A controversy of poets: translations by Roberto Márquez

Appearing in what is their first lyric translations into English, this piece presents the historic poems of Fray Damián López de Haro, the poems of his anonymous 17th century colonial antagonist, and José Gualberto Padilla s still more sharply pitched and nationally selfassertive 19th century rejoinders to a later visiting Spaniard s lyric but derisive view of colonial Puerto Rico, his experience there, and its people. Setting the poems in their respective historical contexts, the translator s introduction argues that, taken together, this double Controversy of Poets and the telling clash of attitudes and perceptions it reveals, epitomizes and offers an emblematic, telescoped, and synoptic view of two successive stages of the unfolding ruptures, forces, and processes of Puerto Rico s ongoing and (re)definitive historic evolution.