The 1847 Dutch Translation of the Life of Black Hawk Webinar from AADAS

The Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies invites you to:

A presentation on The 1847 Dutch Translation of the Life of Black Hawk

By Frank Kelderman, Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville

Zoom webinar

Thursday, March 31, 2022

12:00 pm EST

In 1846, Rinse Posthumous, a Protestant country pastor in the north of the Netherlands, received from a friend a copy of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, the as-told-to autobiography of the Sauk military leader Black Hawk. First published in Cincinnati in 1833, the Life was a best seller in the United States, but it was unfamiliar to Posthumous, who lived in a small village near the North Sea in the province of Friesland. Over the course of the year, he studied Black Hawk’s life story and began a translation of the text for Dutch readers, which he published in 1847. If Black Hawk can be regarded as the author of this autobiography, this makes Posthumous’s text the first foreign translation of a book-length work of Native American literature. This presentation will explore the textual history to trace what happened to Black Hawk’s life story in translation.

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