Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation

Historians have long been translators and users of translations. Their discipline’s commitment to making what is distant in space and time comprehensible demands it. But they have written surprisingly little about historical translation as an art, a social activity with a history of its own, and a means of contact between different cultures.

In our round table “Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation” historians from ten countries begin to create an international history of what may be the most unabashedly universalistic American document. They identify moments when the Declaration of Independence figured in public discourse in their particular countries, the people who admired or attacked it, the ways it was appropriated or rebuffed, the distortions, transformations, and insights embodied in particular translations.

The stories are full of surprises. How could a Nazi achieve a more empathic translation of the declaration’s republicanism in the 1940s than republican French revolutionaries produced in the 1780s? Why was the declaration more important in faraway Japan than in Spain, an early ally of the United States, or in Mexico, a neighbor?

The universal is always particular. The history of the Declaration of Independence outside the United States both bears out and challenges the document’s universalist assumptions of shared human aspirations and reason. Almost everywhere translators successfully conveyed the document’s central message. And almost everywhere the message resonated only in times of political crisis and only when it seemed useful to movements with deep local roots. By rendering translations of the declaration back into English and examining the different choices translators made to bring its universalist sentiments to local readers, contributors to the round table show us the original document through new lenses.

The round table as a whole suggests broad questions: What circumstances make societies open to words and ideas from outside? Who are the cultural mediators and how do they find their audiences? How do people intertwine and fuse local traditions, borrowed ideas, and the lessons of experience? In short, how do societies learn?

Visit the Web companion to the special issue, where readers will find translations of the declaration into some of the languages referred to in the round table, as well as retranslations into English. http://www.chnm.gmu.edu/declaration/

• Foreword,
  by Willi Paul Adams and David Thelen (pp. 1280–82)
• The Historian as Translator: An Introduction,
  by Willi Paul Adams (pp. 1283–88)
• Individual Creativity and the Filters of Language and Culture: Interpreting the American Declaration of Independence by Translation,
  by David Thelen (pp. 1289–98)
• French Translations and Reception of the Declaration of Independence,
  by Elise Marienstras and Naomi Wulf (pp. 1299–1324)
• German Translations of the American Declaration of Independence,
  by Willi Paul Adams (pp. 1325–49)
• Tradurre/Tradire: The Declaration of Independence in the Italian Context,
  by Tiziano Bonazzi (pp. 1350–61)
• The Mexican Declaration of Independence,
  by Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (pp. 1362–69)
• Jeffersons Declaration of Independence in the Spanish Political Tradition,
  by Joaquim Oltra (pp. 1370–79)
• The Hebrew Translation of the Declaration of Independence,
  by S. Ilan Troen (pp. 1380–84)
• The Declaration of Independence in Poland,
  by Jerzy Kutnik (pp. 1385–88)
• The Declaration of Independence: A View from Russia,
  by Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov (pp. 1389–98)
• The American Declaration of Independence in Russian: The History of Translation and the Translation of History,
  by Marina A. Vlasova (pp. 1399–1408)
• The Declaration of Independence in Japan: Translation and Transplantation, 1854-1997,
  by Tadashi Aruga (pp. 1409–31)
• East Is East and West Is West: Did the Twain Ever Meet? The Declaration of Independence in China,
  by Frank Li (pp. 1432–48)
• Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Linguistic Parity: Multilingual Perspectives on the Declaration of Independence,
  by Eugene Eoyang (pp. 1449–54)
• Appendices
• 1. Declaration of Independence (pp. 1455–57)
  2. The Historian as Translator: Initial Proposal (pp. 1458–60)

The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War, 1861–1900

Many high school students first learn about the lived reality of the Civil War by reading Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage. Alice Fahs reveals that the novel is a poor guide not only to the war but to contemporaries’ view of it. Fahs shows that Crane’s influential novel invented a masculine world of war that had not been dominant in northern literature during the war itself. Instead, much popular wartime literature, including short stories, essays, poems, and cartoons, feminized the war, portraying women’s home front experiences as central to the meaning of the struggle. Examining interconnections among the literary marketplace, popular culture, and collective memory, Fahs explores the late-nineteenth-century demise of feminized understandings of the war. (pp. 1461–94)

The Other Suburbanities: African American Suburbanization in the North before 1950

By the end of World War 11, the United States was becoming a suburban nation. But what was the characteristic suburb? Who lived there? And why? Reinterpreting suburban history, Andrew Wiese argues that working-class Americans played important roles in shaping the suburban pattern before 1950. Focusing on an African American suburb of Cleveland, Wiese argues that African Americans moved to the suburbs for many of the same reasons as middle-class whiteshome ownership, open space, and family-centered community life. But-as members of a working class and migrants from the rural black South-they pursued a distinctive suburban vision that suggests real divergences in approaches to economic and family life among twentieth-century suburban Americans. (pp. 1495–1524)

• Textbooks and Teaching: A Reintroduction, by Peter Filene and Peter Wood (pp. 1525–26)
• “Out of the Streets and into the Classroom? The New Left and the Counter culture in United States History Textbooks,” by Bruce J. Schulman (pp. 1527–34)
• “Teaching the Children of the Vietnam War,” by (pp. 1535–37) Peter Filene
• “Interdisciplinary Explorations in the History of Children, Adolescents, and Youth—for the Past, Present, and Future,” by (pp. 1538–47) Harvey J. Graff