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From the 1870s to the turn of the century, an American literature was invented and performed in translation in the pages of the French elite journal, La Revue des deux mondes. Th. Bentzon, alias Madame Blanc, a French aristocrat enamored with the United States, was the chief actor in this performance that acquainted the French with American regionalists in the language of the Republic. But Bentzon’s transaction had a cost. Tailored to fit the French Republican paradigm at the very moment when France was engaged in redefining its regional and linguistic particularities, the many tongues and variegated dialects of post-bellum American literature could hardly pass in French as yet another patois. At the time when both France and the United States revisited their nation-building processes on different political grounds, the nation—Bentzon’s translations reveal—could only serve through a universal middle term authorizing equivalence. Translating regionalism required instead the revisiting of the epistemic foundations of translation itself and its conditions of possibility. As the key to Howells’s conception of “the nation as acquaintance” on the one hand and the challenge of the French Republic on the other hand, regionalism, this paper argues, was the litmus test of translation ; translating regionalism reveals what was at stake politically and epistemically in a search for national commensurabilities.