Day One: Thursday February 15
10:30–12:00 Marta Aponte Alsina, author of La Muerte Feliz de William Carlos Williams
ADD
1:30–2:45 “Cultural Identity, Translation, and William Carlos Williams,” Peter Ramos, English Department, Buffalo State College
ADD
3:00–4:15 William Carlos Williams and Translation: Julio Marzán and Peter Ramos (Facilitator: Jonathan Cohen)
Our panel will focus on Williams’s literary translations, both real and imaginary. Throughout his career as a writer, he produced a wide variety of translations. He translated poetry from Spanish (more than thirty poets), French, classical Greek, and classical Chinese. He also translated fiction and drama from Spanish and fiction from French. His work as a translator paralleled and at times intersected with his own original work. We will address the following questions:
- How should Williams’s method of translation be defined, especially his translation poetics?
- What impact did Williams’s translation work have on his development as a poet, novelist, short story writer, and playwright?
- How should Williams’s translations be considered in terms of his achievement as a writer?
Special attention will be given to his Spanish translations, with reference to his 1916 “Spanish-American Number” of the little magazine Others and his translation of Luis Palés Matos’s “Preludio en Boricua.” In addition, the imaginary translation technique of his style will be discussed, with reference to his poems “Hymn to Love Ended (Imaginary Translation from the Spanish)” and “Translation” (early title, “Imitation of a Translation”).
6:30–8:00 “William Carlos Williams in Mayagüez: The Poet and his ‘Line,’” Julio Marzán
A condensed history of my following Williams’s pursuit of his understanding of himself. Williams’ secretive family made his past a mystery to him and he built a personal history with what he knew, extrapolating also a literary lineage, the ambiguity compacted into the metaphor [his] “line,” always written in quotation marks. This “line” originates with his mother Elena’s birth in Mayagüez and informs all his work even as it fades from surface visibility in the gamut of his contributions, to modernism, to aesthetics, to poetics. That “line” also gave his writing roots in Spanish literature, which in his day also meant writings of “Spanish” America. But in the course of his life, Elena’s purer Europhilic Hispanic “line” from which he first saw himself descending became more specific, impure, racially mingled––in other words, American–– especially after his having visited a Puerto Rico, in 1941, that contradicted his mother’s nostalgic remembrances. His personal silence suggesting no impact of that visit is contradicted by the evidence of his writings. Nor did Williams publicly react to the post–1945 migration of darker and working class islanders, presumably not his “line.” For a decade that unmentioned migration was his background, bequeathed by Elena, when he visited Mayagüez in 1956, an invitation that he accepted with the purpose of gathering more material for the last book that he would publish in his lifetime, ironically the book on the matrix of his “line,” Elena. That book filled in gaps omitted in The Autobiography, notably completing their Caribbean history in a way that also tacitly associated Elena with the postwar migration that he never publicly acknowledged as also part of his “line.”
Day Two: Friday February 16
1:30–2:30 “Recovering William Carlos Williams’s ‘My Excellency’: The Puerto Rican Drama of Luis Rechani Agrait in the American Idiom,”Jonathan Cohen, Independent Scholar
My paper focuses on the translation from Spanish that William Carlos Williams made in the early 1940s of a major dramatic work by Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rechani Agrait (1902–1994), namely, Mi señoría (“My Excellency”). This translation, as-yet unpublished, resulted from Williams’s acquaintance with Rechani, whom he met during his first visit to Puerto Rico in 1941 when attending the First Inter- American Writers’ Conference. The conference was held at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, where the play—a political farce—had debuted the previous fall. Rechani gave Williams the published playscript. A three-act play, it was Rechani’s first play to be staged, and it received high critical praise. Williams and Rechani had much in common in terms of their literary aesthetics and political sensibilities. Coincidentally, drama was center stage in Williams’s creative life at the time. Before and after going to Puerto Rico, he was at work on his play Trial Horse No. 1, which ultimately became Many Loves, his most successful play. Rechani had brought Mi señoría to the attention of a new theater company formed in 1940 to produce experimental theater in search of a national identity, the first company of its kind in Puerto Rico, dedicated to a vital dramaturgy of genuine national character—like the poetry of the American idiom that Williams himself sought. Set in an “imaginary country” that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression with its high unemployment and labor unrest, Mi señoría deals with the plight of an idealistic but naïve man, Buenaventura Padilla, in a corrupt political system. (The name Buenaventura literally means “good fortune” in Spanish, ironically here.) After twenty years of fighting for social justice and for his Workers Party to gain control of his country, Buenaventura finally becomes President of the Chamber of Deputies, in effect the national leader, by resorting to the same unethical methods that his enemies used successfully in past elections. Once in office, he tries to bring about much- needed social reforms, but the uneducated and unscrupulous characters he appoints to government positions abuse their power and betray him. The play is successful as political satire largely because of Buenaventura’s comic language, with his grandiloquent style combined with stunning malapropisms and clownish errors in history and grammar. As translator, Williams used his skill with vernacular to create real dialogue and to control the timing of it for maximum comic effect. The dialogue in the play often resounds with the coarseness of language used by the working class, like the language of his patients and other Jersey locals he portrayed in his short stories throughout the 1930s. He knew it well and could effectively create in his American idiom an accurate equivalent of the Spanish. Beyond that, he included Spanish words for a dimension of Spanglish in the dialogue that resists domestication of the source text. In sum, my paper provides an analysis of Williams’s “My Excellency” as the translation relates to his own creative ambitions in theater and his embrace of Puerto Rican writing.
Excerpt from the play translation
2:45–3:45 “‘I bless the muscles of their legs’: Williams in the Time of Polio,”María del Pilar Blanco, Trinity College, Oxford
This paper deals with an apparent absence in the publicly available record of William Carlos Williams’s time as a family doctor specializing in paediatrics: the outbreaks, treatment, and eventual cure of poliomyelitis. Williams’s medical career coincides with the rise in consciousness about, and peak of, this disease in the United States. It represents an ongoing search through Williams’s prose, poetry, and notes for direct and oblique references to his knowledge of, and apprehensions about a disease that, in his time, loomed ever larger in the tristate area, affecting the wellbeing and social lives of children. It is also an attempt to situate Williams, the family doctor who observed children so closely, within a wider historical moment where contagion, debility, and disability in children faced radically different medical approaches – from eugenicist thought (displayed in such films as The Black Stork (1917), produced by Dr Harry J. Haiselden, who promoted euthanasia for “defective” infants) to increased advocacy for the disabled.
Day Three: Saturday February 17
9–10:15 “Medicinal Poetry: Words, Places, Code-Switching, and Healing in William Carlos Williams’s Language,”Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Ph.D., Departamento de Humanidades,Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mayagüez
Upon some personal reflection on William Carlos Williams’s connections to Mayagüez, his family connections to Judaism, and a period-specific look at the neighborhood where his mother lived on Calle Méndez Vigo, in this paper I argue that the structure of WCW’s poetry was constrained by the medical prescription pads he used to take notes; that his precise use of language joins the physical nature of his profession with his art; and that the depths of his achievement can best–and perhaps only–be understood through his Puerto Rican links, including those to his uncle, who had a medical clinic at 57 Calle Marisol (since renamed Betances/Post).
Este ensayo será translingüe, realizado entre español e inglés, cosa que coordina el argumento con las claves metalingüísticas—pero también lingüísticas—de la práctica poética de Williams, y también con su vida.
10:30–11:45 “Reading the Shore From the ‘Edge, Unseen’: Kamau Brathwaite’s Tidalectics in William Carlos Williams’s ‘Flowers by the Sea,’”María del Carmen Quintero Aguiló, Department of English, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.
The aim of this paper is to re-read, re-member and thus reflect upon William Carlos Williams’s “Flowers by the Sea” through Kamau Brathwaite’s Tidalectics. By utilizing the central image/metaphor of an old woman endlessly sweeping sand on an unnamed beach in the North-Jamaican coast, the shore serves to re-present the Caribbean subject’s ability to straddle cultures, histories, ethnicities, races, and physical shores by forever being in flux and in submarine geological contact, paving the watery way to dismantle the Western Nature/Culture divide, which in turn has also severely affected the Caribbean in various economic and geopolitical aspects. Taking various perspectives on the shore as a space for identity formation, ritual, creation, and reflection, “Flowers by the Sea” can be read with the intent to re-member the imagist landscape poem and reassemble it as a Tidalectic poem that showcases the beach/shore as its primal conceit.
El propósito de esta ponencia es re-leer, re-ensamblar, y por ende refleccionar sobre el poema de William Carlos Williams titulado, “Flowers by the Sea,” a través del neologismo del poeta Kamau Brathwaite llamado la marealéctica. Utilizando la imagen/metáfora central de una mujer anciana barriendo arena en la costa norte de una playa desconocida en la isla de Jamaica, la costa sirve como re-presentación de la habilidad Caribeña para habitar varias culturas, historias, etnias, razas y costas al estar contínuamente en flujo y en unión geológica submarina abriendo caminos líquidos para desmantelar el binario de la naturaleza y la cultura que ha impactado el Caribe en múltiples aspectos. Tomando en cuenta varias perspectivas sobre la costa como espacio para la forjación de identidades, ritual, creación/poiesis y reflección, el poema de Williams puede ser leído/interpretado como un poema marealéctico el cual revela la costa como metáfora central.
10:30–11:45 Discussion (Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Ian Copestake, Jonathan Cohen): themes, questions, prospects for further work and collaborations. (Moderator: Mark C. Long)
