ABSTRACT
One might easily have known 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. Williams gets from the Latin American and Caribbean poetry he translated a certain neo-baroque quality—rich, layered with seemingly disjointed images and rhetorical turns—which seems emphatically at odds with the kind of sparse, lyrically straightforward, and materially based poetics for which he is more commonly known. Williams’s interest in Spanish, besides his personal attraction to it based on his mother’s identity—an identity he finds interesting but not as the driving basis for defining a poetics, much less an essentializing force on his personality—is due to his sense that Spanish offers greater opportunities for new techniques in translation. Williams published “Prelude in Boricua,” he published his own poem, “The Gentle Negress” in Palisade. He then published a different version of this poem in his own collection, The Wedge, in 1944.
