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By Word of Mouth

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Jonathan Cohen

October 2011

Patrick Dunagan

After more than fifty years of James Laughlin’s New Directions publishing the work of William Carlos Williams, to have yet another new collection is a splendid surprise. Although many of these translations already appear in Williams’s Collected Poems, when all are gathered together from these separate sources and placed in company with a few other renegade poems not found there, the continuing necessity of considering the influence of Williams’s biracial heritage upon his work is evident. To not recognize this aspect of Williams’s identity is to risk missing a key component of his poetry. This is a danger editor Jonathan Cohen notes with his assertion that “Pound failed to understand that Williams identified himself as American because of his Hispanic background.” The multi-layered cultural identity of Williams celebrates the rich, fertile brewing ground that the Americas remain.

After more than fifty years of James Laughlin’s New Directions publishing the work of William Carlos Williams, to have yet another new collection is a splendid surprise. Although many of these translations already appear in Williams’s Collected Poems, when all are gathered together from these separate sources and placed in company with a few other renegade poems not found there, the continuing necessity of considering the influence of Williams’s biracial heritage upon his work is evident. To not recognize this aspect of Williams’s identity is to risk missing a key component of his poetry. This is a danger editor Jonathan Cohen notes with his assertion that “Pound failed to understand that Williams identified himself as American because of his Hispanic background.” The multi-layered cultural identity of Williams celebrates the rich, fertile brewing ground that the Americas remain.

The collection begins with translations first attributed solely to the poet’s father, William George Williams, originally appearing in the small avant-garde magazine Others, of which Williams was an associate editor at the time. Cohen argues for their inclusion based on the fact that during the same period, father and son collaborated on a translation of Rafael Arévalo Martínez’s story, “The Man Who Resembled a Horse.” As Williams later writes, “In his last years when [my father] was getting ready to die [of colon cancer] I tried to invent ways to keep him entertained, one of them happened to be to help me translate Rafael Arévalo Martínez’s story.” In Cohen’s opinion, “another, surely, was the translation project for Others,” as he notes, “George Williams was very much a traditionalist in his own literary taste, and naturally inclined towards translating poetry in the prevailing Victorian manner, not in the ‘new verse’ manner of Carlos Williams, using colloquial speech without rhyme and abandoning meter for measure.” While Cohen’s reasoning is sensible enough, he also offers further assurance from Williams’s biographer, Paul Mariana: “I have a strong sense that they really did work together on these.”

And in case of further doubt, Cohen’s annotations to José Santos Chocano’s poem “The Song of The Road” (La Canción del Camino) offer the opening lines as rendered by John Pierrepont Rice for comparison with Williams’s own translation. As with all of Cohen’s excellent annotations, the soundness for inclusion of this work as identified with Carlos Williams is redoubled in strength. Here are the first four lines in Chocano’s Spanish: “Era un camino negro. / La noche estaba loca de relámpagos. Yo iba / en mi potro salvaje / por la Montaña andina.” Here is Rice’s version: “The way was black, / The night was mad with lightning; I bestrode / My wild young colt upon a mountain road.” And here is Williams’s: “It was a black road. / The night was mad with lightnings. I was riding / my wild colt / over the Andean range.” Not only does the immediacy of Williams’s version irrefutably announce it as a product of the Modern Age—“It was a black road” and “I was riding” as opposed to the Victorian happenstance of “The way was black” and “bestrode”—but Williams carries over Chocano’s specificity as well, retaining its locality as “Andean range”—”Montaña andina”. Insisting a focus on what the words are (“lightnings”), not necessarily how they function, Williams doesn’t seek to gloss over the texts with any additional polish. If there’s a grade of evaluation he seeks to be met with his testing of the English language’s ability to carry the Spanish, it is what in later years he terms as the American Idiom, his contribution towards an international conversation of poetry.

The second section of the collection, “And Spain Sings / 1930s,” is comprised of poems from Spain dating “from around the fifteenth century (possibly older) and also from the late 1930s, specifically, the years of the Spanish Civil War,” the event of which devastated Williams. These translations provide him with opportunity to explore his own interests in, as well as show his support for, the continuing strength of the imagination as evidenced in Spanish poetry. One noted result of this shared conviction among writers of the time is And Spain Sings: Fifty Loyalist Ballads Adapted by American Poets, where several translations by Williams appear.

The third and final section, “Sweated Blood / 1940s & ’50s,” contains translations of Latin American poets. Many are poets Williams had the opportunity to meet. Quite a few were also texts brought to his attention by Rutgers professor José Vázquez-Amaral, who after much struggling became “in 1971, founding chairman of the new Spanish and Portuguese Department” there. Also included is a poem by Williams’s own mother Raquel Hélène (Elena) Rose Hoheb Williams, “her only poem!” And with a nice bit of panache, the final poem is Eunice Odio’s “To W.C.W.,” written after a visit to his home where she had felt she was “facing a true poet.” For Odio: “En el estaba contenida / la enramba.” (Or, as Williams phrased it, “The whole arbor / is contained in him.”)

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