Oy vey, can you see...

IF NOTHING ELSE, the controversy over "Nuestro Himno," the new Spanish-language version of "The Star-Spangled Banner," has offered a crash course in just how often immigrants have translated our national anthem.

On April 28, The Washington Post wrote in a front-page story that "musicologists could not name another foreign-language version" of the anthem--heightening the sense that this was a uniquely fraught moment in the history of language politics. But within days, commentators had turned up German versions dating to the mid 1800s, a Spanish-language version from 1919 created by the US government as part of a pro-assimilation campaign, and at least two Yiddish versions commissioned by Jewish groups in the 1940s. Awkwardly, given President Bush's statement last week that immigrants "ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English," it so happens that the State Department website presents its own Spanish-language version of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Er, make that four Spanish versions.

A few Web surfers even found themselves tentatively sounding out the first few lines of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Samoan ("Aue! Se'i e vaai, le malama o ataata mai"). Legislators in American Samoa have proposed that as the official translation for the island.

To scholars of immigration, nothing about the controversy is surprising. "It is pretty much history repeating itself," says Walter Kamphoefner, a professor of history at Texas A&M University, in an interview. "I do detect more vehemence when Hispanics are involved, with the exception of World War I, when everything German was suspect."

For historical context, Kamphoefner tells the story of one particular translation into German, from 1851, of "The Star-Spangled Banner." The translator, Kamphoefner thinks, was Hermann Seele, a founder of New Braunfels, Texas, a heavily German town, and his lyrics were sung at a ceremony at Galveston that same year. (A German version of the Declaration of Independence was also read there.)

That same translation was still being printed in the 1860s. In fact, Kamphoefner suggests, it may have been sung at times by all-German units of the Union Army, some of which used German as their "command" language. (As many as one in four Union soldiers was an immigrant, Kamphoefner says.) "Even if they were singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner auf Deutsch,' they understood the core principles of the United States better than many Anglophones of American birth who were whistling 'Dixie'," Kamphoefner wrote.

German versions of "The Star-Spangled Banner" only became controversial during World War I. The novelist Booth Tarkington was among those who demanded that children in bilingual public schools in his hometown of Indianapolis stop singing the anthem in German to start the day. (It's not just linguistic translations that get people in trouble. Igor Stravinsky was greeted with silence, in Boston in 1944, when he conducted a Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of his own orchestrated version of the anthem. The police showed up the next night to make sure he didn't play it again.)

Kamphoefner isn't the only scholar who thinks Americans have a sort of amnesia about the country's multilingual past. In the introduction to "The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature" (2000), the Harvard English professor Werner Sollors notes that the 1914 edition of the "Cambridge History of American Literature" had more than 60 pages devoted to home-grown, foreign-language literature. Yet for decades, American lit anthologies have been English-only--something Sollors and his Harvard colleague Marc Shell tried to remedy with their volume, which includes a slave narrative in Arabic, Gothic German fiction written in New Orleans, and Danish poetry from Minnesota.

Of course, this latest controversy raises two touchy issues. One is the question of translation; the other is fiddling with an iconic patriotic text for political purposes. The first stanza of "Nuestro Himno" is a poetic translation of Francis Scott Key's lyrics, but the second alludes to current debates ("My people fight on {hellip} it is time to break the chains"), while a much-discussed recorded version includes an overtly political spoken-word section in English ("Let's not start a war / With all these hard workers").

Yet there's a history to this tactic, too. The classic phrases of the Declaration of Independence, as well as its format (a list of outrages committed by an oppressor), have been borrowed many times for "declarations" by working men, feminists, and African-American activists. And this isn't the first time "The Star-Spangled Banner" has been politicized. During the Civil War, angered that Confederates were claiming the song, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a stanza that turned it into a pro-Union, even abolitionist manifesto: "By the millions unchained / Who their birthright have gained / We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained." Southerners may well have found that version as offensive as right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin finds "Nuestro Himno." She's dubbed it the "Illegal Alien Anthem."

Ilan Stavans, a professor of Latin-American and Latino studies at Amherst College, says that most immigrant groups, as they toggle between two languages, have been quite playful with iconic American songs and texts.

Stavans would know: He has translated the Pledge of Allegiance into Spanglish, the hybrid Spanish-English tongue popular in urban Latino neighborhoods. Stavans has read the pledge--"Yo plegio alianza a la bandera de los Unaited Esteits de America"--several times on English and Spanish-language radio. The world hasn't collapsed, and the only complaints he gets are from older Latino listeners who think he has desecrated their beautiful language.

Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net.