposition in 20th Century Poetry

This paper examines the relationship between language and diaspora by trying to look beyond the question of what befalls native tongues in the countries of arrival. The experience of forced migration undergone by African people brought to the Americas might have dispossessed them from their ancestral tongues, but it did not prevent them from aspiring to use language, be it the language of the former slave owner, to express their identity and shared historical experience. Using the example of American poet Langston Hughes and his Cuban peer Nicolás Guillén, this article will highlight the way poets from the African diaspora have influenced and translated each other as a way of bridging the linguistic and cultural gap brought about by history. The literature of the diaspora might well lie in that very rift, which calls for continued translation and rewriting of each other.