Cultural Identity, Translation, and William Carlos Williams

Fifteen years ago, one might easily have known about the work of William Carlos Williams without being aware that his mother was Puerto Rican or that he grew up in a bicultural, multilingual household (his father, though English, was raised in the Dominican Republic). While some critics continue to ignore Williams’s bicultural background—and thus maintain his image as the “non-ethnic” canonical figure to which we have been accustomed—certain trends in identity-based scholarship and pedagogy have allowed those who teach and write about Williams to feel comfortable enough now to emphasize the poet’s multicultural, diverse background.¹ In fact, other critics have gone as far as insisting that Williams’s Latin American ethnicity actually influenced his verse in ways previously ignored, which should determine how we now categorize his poetry. That is, it has become a question for some whether we call Williams and his work “American,” “Spanish American,” or “Boricua” (a synonym for Puerto Rican, from boriken, the island’s original name).² It is certainly not the case that Williams hid his ethnicity; he is the one, after all, who insisted on keeping his middle name in print. Considering the autobiographical and biographical works in which he acknowledges his own bicultural, multi-ethnic background, his repeated use of Spanish terms in his poetry, his critical praise for Spanish-speaking poets—not to mention his translations of Spanish and Latin American writers into English—one must admit that he made little effort to distance himself from his Latin American background.

But the insistence among some critics that he inflected or actively wielded his ethnic background in his poetry as a way of undermining what he considered a hegemonic American majority culture misconstrues and then confuses both Williams’s sense of himself and his poetic vision. There is no evidence, from him or others, that Williams would have considered either American immigrants (including former Latin Americans) or their children as anything but American in identity. Furthermore, nothing in his writing indicates he viewed himself or his mother as a minority—as the term is used today, that is, to describe someone institutionally hindered from receiving all the benefits of first-class citizenship enjoyed by the majority.³ So the overarching question I address concerns the particular ways in which Williams identified himself with Spanish and Latin American culture, especially as these affected his poetry.

I argue, first, that Williams, in his creation of what he called “the American idiom” (qtd. in Cohen 28), consciously attended to and utilized the language(s) and culture(s) of his local environment—beginning with those of his own childhood home, and then extending to those of the immigrants he lived among all his life—and that his aesthetic ideal of using the American English from “the mouths of Polish mothers” (Autobiography 311) assisted and confirmed for him his vision of a new American language.⁴ The Spanish literature and Latin American culture of his childhood, especially as they blended with the US mainstream culture of his hometown, created for Williams a model he would later see repeated in the other immigrant communities of his small-town locales. In this case, then, his relation to Spanish and Latin American culture is noteworthy for its particular effects on Williams as an immigrant culture, the first among many he experienced in childhood and later drew from in his creation of a poetry of the American idiom. Second, his familiarity with particular qualities of medieval and Renaissance/Baroque Spanish (that is, European Spanish) literature—to which his mother introduced him while he was young—confirmed for Williams his quasi-Romantic poetics of a local and ennobled working class people and culture. Finally, Williams’s conscious interest in and translation of Latin American verse ultimately affected his own poetry—offering him opportunities for exploring new poetic techniques and thereby transforming his own poetics of that fluid national idiom.

To claim that Williams was interested in an apparently single “American idiom” is not to say that he did not understand or acknowledge different cultures within that idiom. For Williams, the very presence...