Situating Latin America within U.S. Modernism : Others’s Spanish American Avant-Garde
p. 19-26
Texte intégral
1The little magazine Others, published between 1915 and 1919, contributed importantly to the development of modernism in the United States. The journal’s primary editors, Alfred Kreymborg and William Carlos Williams, championed formal innovation and helped to launch the careers of some of the most important modernist writers of the period, including Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens. Given its importance to modernism, it is unsurprising that Others has garnered critical attention, most recently Suzanne Churchill’s excellent 2006 monograph The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry 1. Yet the August 1916 “Spanish American Number” of Others has been consistently overlooked. The issue’s collection of lesser-known Central and South American poets seems to have no place in the narrative of modernism as it is currently understood. In fact, the special number itself begins to create such a narrative, asserting in its framing manifesto the avant-garde status both of the Latin American poets it published and the avant-garde nature of exchange with Latin America more broadly. Indeed, this Spanish American Number anticipates Waldo Frank and William Carlos Williams’s later assertions that the Americas should be understood as an interconnected whole, deeply marked by a history of Spanish and French, as well as English, colonialism.
21916 was an interesting year for a Spanish American issue to appear in a U.S. little magazine. The late nineteen-teens were a period that saw the emergence of a concept of American identity as cultural identity, as well as acrimonious debates about who might belong to that culture. Spanish literature held very little prestige, and Latin American literature even less. One employee of the New York Department of Education declared around this time, “He is a bold man who will claim that Spain ranks with England, France, America or Germany in any element of greatnesss2”. The few histories of Spanish literature that were published in the U.S. between 1900 and 1940 generally either excluded Latin American literature altogether or made disparaging reference to one or two poets3. Moreover, the advent of WWI led to a rising tide of wartime nationalism and xenophobia. Puerto Ricans, under U.S. rule since 1898, were granted–or had imposed on them–a limited form of U.S. citizenship under the 1917 Jones Act. But wartime nationalism also led to the 1917 Immigration Act, the strictest yet in the United States, which included a literacy test specifically meant to limit the immigration of eastern and southern Europeans4.
3Yet during this same period events served to draw U.S. attention towards its neighbors to the south in positive as well as negative ways. In 1914, construction began on the Panama Canal, while the advent of WWI in the same year pushed many students who would otherwise be learning German to study Spanish5. Due in part, perhaps, to the rise in student interest, scholarly interest in Latin America also increased during WWI. In 1915, the journal Hispania was founded in an attempt to increase the intellectual and cultural prestige of the study of Spanish in the United States ; one year later, in 1916, Harvard professor Alfred Coester wrote the first North American history of Latin American literature. In that same year, Columbia University founded the first professorship dedicated to the study of the literatures of Latin America6. These were the institutional measures of a growing interest in recognizing and valuing the accomplishments of Latin American literature. This growing interest was made possible in part by the increasing recognition and prestige garnered by the modernismo movement, the first Latin American literary phenomenon to gain recognition in the United States7.
4It is in this complex literary, political, and scholarly context that Others offers its intervention, an intervention that is both politically and artistically radical. In its opening manifesto and in its selection of texts, the Spanish American number claims Latin American literature as not a primitive phenomenon to be imitated and appropriated by US writers but as avant-garde in its own right. In claiming Latin American poets as peers, the editors of Others worked to refute a whole tradition of reading Latin America, like Africa, as vibrant but primitive and exotic. Thus Claire Goll writes in her 1921 anthology of US poetry, “Americans are still a barbaric people. Only such people are fruitful8”. This view of the New World has its precursor in Hegel’s famous assertion that the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas are without history9”. Such peoples might have artistic traditions-such as Mexican folk art or African masks-that might inspire the depleted European or Anglo-American tradition to a new, primitivist avant-garde, but indigenous peoples cannot, following this train of thought, be themselves contemporary or avant-garde. They exist perpetually in a history-less present that is always past, always primitive10. By contrast, Others offers US readers a truly contemporary Latin America, a Latin America that is our neighbor and our peer.
5From its opening pages, the Spanish American number seeks explicitly to situate South and Central American poets within its modernist project. It begins with a manifesto that lays claim not only to the literary importance of the poets translated but also to the avant-garde status of the very act of cultural exchange with Latin America :
This issue presents translations of the work of some of the most prominent poets among our neighbors of Central and South America. Not long ago, Alfonso Guillen Zelaya, of Honduras, materialized in New York, and the Quijotian dream quickly evolved of bartering the product of men and women who appear in Others with that of men and women of Spanish America11.
6Guillén Zelaya was an aspiring poet who came to New York to work for the Honduran consulate, and who would soon return to Honduras to become editor and writer for several important Honduran papers. He seems to have offered inspiration and impetus to the project, though I have yet to uncover any evidence that, as planned, “translations from Others” were printed “in Spanish American periodicals”, or that “a Spanish edition of Others [was printed] under the title Otros 12 !”
7Most importantly, in the context of the opening poem in the issue, calling the ideal of hemispheric cultural exchange a “Quijotian dream” designates that ideal as avant-garde. While there is nothing about Don Quijote per se that would mark him as modernist, the opening poem in the collection figures Sancho Panza as the fat, ignorant critic or poet of traditional verse forms and Don Quijote as the avant-garde poet leading Sancho towards the future of verse. The poet appropriates the literary authority of Don Quijote to authorize his new poetic forms13. The final stanza of the poem communicates the relationship between the poet and his critic follower:
In opening to the mind a sealed path,
Thus history combines the divine pair :
In front, the thin master dragging his squire ;
and behind the fat servant, laughing, but he comes.
Abriendo a las consciencias hermético sendero
así forma la historia la pareja divina :
delante, el Señor flaco remolca a su escudero ;
y atrás el criado gordo, ríe, pero amina 14.
8The relationship between the poet and his critics is ultimately not adversarial but a perfect pairing in which the poet leads and the critic, though he laughs, follows behind. By opening the issue with this poem, the editors announce the avant-garde status of the poems included and of their own project of pan-American literary exchange.
9In “The Contemporary Sancho Panza” the poet is figured literally as one who goes before the rest. Yet the poetry represented in the Spanish American Number would not necessarily have struck readers of Others as all equally cutting-edge. On a literary level, the selection of writers in the Spanish American issue of Others looks back to the achievements of modernismo–which seeks “pure beauty” and a break with traditional forms–and at the same time forward to a still-nascent posmodernismo more in line with Anglo-American modernism. The terminology here is confusing. Modernismo, despite its name, was a movement that preceded the peak of Anglo-American modernism by close to twenty years ; it is generally thought to have begun in 1888, and to end around 1910, the very year that, according to Virginia Woolf, “human character changed15”.
10Some of the poems in The Spanish American Number were published during the height of modernismo, while some were published only a few years before their translation in Others. In one poem in the issue, by Juan Julián Lastra, the speaker asserts “I love the sad ‘for life is Pain”. The final poem in the volume, “The Disease of the Century” by Columbian José Asunción Silva (1865-1896), epitomizes this gesture of fin de siècle modernismo. A poet-patient tells his doctor that he suffers from “the disease of the century... that same disease of Werther,/[...]/A weariness with all things”. The doctor responds by misreading the poet-patient’s existential crisis–a crisis “worthy of my master Schopenhauer”–as a problem of health, prescribing rest, exercise, and healthful consumption. The poem ends on the doctor’s words, leaving the reader with an experience of the painful disjunction that the patient experiences between his sense of disillusionment with the modern world and the doctor’s contented participation in the “regime[s]” of modernity.
11If some of the earlier poets in “Spanish American Number” express a sense of alienation in the language of the fin de siècle, other poets express their sense of avant-garde alienation using a posmodernismo aesthetic closer to that of William Carlos Williams’s ideal of a descriptive modernism. Rafael Arevalo Martínez, the writer with the most poems included in Others, sometimes approaches a plain style. His early poetry is characterized in general by a fin de siècle sensibility, and critics generally concur that is only later in his career, in the 1930s, 1940s, and 50s, that Martínez turned definitively towards a declarative style that might be characterized as more recognizably ‘‘modernist’’ in the Anglo-American sense of the term. Yet the selection of Martinez’s poems in Others includes works such as “The Contemporary Sancho Panza” and “The Sensation of a Smell,” that anticipate Martinez’s later, sparer poetry.
12Another young poet in the collection, Luis C. Lopez (1878-1950), moves even more decisively away from a modernismo aesthetic. “Verses to the Moon” is a sonnet that undercuts the romanticism of its title by offering a “low” scene. A modernista poet might well write a sonnet directed to the moon, but that sonnet would be filled with exotic references and obscure literary allusions ; instead, López here undercuts a modernismo idealism with ironic references to the verisimilar and the low : corrupt judges, drunken brawls, and “lousy creatures who play dominoes16”.
13The Others special number is not bilingual–it offers only English versions–and the translations by William George Williams, the father of William Carlos Williams, emphasize further the avant-garde nature of the poems included by obscuring their literary forms. Williams senior preferred a strictly literal, heavily Latinate, academic translation that did not preserve the rhyme scheme and other formal elements of the poems. Williams Senior was not a poet but a businessman who enjoyed Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar, a British citizen who had spent much of his childhood in the West Indies and spoke Spanish with native fluency. Williams Junior may have encouraged his father to take up the translation project for Others in order that his father have something to entertain him in his final years. Williams has written that “[i]n his last years when he was getting ready to die I tried to invent ways to keep him entertained, one of them happened to be to help me translate Rafael Arévalo Martinez’s story”. That story was “The Man who Resembled a Horse,” first published in The Little Review in December 191817. Presumably the translations of Latin American poetry, published two years earlier, were motivated by a similar desire on the part of Williams to entertain his father. Certainly this was a way of including his father and later his mother in his intellectual pursuits.
14Whatever Williams Junior’s motivations may have been for including his father in the Others project, however, the editors might have found any number of other translators had they wished for a more traditional translation style. Williams Senior’s translations have little to recommend them musically, and this style may have contributed to the issue’s quick disappearance into the archive. Yet his work offers an interesting alternative to the Victorian-inflected translations from Spanish dominant at the time. William Carlos Williams’s 1913 translations of Spanish ballads, for example, retained archaicisms such as “thou”, “ware”, and “ye” that he would later discard in a 1936 revision of the translations18. The dominance of a nineteenth century aesthetic in translation from Spanish is well-illustrated by examining the Hispanic Anthology, a book published four years after the Others Spanish American Number, that reprints several of George Williams’s translations19. Over half of the translators in that anthology are from the nineteenth century, including Byron, Longfellow, and Southey. Moreover, the editor, Thomas Walsh, seems to have preferred a Victorian style that obscured literary innovation to William George Williams’s stiff but revealing translations.
15Walsh’s preference for translations in the style of Longfellow is evident in his decision to use translations other than those of George Williams whenever possible. For example, he includes a translation of José Santos Chocano’s “A Song of the Road” by John Pierrepont Rice that turns Santos Chocano’s silva into rhymed Victorian sentiment. It is sonically pleasing–the rhymes and alliterations make it sound more like a “poem” in the traditional sense, and while not written in pentameter, the translation has a strong iambic heartbeat. Yet at the same time, Rice’s emphasis on making a translation that will follow traditional Anglo-American literary codes moves the poem into the “dim lands of peace” that Pound decries in his Imagist manifesto. William George Williams’s translation of the same poem might be awkward, but it more aptly captures the poem’s tone and the almost free-verse quality of the silva form.
16This special number of Others must be considered part of the story of the controversy between William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound over the literary and racial meanings of modernism. During the teens, Pound worked on several translation projects from Spanish, and even suggested to Margaret Anderson that he might edit a Spanish issue of The Little Review. (Notice the difference–Pound’s Spanish issue would have been entirely peninsular ; Latin America never “counts” for him.) However, Pound never published the essays he had planned. For Pound, Spanish remained associated with earlier, Victorian-era literary trends, with the translations of Longfellow and Southey, and with cultures, whether Spanish or Latin American, that were primitive and racially mixed. Spanish literature never came to represent for Pound the possibility of modernist innovation.
17By contrast, Williams advocated a modernism based in a sense of the local, in the democratic, and in the multiracial and multicultural history of the Americas. In the draft of an essay years later, Williams wrote, “If more of the Spanish were better translated–more in the spirit of modern American letters, [...] most of the principles which have been so hard won, the directness, the immediacy, the reality of our present day writing in verse and prose would be vitally strengthened20”. The Spanish American number of Others represents one of many projects over the years that Williams was involved in that assert the mixed identity of the Americas and the value of literary exchange with both Spain and Latin America.
Notes de bas de page
1 Suzanne W. Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of American Poetry, Burlington, Vt, Ashgate, 2006.
2 Luis Fernández Cifuentes, “La Literatura Española en los Estados Unidos : Historia de Sus Historias,” in Historia Literarial Historia de la Literatura, Leonardo Romero Tobar (ed.), Zaragoza, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004, 259.
3 Ibid., 255-257.
4 Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects : Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, 283. Julio Marzán writes that the ‘‘public debate over this Jones Act was laced with bitter words over opening the doors to a population of inferior types’’. Julio Marzán, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1994, 230-233. It is in this nativist context that Williams chose to title his 1917 book of poems Al Que Quiere !-initially Al que quiere ! or the pleasures of democracy. Marzán has suggested that the “pleasures of democracy” in the initial version of this title must be read in terms of controversy over the fate of colonial Puerto Rico, which did not gain the right to elect its own governor until 1947. Marzán, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, 230-233.
5 Fernández Cifuentes, “La Literatura Española en los Estados Unidos : Historia de Sus Historias,” 260. Interestingly, this is a phenomenon that would be redoubled during the Second World War, when the Office of War Information sponsored an anthology of Latin American poetry and the State Department offered subventions to little magazines such as Fantasy to include special sections on Latin American literature. Dudley Fitts, “Dudley Fitts Correspondence”, in The Yale Collection of American Literature, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University ; “Fantasy Magazine Papers”, in Yale Collection of American Literature, New Haven, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
6 Fernández Cifuentes, “La Literatura Española en los Estados Unidos : Historia de Sus Historias,” 258-261.
7 This scholarly recognition did not translate into the broad dissemination of these works. A major anthology of modernismo poetry in translation only appeared in 1934. G. Dundas Craig (ed.), The Modernist Trend in Spanish-American Poetry : A Collection of Representative Poems of the Modernist Movement and the Reaction, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1934.
8 “Noch sind die Amerikaner ein barbarisches Volk. Nur solche Völker sind fruchtbar”. Claire Goll, Die Neue Welt : Eine Anthologie Jüngster Amerikanischer Lyrik, Berlin, S. Fischer, 1921, 7.
9 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Introduction : Reason in History, H. B. Nisbet (trans.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975, 164-171, 90.
10 Among the most well known advocates of this kind of primitivist perspective is Oswald Spengler, whose two-volume Untergang des Abendlandes appeared several years before Goll’s anthology, but was not translated into English until the mid 1920s. My understanding of the logic of primitivism has been aided by reference to the following works : Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other : How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983 ; Donna Jones, “The Ambiguous Promise of European Decline : A Comparative Study of ‘the End of History’in Literature of the Americas and Europe”, Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1998 ; Roger Bartra, “Paradise Subverted : The Invention of the Mexican Character”, in Primitivism and Identity in Latin America : Essays on Art, Literature, and Culture, Erik Camayd-Freixas and José Eduardo González (ed.), Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2000 ; Victor Li, The Neo-Primitivist Turn : Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity, Toronto, Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 2006.
11 « Manifesto », Others, 3, n° 2, The Spanish American Number, 1916, 34.
12 Information on the life of Guillén Zelaya can be found in Ramón Oquelí, “Don Alfonso, el de la Inmensa Fe,” in Alfonso Guillén Zelaya : Consciencia de una Época, Medardo Mejía et al. (ed.), Colleción Letras Hondurenas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, Editorial Universitaria, 1999. Oquelí, however, has nothing to say about Guillén Zelaya’s experience with Others, mistakenly suggesting that it was during Guillén Zelaya’s later, 1930 trip to the United States that he participated in the editing of this little magazine. Oquelí, “Don Alfonso, el de la Inmensa Fe”, 16.
13 Francisco Nájera, El Pacto Autobiográfico en la Obra de Rafael Arévalo Martínez, Guatemala City, Cultura, 2003, 182.
14 Rafael Arévalo Martínez, « The Contemporary Sancho Panza », Others, 3, n° 2, The Spanish American Number, 1916, 36. Spanish lines quoted from Nájera, El Pacto Autobiográfico en la Obra de Rafael Arévalo Martínez, 182.
15 From Virginia Woolf, “Character in Fiction”, an essay originally published in 1924. Quoted in Maria Dibattista, “Virginia Woolf,” in Modernism and the New Criticism, A. Walton litz, Louis Menand and Lawrence Rainey (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, 132. Cathy Login Jrade, Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1998.
16 See James J. Alstrum, La Sátira y la Antipoesía de Luis Carlos López, Bogotá, Columbia, Banco de la República, 1986.
17 New Directions, 1944, 319. I have no direct evidence to suggest the circumstances under which William George Williams took on the translation of the poems for Others, or whether Williams Junior was involved in any way in the project. Churchill does not list Williams as one of the editors of the Spanish American Issue. However, given his father’s role in producing the translations, it seems very likely that he would have been involved in the production of the issue, however tangentially.
18 Debby Rosenthal, “‘Accurate Equivalents’ : Comparing Williams’1913 and 1936 ‘Translations from the Spanish’, ” William Carlos Williams Review, XVI, 1, 1990.
19 Thomas Walsh (ed.), Hispanic Anthology : Poems Translated from the Spanish by English and North American Poets, New York, Putnam, 1920.
20 From a draft of the essay “Federico Garcia Lorca,” probably written during the winter of 1938 and titled “Lorca and the Tradition of Spanish Poetry”. Held at the Poetry Archives, SUNY Buffalo. For more on the composition of this essay, see Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams : A New World Naked, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1981, 409. The final version was published in 1939 in the Kenyon Review and reprinted in William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, New York, New Directions, 1969, 220-30.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Comparer l’étranger
Enjeux du comparatisme en littérature
Émilienne Baneth-Nouailhetas et Claire Joubert (dir.)
2007
Lignes et lignages dans la littérature arthurienne
Christine Ferlampin-Acher et Denis Hüe (dir.)
2007