Jonathan Cohen
With William Carlos Williams in Mayagüez
Tinta regada
1 de octubre de 2024
I flew from San Juan to Mayagüez on 2024 Valentine’s Day to attend the three-day conference of the William Carlos Williams Society, hosted by the Universidad de Puerto Rico there. It was a thrill to fly along the island’s north shore in a small plane and see from above the blue ocean with its white ribbon of surf, then briefly over the lush green mountains just before landing. This was not my first time in Puerto Rico but my first time visiting its western coast and Mayagüez. Puerto Rico became a part of my life a couple of decades earlier when writing my biography of poet Muna Lee, A Pan-American Life (2004; see online version). Several trips followed. Now I was about to have another Boricua experience, with fellow Williams scholars and with the place itself.
I spent the first afternoon solo. After checking into my hotel near the Plaza Colón, the town’s main plaza, I went out for a walk to get a sense of the town. It reminded me of my recent visit to Ponce, where I saw the remnants of its early twentieth-century grandeur before the waves of economic decline took their toll. Mayagüez showed me its past and present in all kinds of buildings and monuments. I felt the sadness of the many boarded-up and abandoned buildings which I imagined were very grand once upon a time. I also felt the local pride of the people gathering in the plaza with its magnificent fountain and sculptures, with the Catholic cathedral on one side and the government building on the other. It’s a scene I know well from Spanish colonial towns in Latin America. Around the corner there is an abandoned building with a battered door that has been transformed into a haunting work of art — something Williams, I am sure, would have recognized immediately as poetic — with the image of a wide-eyed face and these words in Spanish: “I’M LOOKING AT YOU LOOKING AT ME LOOKING AT YOU.”
Foto por Jonathan Cohen
It made me feel self-conscious, as a gringo outsider from Nueva York looking at everything around me, a gringo keenly aware of Puerto Rico’s colonial status as a US territory. That awareness is always a part of my experience on the island, of what I see and feel.
Williams had long wanted to visit Mayagüez, his mother’s hometown. It’s the town where his uncle Carlos, his namesake, practiced as a surgeon. He had hoped to get there during his first trip to Puerto Rico in 1941 but didn’t make it until his second (and last) trip to the island in 1956. [1] He finally “touched the soil of his mother’s origins,” as his biographer Paul Mariani puts it in William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. She had told him about her father’s business importing flour and rice from Europe. What she likely didn’t tell him — one of the remarkable things I learned at the conference — is that her father was a member of the crypto-Jewish community of Mayagüez, when it was illegal to practice Judaism in Puerto Rico. Surely, her father knew well all the “secret Jews” there who practiced Catholicism in public and Judaism in private, including those who became leaders of the failed revolt in 1868 against Spanish rule in the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. His name was Solomon Hoheb, the surname being Oneff in Iberia before the Inquisition forced his forefathers up to the Netherlands, where the name was changed; then generations later, they emigrated to the West Indies. Before she left Mayagüez for Paris to be an art student at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Williams’s mother Raquel Hélène Hoheb lived that converso life (she had been baptized of course). All the secret activity around her was happening in the mid-nineteenth century just down the street from my hotel on Calle Méndez Vigo. It’s almost hard to believe that she ended up a suburban housewife in Rutherford, New Jersey, where Williams was born and raised and lived his entire life. Her husband, a Spanish-speaking Englishman, grew up in the West Indies like her. Indeed, she kept from her poet son many things about her early life, despite his efforts to hear about them.
The Williams conference started the next day on the UPR-M campus. I walked to it along the Río Yagüez, passing the awesome sculpture of a regal indigenous figure who I imagined to be a chief of the Taínos, the original inhabitants of Mayagüez. The sculpture’s location well off the beaten path seemed purposeful. It reminded me of the famous line in Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Williams knew this, I told myself, and he wrote the essays of In the American Grain to articulate it.
Foto por Jonathan Cohen
Once on campus, approaching the gathering of Williams scholars in front of the Figueroa Chapel Theater, I felt very happy. I had been looking forward to this chance to spend time with these people who speak the same language I do, that is, Williams talk. Yes, we talked about every aspect of his life and work as a writer, as a physician, and as the man he described in a letter to Marianne Moore: “a mixture of two bloods, neither of them particularly pure.” It was wonderful to see old friends and to meet people who’d become new friends. I expected that during the conference, I was going to learn many things and expand my Williams knowledge — and I certainly did. The titles of the presentations show the wide array of topics: “‘That fertile darkness’: Mayagüez, the Mother and the Poet,” by Marta Aponte Alsina; “Cultural Identity, Translation, and William Carlos Williams,” by Peter Ramos; “William Carlos Williams in Mayagüez: The Poet and His ‘Line,’” by Julio Marzán; “‘I bless the muscles of their legs’: Williams in the Time of Polio,” by María del Pilar Blanco; “Reading the Shore from the ‘Edge, Unseen’: Kamau Brathwaite’s Tidalectics in William Carlos Williams’s ‘Flowers by the Sea,’” by María del Carmen Quintero Aguiló; “Medicinal Poetry: Words, Places, Code-Switching, and Healing in William Carlos Williams’s Language,” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera. Beyond the formal presentations, the informal conversations added greatly to my education. How surprised (and not surprised) I was to hear from more than one member of UPR’s faculty that Williams is a Puerto Rican poet! Williams himself would have been equally surprised to hear that, I think, even though Muna Lee told him after his first visit to the island: “You may be sure that Puerto Rico will not forget you and has very evidently taken you to her heart as her prodigal son.”
Gracias al Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña
One of the excitements for me was to give my presentation about Williams’s hitherto unknown translation of the famous Puerto Rican play Mi señoría by Luis Rechani Agrait, first staged to critical acclaim in 1940 at UPR in Río Piedras, and later revived in 1966. Williams befriended Rechani during his first trip to Puerto Rico, and he made his translation soon after his return home, translating the title as “My Excellency.” The play is a political satire that resonates with the tragicomedy of today’s politics in the USA and abroad. 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 naïve man, Buenaventura Padilla, in a completely corrupt political system. The play is successful as a political satire largely because of Buenaventura’s hilariously funny language — recreated by Williams — with its grandiloquent style combined with stunning malapropisms and clownish errors in history and grammar. The play’s very title is a laughable malapropism. The translation is golden Williams as much as Rechani (his drama masterpiece). I discovered the manuscript of Williams’s translation in his papers at the University at Buffalo. Like his many other translations, his rendering of Rechani’s play is a significant part of his canon. However, because of the widely held idea that translations are not true works of literature, Williams’s creative, career-long work as a translator has been overlooked or simply ignored by scholars: his translations from Spanish of poetry, fiction, and drama; his translations from French of poetry and fiction; and his translations of poetry from both classical Chinese and classical Greek. My argument is that the diverse translations he produced are essential to fully understanding his development and achievement as a writer, in particular his translations from Spanish. It was a great pleasure to introduce Williams’s translation of Rechani’s play to the audience at the conference, especially since it is a dramatic expression of Williams’s Puerto Rican roots.
I loved the walking tour of Mayagüez that was part of the conference program, seeing the blend of traditional Spanish architecture and modern Art Deco that distinguishes the town, from the Catholic cathedral with its ecstatic ceiling of wood to the magnificent restoration of the Teatro Yagüez — “The Cathedral of Sounds Art” — that celebrates the town’s history of stellar theater and arts of the early twentieth century. Visiting the home of Pablo Casal’s mother, Pilar Defilló de Casal, now the beautiful Casa Pilar Defilló Museum, with its proximity to the possible home of Williams’s mother, was memorable. And walking through the streets with the tour guide narrating the history of Mayagüez over the centuries. The small plaza on the tour with the statue of Puerto Rico’s beloved first elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín, made a big impression on me, largely because on the statue’s pedestal there’s a plaque presenting his poem “Panfleto” (“Pamphlet”) from 1920, which Muna Lee, his first wife, translated as follows:
I have broken the rainbow
against my heart
as one breaks a useless sword against a knee.
I have blown the clouds of rose colour and blood colour
beyond the farthest horizons.
I have drowned my dreams
in order to glut the dreams that sleep for me in the veins
of men who sweated and wept and raged
to season my coffee . . .The poem builds with a sequence of dreams (hopes) of Puerto Rican jíbaros, and it concludes: “I am the pamphleteer of God, / God’s agitator, / and I go with the mob of stars and hungry men / toward the great dawn” (quoted from New Directions’ Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry). This verse dates from when Muñoz was a young poet and journalist living in my town, Nueva York. The great woman behind the great man, Lee helped him to become the leader of his homeland. Williams admired Lee’s translations of so many Latin American poets, and in the spirit of Pan-Americanism, he once told her, in response to her translations of poems by Jorge Carrera Andrade: “We all need to know each other better, we need it badly. We need it more than anything else in the world.”
Finally, I have to say that I am very grateful to the William Carlos Williams Society for the opportunity to spend three days with him in Mayagüez; to the society’s president Mark Long who did so much to organize the conference; and to the UPR-M faculty organizers who worked closely with him, Linda Rodriguez Guglielmoni, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Rosa Román Perez, Hugo Ríos-Cordero, and Jose Irizarry-Rodríguez. Flying back to Nueva York from Aguadilla, above the clouds, I felt like a very lucky man and a smarter one for all I had seen and heard in Mayagüez. I also felt how much Puerto Rico deserves a brighter future as a nation.
***
[1] Williams’s first trip to Puerto Rico, in 1941, was thanks to Muna Lee, who worked at UPR in Río Piedras at the time and who invited him to participate in UPR’s First Inter-American Writers’ Conference held there in the spring of that year. For information about this conference including Williams’s lecture “An Informal Discussion of Poetic Form,” see The University of Puerto Rico Bulletin, series 12, no. 2 (December 1941).
