Reading across the Water: Plácido and Translation in Blake; or, The Huts of America

Abstract

This essay examines global networks and alliances in Martin Robison Delany's serialized novel, Blake (1859–60, 1861–62). I read Delany's writing on Cuban annexationism and the poet Plácido in relation to the voluminous writing about the latter that was circulating in the US and South American periodical press after the poet's public execution in 1844. I contend that Delany's novel performs what I call an "affective translation" of Plácido's poetry, an oblique translation that models itself on what Delany called "harmony in sentiment," which reproduces his anti-annexationist stance and sense of anticolonial fraternity. My essay sees the work of citation, literary interpretation, and translation as key factors in the novel's vision of hemispheric emancipation, topics I discuss in relation to the work of Delany's immediate contemporaries, including James McCune Smith, who was writing for some of the same newspapers and publications to which Delany contributed.