Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge examines the ways in which U.S. and Latin American modernist canons have been in cross-cultural, mutually enabling conversation, especially through the act of literary translation. Examining eighteen U.S. and Latin American poets, my book is one of the few works of criticism to present case studies in U.S. and Latin American poetries in dialogues that highlight the social life and imaginative encounters obtained through methodologies of translation and innovations in poetic technique.

Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge examines the ways in which U.S. and Latin American modernist canons have been in cross-cultural, mutually enabling conversation, especially through the act of literary translation. Examining eighteen U.S. and Latin American poets, my book is one of the few works of criticism to present case studies in U.S. and Latin American poetries in dialogues that highlight the social life and imaginative encounters obtained through methodologies of translation and innovations in poetic technique.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.

Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, Scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one's own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations.

The Poetry of the Americas provides an expansive history of relations between poets in the US and Latin America over three decades, from the Good Neighbor diplomacy of World War II to 1960s Cold War cultural policy.

Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.