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Preface to the Sixth Edition of Walt Whitman: Poemas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Álvaro Armando Vasseur
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Extract

Álvaro Armando Vasseur's 1912 selection and translation of Walt Whitman's poetry, titled simply Walt Whitman: Poemas, was an extremely influential text for hispanophone readers—the first substantial collection of Whitman poems in Spanish. Scholars have identified Vasseur's translation as instrumental in accelerating Latin American poetry's shedding of its modernista tendencies in favor of franker, often more explicitly socially and politically engaged verse. Republished frequently throughout the period of extraordinary historical and aesthetic change bounded by 1912 and 1951, Poemas played a crucial role in keeping both Whitman and Vasseur in the public eye. Of Vasseur's prefaces to the various editions of the work, that to the sixth edition is the longest and most elaborate declaration of his sense of Whitman's importance to international letters.

Type
Criticism in Translation
Information
PMLA , Volume 123 , Issue 2 , March 2008 , pp. 438 - 451
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by The Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

MATT COHEN, an assistant professor in the English department at Duke University, is the editor of Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston (Duke up, 2005) and a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive. He is studying the relations between form and distribution in the literary marketplace.

RACHEL PRICE is visiting assistant professor of Hispanic languages and literature at stony Brook university. She is researching a book on circum-Atlantic poetics and philosophies of history.

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