‘I like the Spanish title’: William Carlos Williams’s Al Que Quiere!

Abstract

This chapter ponders the decision of William Carlos Williams to give his volume Al Que Quiere! a Spanish title. It examines the social inequities implied—in a North American context—between this poet’s use of Spanish and English, and reflects upon not only the sociopolitical, but the creative aesthetic and the biographical ramifications of this choice. The chapter looks at the relationship between Williams’s use of non-translation and a democratic view of the pleasures of modern poetry. This chapter suggests that implications of the non-translated title speak to the pleasures and themes contained within the poems themselves, examined in a series of close readings of particular poems.