Cultural Identity, Translation, and William Carlos Williams

Abstract

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.

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