The role of translation in Langston Hughes's creative processes, literary production, aesthetic growth, and international influence provides a new and fruitful vantage-point for a reinterpretation of Hughes's oeuvre. Hughes's translations of Regino Pedroso, Nicolás Guillén, Jacques Roumain, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Louis Aragon, Federico García Lorca, Gabriella Mistral, Léon G. Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor demonstrate that the aesthetic failures and contradictions attributed to Hughes's radical-socialist poetry actually reflect engagements with the literary palettes of foreign-language agendas—political and otherwise. These divergent visions, in turn, allowed multiple versions of Hughes to serve as a celebrated literary forefather to several black poetic movements including négritude and poesía negra throughout the Hispanic and Francophone worlds of the twentieth century, to be conceptualized within a framework of cultural exchange shaped, in part, by Hughes's translating and translators. The dissertation's methodology draws upon recent trends in the fields of Translation Studies, Literature of the Americas, and Literature of the African Diaspora. It reflects a commitment to interrogate the individual creative processes of reading, writing, and rewriting that are part and parcel of an exploration of both Hughes's practices of translation and those of his translators. At the same time, it underscores the extent to which these processes and practices are embedded in the evolving ideological and historical contexts that surround literary production and translation in the Hispanic, Francophone, and African American literary worlds. The dissertation draws upon extensive archival material from Yale's Beinecke Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile to make arguments about translation in relation to literary practices, production, and institutions—from the impact of correspondence between authors, translators, and publishers on literary production to the impact of heretofore uncovered translations, manuscripts, drafts and abortive literary efforts on Hughes's subsequent publications and literary relationships.