Can you sing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish? You could in 1919, when the federal government commissioned La Bandera de las Estrellas. John Philip Sousa was on the committee supervising this official translation. His very name symbolized patriotism. But try singing the national anthem in Spanish now, and you’re likely to be told, “Speak English or go back where you came from.”
Despite the government’s nod to Spanish speakers, America saw World War I as an opportunity to declare war on foreign languages. German was the language of the enemy, and a German version of the "Das Star-Spangled Banner," sung by German immigrants for sixty years, was suddenly verboten. Speaking English distinguished patriot from enemy, and English became the public way for immigrants to show they had cut ties with their past. Then, in 1924, Congress shut down immigration, and the “problem” of foreign languages all but disappeared for fifty years.
The 1965 immigration reform re-opened U.S. borders, and as a new wave of immigrants, not just from Europe but from around the globe, brought their languages with them, earlier efforts to enforce the use of English revived (see my last post on translating the Pledge of Allegiance).
When a new Spanish version of the Star Spangled Banner called “Nuestro Himno” hit the airwaves in 2006 to coincide with the May 1 “Day without Immigrants,” Pres. George W. Bush denounced it in a Rose Garden presser: “I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the National Anthem in English.”
Bush added, “One of the things that’s very important is when we debate this issue that we not lose our national soul.” The implication was clear: “our national soul” speaks only English.
The president’s reaction was hypocritical. The American “soul,” such as it is, has always been multilingual. Plus Bush had been no enemy of Spanish while he was growing up in multilingual Texas. He was the first American president to air a Spanish version of his weekly radio address. He often joined in the singing of a Spanish version of “The Star Spangled Banner” during his first presidential campaign. And a pop singer performed the national anthem in Spanish for Mr. Bush at his first inauguration.
There’s no reason to object to translations of the Star Spangled Banner. Composed in 1814, it was not a founding document like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and even those were translated so that would-be allies and nonanglophone Americans could understand the brand-new “national soul.”
Plus the Star Spangled Banner wasn’t the only national anthem. There was “Hail, Columbia,” with music composed in 1789 for George Washington’s inauguration, and words added in 1798. Once popular, it was soon forgotten. “America,” also known as “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” was composed in 1831, with words set to the tune of “God Save the King.” It was often considered the American national anthem, even though it was a rewrite--a translation, if you will--of the British national anthem.
The Star Spangled Banner didn’t become the official national anthem until 1931. But it too was a rewrite of an English song. In fact it was a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite. The tune that Francis Scott Key used for the Star Spangled Banner was composed in the 1760s and served as the music for “Anacreon in Heaven,” written around 1779 as the anthem for a British music and drinking club called the Anacreon. Then, in the 1790s, the same music was put to the words of “Millions Be Free,” a song celebrating the French Revolution.
“Millions Be Free” was a favorite of Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, and with a chorus praising “the decree / That tears off their chains and bids millions be free,” the song also became popular with English abolitionists. In 1796 it was reprinted in the United States as “Freedom Triumphant,” and it continued to evolve.
The Reign of Terror soured Americans on the French Revolution, and the Anacreon music was repurposed yet again by a New England poet also named Thomas Paine, to celebrate American independence under the title, “Adams and Liberty” (he was not the English Tom Paine who liked “Millions Be Free” and wrote “Common Sense”).
Francis Scott Key, a Baltimore lawyer, may have first encountered some or all of these forerunners in a song collection published there by Thomas Carr around 1800.
At any rate, in 1805 Key wrote and also sang “The Warrior Returns,” set, like all those earlier songs, to the Anacreon music, and commemorating a victory by Stephen Decatur and Charles Stewart over Barbary Coast pirates. “The Warrior Returns” contains phrases like “star spangled flag” and “the war’s desolation,” and its chorus ends with a couplet rhyming “wave” and “brave,” material that Key later recycled for the Star Spangled Banner.
"The Warrior Returns." Poet’s Corner, Maryland Gazette, December 19, 1805.
On the night of September 13, 1814, two years into the War of 1812, the British Royal Navy bombarded Fort McHenry, in Baltimore Harbor. Key watched the attack from a neutral "truce ship" in the harbor. In the morning, seeing that the fort had survived, he put new lyrics to “The Warrior Returns” and renamed it “The Defence of Fort McHenry.” His song was quickly reprinted in American newspapers, and Carr soon published the words and music as well.
Key’s “Defence of Fort McHenry” appeared anonymously in the American and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), September 21, 1814, p. 2, and was widely reprinted, even in England.
Key chose the Anacreon music for his songs though he had good reason not to do so. It had been associated with the French Revolution, which both the British and the Americans had stopped celebrating. And it was an abolitionist anthem, which could have been a deal-breaker for Key, who was a slaveholder. In addition, Key's law partner and brother-in-law was Roger Taney, who later, as Chief Justice of the United States, wrote the notorious Dred Scott decision declaring that slaves were property, not people.
There were objections to the Star Spangled Banner from the start. Its imagery is violent. Abolitionists complained the words should be “the land of the free and the home of the oppressed.” The text is confusing, with countless children puzzled by “the dawn’s early light”: to cite a well-known example, in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest, Ramona Quimby thinks a “dawnzer” is a kind of lamp. Plus the Banner is just too long: no one learns all four stanzas. And as amateurs and professionals will attest, it’s almost impossible to sing.
Despite all this, the patriotic status of the Star Spangled Banner is secure. But it’s a commonly-held belief that the language of both the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem—the same English used by British royalists, colonizers, and empire-builders, not to mention enslavers and secessionists—somehow embodies the enlightened spirit of American democracy, a spirit that can’t be expressed in words from other tongues.
That’s just not true. Translation is essential for understanding everything from sacred texts to literature to Italian opera to instruction manuals. And it's essential for civic texts as well. The goal of translation is not to sabotage the original but to make it available to a broader audience.
It’s a complex path from the theme song of a boozy London music club to a national anthem, but the backstory of the Star Spangled Banner reveals a process that’s certainly more complicated than translation.
The Star Spangled Banner is a national symbol, like La Marseillaise and God Save the King (or Queen). That status can’t be shaken by translation. In yet another attempt to include immigrants and refugees rather than deport them, in 1943 the national anthem was translated into Yiddish as “Di Shtern-Batsirte Fon” by the poet Avrom Aisen, known for his Yiddish translations of Byron, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Whitman.
Aisen's Yiddish translation of the Star Spangled Banner was published in New York by the Educational Alliance to commemorate the 100th yahrzeit of Francis Scott Key.
