At a time when the vogue of “hybridity” in literary studies seems all but exhausted, here comes a book written with learning and simplicity about a poet’s ingrained craft in bicultural poetics. Such is Julio Marzán’s knowledge of poets and poems that the seven chapters of his book can be easily imagined as a seminar sequence on William Carlos Williams’ work and literary biography, as well as a workshop on poetic practice itself. In language less opulent than George Steiner’s still unsurpassed After Babel, Marzán examines the hermeneutics of translation at the core of poetry. He observes how idioms and phrases and hidden echoes and allusions in William Carlos Williams’ poems, essays, and novels convey the urge to translate themselves, to migrate into “alter images,” as one chapter title puts it.
The poet’s bridge, or allegory of passage, from past words and images to present ones —explored in chapters 2 (“The Female Totem”) and 6 (“Inherited Souls”)—embodies the transfigured presence of his mother, Raquel Helene Rose Hoheb, “born in Mayagüez . . . to a mother originally from Martinique and a Puerto Rican father of Dutch ancestry, both of whom had died by the time she was fourteen” (p. 43). Her burnished and layered presence in the son’s poetry far exceeds her central role in Yes, Mrs. Williams and the Autobiography. As Marzán shows, with exemplary command of detail, the mother’s transfigured, spiritualist self pervades In the American Grain and Kora in Hell as the poet’s specular muse (“Elena-America”) and as his Elena’s Kora-zón, his own “core/Kore” in the harrowing of the underworld’s spiritual harvest.
For the bilingual reader in particular, the book’s heart lies in chapters 4 and 5, “Alter Images” and “Translations, Imaginary and Real.” Marzán weaves a lightfooted path through the orchestral philology composed by Spanish and English in which Williams’ poetry is rooted, or from which it takes flight. The rubbing of Quevedo’s poetic grain on Williams’ own yields a quick succession of small pleasures, as when a crimson wart—sabañón morado y frío — on the tip of poetry’s most abused nose finds improvement as “a carafe-shaped frostbite, red and fried” (notice the multiple puns on “carafe” as cara [face] and cara fea [ugly face] with the added satirical twist).
Plucking such topics from Marzán’s rich text does it scant justice. Just the chapter “Bloodline, Poetic Line,” with its vivid scanning of Williams’ debt to seventeenth-century Spanish poetry, would suffice to make this a valuable study. The book should inspire readers of Hart Crane, José Lezama Lima, Derek Walcott, and other great poets to realign their understanding of what remains alive in the hidden, seamless, buried body of American poetry, its European legacy, and its different New World climates.
