Julio Marzán

William Carlos Williams’s “lost” translation of Luis Rechani Agrait’s masterpiece. William Carlos Williams’s passion for his matrilineal Puerto Rican roots led him to visit Puerto Rico for the first time in 1941. There at a writers’ conference, he befriended the playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, who gave him his play Mi señoría, staged to acclaim the previous year. My Excellency, as Williams calls the play in his translation, is a political farce set in an “imaginary country” that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression, with its high unemployment and labor unrest. The play focuses on the plight of an idealistic but naive man, Buenaventura Padilla, in a completely corrupt political system. Through an unscrupulous election, he becomes the nation’s leader. The play is successful as a satire largely because of Buenaventura’s hilarious language—recreated by Williams—with its pompous style combined with stunning malapropisms and clownish errors in history and grammar. The play’s very title is a laughable malapropism. My Excellency shows the corrupting power of success and the tragic flaw of materialism. Driving the comedy in Williams’s translation is his firm command of the play’s dialogue interwoven with popular idioms in which the charm of pure nonsense abounds. This edition is Luis Rechani Agrait’s debut as a playwright in English.

Seventies "Hispanics," identifying with Latin American emergence and increasing immigration to the U. S., adopted the epithet 'latino', soon written as Latino. Media fast-tracked, English Latino would eventually tilt presidential elections, advocate national programs, and protest policies, with native and immigrant subgroups presumed homogenous. Enunciated identically as 'latino' and presumed to be 'latino' or its exact translation, "Latino" proved to be a transliteration that since its coining started diverging from 'latino'. Latino became the political mask of unity over discrete subgroups; its primary agenda identity politics as a racialized, brown consciousness divested of its Hispanic cultural history. In contrast, 'latino' retains its Spanish transracial semantics, invoking an 'hispano' cultural history. Nationally Latino represents the entire Hispanic demographic while internecinely not all subgroups identify as Latinos. Latino is defined by immediate sociopolitical issues yet when needed invokes the 'latino' cultural history it presumably disowns. Intellectual inconsistency and semantic amorphousness make Latino a confusing epithet that subverts both speech and scholarship. Collective critical thinking on its semantic dysfunction, deferring to solidarity, is displaced with politically correct but circumventing tweaks, creating Latino/a, Latin@, Latinx. On the other hand, Latino exists because its time had come, expressing an aspiration for a more participatory identity in a multicultural America. Julio Marz n, author of 'The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams', suspends solidarity to articulate the intellectual challenges of his Latino identity. Writing to academic standards in a style accessible to the general reader, Marz n argues that from 'latino' roots Latino evolved into an American identity as a demographic summation implying a culture that actually origin cultures provide, ambiguously an ethnicity and a nostalgic assimilation. "Latino" are American-germane sociopolitical extrapolations of 'latino' experiential details, the often-conflicted distinction illustrated in Marz n's equally engaging essays that revisit iconic personages and personal events with more nuance than seen as Latino.

The Glue Trap and Other Poems is a volume in which range should be read as trajectory, the personal and the social as reciprocal metaphors, in which my speaker's voice aspires to the credibility of a masterful monologue and my monologues aspire to the credibility of my truest voice, spoken and formal language converging in artifice as sincerest sense, the genuine.

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) produced a startling number of translations of both Spanish and Latin American poetry starting during WWI and continuing through the late fifties. Williams grew up in a Spanish-speaking home and sometimes described himself as half-Spanish. His mother was Puerto Rican and his father spoke Spanish fluently. “Spanish is not, in the sense to which I refer, a literary language,” Williams wrote in his Autobiography. “It has a place of its own, an independent place very sympathetic to the New World.” Williams approached translation as a way not only to present the work of unknown Spanish poets, but also to extend the range and capacity of American poetry, to use language “with unlimited freshness.” Included in this bilingual edition are beautifully rendered translations of poets well-known — Neruda, Paz, and Parra — and lesser-known: Rafael Are´valo Marti´nez (from Guatemala), Rafael Beltra´n Logron~o (from Spain), and Eunice Odio (from Costa Rica).