“To Die ‘incommunicado:’ Problems of Translation and Communication in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson”

William Carlos Williams’s "Paterson" develops as an essential search for the appropriate idiom to “translate” and communicate America. Criticizing arbitrary codes, which abstract men from their immediate environment, prevent true knowledge, determine misunderstanding and miscommunication, it brings forward the poet’s dream of a “natural language,” which is based on the exact correspondence between word and world, signifier and signified. Such a vision can be traced back to the linguistic tradition inaugurated by Cratylus in Plato’s homonymous dialogue, and is mediated by the Transcendentalists’ approaches to nature, language, and theories of organic forms. Intended as a cure against “false”—i.e. totally arbitrary—modes of expression, such an ideal is pursued by a poetics of marriage and vision which relies on metaphor, ekphrasis, and (American) speech, in order to heal the fracture between sign and referent. At its best, "Paterson" finally develops as a “speech act,” in Austin’s notion, performing the central imperative of the work: “Say it! No ideas but in things;” it suggests and provides a “rhetoric of love” which is as “real” as the roar of the Passaic Falls.