Aesthetic Radicalism: Langston Hughes’s Lost Translation of Federico García Lorca’s Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Langston Hughes’s long-lost translation of Federico García Lorca’s play Bodas de sangre / Blood Wedding (1933) – Fate at the Wedding (1938) – demonstrates a synchronicity between two 1930s aesthetic radicals who shared a transnational perspective. Through his act of translation, Hughes not only perpetuates and amplifies Lorca’s concern with social issues but he uses his own version of Lorca’s total theatre, with its graphic and sound effects, to deploy a unique blend of avant-garde European and fringe modernist styles of the Latin American and Caribbean worlds he knew intimately. Hughes’s act of translation opens a politicized space in the play that reveals his own aesthetic project, wrought in terms of colour, vernacular discourse, and a hybrid notion of American musicality and culture. He thus melds his subversive message with Lorca’s own and highlights the latent radicalism of the Spanish playwright’s aesthetics and politics. At a time when he was intensely politicized and often didactic in his writings on race and class oppression, Hughes chooses to infuse the experimental style of Lorca’s play with political potentiality, reading it as an internationalist study of the mechanics of oppression, without reducing it to a single political or racial reading.