One of the earliest translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was done in Armenian, the Library of Congress says in a Facebook post.
In 1854, just two years after the publication of the groundbreaking anti-slavery novel, the Armenian Catholic Mkhitarist congregation in Venice published the first translation, with an introduction railing against the horrors of slavery and the importance of its abolition.
In subsequent decades, the horrors of slavery depicted in the novel seem to have hit a nerve with the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian readership, the publisher’s main market. Several editions of the translation followed.
African and Middle Eastern Division holds copies of the second edition of the 1854 translation, published in 1906 and a subsequent edition published in 1928.
