I
realize that where I am at this point is already at a considerable distance
from what my more literally directed side (and yours) would recognize as
translation, that it begins to touch on what I have elsewhere and persistently
spoken of as “othering” (a word my spell-check refuses to recognize as
legitimate). Still I would like to
digress for a few minutes to speak of collaboration as it touches on
translation and as a foundational part of my poetics and an antidote perhaps to
those anxieties of influence that were injected into literary discourse some
forty and more years ago. Translation of
course is, at its best, the joyful acceptance of influence and of shared voices
in the process of creation and transcreation.
In that sense too it opens to an acceptance of collaboration and
community (however problematic they may sometimes be) as foundations for the
work at hand. And I would take
translation as a metaphor for the entire poetic process.
My over-all experience of
collaboration goes well beyond translation – work with artists & musicians.
with editors and book designers, with performance troupes like The Living
Theater, with poetry readings and publications shared or organized in common –
all of which I came to see (rightly or wrongly) as a principal mark of the
avant-garde in poetry & art. This
idea of an avant-garde, at least as I conceived it, is – or was – the work of
individuals acting together – an effort somehow in common, even if performed
one by one. There are times of course
when an individual proclaims himself to be an avant-garde, but I don't believe
that there are, strictly speaking, avant-gardes of one. (There are great & unique
experimentalists who operate in isolation, but that I think is something
different – referential sometimes to an avant-garde but different.) And there are individuals also – Bretons or
Marinettis – who dominate their avant-gardes, probably to nobody's
advantage. Strong individuals like
that, I now believe, were not only influential in forging their avant-gardes
but were responsible as well for the ephemeral nature of what they had
created. In that sense it’s also
possible that avant-gardes are destined for short lives, hellbound for
self-destruction – or an aspect, maybe, of what Tristan Tzara might have had in
mind when he told us that “the true Dadas are against Dada.” (Cooptation by the art market is of course another factor to consider.)
In addition I thought of the big
books, which were as often as not co-authored with one or two other poets or
editors, not so much as anthologies but as assemblages or collages that
fulfilled for me the primary function of collage – to bring the words of others
into the work at hand. It was the
recognition of something like that, I think, that freed my own poetry to be
more than it had been to start with. It
also energized me in the direction of translation – an activity that I’ve
pursued into the present. Even working as
a solitary translator I felt myself in an interaction with whoever I was then
translating, and I came to believe that all translation – of poetry at least –
was inherently a matter of collaboration.
(I’ve called such processes – both of translation and collage –
“othering” and have spoken about them elsewhere.) But to carry on the translation work in
particular, I often had to call on the help of others – either because the task
at hand was too big or too foreign or needed more than my own voice to make it
stick.
With the ethnopoetic books I thought that all of this was
obvious. Technicians and Shaking the
Pumpkin were assemblages of (mostly) translations, generally as I found
them but sometimes with interventions of my own. The range of languages was vast, & my own
competence outside of the European sphere was non-existent. On two principal occasions I came more
properly into the translator’s role – both times with a collaborator. In the one instance (Seneca Indian) my
co-worker was a native speaker & songmaker, Richard Johnny John, and in the
other (Navajo) the work was made possible by the great American
ethnomusicologist David McAllester.
Aside from that – and apart from the ethnopoetic experiments – there
were Hebrew translations with Harris Lenowitz for A Big Jewish Book and a more recent book of poems from the Czech modernist
poet Vitezslav Nezval (Milos Sovak my co-translator there), in addition to
which the ample books of poetry from Schwitters and Picasso were assembled
alongside Pierre Joris (and in the case of Picasso a number of other poet-
translators whom we brought together for the project).
It is in this context, then, that I would speak of
translation with a recognition that my own work, as well as that of others, is
not only experimental or avant-garde but practices all those forms of
translation that John Dryden spelled out centuries ago: metaphrase, paraphrase
and imitation, three procedures with varying degrees of departure from the
original. Or put another way, I’m
mindful of the observation somewhere attributed to Wallace Stevens that “all translation is experimental
translation.” To which I would add that
all translation [at least of poetry] is collaborative
translation ... from the perspective at least of the poet translator. As such my own experience has been that when
I’m most intensely into the act of translating, setting another before me –
“the most sublime act” as Blake would have had it – I am or I feel like an
actor immersed in a role, becoming that role or character, or like a dancer, say, responding to the
movements of a partner, then thrown forward to do the dancing on my own. The Lorca Variations, from which I read
earlier, are the clearest example I have of this – from translations in
immediate response to Lorca (developing my own rhythms as I go, but always with
Lorca to guide me) to poems of “my own” which retain words from my translation
but leave me free to compose anew.
With that in mind I want to end with a twofold
exploration of myself not as translator but as the object of translation and
variation.
A few years back, while I was preparing (with the
Mexican poet Heriberto Yépez) a large anthology-like assemblage of my own
writings, Eye of Witness: A Jerome
Rothenberg Reader, the retrospective nature of that work opened me to the
idea of applying to earlier poems of my own the procedures I had followed for
Lorca and others in the “variations.”
That meant, as with the other variations, taking a poem of some length,
isolating mostly the nouns and some adjectives, rearranging the order in which
they appeared, and using them as what Jackson MacLow called “nuclei” in the
seeding or composition of new poems. I
was also mindful of two statements attributed to Henri Matisse when he was my
age or possibly a little younger: “One should be able to rework an old work at
least once – to make sure that one has not fallen victim – to one’s nerves or
to fate.” And again: “When you have achieved what you want in a certain area,
when you have exploited the
possibilities that lie in one direction, you must, when the time comes, change
course, search for something new.”
[Reads:
Jigoku Zoshi & variation]
The
final experience of translation, however, came on the various occasions when my
work was being translated into another language, but particularly where I was
familiar with that language and, even more so, where I was able to work along
with the translator. That process in
several instances was truly exhilarating while it also brought me up against
the limits of translation and the strategies of the translator in trying to
address them. Some of this is obvious to
all of us here and applies in whatever direction the translation is going: how
to distinguish heaven from sky in most European languages, or spirit from mind
in others. For the former too I ran into
a problem compounded by an element of word play, when I included a short
sentence – “I will change your mind” – in a series of manifesto propositions,
for which the translation could never be handled properly. Or there is another instance where I speak of
mind changing into spirit or of spirit changing into mind, and another example
in a line and a poem title “the sky that harbors heaven.”
Those of course are familiar
instances, but the translation problem has been compounded for me in a recent
series of poems (“Divagations”) where rhyming enters the picture. I don’t here mean structural or end rhyme,
where the rhyming words don’t have to be consistent between the original and
the translation. Rather what I’ll present
to you now is from a series of poems called Divagations,
which are currently being translated for a new book in French. The rhymes here are obvious and have a
relevance both to sound and sense.
[Reads
and discusses: Divagations (1)]
An
even clearer instance is a poem from a series that drew on images from Goya’s
masterwork Caprichos and were then
translated into Spanish by Mexican poet Heriberto Yépez. What the Goya image gave me were two animal
figures, a monkey and a donkey in English, but most literally “un mono” and “un
burro” in Spanish. My poem however took
the rhyming coincidence in English as a point of departure to seed the entire
poem with rhymings.
[Reads:
“A Monkey & a Donkey”]
In
this instance anyway, since Yépez and I were very close, we worked on several
of the rhymes together, and at a couple of points we rewrote lines in question,
to get the same effect if not the same meaning in Spanish. It strikes me that more was possible here – a
greater degree of Dryden’s “imitation” or de Campos’s “transcreation” or my own
“othering” – but maybe we’ll get back to that in the years ahead.
[Reads:
“Un asno y un chango”]
I
will close then – if the time allows – with a translation of my work that I was
most able to incorporate into the performance of my own poetry once it came
into my possession. The poem in question
was the opening of Poland/1931, my
attempt in the 1970s to create an ancestral poetry of my own “in a world of
Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen.”
Amos Schauss, a translator whom I had met briefly and who was a rabbi
and teacher at Hebrew Union College
in Cincinnati
[Reads:
“The Wedding” in English and Yiddish]
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