Injury and intimacy The queer transfiguration of racialized exclusion in Langston Hughes's translations of Nicolas Guillen

Langston Hughes's translations of Nicolas Guillen in Cuba Libre (1948) can aid in the theorization of the interrelation between race and eroticism. Hughes's versions actualize a space of exclusion that frustrates easy identification with either a priori African American or Afro-Cuban communities; this is a space wherein the very real hurts of racist oppression and the struggle between black subjects can be shared. There he brings into relief the trials and pains of black bodies by approximating their presence through lyric forms resembling speech and song. Their pained presence incorporates a kind of textual eroticism. This queer intimacy has the potential to seduce readers - white and black alike; it can draw readers into a similarly exilic state where they feel the injuries of the figures represented in the translations. In this way, Hughes implicitly levies upon his North American audience a shared responsibility for cultivating a new social world. Translation by black lyricists such as Hughes generates a new understanding of queerness as an eroticized effect of a literary resistance to discourses that racialize, and thus exclude, embodied subjects.