{"id":36,"date":"2023-06-13T14:59:12","date_gmt":"2023-06-13T14:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/?page_id=36"},"modified":"2024-02-06T14:26:54","modified_gmt":"2024-02-06T14:26:54","slug":"abstracts","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/abstracts\/","title":{"rendered":"Abstracts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Day One: Thursday February 15<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>10:30\u201312:00 Marta Aponte Alsina, author of <em>La Muerte Feliz de William Carlos Williams<\/em><\/strong><em><br><br><\/em>ADD<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>1:30\u20132:45<\/strong> <strong>\u201cCultural Identity, Translation, and William Carlos Williams,\u201d Peter Ramos, English Department, Buffalo State College<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">ADD<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>3:00\u20134:15 William Carlos Williams and Translation: Julio Marz\u00e1n and Peter Ramos (Facilitator: Jonathan Cohen) &nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Our panel will focus on Williams\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>How should Williams\u2019s method of translation be defined, especially his translation poetics?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>What impact did Williams\u2019s translation work have on his development as a poet, novelist, short story writer, and playwright?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>How should Williams\u2019s translations be considered in terms of his achievement as a writer?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Special attention will be given to his Spanish translations, with reference to his 1916 \u201cSpanish-American Number\u201d of the little magazine Others and his translation of Luis Pal\u00e9s Matos\u2019s \u201cPreludio en Boricua.\u201d In addition, the imaginary translation technique of his style will be discussed, with reference to his poems \u201cHymn to Love Ended (Imaginary Translation from the Spanish)\u201d and \u201cTranslation\u201d (early title, \u201cImitation of a Translation\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>6:30\u20138:00 \u201cWilliam Carlos Williams in Mayag\u00fcez: The Poet and his \u2018Line,\u2019\u201d Julio Marz\u00e1n<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A condensed history of my following Williams\u2019s pursuit of his understanding of himself. Williams\u2019 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] \u201cline,\u201d always written in quotation marks. This \u201cline\u201d originates with his mother Elena\u2019s birth in Mayag\u00fcez 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 \u201cline\u201d also gave his writing roots in Spanish literature, which in his day also meant writings of \u201cSpanish\u201d America. But in the course of his life, Elena\u2019s purer Europhilic Hispanic \u201cline\u201d from which he first saw himself descending became more specific, impure, racially mingled\u2013\u2013in other words, American\u2013\u2013 especially after his having visited a Puerto Rico, in 1941, that contradicted his mother\u2019s 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\u20131945 migration of darker and working class islanders, presumably not his \u201cline.\u201d For a decade that unmentioned migration was his background, bequeathed by Elena, when he visited Mayag\u00fcez 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 \u201cline,\u201d Elena. That book filled in gaps omitted in <em>The Autobiography<\/em>, 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 \u201cline.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Day Two: Friday February 16<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>1:30\u20132:30 \u201cRecovering William Carlos Williams\u2019s&nbsp; \u2018My Excellency\u2019: The Puerto Rican Drama of Luis Rechani Agrait in the American Idiom,\u201dJonathan Cohen, Independent Scholar <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u20131994), namely, <em>Mi se\u00f1or\u00eda <\/em>(\u201cMy Excellency\u201d). This translation, as-yet unpublished, resulted from Williams\u2019s acquaintance with Rechani, whom he met during his first visit to Puerto Rico in 1941 when attending the First Inter- American Writers\u2019 Conference. The conference was held at the University of Puerto Rico-R\u00edo Piedras, where the play\u2014a political farce\u2014had debuted the previous fall. Rechani gave Williams the published playscript. A three-act play, it was Rechani\u2019s 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\u2019s creative life at the time. Before and after going to Puerto Rico, he was at work on his play <em>Trial Horse No. 1<\/em>, which ultimately became <em>Many Loves<\/em>, his most successful play. Rechani had brought <em>Mi se\u00f1or\u00eda <\/em>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\u2014like the poetry of the American idiom that Williams himself sought. Set in an \u201cimaginary country\u201d that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression with its high unemployment and labor unrest, <em>Mi se\u00f1or\u00eda <\/em>deals with the plight of an idealistic but na\u00efve man, Buenaventura Padilla, in a corrupt political system. (The name Buenaventura literally means \u201cgood fortune\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cMy Excellency\u201d as the translation relates to his own creative ambitions in theater and his embrace of Puerto Rican writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/From-MY-EXCELLENCY-Rechani-Williams.pdf\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/From-MY-EXCELLENCY-Rechani-Williams.pdf\">Excerpt from the play translation<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>2:45\u20133:45 \u201c\u2018I bless the muscles of their legs\u2019: Williams in the Time of Polio,\u201dMar\u00eda del Pilar Blanco, Trinity College, Oxford<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This paper deals with an apparent absence in the publicly available record of William Carlos Williams\u2019s time as a family doctor specializing in paediatrics: the outbreaks, treatment, and eventual cure of poliomyelitis. Williams\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 from eugenicist thought (displayed in such films as The Black Stork (1917), produced by Dr Harry J. Haiselden, who promoted euthanasia for \u201cdefective\u201d infants) to increased advocacy for the disabled.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Day Three: Saturday February 17<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>9\u201310:15 \u201cMedicinal Poetry: Words, Places, Code-Switching, and Healing in William Carlos Williams\u2019s Language,\u201dJeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Ph.D., Departamento de Humanidades,Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mayag\u00fcez &nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Upon some personal reflection on William Carlos Williams\u2019s connections to Mayag\u00fcez, his family connections to Judaism, and a period-specific look at the neighborhood where his mother lived on Calle M\u00e9ndez Vigo, in this paper I argue that the structure of WCW\u2019s 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&#8211;and perhaps only&#8211;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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Este ensayo ser\u00e1 transling\u00fce, realizado entre espa\u00f1ol e ingl\u00e9s, cosa que coordina el argumento con las claves metaling\u00fc\u00edsticas\u2014pero tambi\u00e9n ling\u00fc\u00edsticas\u2014de la pr\u00e1ctica po\u00e9tica de Williams, y tambi\u00e9n con su vida.&nbsp; &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>10:30\u201311:45 \u201cReading the Shore From the \u2018Edge, Unseen\u2019: Kamau Brathwaite\u2019s Tidalectics in William Carlos Williams\u2019s \u2018Flowers by the Sea,\u2019\u201dMar\u00eda del Carmen Quintero Aguil\u00f3, Department of English, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Mayag\u00fcez. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The aim of this paper is to re-read, re-member and thus <em>reflect<\/em> upon William Carlos Williams\u2019s \u201cFlowers by the Sea\u201d through Kamau Brathwaite\u2019s <em>Tidalectics<\/em>. 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\u2019s 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, \u201cFlowers by the Sea\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">El prop\u00f3sito de esta ponencia es re-leer, re-ensamblar, y por ende refleccionar sobre el poema de William Carlos Williams titulado, \u201cFlowers by the Sea,\u201d a trav\u00e9s del neologismo del poeta Kamau Brathwaite llamado la<em> mareal\u00e9ctica<\/em>. Utilizando la imagen\/met\u00e1fora 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-presentaci\u00f3n de la habilidad Caribe\u00f1a para habitar varias culturas, historias, etnias, razas y costas al estar cont\u00ednuamente en flujo y en uni\u00f3n geol\u00f3gica submarina abriendo caminos l\u00edquidos para desmantelar el binario de la naturaleza y la cultura que ha impactado el Caribe en m\u00faltiples aspectos. Tomando en cuenta varias perspectivas sobre la costa como espacio para la forjaci\u00f3n de identidades, ritual, creaci\u00f3n\/<em>poiesis<\/em> y reflecci\u00f3n, el poema de Williams puede ser le\u00eddo\/interpretado como un poema <em>mareal\u00e9ctico<\/em> el cual revela la costa como met\u00e1fora central.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>10:30\u201311:45 Discussion (Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Ian Copestake, Jonathan Cohen): themes, questions, prospects for further work and collaborations. (Moderator: Mark C. Long)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Day One: Thursday February 15 10:30\u201312:00 Marta Aponte Alsina, author of La Muerte Feliz de William Carlos Williams ADD 1:30\u20132:45 \u201cCultural Identity, Translation, and William [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-36","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/williamssociety.org\/biennialconference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}