In part this interest resulted from the wartime activities of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, which sent several of our writers on lecture tours of South America and subsidized the publication of North American books that would not otherwise have appeared by paying for their translation into Spanish and Portuguese. Most of the books it subsidized were technical or historical; but the Office of Inter-American Affairs also arranged for the publication in Spanish of a two-volume anthology of contemporary North American writing, carefully edited by John Peale Bishop and Alien Tate, There would have been a growing interest in our literature without such encouragement, for the Latin Americans were excited by our entrance into the war, they were receiving very few books from Europe, and they were hearing from many unofficial sources about the younger North American novelists and poets. Hemingway, Steinbeck, KatherineAnne Porter, and Crane were among those and Brazilian intellectuals.
It is hard to gather accurate information about American literature in the Orient, where, generally speaking, the laws of international copyright are not enforced. In Japan before the Second World War, they did not even exist, as regards American books: a treaty negotiated under the first Roosevelt gave the Japanese permission to translate any American work without notifying the author. Not even squatter's right was recognized, and there was nothing to prevent five Japanese publishers from presenting five differently garbled translations of the same novel, as happened in the case of Gone with the Wind. Of three Japanese versions of Whitman, who had a large following, only one is said to have had any literary merit. Poe also--his fiction rather than his verse--was inaccurately rendered and widely read.
After 1930 the ruling clique in Japan tried hard to discourage "decadent" American influences, including the new American fiction; but Japanese publishers kept racing to press with competing versions of American best sellers. Main Street was a success in Japan; so too was Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, which was followed by translations of her later books (even those like The Patriot in which she condemned the Japanese invasion of China); while Gone with the Wind was the greatest success of all, having a sale in its various translations of more than half a million copies. At least twenty-four books by Upton Sinclair were translated into Japanese. A correspondent told him in 1931, "A term now often on the lips of people interested in modern literature is Sinkurea Jidal, which means 'The Sinclair Era.'" Many of the American proletarian novelists who flourished in the thirties had larger sales in Japanese, as in Russian, than they had in their own language; and the censors at first were rather easy-going. Leafing through the proof sheets of translations about to be published, they looked chiefly for Japanese equivalents of three words, "revolution," "people's," and "social." If the dangerous words were present, at first they merely deleted them before approving the book for publication; but later they deleted the whole chapters in which they appeared and, still later, they began throwing the translators and publishers into jail. Hide Ozaki, who had translated Agnes Medley's Daughter of Earth, was hanged in November, 1944, long after some of Sinclair's trans-lators had preceded him to the scaffold. Safire Judaic had ended.
There was also a Sinclair era in China, where at least seventeen of his books had been published by 1930. Six more were then in process of translation, but nobody in this country, it would seem knows whether they appeared. In China the business of publishing foreign books is not only piratical, as it has been in Japan, but also completely unorganized. Any bookstore in Shanghai is likely to issue its own translations without notifying its rivals, let alone the American authors. Some of these authors have been widely read. There were, for example, at least three translations of The Good Earth, one of which was cut and garbled; the other two were widely discussed in the Chinese press, where some of the reviewers--a minority, as might be expected--thought that Mrs. Buck had presented a true picture. Gone with the Wind appeared in one or more unauthorized translations. Lao Shaw, the author of Rickshaw Boy, reported for the Chinese writers born after 1910 that their chosen American author was Eugene O'Neill, who was also most influential with the educated public as a whole. Other favorites were Steinbeck and Saurian.
In India the educated classes read many or most of their American books in the British colonial editions. Whitman, with what might be called his profound smattering of Eastern philosophy, has always had followers there; the greatest of these was Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi read Thoreau, who contributed to his philosophy of nonviolent resistance; also, according to nephew Marinades Gandhi, he read "most if not all" of Upton Sinclair. No study has been made of recent translations into the various Indian languages; but it is known that The Good Earth was rendered at least into Bengali, and possibly into others as well, while various books by Sinclair have appeared in Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Urdu, Tillage, Marathi, and Singhalese.
Beyond a doubt, Sinclair is the most widely translated novelist of the twentieth century not read for pure entertainment. By 1938 there had been 713 translations of his various books, which had then been published in forty-seven languages and thirty-nine countries. There are several reasons for Sinclair's international popularity. Shortly after he wrote The Jungle, which traveled round the world within two years of its American publication in 1906, he was adopted as a favorite author by the international working-class movement in both its main branches, the Menshevik and the Bolshevik, later the Social Democratic and the Communist. But his books were also read by the middle classes in most of the countries where they were allowed to circulate, partly because they all told straightforward, rapidly moving stories, but chiefly because each of his novels, besides being a story, was a well documented journalistic survey of some aspect of American life: an industry, a city, a political movement, or a celebrated trial. The world-wide interest in Upton Sinclair was also an interest in America as a whole.
From any survey of American books abroad, however incomplete it may be, we gain a somewhat different picture of American literature at home. We learn, for example, that it has been richer and more varied than most of us had suspected from merely reading our choice of each season's new fiction or factual reporting. The export of American literary works has not been standardized, like that of Detroit automobiles; instead each country has been choosing the American books that met its particular tastes. Sometimes these books have been the work of authors little known in the United States who achieved their widest fame in Europe or Asia. Sometimes American writers have been adopted and, as It were, given honorary citizenship by the differ-ent countries to which their minds appealed; so that Faulkner in France, Hemingway in Russia (like Jack London and Mark Twain before him), O'Neill and Pearl Buck in Scandinavia, Thomas Wolfe in Germany, Waldo Frank in Latin America, and Upton Sinclair in many parts of the world, but especially in the Orient, have come to be regarded as almost native authors.
At the same time, there are some American books that have swept across the world without pausing at national boundaries. Not a few of them were critical of American standards, and the reason for their popularity is not hard to explain: foreign readers like to be told that not everything is perfect in the land of the jukebox and the low-priced automobile. Most of the universally read books, however, were either adventure stories (a commercialized branch of fiction in which our writers have a long tradition of technical skill), or they were epical novels on the scale of Gone with the Wind and Grapes of Wrath--it did not matter, apparently, whether they dealt with the past or the present, from a conservative or a radical point of view, so long as they filled a canvas as big as the top of a covered wagon, and so long as they told a story that everyone could follow.
Story, or narrative, according to the English critic Lovat Dickson, is one of two qualities that distinguish recent American fiction. "To the outside observer," he said, "it seemed suddenly to become characteristic of all American entertainment and to mark it off quite sharply from the English equivalent. Story suddenly became of first-rate importance, and appreciation of narrative became a marked American characteristic." The other quality Dickson mentioned was gusto. "Today it seems to us in England," he said, "the essential, distinctive, and enviable quality of American fiction. Somewhere and somehow, in the American novel towards the end of the post-war decade, solemnity was miraculously shed and in its place appeared a new virility as mysteriously and suddenly as the works of Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett had appeared in eighteenth-century England."
French critics were more impressed by other qualities of American fiction (or by the same qualities under different names): they mentioned its intensity and singleness of emotion, its earthy dialogue, its delight in physical violence, and what they called its "pure exteriority," a term they applied to the practice common among American novelists of presenting character in terms of speech and action, without auctorial comments, as if they were writing for the stage. Russian and Czech critics were deeply impressed by the technical discoveries of our novelists, whom they studied very much as American writers used to study Flaubert. Critics of all nations felt that they were dealing with a unified body of work. For that is our second impression after a survey of American books abroad: besides being immensely varied, they also possess a family resemblance that has not always been recognized at home. "American," said one French critic "is not so much a nationality as a style."
During the first half of this century, the position of American literature in foreign countries has been completely transformed. It was still regarded, before 1900, as a department of English literature, a sort of branch factory that tried to duplicate the products of the parent firm. After 1930 it came to be regarded as one of the great world literatures in its own right, and perhaps, as regards contemporary work, the greatest of them all. But this transformed position was not merely a secondary result of the growth in economic and military power of the American nation; it was also an independent development that testified to a change in the literature itself. Europeans were not slow to recognize that there had been a literary revival here after 1910; and they showed the same hospitality to the new writers of the interwar period that they had shown, a century before, to the writers of the New York and New England renaissance.
Conclusion
Mark Twain is the most famous American writer in our country. His books are being read in our country for more than one hundred years already, and interest to his creative activity is still not decreased.
Opposite, we can boldly say that with each new generation, who opens for themselves Twain's books, the attention of the reader to Twain becomes broader and deeper.
The personality of a writer constantly causes sympathy and respect because of unrestrained gaiety of the early Twain and, anger and bitterness of the late Twain.
During his known trip to USA in 1906 A.M. Gorky had got acquaintance with Twain. The former characterized the outstanding humorist as following:
"Beside on his large skull there were splendid hair, - somewhat like wild stripes of white, cool fire.” - enchanted by the old writer, Gorky wrote.” From beneath heavy, always half-lowered ages, there is vividly seen a clever and sharp, brilliance, sculpture eye, but, when they are taken a look straight in your face, you feel that all wrinkles on him are measured and will remain for ever in memories of this person.
With the help of the Twain's books, tales, journeys, we get acquainted with the American folk, American history, their customs, and the beauty of the American nature. The Great Russian poet Nicolay Aseev wrote: “I am very fond of Mark Twain. He, with the only one wave of his hand, instantly carries me to the bank of the majestic Mississippi river. And I see in the silver depths the life of the people of the Mississippi.”
We also feel the same delight of Mark Twain when he, as a real patriot of his country, criticizes his own country. The Russian writer Yury Olesha expressed the thoughts of all our folk, when he wrote, “Mark Twain threw all his genius to the service for humanity, to the fortification of humans' belief in them, to the help of soul development aside to fairness, good and beauties!” And these words seem to us as the best to show the significance of Mark Twain for humanity.
Bibliography
1. Albert В.Paine. Mark Twain. A Biography. Vols.1-2, 1982 Harvard University press pp.483, 511
2. A.Paine Mark Twain and his works Washington 2002 pp.160-161
3. А.Старцев Жизнь и творчество Марка Твена М. ИХЛ 1976 стр 23, 45-46, 79, 112-113, 255
4. History of the American Literature M. High School 1987 pp.223-224
5. Internet: http:// www.marktwainhouse.org/mark_twain.htm
6. Internet: http://www. etext.virginia.edu/railton/ Charles Wyett In-depth look at the writer. txt
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11. Mark Twain Collection of works NewYork 1997 pp.156-159, 274-276, 279, 412
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13.·Mark Twain The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer L. High School 1974 pp. 34,47, 89, 113-114
14. Mark Twain. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court M. Drofa 2003 p.134, 163, 222, 267
15. Mark Twain quotations Prentice Hall Publishers 2001 pp.34, 46, 172, 228, 291
16. Philip Phoner Twain Prinston, 1998 p.145
17. Readings on modern American Literature M. High School 1977 pp. 177-229
18. The Correspondence of Samuel L.Clemens and William D.Howells. 1872-1910. Vols. 1-2. Harvard Universily Press, 1960 pp. 284, 287, 312
19. World Book Encyclopedia New York 1993 Vol. 21 pp.597-600
20. Юрий Олеша Заметки о Твене М. Детская литература 1975 стр. 11
21. Юрий Олеша. Ни дня без строчки. М., 1965, стр. 216-220.
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