Introduction to Walt Whitman, Poemas, by lvaro Armando Vasseur

Matt Cohen and Rachel Price

In Memoriam
Fernando Alegra
1918 (Santiago, Chile) 2005 (Walnut Creek, California, U.S.A.)
As Americanist scholarship increasingly incorporates work on literatures of the
Americas, publishers are re-editing or translating for the first time important Latin
American authors long-neglected by U.S. readers and scholars. Joint consideration of
the Americas, North and South, has elucidated connections and divergences between the
two continents' literatures. Less common has been scholarly attention to the criticism of
English-language literatures by scholars based in Latin America and writing in other
languages, principally Spanish. Yet surveys of scholarship on Walt Whitman produced
outside the United States have long identified Latin American critics as among the more
astute readers of the Good Gray Poet. 1
This digital edition of lvaro Armando Vasseur's 1912 selection and translation of
Leaves of Grass seeks to make widely available not a book of criticism about Whitman
but a nonetheless extremely influential text for Latin American readersthe 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 (modernismo was less like Anglo-American modernism than
something approximating French symbolism) in favor of franker, less precious, and
often more explicitly socially and politically engaged verse. 2
Access to this seminal Spanish-language volume of selections from Leaves of Grass
will aid in understanding Whitman's reception and influence in the Spanish-speaking
world. "Every society brings to literature its own form of expression, and the history of
the nations can be told with greater truth by the stages of literature than by chronicles
and decades," wrote the Cuban poet, journalist, and revolutionary Jos Mart in his 1887
homage to Whitman. Mart's was the first known piece published in Spanish on the
North American poet, written after Mart had heard Whitman deliver his lecture on
Abraham Lincoln in New York. 3 Mart thus argued to his Latin American readers that
insight into nineteenth-century U.S. culture was to be gleaned from reading Whitman.
We hope that this digital edition of Vasseur's translation may similarly provide insight
not only into Whitman's treatment in Latin American and Spanish letters, but also into
an important moment in Latin American and Spanish literary history.

I. WALT WHITMAN IN LATIN AMERICA AND SPAIN

Whitman remained all but untranslated into Spanish until Vasseur's 1912 edition, even
though his work had long been known to Spanish-language critics who encountered it in
the U.S. (as was the case for Mart) or in translation into other European languages (as
was the case for the Guatemalan writer Enrique Gomz Carillo, who read Whitman in
French and wrote about him in 1895). In attempting to convey Whitman's import for
U.S. literature and culture, Mart had rhetorically queried his readers, "[b]ut what can

give you an idea of his vast and fiercely burning love?" 4 A translation might clearly
have accomplished this. Yet, despite his own vocation as poet, critic, and translator of,
among others, Emerson, Longfellow, and Poe, Mart did not translate any Whitman.
(When he died it was discovered that he had planned a book on Whitman and other
American poets.) 5 Following Mart's piece, Rubn Daro, the famous Nicaraguan
modernista who would later write an anti-imperialist ode "To Roosevelt," dedicated a
glowing sonnet to Whitman in his 1888 book Azul. Yet similarly, Daro did not attempt a
translation. A Mexican, Balbino Dvalos, translated only a few of Whitman's poems on
the occasion of the second American International Congress held in Mexico City in
1901. 6
Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno translated a few poems in 1906. 7 In 1909, three
years before Vasseur's edition, a Peninsular translation of twenty-four of Whitman's
poems was publishedbut in Catalan, by Cebri Montoliu, who was himself following
upon J. Prez Jorba's 1900 Catalan study of Whitman. (It is striking that Prez Jorba's
study had proposed that the American poet displayed the "philosophical sensibility of
Nietzsche," an aspect Vasseur too would highlight in the preface and footnotes to his
translation.) 8
In 1910 a Spanish journalist under the pseudonym "Angel Guerra" published a short
article in the journal La Ilustracin Espaola y Americana on "Walt Whitman's Lyric."
Guerra would go on to write an enthusiastic preface to the 1939 edition of Vasseur's
translation. In the 1910 article, occasioned by the publication of both the Italian
translation of Leaves of Grass and a study by famous French Whitman commentator
Len Bazalgette, Guerra lamented the lack of curiosity in Spain about the American
author. Only with Vasseur's subsequent 1912 translation did Whitman become available
and important to generations of Latin American poets, from the residual modernistas to
the region's major twentieth-century figures, including Peruvian vanguardist Csar
Vallejo, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the Argentine Jorge Lus Borges. 9 Following
Vasseur's edition, selected poems by Whitman continued to be translated anew by
writers such as the Cuban poet Jos de Armas y Crdenas and Chilean author and critic
Arturo Torres-Rioseco. Complete translations of Leaves of Grass into Spanish followed
in the post-war era, beginning with Concha Zardoya's 1946 full translation with
additional selections of Whitman's prose, entitled Obras Escogidas. 10

II. LVARO ARMANDO VASSEUR (18781968)

Vasseur was born in 1878 to French immigrants in Montevideo, Uruguay. He grew up in
the small town of Santa Luca, Canelones, about thirty miles outside of the capital, and
left at the age of twenty for Buenos Aires, Argentina. There he mingled with prominent
modernista writers Rubn Daro and Leopoldo Lugones, and greatly admired the
Argentine poet "Almafuerte" (Pedro Bonifacio Palacios), with whom, however, Vasseur
would later have a violent falling out. During this period Vasseur is said to have
translated some Oscar Wilde and, writing under the portentous pseudonym "Americo
Llanos" (the name defies exact translation but suggests "American Plains"), to have
composed poetry that oddly mixed modernista aestheticism with what was called
"social" versea poetry concerned with what U.S. writers of the same period might
have called "the social question." While in Buenos Aires, Vasseur grew increasingly

interested in Nietzsche, Marx, and scientific materialism, the latter of which provided
him with the tools to combat what he later called, witheringly, the "sentimental
socialism" he had previously known (Infancia y juventud, 59).
In 1901 Vasseur returned to Montevideo, dropped his pseudonym, and threw himself
into a host of projects. He took up journalism for newspapers such as the Montevideobased El Tiempo, oversaw the Constitutional Manifesto of the Uruguayan Socialist
Party, and gave lectures in favor of divorce. He also soon published several books of
poetry, including Cantos Augurales (1904), Cantos del Nuevo Mundo, and A Flor de
Alma (both 1907). As Uruguayan critic Hugo Achugar points out, Cantos del Nuevo
Mundo exhibits a paradoxical kind of regionalist universalism typical of the period, and
exalts a pan-Americanist utopia of Progress. In this, then, Cantos del Nuevo Mundo was
already perhaps a bit Whitmanesque; indeed, the book included lines of Whitman verse
taken from an Italian translation as prefaces to Vasseur's own poems (Poesa y sociedad,
153).
In 1901 Vasseur was also involved in a rather sordid exchange of calumny with his
contemporary and author Roberto de las Carreras, a notorious exponent of free love. On
June 1, 1901, in the newspaper El Tiempo, Vasseur called de las Carreras' sensibility
"exaggerated like that of an androgynous decadent" and accused him of sharing, with
Enrique Gmez Carillo (ironically, the early commentator on Whitman noted above) a
"cosmic vanity and feminine ill-will." De las Carreras responded in kind, flinging some
thirty slurs at Vasseur, calling him everything from a "rube" to the "miserable product of
a stale marriage, in whose stupefied features is etched the slight yawn with which he
was conceived." 11 Such literary gossip allows us to glimpse Vasseur's anxious
relationship to gender and sexuality. If in some ways it was unremarkable for the time,
in the self-consciously liberal environment in which de las Carreras and Vasseur moved,
it was notably reactionary. It may also offer insight into Vasseur's later decisions to
"straighten" some of Whitman's sexual language in Leaves of Grass.
Petty disputes like that of 1901 were the more trivial side of a lively intellectual climate
in Uruguay in the late nineteenth century, which was first centered about Montevideo's
Ateneo, a liberal cultural and educational center and the seat of the nation's Academic
and Romantic authors. With fin-de-sicle socio-political ferment and the turn towards
both socialism and modernismo, the scene moved to a series of more informal watering
holes such as the Polo Bamba caf, the Caf Moka, the "Carlos Marx" and "Emilio
Zol" Clubs, and the International Center for Social Studies, this last founded in 1898
by a group of workers and artisans to foster intellectual and political activity through
courses and lectures. 12
At the turn of the century neo-Romanticism and criollismo (local color) reigned in River
Plate literature, giving way to modernismo (again, a sort of aestheticism) and eventually
to more "social" poetry. It is not surprising, given the character of both the Ateneo
whose members included ministers, senators, diplomats, and Presidents of the Republic
and the syndicalist International Center for Social Studies, that the poetry issuing
from both would be of a more "political" nature. Vasseur, emerging from such a climate,
found Whitman's rhetoric of democracy consonant with the overlap between politics,
civic culture and art historically more typical of Latin- than of North American letters. It
is significant, then, but not incongruent, that the press responsible for the diffusion of
European revolutionary thinkers such as Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon, Georg Bchner and Friedrich Nietzsche would be the press to publish
Vasseur's translation of Whitman: the editorial house Sempere, based in Valencia, Spain.
13

III. VASSEUR'S WALT WHITMAN, POEMAS

In 1907, at age 29, Vasseur was named a consul to San Sebastin, Spain by Uruguayan
president Jos Batlle Ordoez. Five years later Vasseur published his Spanish translation
of selections from Whitman's Leaves of Grass, entitled Poemas. Much later, in a preface
written for the book's sixth edition, Vasseur would recall that he had first encountered
Whitman when he was still living in Uruguay, through Italian translator Luigi
Gamberale's selections from Leaves of Grass. 14 It has been assumed that Gamberale's
complete translation Foglie di Erba (1900; 1907), rather than the English original,
served as Vasseur's source text. 15
Whitman's route into Spanish was even more circuitous than this, however. It had been
French critics who initially brought Whitman to the attention of Italian writers. One of
those writers was Girolamo Ragusa-Moleti, a Sicilian who encountered Whitman's work
in 1872. Ragusa-Moleti encouraged his friends to write about the American poet; one
friend, Enrico Nencioni, obliged with a piece on Whitman in 1879. Another friend was
Luigi Gamberale, whose 1887 and 1890 selected translations from Leaves of Grass
were followed by a complete translation in 1900, a reprint in 1907, and a revision in
1923. 16
Gamberale based his translation on two different Whitman editions: the poems
translated before 1885 used Wilson and McCormick's 1884 Glasgow edition, while
poems translated later were based upon the 1890 Small, Maynard edition of Leaves of
Grass. Gamberale's complete 1900 edition was based on David McKay's 1892 so-called
"deathbed" edition. 17 Vasseur's edition, though not a complete translation, thus is
based indirectly on Whitman's of 1892.
In an essay entitled "The Accidental Tourist: Walt Whitman in Latin America," Enrico
Mario Sant begins the work of documenting the complex history of the Vasseur
translation. In tracing its genealogy, Sant picks up on Vasseur's admission, in his
preface to the sixth edition of Poemas, that the Uruguayan translator "was never able to
take in 'Anglo-Saxon words and tones,'" and that Vasseur's wife and son assimilated the
language better. Yet Sant concludes rather too hastily from scant and evasive words that
therefore "all translations from the original English were done by [Vasseur's] wife and
son." 18
In fact, however, the preface to the sixth edition, published almost forty years after the
initial translation, is much less conclusive about sources consulted and translation
methodology. Vasseur does write that he never grew comfortable with the sounds of
English, as Sant notes, and that, despite Vasseur's consultation of exercise books and
dictionaries, it was his "wife and son [who] assimilated it better." Yet Vasseur concludes
the passage with an enigmatic sentence: "In general, when I needed to translate, I did so
well-accompanied." This ambiguous phrase suggests he received assistance from his
family or friends, and certainly underscores Vasseur's need for aides, human or

bibliographic, in the translation process. It does not, however, indicate that Vasseur was
not the principal translator of any English texts consulted, nor that his wife and son
were. In fact, elsewhere in the same introduction Vasseur claims that the process
involved, in his words, "making myself read the original, verifying the versions,
choosing the most rhythmical." 19 As we will suggest below, some, if tenuous, textual
evidence does seem to confirm that Vasseur had access to an English edition, or at least
to someone able to check the English, during the writing of the translation.

IV. COMMENTARY ON VASSEUR'S TRANSLATION

Chilean scholar Fernando Alegra's pioneering 1954 study Walt Whitman en
Hispanoamrica [Walt Whitman in Hispano-America] offers one of the most
comprehensive and cogent readings of the Vasseur translation, and has served as the
foundation for all subsequent studies. Its exhaustive textual analysis of the work
remains indispensable, though Sant's essay, cited above, offers a more detailed
genealogy of the translation, as well as some new insights into it. Bringing the history of
the translation up to date, Sant points out, for example, that despite the 1954 date of
Alegra's study, the Chilean scholar seems not to have been acquainted with the preface
to the sixth edition, in which Vasseur owns up to having used other translations as his
source. (Alegra writes that Vasseur's translation is based, presumably directly, upon
Whitman's 1892 edition). There too, Vasseur describes his free-handed stylistic
approach to both the structure and the content of the poetry: "Purifying, pruning, and at
times enriching it with some spark." 20
Still, Alegra's painstaking analysis of Poemas provides the necessary figures on the
translation: it tallies up the total of 83 poems included from Leaves of Grass, many in
abbreviated forms, and lists the titles of the 16 poems whose names Vasseur changed,
often drastically (Walt Whitman, 351, see Appendix A below for a full list). Alegra
further compares, section by section, Vasseur's version of "Song of Myself" with
Whitman's, listing by subsection each omission made by Vasseur (some 750 verses in
total) and tracking Vasseur's strange reordering of sections of the poem. 21 Alegra
critiques what he sees as Vasseur's inconsistencies and occasional sloppiness, as, for
example, the decision to translate "Song of the Answerer" as "Canto del Poeta" ["Song
of the Poet"]. 22
Such inconsistencies indeed can do more than irritate: at times they undermine the sense
of the book as a whole, as in "Song of the Exposition," for example, when Vasseur
leaves "Columbia" unchanged in the Spanish ("Columbia"), whereas in the poem
"Spain, 1873-1874" ["Espaa 1873-1874"], appearing earlier in the collection, he
inexplicably renders the same word "America." This curious change may owe
something to the Americanist voice typical of Vasseur's own poetry. Such a perspective
emerges more strongly at times than even the oft-strident Whitman'sas, for example,
when Vasseur amplifies Whitman's "new garden of the West," from the poem "Ages and
Ages Returning at Intervals," into "the new Eden, the great West of my race" [el nuevo
Edn, el gran Oeste de mi raza]. "Raza," or race, does not have in Spanish quite the
racialist connotation it does in English, meaning something more like a nationalist
sentiment, or a sense of a "people." Here it has the unmistakable ring of celebratory
pan-Americanism. And in a comic moment that Alegra dryly glosses, a regionalist

chauvinism overtakes Vasseur when he changes Whitman's "wait at Valparaso, Rio de

Janeiro, Panama" to "wait at Valparaso, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo"
(from "Salut Au Monde"), and again, later in the same poem, "I see the Amazon and the
Paraguay [rivers]" to "I see the Amazon, the Paraguay, the River Plate" (Walt Whitman,
359). 23
Vasseur abbreviated poems according to his own taste, almost invariably eliminating
Whitman's signature catalogues (Vasseur's translation of "Salut au Monde" is the only
exception, rendered in its entirety). 24 The problematic features of what Vasseur termed
his "adaptation" include but are not limited to outright errors; the completion of
sentences Whitman had deliberately rendered opaque; the omission of Whitmanesque
gerunds; and, perhaps most glaringly, a tendency to cover over Whitman's
homosexuality with, in the most benign cases, a vague rhetoric of brotherly love. 25 In
the most radical instances of Vasseur's censoring, the translator changes originally
homoerotic or at least ambiguous phrases into expressions of clearly heterosexual
desire.
Alegra's comprehensive enumeration of Vasseur's changes lays important groundwork
for a more interpretive analysis of Vasseur's departures from the original. On the whole,
Vasseur's translation is not unfaithful, but changes in elements as seemingly minor as
punctuation, for example, have cumulative effects on the style and sense of the work as
a whole. Vasseur often adds a fervid exclamation mark where Whitman has none.
Vasseur converts commas into periodsa surprising echo of what more typically marks
translation from the more clausal, long-winded Spanish into the curter English
reducing Whitman's penchant for catalogues to a more brusquely prosaic style and
removing some of his biblical rhythms. Further, Vasseur unfortunately either misjudges
the significance of or dislikes too much to preserve Whitman's lyric "I." Instead, he
makes the most of the ability to drop pronouns in Spanish. This loss of the repetition of
"I"s does disproportionate damage to the cadence and sense of the poems. And Vasseur's
occasional insertion of parentheses within lines sometimes dulls Whitman's frankness,
turning bold statements into qualifications, or worse, into seemingly unnecessary
elaborations. Taken together, these subtle editing choices can make Whitman less
strange than he is in the original. In one instance, for example, Vasseur turns Whitman's
unusual locution "not-day"a neologic negationinto the quotidian, positive term
"noche" [night].
In analyzing Vasseur's changes one must bear in mind that his may be either principally
or entirely a second order translation from not the English but Gamberale's Italian. Thus
before drawing conclusions about the significance of Vasseur's changes it is first
necessary to make sure they are indeed Vasseur's own doing, and not the passive
reproduction of Gamberale's changes or errors. That said, it is striking that in our
comparisons, glaring innovations in Vasseur's translation are almost invariably his own
departure from the Italian, the latter of which is unusually, even at times detrimentally,
literal. 26
Vasseur's handling of the sexual thematics of Whitman's poetry offers a good example.
Here the translator vacillates between muted renditions of Whitman's sexual openness
and versions that may push Whitman's suggestiveness beyond its original bounds. This
is particularly the case when the passages involve issues of race or genderconcepts
whose framing ideologies vary considerably across Latin America as well as between

Latin America and the United States. In the case of Whitman's famous "fugitive slave"
passage from "Song of Myself," Vasseur's rendition makes an important amendment to
the original scene:
Whitman (1892):
The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and
weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him. . . .
Vasseur (1912):

El esclavo fugitivo se aproxim mi choza, detenindose en el umbral,

Por la entreabierta puerta de la cocina, lo vi tambalearse y sin fuerzas:
Fu hacia el tronco de rbol en que se haba sentado, lo cog entre mis brazos, y lo
llev adentro;
[The fugitive slave approached my hut, stopping at the threshold,
Through the half-open door of the kitchen, I saw him tottering and weak:
I went toward the stump where he had sat, I held him in my arms, and I carried him
inside. . . .]
The addition of "held him in my arms" opens up this passage to more erotic readings
than did Whitman's original. In another passage substantively amended by Vasseur, the
body of the black male slave is made to resonate historically with the violent restriction
of women's bodies:

La madre de antao condenada por bruja y quemada sobre haces de lea seca, la
vista de sus hijos,
El esclavo, perseguido como una presa, que cae en mitad de su fuga, todo tembloroso
y sudando sangre,
[The mother of old condemned as a witch and burned over dry firewood, before her
children's eyes,
The slave, persecuted like an imprisoned woman, who falls mid-flight, all atremble
and sweating blood.]
Here is Whitman's original from 1892:
The mother of old, condemn'd for a witch, burnt with dry wood,
her children gazing on,

The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover'd with sweat. . . .
Vasseur's direct comparison of the slave to a woman is based, presumably, on their
common lack of power, but it also creates cross-gendered possibilities that turn the
passage in new ways. Whitman had distinct unitsseparate linesfor the witch and the
hounded slave. An association could be made between them because of their
juxtaposition; yet that association is not insisted on in the English original. Vasseur turns
the suggestion of a link into an unmistakable link, associating racial slavery with all the
irrationality of religious persecution (invoking, perhaps, the spectre of the Inquisition).
That church-sponsored terror might in turn remind informed Hispanophone readers of
the widespread support of slavery by some religious organizations in the United States
(bitterly denounced in Frederick Douglass's narrative and in others'). Such a reading is
remotely perceptible in Whitman's original, but in Vasseur's it rises to the surface.
Still, this dynamic of reaching across boundaries of gender, race, and sexuality does not
uniformly characterize Vasseur's translation. Whitman's identification with the slave in
his 1892 passage concludes with the declaration, "All these I feel or am." Vasseur's
Spanish, however, renders this identification less close: "All this I feel and suffer as he
does." The tension here may be rooted in racist boundaries; Vasseur's version of
Whitman, it might be argued, seems to allow for homoeroticism in the case of a black
subject, while at the same time, it stops short of permitting empathy across racial lines.
In other moments involving Whitman's gay poetics a certain squeamishness is evident in
Vasseur's choices. Alegra notes that Vasseur twists key words that Whitman uses to
express particularly homosexual desire, relationality and coupling into less physical,
even cerebral termshis prime example is Vasseur's rendering of "adherence" as
"trust." 27 Additional examples are plentiful. In "City of Orgies" Vasseur changes
"lovers" to "friends" [amigos]. In the translation of "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak
Growing," "manly love" becomes the slightly tamer "male affection" [afecto viril]. In
"Song of Myself," Vasseur translates "the atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of
the distillation, it is odorless/ It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it" as, to back
translate it as literally as possible, "The atmosphere is not a perfume, it tastes of no
essences, it is odorless,/ My mouth breathes it in vital gasps; I love it madly, as I would
a woman." The Italian contains no such insertion of loving a woman; this addition is
Vasseur's. Strangely enough, elsewhere in the translation Vasseur omits references to
women: for example, in his version of "Give Me Your Silent Splendid Sun," the line
"give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire" is
eliminated, as is, in Vasseur's version of "From Pent-up Aching Rivers," the phrase "of
the woman that loves me and whom I love more than my life." 28
The Whitmanian word Camerado presents an interesting challenge to Vasseur's vaguely
homophobic sensibilities, and perhaps represents something of a cop-out in his attempts
to maneuver around openly gay love. Camerado is a defunct term borrowed from
Renaissance Spanish, and is the root of the English comrade, Whitman's basic
denotation. But Vasseur's frequent equivalent, the contemporary Spanish word
camarada, is unusual insofar as it is functionally neutral, but suggests a feminine
subject because of its female-gendered ending, "-a" (camarada is in fact grammatically
a collective feminine.) A little-used term, camarada is derived from the Spanish

cmara, or chamber, and a camarada was originally a group sharing a chamber, or

sharing a bed. Hence it first meant bedfellow, then more generally a companion or
friend.
In "An Oak in Louisiana," a poem focusing on male love, Vasseur opts for camarada.
He does translate the phrase "without a friend" as without an amigo (male/neutral). But
Vasseur translates "lover" as "camarada," a dodging of the issue. It is possible that
Vasseur is here influenced by the Italian rendition, which chose camarata for camerado.
The Italian camarata, however, is a more common word for companion,
interchangeable with the unambiguously male/neutral compagno, and indeed carries
militaristic, masculine connotations despite its apparent gender. In another passage from
"Song of Myself," Gamberale translates Whitman's "bed-fellow" as "compagno di letto"
in the lines "the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and
withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread,/ Leaving me baskets cover'd with
white towels swelling the house with their plenty." Vasseur makes the loving bedfellow
the more muted "caressing, affectionate camarada," rather than, say, compaero de
cama. The Italian bedfellow kisses and hugs, and fills the house with white towels. The
Spanish companion is merely affectionate and caressing, and leaves white towels that
brighten (alegran), rather than more sensually "swell[ing]," the house with their plenty.
It is, of course, possible that Vasseur simply finds camarada the best translation for
bedfellow. The gender agreement for "caress" does indicate that the bedfellow is male.
29

At times Vasseur's changes evince a general fidelity to the integrity of Leaves of Grass,
but remain puzzling. Why, for example, does he render "Endless unfolding of words of
ages!/ And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse," the last word faithfully
maintained in French in the Italian translation, as "Infinite unfolding of words in time!/
Mine is a modern word: the word multitude!"? Multitude is in keeping with Whitman's
famous lines about contradiction, but the very use of multitude later in the original
suggests Whitman meant something particular in choosing "En-Masse" in the earlier
line. The choice is the more puzzling because in his version of "Song of Myself"
Vasseur uses the term "en masa," an equivalent of en masse, to describe the killing of
captured soldiers in the poem's thirty-fourth section (1892 ed.).
As evidenced in Vasseur's insertion of additional exclamation points, something of his
Romantic stylistic tendency persists and breaks through at moments. As Alegra puts it
wonderfully, "Whitman as much as Vasseur expresses . . . a sentimentalist indignation
typical of nineteenth century Romantic, liberal philanthropism. But Vasseur laments two
times where Whitman does once" (358). These flourishes can be almost comical, as
when Vasseur adds to Whitman's line "my faith is the greatest of faiths and the least of
faiths" the superfluous addition "like the tail of a comet."
An additional trilingual comparison of the Whitman, Gamberale, and Vasseur versions
offers intriguing evidence that Vasseur was working with an English edition as well. We
reproduce the three versions below to illustrate what appears to be a correction on
Vasseur's part back to the English meaning of a word erroneously translated into the
Italian:
Whitman (1892):

I know I have the best of time and space, and was never measured
and never will be measured.
Gamberale (1907):

Io so di avere il meglio del tempo e dello spazio, e che esso non fu misurato mai, n
sar misurato mai.
[I know I have the best of time and space, and that this was never measured, nor ever
will be measured]
Vasseur (1912):

S que soy superior al tiempo y al espacio, s que nunca he sido medido, que no lo
ser jams.
[I know I am above time and space, I know I have never been measured, that I never
will be.]
Here, although Vasseur inexplicably changes "have the best of" to "above," he
reinstitutes the "I" as that which is not subject to measure, which Gamberale had turned
from the subjective to the objective immeasurable "best of time and space."
In her study of Gamberale's translation, Grazia Sotis points out that some of the
idiosyncratic or more streetwise English words give the Italian translator trouble (52).
The famously barbaric yawp, for example, becomes a mere shriek or scream in the
stanza that ends "I, too am untranslatable," which Gamberale faithfully renders
"intraducibile." But in the Spanish, as if Vasseur were making a subtle yet bold
commentary on these challenges of translation, the same section concludes with an "I"
not untranslatable but "inexplicable" [inexplicable]. Perhaps Vasseur was, in the very act
of translation, refuting Whitman's claim, and honoring Whitman's "dearest dream" for
"an internationality of poems and poets binding the lands of the earth"? 30 Though not
all of Vasseur's changes may be "explicable," the wider availability of this important
translation may help encourage further study of the "internationality" of Whitman's
works.
Matt Cohen
Rachel Price
Duke University
NOTES

In addition to those thanked in the footnotes, the editors would like to thank Ralph Bauer, George
Handley, Hugo Achugar, and the directors of the Walt Whitman Archive for reviewing this introduction
and making suggestions that much improved it.

Introduction
1. Basing his judgment on John Delancey Ferguson's 1916 assessment of Whitman scholarship in
Ferguson's American Literature in Spain, Gay Wilson Allen concluded that, "to judge from the
representative examples which Ferguson has provided, Spanish criticism of Walt Whitman has been as
intelligent and perceptive as that of any other foreign country,more intelligent, in fact, than that of most
of the infatuated disciples in France, Germany or even the United Status" (Allen quoted in Aizen de
Moshinsky, Walt Whitman, 60). (Back)
2. Fernando Alegra succinctly justifies further study of Vasseur's work, "because of all the Spanish
translations of Whitman's book it is the one which has had the greatest influence on the poets and public
of Spain and Hispanoamerica" (Walt Whitman, 349, our translation). Vasseur's rough contemporary, the
Uruguayan poet and critic Alberto Zum Felde, similarly argued that Vasseur's translation "was the one I
knew in those years, as it was the one that circulated in Uruguay, and surely elsewhere in Latin America.
Knowledge of this translation influenced [my own work]" (Visca-Arturo, Conversando, 35-6, our
translation). The importance of the translation, Alegra argues, was such that it served as something of a
"literary manifesto" insofar as it did not translate Leaves of Grass in its entirety but instead selected a
limited number in an attempt to "convulse and revolutionize the world of Spanish letters and to stamp in
the minds of poets the idea that a more profound conception of poetry was necessary if they hoped to gain
any measure of universality" (Walt Whitman, 350, our translation). (Back)
3. Mart, Allen, and Echevarra, JosMart, 185. (Back)
4. Ibid., 189. (Back)
5. See Mart, Obras Completas, 18: 286. (Back)
6. See John Englekirk, "Notes," 134. (Back)
7. See Allen, Handbook, 320. (Back)
8. See Ferguson, American Literature in Spain, 175. For a chronological list of Whitman's translators and
critics in Spain and Latin America see Alegra, Walt Whitman, 34. (Back)
9. For more on Whitman's role in Latin American literary aesthetics see Sant, "The Accidental Tourist";
and Salessi and Quiroga, "Errata sobre la ertica." (Back)
10. For an exhaustive catalog and analysis of Whitman's presence and translators in Latin America see
Fernando Alegra's Walt Whitman en hispanoamrica. For a more circumscribed but nuanced reading of
Whitman's influence on some of the twentieth century's more notable Latin American authors, including
Borges and Neruda, see Enrico Mario Sant's "The Accidental Tourist: Walt Whitman in Latin America"
(156-176). (Back)
11. Quoted in Monegal, "Sexo y poesa." (Back)
12. For further consideration of this moment see Achugar, Poesa y sociedad; and Sergio Visca-Arturo's
interview with Alberto Zum Felde, Conversando Con Zum Felde. This helpful source we owe to Sant's
excellent bibliographical research on Vasseur's translation, discussed in "The Accidental Tourist." (Back)
13. See Zum Felde, El proceso intelectual, 213. (Back)

14. Vasseur, "Prlogo para la sexta edicin." (Back)

15. Indeed, Vasseur hints at one of the origins of his translation, as well as his professional anxiety about
turning Whitman's translator instead of writing poetry inspired by him, at the conclusion of the preface to
the first edition. There he writes, "Yo poda haber seguido silenciosamente tan lustres ejemplos sin
exponerme pasar por tradittore. . . Me ha parecido ms original correr este ltimo albur. . ." ["I could
have followed silently such illustrious examples, without risking passing for a traitor . . . It has seemed to
me more original to take this last risk . . ."] (Poemas 1912, xii). Vasseur chooses to render the word
"traitor" in Italian when we expect the word "traductor," evoking the ironic saying, "traduttore, traditore,"
or "translator, traitor." At the same time he plays on the multiple meanings of the verb "exponserse,"
which can mean both to risk and to expose oneselfthe playful use of the Italian suggesting
simultaneously that his source is not directly Whitman and that he is aware of the pitfalls of translation.
(Back)
16. See Allen, Walt Whitman Abroad, 187. (Back)
17. Thanks to Grazia Sotis for clarifying these details. (Back)
18. Sant, "The Accidental Tourist," 366 fn 12. Perhaps Sant was unduly convinced by an anecdotal (and
unfortunately unverifiable) recollection, by Vasseur's contemporary Zum Felde, that Vasseur had not
known any English, but instead had depended upon a certain Dr. Vitale for auxiliary literal English
translations. In the preface to the sixth edition Vasseur does mention his friend Dr. Vitale's role in
familiarizing Vasseur with English-language literature, including Whitman, but says nothing about Vitale
as a consultant in translation. Further, he mentions visiting Vitale in Montevideobut Vasseur undertook
the Whitman translation in Spain. (Back)
19. Vasseur, "Prlogo para la sexta edicin." In the same introduction Vasseur dwells on having grown up
in a French-speaking household, recalling that French was his mother tongue until he was at least fifteen
years old. And he follows the above-cited comment about being well-accompanied in his translation
process with the sentences: "Harto diversas y simultneas solan ser mis preocupaciones. Singularmente,
en aquella primera etapa hispano-anglo-francesa" [My concerns tended to be quite varied and
simultaneous. Singularly so, in that first Hispano-Anglo-French moment]. This signals the possibility that
one of the "versions" or translations of Leaves of Grass consulted was the French. (Back)
20. Vasseur, "Prlogo para la sexta edicin" (our translation). (Back)
21. Alegra describes the parts Vasseur edited out of "Song of Myself" (using a numbering system
explained in the appendix): "6, pantheistic symbol of grass; 9, an illustration of his philosophy of death;
12, a detailed description of human types, important because it helps in understanding the poet's
incarnation in familiars, part of his pantheistic doctrine; 15, enumeration of jobs; 16, 17, 19, where the
poet expresses his understanding of all kinds of men, victors and vanquished alike, good and evil,
throughout the eras; 27, 28, 29, 30, where he glorifies the feelings of and affirms the greatness of the
human body; 37, where the poet identifies with the prisoner, the rebel, the thief, the choleric, the beggar;
38, in which he suggests his transfiguration; and 50, where he indicates the meaning of his Happiness. In
addition to these sections, omitted altogether, many verses were excluded from the translated sections"
(Walt Whitman, 367-8, our translation). (Back)
22. Ibid., 352. (Back)
23. At times, it should be noted, Vasseur manages to out-Whitman his master, or to put a verse into words
that may seem truer to Whitman's own spirit. Take, for instance, Vasseur's decision to translate "imbue" as
"impregnate" in a line from "Song of Myself." One meaning of imbue can be to impregnate, but the latter
word lends a rawer, transgressive, if less lyrical, tone to Vasseur's rendering, which in English would be:
"I accept Reality, I do not argue with it,/ I begin and end impregnating myself with materialism" (the
original is "I accept Reality and dare not question it,/ Materialism first and last imbuing"). On translation
and the possibility of supersession see Ilan Stavans, "Beyond Translation: Jorge Luis Borges Revamps
William Faulkner," in Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies, ed. Jon Smith and Deborah
Cohn (Durham: Duke UP, 2004): 495-504.

Several critics have argued on behalf of the innovation of Vasseur's interpretation of Whitman. Enrico
Mario Sant, for instance, offers a revision of Fernando Alegra's critique of Vasseur's translation. Sant
places scare quotes around Alegra's criticisms and goes on to ratifyeven endorsewhat he reads as
Vasseur's knowing and pointed re-writing of Whitman. Alegra's judgment of Vasseur's readings as
"truncated" and "incorrect," and his grumbling about Vasseur's "excessive liberties," were, in Sant's
estimation, misguided. Indeed, he counters, "Far from Alegra's view that Vasseur's 'translations' were
defective or aberrant because they did not render faithfully Whitman's English original, I find them to be
the most apposite. These 'unfaithful' versions of Whitman, foundation-texts of his Latin American cult,
confirm the alienated, second-order quality of such discourse" (164). Another article, by Jorge Salessi and
Jos Quiroga, similarly defends Vasseur's poetic license, proclaiming that the Uruguayan poet manages to
make Whitman more erotic than he reads in the English. Citing a fragment of Vasseur's translation of "To
a Locomotive in Winter," they write that in translation "Whitman's locomotive is turned into an erotic
manifesto that is already not without a certain Marinettian flair. In the original, the body is more
mechanical" (125). (Back)
24. See Ferguson, American Literature in Spain, 189. (Back)
25. See Alegra, Walt Whitman, 352-355. (Back)
26. Again, despite the fact that he was apparently unaware that Vasseur was working from at least the
Italian translation, Alegra's major assessments still obtain. For example, it is true that several of the titles
Vasseur changes were also slightly changed in the Italian. But the changes are not consonant, suggesting
that at most Vasseur was inspired by Gamberale's adaptations to make his own, or that indeed the changes
may be merely coincident or derived from another source such as the French translation. Thus, for
example, while "To a Certain Civilian" is rendered by Gamberale as "Ad un pacifico cittadino" [To a
peaceful civilian], it is translated equally curiously but distinctly as "A un burgus" [To a
burgher/bourgeois] by Vasseur.
For a discussion of Gamberale's translation and the debatable merits of its literal nature see Grazia Sotis,
Walt Whitman in Italia: la traduzione Gamberale e la traduzione Giachino di Leaves of Grass (Naples:
Societ Editrice Napoletana), 1987. (Back)
27. 361. Alegra notes also, importantly, that Whitman's rendering of key terms from phrenology, such as
"adhesiveness" or "amativeness," is lost in Vasseur's version; this may be the case for other terms
Whitman has borrowed or adapted from specialist discourses. (Back)
28. Perhaps more strangely, as if to balance out Whitman's male-focused gaze, Vasseur fantasized the
poem "The Poet's Grandmother" ["La Abuela del Poeta"] into existence, constructing it from a section of
Whitman's poem "Faces" (Poemas 1912, 147). (Back)
29. Just a year after Vasseur's translation was published in Barcelona, Cebri Montoliu, the author of the
1909 Catalan selections from Leaves of Grass, wrote his in-depth study of Whitman, Walt Whitman:
L'home i sa tasca (1913). One can only speculate about whether or not he read Vasseur's translations in
the meantime. In any case, as Alegra points out, Montoliu was clear, if ambivalent, about Whitman's
sexuality, writing that Whitman "demonstrated all his life a great indifference to the fair sex" and that,
"strange as it may seem," the "perfect male . . . seemed not to feel . . . the magical attraction of females"
(quoted in Alegra, Walt Whitman, 37, our translation). (Back)
30. Whitman quoted in Allen, Handbook, 252. (Back)

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