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By 1943 essays by and about Jorge Carrera Andrade were beginning to
appear in the major American literary journals of the time. H.R. Hays wrote and published an
eloquent appraisal, “Jorge Carrera Andrade: Magician of Mirrors”, as the lead feature of
the distinguished international literary journal Books Abroad (now World Literature
Today) at the University of Oklahoma. Poetry magazine in Chicago published a major essay
by Carrera Andrade (translated from the Spanish by Hays). Although fifty years later the essay,
“The New American and His Point of View toward Poetry”, seems dated, at the time it was a
dazzling survey of the contemporary Latin American poetry scene of the 1940s, a series of snapshots
of an exciting and evolving literary scene taken from the inside.
By the time the essay appeared in 1943 the United States was fully engaged in World War II in both
Europe and the Pacific. Carrera Andrade’s portrait of the poetry of the southern continent and
Carribean was both poetic and evocative. It’s clear that he envisioned a future poetry that
would combine all the elements of the hemisphere to allow the new American to speak with the voice
of the changing century. It was for many American readers an eloquent introduction to a new
literature emerging from the European models to maturity as a purely Latin American literature.
Carrera Andrade used the essay to also draw attention to the fact a number of Latin American
countries were contributing their sons to the fight for democratic ideals in Europe. In the same
breath in which he promoted Latin American literature and culture, he was aware of the need to
lobby for political support for the countries south of the United States’ borders.
The appearance of the essay in Poetry immediately drew letters from Wallace Stevens and
William Carlos Williams. Williams wrote in Spanish from his New Jersey home to the editor of
Poetry that “...if the essay had appeared twenty years earlier it would have saved us
all a great deal of work.” Stevens, in a handwritten letter on the letterhead of the Hartford
Life Insurance Company, was impressed by the essay and invited Carrera Andrade to visit him in
Connecticut.
In 1941 Carrera Andrade published a political tract, “Ecuador Sheds Its Blood For
Democracy,” and spoke at the San Francisco Press club on behalf of support for Ecuador in its
ongoing military dispute with Peru. Dating from the eighteenth century Ecuador and Peru had
repeatedly battled over shared border demarcations and land. In 1941 Peru - by now a Japanese proxy
in the region- had engaged in armed incursions over the Ecuadorian border. Ecuador’s coast was
valuable because of its access to the Pacific. By 1944 the United States had established naval
military bases on the Galapagos Islands and on the Ecuadorian coast. In 1944 Carrera Andrade was
appointed ambassador to Venezuela and left the United States.
In 1946 a brief flurry of attention was generated in the United States by Carrera Andrade’s
first major book in English, Secret Country (New York: MacMillan, 1946). Translated by Muna
Lee, wife of the then governor of Puerto Rico, it drew praise in the pages of the The Chicago
Times, Hispania, The New York Times, The Partisan Review, Saturday Review of Literature, and
The Yale Review. Carl Sandburg, writing in Spanish from his farm in Flat Rock, North
Carolina sent a letter to Lee praising the poetry of Carrera Andrade, calling him his “brother in the poetry quest.”
Within the next ten years additional essays, articles and reviews of his work would appear in the
United States, England, France, Belgium, and The Netherlands. From 1952 to 1958 Carrera Andrade
lived in Paris and worked at UNESCO. He continued his literary activities there, including two
additional books published in bilingual Spanish-French editions. Although Carrera Andrade continued
to make short trips to the United States as part of his duties with UNESCO or as a delegate to the
United Nations, it was not until 1968-1970 that he spent another substantial period there.
During the intervening years a number of other translators had begun to translate his work.
Vistor of Mist, a book of poetry translated by G.R. Coulthard, was published in England in
1950. J.M. Cohen included him in his Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (England, 1956) and
Willis Barnstone included his poetry in Modern European Poetry (New York, 1966). Carrera
Andrade appeared in other anthologies on the European continent, including anthologies in Danish,
French, and German. Thomas Merton, John Malcolm Brinnin, and Donald Walsh translated various poems
for anthologies, books, and magazines. While Brinnin’s translations on the whole are
unaccomplished, Thomas Merton managed to capture the flavor and delicacy of Carrera Andrade’s
poems in a small collection of translations he included in Emblems of A Season of Fury
(1963), one of his many books of poetry from New Directions. H.R. Hays published a flawed and
poorly edited book, Selected Poems, in 1972 with SUNY Press. An even worse rendering of
Jorge Carrera Anadrade came with the SUNY publication in English of a collection of his lectures
from Harvard, SUNY Stony Brook, and Vassar, Reflections On Latin American Literature
(1973).
From 1968 to 1970 Carrera Andrade taught at SUNY Stony Brook while living on Long Island. He
traveled to give lectures at Harvard and Vassar and also participated in a writer’s gathering
at the Lincoln Center in New York City. A collection of photographic contact sheets by American
photographer Rollie McKenna from the University of Delaware archives reveals the attendees at the
Lincoln Center gathering included Carrera Andrade, John Malcolm Brinnin, Jim Harrison, Anthony
Hecht, Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz, John Logan, Nicanor Parra, Henry Rago, Louis Simpson,
William Jay Smith, and James Tate. It was soon after that Carrera Andrade also participated in a
poetry festival at the Library of Congress and recorded his poems in Spanish for the Hispanic
Reading Room at the Library of Congress.
At the age of seventy, as he mentions in his Vassar lecture, Jorge Carrera Andrade had come full
circle. Throughout his life and career Jorge Carrera Andrade was a man constantly on the move. New
cities and countries rose and fell on his horizon with regularity. He was a diplomat to a variety
of countries, often sent to negotiate or lobby for Ecuador’s financial or political
needs.
Posted to Japan in 1936, he watched as Japan devastated Asia and Indochina. In December 1941 he
lobbied for American military support for Ecuador against armed incursions by Peru. With the title
of Envoy Extraordinaire and Minister Plenipotentiary Carrera Andrade was later sent to Great
Britain to renegotiate Ecuador’s foreign debt. He shuttled back and forth between Argentina,
Brazil, and Chile seeking support to pressure Peru to return land taken during the border disputes.
Throughout the course of his professional career a dizzying array of politicians, generals, and
incompetents held presidential office in Ecuador. He was hired and fired, reassigned, or sought
other employment according to the political winds that blew through the presidential palace.
As much politician as poet, it was a dual life that resulted in two divorces and estrangement from
the children who knew him only as a man with a suitcase on his way to some distant city. When he
finally retired he discovered that the pension he had earned as a diplomat in service to his
country for fifty years had been squandered by the financial black magic and bankrupt fiscal
policies of a government that no longer had any use for him. His last years in Quito were spent on
a small stipend as director of a cultural organization. He died unexpectedly November 7, 1978, and
was buried in the cemetery of San Diego in Quito.
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