Julio Marzán is a writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. He has published two books of poetry, one in English, Translations without Originals (I. Reed Books), and one in Spanish Puerta de Tierra (University of Puerto Rico Press), and a novella-in-stories, The Bonjour Gene (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). From 2007 until 2010 he served as the fourth Poet Laureate of Queens, NYC.
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 Arévalo Martínez (from Guatemala), Rafael Beltrán Logroño (from Spain), and Eunice Odio (from Costa Rica).
