translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views ISSN 2065 - 3514
(2008) Year I, Issue 1
Galaţi University Press
Editors: Elena Croitoru and Floriana Popescu (First volume)
Proceedings of the Conference Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views
9 – 11 October 2008 “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, ROMANIA
pp. 17 - 28
BLACK IDENTITY IN RICHARD WRIGHT’S BLACK BOY
Sorina Chiper
“Al. I. Cuza” University of Iaşi, Romania
In 1846, when the question of genuine American literary creation
became topical, Theodore Parker bemoaned that: “We have no American
literature which is permanent.” (Davis, 1985: xxi) This overtly critical view
was refined in 1856 when, in his oration on The American Scholar, he found
an outlet of American originality:
So we have one series of literary productions that could be written by
none but Americans, and only here; I mean the Lives of Fugitive Slaves.
But as these are not the work of the men of superior culture they
hardly help to pay the scholar’s debt. Yet all the original romance of
Americans is in them, not in the white man’s novel. (Davis, 1985: xxi)
The pragmatic and political use to which slave narratives were put,
rallied as they were in the Abolitionist cause, fossilized them into strict
conventional forms. In the article “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their
Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” James Olney (1984) provides a
comprehensive list of the generic features of slave narratives: an engraved
portrait, signed by the author; the title page, with the eager specification
“written by himself” or “written by a friend”; testimonials and/or one or
several prefaces/introductions by a white abolitionist friend, by a white
amanuensis or editor in charge of the text which is declared “plain” and
“unvarnished;” a poetic epigraph, and then the narrative as such, followed
by an appendix comprising documentary material, reflections on slavery,
newspaper items, sermons, and poems.
Stephen Butterfield argues that “The ‘self’ of black autobiography is
not an individual with a private career, but a soldier in a long, historic
march towards Canaan.” (1974: 2-3); it “is a conscious political identity,
drawing sustenance from the past experience of the group, giving back the
iron of its endurance fashioned into armor and weapons for the use of the
next generation of fighters.” (1974: 3) As far as the autobiographical form is
concerned, he considers that
17