Langston Hughes (1902–67), the wondering wandering poet, has left behind a rich legacy of books that never grow dusty on the shelves. There seems to be no path that Hughes left untrodden; he wrote drama, novels, short stories, two autobiographies, poetry, journalistic prose, an opera libretto, history, children's stories, and even lyrics for songs, in addition to his translations. Hughes was the first African American author to earn his living from writing and his career spans a long time, from the 1920s until the 1960s – he never stopped writing during this period. The Harlem Renaissance introduced prominent black writers who engraved their names in the American canon, such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, but Hughes markedly stands out for his artistic achievements and longer career. Hughes had been identified by many as the spokesperson for his race since his works dug deep into black life, and his innovative techniques embraced black dialect and the rhythms of black music. He captured the essence of black life with conspicuous sensitivity and polished his voice throughout four decades. His name also had long been tied to the politics of identity in America. Brooding over his position, Hughes chose to take pride in being black in a racist nation. In his case, the dialectics of identity are more complicated, as they encompass debates involving Africa, black nationalism and competing constructions surrounding a seeming authentic blackness, in addition to Du Bois's double consciousness. Critics still endeavour to decipher the many enigmas Hughes left unresolved, having been a private person and a controversial writer. His career continues to broach speculative questions concerning his closeted sexual orientation and his true political position. The beginning of the new millennium coincided with the centennial of his birth and heralded the advent of new well-researched scholarship on his life and works, including Emily Bernard's Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (2001), Kate A. Baldwin's Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (2002), Anthony Dawahare's Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box (2002), Bruce R. Schwartz's Langston Hughes: Working toward Salvation (2003), and John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's edited collection Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes (2007), among others.

Two books published recently – Vera M. Kutzinski's The Worlds of Langston Hughes: Modernism and Translation in the Americas (2012) and David E. Chinitz's Which Sin to Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes (2013) – probe deeper into the oeuvre of Hughes in two different, albeit complementary, approaches. The books make new hay in Hughes scholarship by investigating his position with regard to “fringe modernism” and analysing his testimony before the McCarthy subcommittee, thus filling in a critical gap in this scholarship. Kutzinski's The Worlds of Langston Hughes is written from a critical standpoint informed by translation studies, modernism and the African diaspora, in which translation is a deeply imbricate practice. Kutzinski interrogates the cultural and political forces that shaped translations of and by Hughes, while simultaneously examining the challenges posed by him and his translators in producing these works. She demonstrates the crucial role played by such translations and juxtaposes Hughes's poetry with other more celebrated modernist writers to show that his poems were, to a large extent, painted by the same brush. She lays much emphasis on cities that served as a backdrop to Hughes's different encounters and contributed to his forging a modernist consciousness. Kutzinski finally extrapolates her interpretation of Hughes's McCarthy hearings as an example of mistranslation. Chinitz's Which Sin to Bear?, which was published one year after Kutzinski's book, also examines the same hearings but from the perspective of ethical compromise or noncompromise. At stake in Which Sin to Bear? is the question whether Hughes was really able to stand his ground ethically or whether he yielded by deciding to ride the wave instead of standing up to the storm. Chinitz's book is mainly concerned with Hughes's battle with identity and art and focusses on problematic notions of authenticity and compromise in his career. This volume explores the long road that Hughes had to take amid a painful labyrinth of oppressing structures of race and class. Chinitz closely examines Hughes's blues poetry and his innovative experimentation that always aimed at realizing his vision of his understanding of racial authenticity. He also dives into the notion of compromise and traces Hughes's ambivalent critique of Booker T. Washington as an endeavour by which to better comprehend the former's stance towards compromise. The arguments in both books attempt to attain a critical purchase on Hughes's legacy by seeing him from different angles and by contextualizing his life and works in new topographies.

In The Worlds of Langston Hughes, Kutzinski retreads familiar terrain. She carries on from where she started in her earlier research on comparative studies in Against the American Grain: Myth and History in William Carlos Williams, Jay Wright, and Nicolás Guillén (1987), translation in The Daily Daily Nicolás Guillén (1989), and Latin American literature in Sugar Secrets (Cuban Nationalism) (1994). Her new monograph roams “the worlds” of Langston Hughes in which translation assumed centre stage in his status in the African diaspora, and it also broadens the contours of a perspective that had long imprisoned Hughes within the boundaries of folk and protest poetry to read his work from a modernist point of view. Kutzinski is not the first to give Hughes's opus this reading. Jeffrey Schwartz's “‘Luani of the Jungles': Reimagining the Africa of Heart of Darkness,” Robert Young's “Langston Hughes's Red Poetics and the Practice of ‘Disalienation’” and Sandra Govan's “The Paradox of Modernism in The Ways of White Folks,” all published in John Edgar Tidwell and Cheryl R. Ragar's Montage of A Dream (2007), locate Hughes's writing in the modernist school. Furthermore, Seth Moglen's “Modernism in the Black Diaspora: Langston Hughes and the Broken Cubes of Picasso,” published in Callaoo,Footnote ¹ highlights the convergence of modernist poetics and the African diaspora in Hughes's writing. However, Kutzinski's work is significant as it offers valuable scholarship in a contemporary review which builds upon and goes beyond their work and underpins Hughes's literary output in the canon.

Kutzinski argues that despite the myriad biographies of Hughes and in addition to his own authored autobiographies, a part of him remains undisclosed and so, in this regard, translations of and by Hughes can help in unravelling this hidden aspect. She limits the focus to Spanish translations of Hughes's poetry, especially in Cuba and Argentina, through which he attained his poetic status in Hispanic America to show how “African diaspora, black internationalism, and modernism” have been intertwined in his life and legacy (3). Kutzinski shifts the focus from London and Paris as the sole representative metropolises of modernism and argues that Harlem, Havana, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Madrid witnessed the same modernist upsurge in literature which she calls “fringe modernism” (8).

Examining Hughes's two autobiographies in the first chapter, Kutzinski argues that the diegeses of their narratives introduce the African American subject interacting internationally in other tongues and thereby generating multilayered meanings, and hence extending the boundaries of African diaspora to transcend the Atlantic world and produce rich modernist texts with “no closure, only more openings” (55). In chapters 2 and 3 she scrutinizes Spanish translations of Hughes's poetry as he attracted Hispanic American poets because he emblematized the darker brother oppressed by the white master, and he also emblematized the politically rebellious poet who defied imperialism. Although his translators made many changes to his poetry to suit their own purposes, they sought to obtain a more universal audience for his work by going beyond the US American context. However, they showed little interest in his blues poetry since it was considered to be too African American to be appropriated for a different cultural milieu.

Kutzinski moves on in the fourth chapter to provide an in-depth examination of the project on which Hughes collaborated with Ben Carruthers and for which they translated Nicolás Guillén's poetry into English in Cuba Libre (1948), thereby demonstrating how they worked hard to adapt Guillén's Afro-Cuban dialect to an African American vernacular and deal with the dilemma that race relations remained very different in both cultural contexts. She compares how each of these writers made their individual choices in translation and argues, in particular, that Hughes's choices were founded upon his own political convictions and his growing apprehension of being categorized as a “Communist sympathizer” (139). This resulted in many differences in the final product regarding both translators' syntax and structure, which Kutzinski explains as a conflict not in aesthetics but rather “between the ‘field of cultural production’ and a larger ‘field of power’” (178). The last chapter examines Hughes's testimony at McCarthy's hearings and the poems that were held against him as evidence of his “subversive ways” (186). Kutzinski employs translation as her tool in reading Hughes's Congressional records in order to highlight how his questioners endeavoured to read those poems as communist pieces and doubted Hughes's intention in writing them, thereby rendering the whole interrogation a mistranslation, not a translation, of his work.

Kutzinski's book, with its thorough analysis, insightful critique, rigorous scrutiny, profound close readings, well-selected illustrations, unique turn of phrase, and comprehensive indexing and rich notes, is undoubtedly a real contribution to the field. Approaching Hughes as a translator and as a translated poet across the Americas, the book opens up a new progeny for reimagining America “as an area that is not beholden to a single, national or regional, set of values” and sheds much light on the part played by translation in creating links among writers of the African diaspora (236). Kutzinski successfully contextualizes Hughes's work in the modernist canon, which had usually tried to segregate black and ethnic writings from its corpus, and from which writers like Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Melvin Tolson and Ralph Ellison had been excluded despite their valuable contributions to this school. Hughes scholars buttressed this exclusion by laying all emphasis on his commitment to the vernacular, to Marxism, and to popular forms of black music, which were always seen as not even remotely related to Eliot's modernist wasteland. It was only recently that his scholars embarked on a reassessment of his works from a modernist standpoint.

In their chapters in Montage of A Dream, Schwartz, Young and Govan locate in Hughes's work a modernist praxis. Schwartz examines Hughes's “Luani of the Jungles” (1928) as a (re)vision of Conrad's Heart of Darkness in a double-layered narrative with multiple voices that inverts Conrad's racist and stereotypical depictions of Africa and Africans, and asserts Hughes's modernist subversion of the “white” text. Young reads Hughes's proletarian poetry through the prism of a poetic practice that he calls “disalienation,” in which Hughes successfully blended his vernacular culture with Marxism. Young places Hughes between Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht, and argues that the real impetus behind these works was Hughes's own modernist sense of alienation. Govan, however, investigates what she coins the “paradoxes” of modernism in Hughes's The Ways of White Folks (1934) and concurs that Hughes borrowed from modernist tenets to suit his own themes in this collection of short stories. Kutzinski's book adds much to their work on Hughes as a modernist. In her analysis, she deeply underlines his sense of both physical and emotional alienation inside and outside the USA as conveyed by his modernist techniques of writing. Furthermore, she widens the scope by including his work on translation in the Americas as a means of creating a cultural coalition of literary relations that were fundamentally modernist in their views and methodologies. In her work, Hughes is set on an equal footing with pioneering modernists such as Eliot and Ezra Pound, and Kutzinski's analysis of his poetry wipes away any accusation of his being simple or shallow and thereby perfectly validates her call to reconceptualize Hughes's poetic renderings as modernist.

The book's only potential drawback is the final chapter, which does not sit as neatly alongside the other chapters as it should do. Despite Kutzinski's profound analysis of Hughes's testimony, the tool of mis/translation is used metaphorically and in ways which strike a different chord from how translation was approached in the previous chapters. The chapter is definitely related to her earlier discussion of Hughes's translation of Guillén and his concerns about his reputation, but it runs short of persuasion when compared with the other chapters and hardly serves the argument on Hughes's modernist contribution or his position in the African diaspora, which are integral parts of the book. However, the book should be of much value to scholars interested in African American literature, modernism, comparative studies and also translation studies. Kutzinski limns judicious links between these areas of study and produces an antinationalistic kaleidoscopic perspective that brings African diaspora, translation and modernism together.

In Which Sin to Bear? Chinitz states from the beginning that his focus “is neither biographical nor psychological, but literary – critical and cultural,” a focus which he scrupulously realizes in his book (3). Over his long career, Hughes had to wrestle with scores of fetters arising from race, poverty, politics and culture, while striving to retain his art as the distinguished voice of the ordinary black man in America. Hughes's measures of survival inevitably had to include identity issues, professional predicaments and compromising ethical stances of various kinds. The notion of authentic blackness had long been closely related to Hughes, but it was not an inherent gift, as Chinitz argues; it was something that he worked quite hard to achieve. Hughes helped in constituting and reconstituting black authenticity by shifting many of its grounds, and his scope of black life was never exclusionary. Chinitz acknowledges that Hughes had to make many compromises which remain difficult to judge. He undertakes the hard mission by averring that “how Hughes felt about the incursion of moral compromise into his life … can only be extracted, pieced together, from his writings on related subjects” (6). Hughes certainly left many porous boundaries for his scholars to outline, and Chinitz takes up the challenge.

The first chapter, in order to come to grips with debates surrounding constructions of black authenticity, traces the diligent journey on which Hughes embarked in his early stages and which played a fundamental role in his forging of his identity and art, where authenticity “is not a matter of ontology but representation” (11). In Hughes's case as an African American writer, authenticity is related to black folklore, the blues and Marxist ideologies. Chinitz argues that Hughes achieved authenticity according to his own definition. In addition to his blues poetry, Hughes authenticated himself and his constructions of blackness by aligning himself with his black subjects since he was never a member of the working class. He also learnt to master the South as he had always been a northerner who powerfully understood the extent to which an authentic blackness was “partly a matter of geography” (31). The second chapter examines his technical experimentation to mirror these constructions of black authenticity by looking at his use of “persona, blues poetry, and dialect” (45). Hughes's authenticity was not limited by static folk roots; it embraced urban and modern aspects of black life. Chapter 3 focusses on Hughes's blues poetry as a performance of authenticity. For Hughes, the blues spirit catches the authentic moment by providing a “compensatory expression of conflicting feelings” (69). By manipulating coherent structures and measured syntax, Hughes succeeds in avoiding poeticizing the blues and captures the musical performance in language.

The fourth chapter shifts the focus to what Chinitz oxymoronically calls “the ethics of compromise.” Throughout his long career, Hughes had to concede to making ends meet by accepting white patronage, denying certain political inclinations, yielding to his publishers, writing commercial pieces or cooperating with the infamous McCarthy Senate subcommittee. Hughes's actions remain ambivalent, for “Hughes was an intensely private person, and his autobiographies often encode his thoughts and feelings in seemingly innocuous anecdotes” (88). Chinitz relates this ambivalence to Hughes's shift from radical socialism to left liberalism in the 1950s. The fifth chapter analyses Hughes's testimony at the closed session before McCarthy's subcommittee, which was first declassified in 2003. Hughes's answers waver between straightforwardness and manoeuvring as, taking “refuge behind the intricacy of the literary work and the complex relation of author to creation, he sought to conceal his own views” (117). Chinitz examines the notion of “cooperation” from different perspectives by delineating how it was seen as both heroic for people who tried to be prudent and unheroic for others who believed in confrontation, especially in relation to Hughes's “cooperative” testimony. The last chapter takes compromise a step further by introducing Booker T. Washington. It draws on Hughes's equally ambivalent judgement of Washington, who is usually positioned as emblematic of compromise in African American history. Various examples of Hughes's ambivalent writings are provided and Washington eventually emerges from his body of work as “a ‘tragic’ figure because he was at once sympathetic and doomed” (175).

Chinitz provides his readers with cogent close readings, nuanced analyses, and comprehensive notes. His book nails home its themes and perfectly fulfils its titular promise of depicting authenticity and compromise. The argument retains an obvious coherence. Chinitz adopts a transnational framework that challenges approaches that have typically restricted assessments of Hughes by focussing too narrowly on racial authenticity or his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” as his blueprint for the issue of racial authenticity. The argument is further enriched by examining the less-looked-at writings of Hughes, mainly his journalistic prose. Christopher De Santis's “The Essayistic Vision of Langston Hughes” in Montage of A Dream draws attention to Hughes's essays from the 1930s until his death. However, De Santis does not discuss Jesse B. Semple/Simple, which appeared in 1943 as a weekly column for the Chicago Defender. Chinitz fills in this gap and thoroughly investigates both characters featured in this column: Simple the black bartender and his foil the white interlocutor, showing how both have the potential to act as Hughes's mouthpiece and voice his opinions, especially during the turmoil of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

The two chapters on the blues poetry of Hughes are also a great addition. The reading of Hughes's experimenting techniques with the blues offers new and revisionary scholarship on his contribution to the genre. Stephen Tracy's groundbreaking Langston Hughes and the Blues, first published in 1988, and republished in 2001 with a new introduction, lays the emphasis on folkloric and musical contexts. Tracy, as a blues musician, adopts a folkloristic approach in his interpretation of Hughes's blues poetry. He asserts that Hughes's target was to be authentic in employing the genre as an American art least tinged by African and European influences. Chinitz's analysis has much to add to this point; he also stresses the notion of authenticity but from another viewpoint. Hughes's blues poetry is read as a technical experimentation that seeks to reestablish the foundations of black authenticity in order to embrace the urban and the modern instead of focussing solely on the rural South. Chinitz gives brilliant close readings of the blues poems and highlights Hughes's poetic craft. Through avoiding syntactic closures, injecting elements of performance, carefully placing the line breaks, and employing syncopation to complicate the rhythm, in addition to a nuanced revival of black dialect, Hughes not only creates racial authenticity, but also performs it. An interdisciplinary tour de force, scholars of African American poetry, literary criticism, history and the blues will find Chinitz's book profoundly illuminating and very informative.

In an exemplary study with so many points of strength, there is only one shortcoming which is worth mentioning. Chapter 5 argues that Hughes's adoption of the Popular Front–left liberalism discourse was a sudden shift in his line of thought and not a betrayal as it had been seen by some of his critics and even friends. Chinitz bases his notion upon the fact that Hughes realized that this discourse would deliver his message of seeking social justice and obliterating racial discrimination better than communist rhetoric. Being contextualized within the framework of compromise, Chinitz's defence of Hughes lacks conviction, for it is greatly undermined by the very examples he cites in chapter 4 as evidence of Hughes's compromise, upon which Chinitz comments, “Hughes compromised expediently, and consciously so” (87). Other examples provided as proof of Hughes's ambivalence, particularly from his testimony before McCarthy's subcommittee, actually exhibit compromise more than ambivalence. But Hughes definitely left many greyish zones that raise a host of questions. In The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (2000), Susan Duffy entertains the possibility that the real compromise by Hughes was joining the radical socialists in the 1930s to sustain his writing career, since communism seemed then to have been in the air. Chinitz's argument would have been more persuasive if he had engaged with Duffy and her reading of Hughes's inclination. But Hughes's testimony as analysed in Chinitz's book captures Hughes in a stoop-without-conquering situation in which he was willing to turn his back against his previous beliefs, works and comrades so long as he got cleared by his interrogators and saved his literary career.

Despite their shortcomings, The Worlds of Langston Hughes and Which Sin to Bear? are daunting reads and they fill in a lacuna in the reappraisal of his works. The new readings adumbrate Hughes's position in “fringe modernism” and his experience in the treacherous terrains of politics in the McCarthy era. They set up a strong foundation for future readings of Hughes's hearings which can help in solving many of the puzzles related to Hughes's ambiguous choices. They raise important questions for future research concerning Hughes's own understanding of racial authenticity, his true stance towards compromise, and his modernist contribution in poetry. The basic premises of the two books are well organized and provide valuable textual exegeses for their readers. Both books suggest that a new undertaking of a critical reassessment of Hughes's life and works is imperative. The arguments in both works are thought-provoking; they generate myriad discussions, prompt a great deal of debate and call for further critical review concerning Hughes as an American, not only an African American, writer. The books are commendable scholarly achievements that effectively add to the existing huge literature on Hughes and aver that Hughes's life and works are not an outworn tale.