SOURCE: "Charles Brockden Brown, Translator," American Literature, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, March, 1972, pp. 1-12.

In the following essay, Tichi contends that Brown's 1804 translation of F. de Volney's A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States reveals Brown's nationalistic bias.

In his lifetime Charles Brockden Brown translated one work only: C. F. de Volney's A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States. For the novelist-editor-critic and, as of 1803, political pamphleteer, the translation of Volney in 1804 seems an odd choice, Although he was America's formost litterateur, Brown rendered into English no romantic tale in the tradition of Chateaubriand's Atala, but "the first book to give an organized synthesis of the physiographic and geologic regions of the United States and of the climatology of the continent."¹ The choice for translation seems doubly puzzling when we consider that a London English language edition was already available in...