| In 1959, four years before his death, William Carlos Williams published Yes, Mrs. Williams, formed with fragments and notes taken from countless conversations over the years with his mother.; This book embodies a number of elements rarely noticed in scholarly work on Williams. Sayings, anecdotes, and songs in Spanish, French, Caribbean Patois and English share space in the book and create a movement of migratory languages and memories. In this sense Williams translates---in the sense of "bearing across"---the memory of the other. The arrangement of every fragment takes us back and forth along the years of conversation, acting as passages, bearing the languages and the uniqueness of experience across time.; Yes, Mrs. Williams is a work that struggles to recover the significance of listening carefully to the voice of the other. This book challenges traditional notions of time and thus, the practice of biographies and autobiography. |
