Image by Eric Hanson
[A talk presented November 16,
2018 as a keynote at “The Fabricant: Symposium on the Figure of the Translator,”
University of California, Santa Barbara. Original title: “Toward a Poetry &
Poetics of the Americas: A Transnational Assemblage in Progress.”]
In the
middle of the journey of my life – or even earlier – it fell to me to make
public a conversation that I heard going on in my head and then all around me,
and to give it a name and a book (Technicians
of the Sacred) that brought together as poetry disparate forms and
structures, largely oral, from disparate cultures and languages, much of it
never recognized as such. It was also
the start, for me, of a life-long project, that has continued to unfold and
transform from the mid-1960s to the present – from ethnopoetics at the start to omnipoetics
at the end. By 1967 the book as such was ready, composed
of poems and commentaries, selected with an eye and mind on the new forms of
poetry and near-poetry developed by our current avant-gardes as guideposts for
what could be seen, perhaps for the first time, as the poetry of deep and
autochthonous (indigenous) cultures throughout the world. My task, as I saw it here, was to dig for
previously hidden or occulted poetry with my sense of the formal and
intellectual range of such poetries expanded in line with the poetry and art
extensions being practiced by our own avant-gardists.
The word ethnopoetics that
I coined for what we were then doing came through George Quasha and his journal
Stony Brook, in which I first
published excerpts from Technicians of
the Sacred, after which Quasha asked me to be a contributing editor and to
give a special name to my editorship.
What I hit on of course was ethnopoetics,
on the obvious model of academic specializations like ethnomusicology, ethnomedicine
and ethnohistory, but with the proviso that what we were doing was primarily
under the curatorship of poets, who I thought of then (as well as now) as
probably our own best chroniclers and theoreticians. It was also a way of skirting around the
earlier designation of the targeted poetry as “primitive” and led to Dennis
Tedlock’s later assertion that “there is no poetics that is not an
ethnopoetics” and a further expansion of the ethnopoetic beyond the “primitive”
as such. Or my own conclusion from that
time: “When it comes to poetry, primitive means complex.”
With Tedlock too – a true co-founder of ethnopoetics – the
association between us began as a response on his part to Technicians and to the ethnopoetics section of Stony Brook, but he was already well engrossed in the work of newly
and experimentally translating oral narrative that would be a real breakthrough
in expanding the range of what poetry was all about. And with Tedlock too came a further
connection, to scholars in anthropology and linguistics as well as in poetry
and literature. And translation also as
a near definitional interest, both as transcreation and what purported to be ultra-literal
translation, which may amount to the same thing. (What we were after in effect
was a kind of cultural studies that never fully developed.)
For this, anyway, our principal vehicle was Alcheringa, a publication that we founded in 1971 and subtitled “a
first journal of ethnopoetics.”
Deliberately also we opened its pages to active poets as principal
contributors and to a range of scholars/thinkers/theoreticians/and translators
(many translators), to keep the
ethnopoetics solidly centered in an exchange with the most experimental of our
poet contemporaries and predecessors. In
this regard the poets represented directly on our masthead as contributing
editors were David Antin, Kofi Awoonor, Simon Ortiz, Gary Snyder, and Nathaniel
Tarn, while the scholars and ethnographers were Ulli Beier, Stanley Diamond,
Harris Lenowitz, Dell Hymes, and David McAllester. In addition our regular and occasional
contributors included poets Anselm Hollo, Jackson Mac Low, W.S. Merwin, Charles
Simic, Diane Di Prima, Clayton Eshleman, Theodore Enslin, Barbara Einzig,
George Quasha, Edouard Glissant, Edward (later Kamau) Brathwaite, Armand
Schwerner, Howard Norman, and bpNichol, along with scholars such as Michael
Harner, Victor Turner, Allan F. Burns, Richard and Nora Dauenhauer, Barbara
Myerhoff, Jill Leslie Furst, Diane Rothenberg, and Barbara Tedlock, to name
just a few.
It was the collaboration
with all these others – and more – that encouraged me to continue, with a shared
desire, a need to explore both the roots of poetry and the ways it manifested
newly in the present. There was nothing
pre-planned here, but early along I declared in “a personal manifesto,” that
one of my intentions as a poet was “to explore the poetic past from the point
of view of the present,” and by the same token to review and alter, as needed,
our sense of the present as well. With Technicians, I felt, I had already
opened up my view of poetry to forms and contexts otherwise hidden from plain
sight, and that gave me leverage to push forward with a sense of anthology as
assemblage or what Robert Duncan called rightly “a grand collage.”
For this transnational
and transcultural project, moving as it did between cultures and languages, translation
of course was a central concern, something I’ll look at shortly as a
contribution to the present gathering.
And maybe also, to say it in advance, the whole project was, as it were,
a massive act of translation, whether or not I was truly suited to pull it off,
while open always to collaboration and a work in common.
For
me, then, the project up to the present has included eleven large anthologies
and assemblages, with a twelfth and probably final one now in progress. The opening volume – Technicians of the Sacred (1968) – was an exploration of what we
still spoke of as “primitive and archaic poetry,” and while my approach was
consistently secular, the title and contents pointed intentionally to the
sources of poetry in practices that crossed over easily into the spiritual and
mystical, with shamans and other traditional visionaries presented throughout
as poets or proto-poets. There are
several points that I would like to stress here:
– The work from the start was
multicultural and multinational in scope, so that poetry, for all of its
differences from place to place and culture to culture, could be read as a
universal human activity, “from origins to present.”
– Following from that and from
what I and my contemporaries were doing as poets, I was able to open up the
range of what we might take as poetry, with an emphasis on performance and
ritual, and “erasing the boundaries between the arts” (as Kurt Schwitters
famously had it) in search of new configurations.
–
As a kind of pseudo-academic or parodically-academic gesture, I added commentaries
at the end of the work that both explored context and drew comparisons to
contemporary, particularly avant-garde or “experimental” poetry and art.
– The publication outside of an academic
context, left me a free hand as editor and composer, that would have otherwise
been denied me, at a moment when commercial presses (Doubleday Anchor in this
instance) were looking – temporarily, to be sure – for an emergent new market
in poetry. (The next two revised
editions of Technicians, I should
add, were both under the imprint of
the University of California Press, along with four later assemblages.)
– The absolute necessity of
translation and the challenges to find new forms of translation for oral and
performative poetry, led in the case of Tedlock and myself, to experiments in
what I would come to call “total translation.”
(More of this later, with maybe a performance or two, if time allows.)
– I was also moved, in the first
revised edition in 1984, to include
a few works from the established (literary) tradition that are connected as
well to the old lore in so far as it remained a living presence in the air of
Europe. The persistence of such connections explains the appearance there of
Rabelais, Saint Francis, Blake, & even Shakespeare—as, less surprisingly,
that of Homer & Hesiod—along with my sense that the equals of the old
“technicians of the sacred” weren’t only to be found at the margins but at the
center of our own poetries as generally understood.
By 1984, then, and the first
re-publication of Technicians of the
Sacred by the University of California Press, I had already published four
additional assemblages – large books and large commercial presses. These allowed me to map and re-map areas of
poetic activity in many times and places, moving toward new readings, some in
places where there had been few readings at all. The first of these, Shaking the Pumpkin in 1971, was a gathering of largely traditional
American Indian poetry, which worked from an expanded sense of what could be
read as poetry: sung and spoken, verbal and visual, embedded often in a complex
range of rituals and other happenings.
The sources of course were multilingual and reflected the complexity of
language and life in indigenous North America.
Buoyed by this I joined with George Quasha to compose and publish, in
1974, a highly collaged and highly revisionary anthology of North American
poetry and related writings, taking as a title William Blake’s America a Prophecy, and attempting to explore
where the title and the pre-dispositions of our time might lead us. I also
returned, in 1978, to a transnational or global model, but from a curiously
different direction, calling it A Big
Jewish Book and subtitling it “Poems & Other Visions of the Jews from
Tribal Times to the Present.” With roots
in traditional sources that I could freely re-vision, but with an emphasis throughout
on diaspora, my intention here was to smash stereotypes, or sometimes to
incorporate them, aiming as far as I could for complexity in its global and
temporal reach, and for surprise and puzzlement, both for myself and
others. The book’s epigraph, echoing
Ezra Pound, was a free translation from Talmudic sources, shaped by me and my collaborator
on Hebrew and Aramaic, Harris Lenowitz, as follows:
Rabbi
Eliezer said:
“prayer
‘fixed’?
“his
supplication bears no fruit
. . . . . .
.
The question
next came up; what
is
FIXED?
Rabba &
Rabbi Yosi answered
“whatever
blocks the will
“to
MAKE IT NEW
Here too the mix was the religious and mystical with the secular, the
divine with the vile, and the dominance of the written over the oral, though
all approaches, as Blake would have it, were “necessary for human existence.”
By the 1980s, then, the
University of California Press took over as the principal publisher for what I
began to think of as “my project” or the project (along with
other collaborators), first with the second or revised edition of Technicians of the Sacred in 1984, and almost
simultaneously with an anthology, Symposium
of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics, co-edited with
Diane Rothenberg, that brought together a wide range of poets and critical
thinkers on ethnopoetics and related matters, from the eighteenth century to
the almost present. At about that time,
with the end of the century and millennium getting near, I began to work with
Pierre Joris, to construct an anthology/assemblage of modern and postmodern
poetry on an international/transnational scale.
The result was Poems for the
Millennium, also presented (in two volumes) as The University of California Book(s) of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. The extra twist here, beyond the globalism,
was our deliberate and far-reaching emphasis on experimental modernism, favoring the poetic extremes and assorted
avant-gardes, as other gatherings had favored the more conventional
center. Once into this, I followed up,
with the Romanticism scholar Jeffrey Robinson as a co-equal and absolutely
necessary collaborator, on a third volume, The
University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry,
rediscovering an international range of “experimental Romantics,” both
canonical and non-canonical, and inclusive of Asian and American poets as well
as British and continental European ones.
And several years later I was able to open the field of poetry still
further in Barbaric Vast & Wild,
a collaboration this time with John Bloomberg-Rissman that served as an add-on
to Poems for the Millennium and that
we subtitled “A Gathering of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to
Present.” The works presented here –
again transnational in scope – were intended as a mapping of language works
outside the normative literary canon (or largely so), so as I listed some of
them elsewhere: Egyptian pyramid texts, biblical prophecies, pre-Socratic
poet-philosophers, Buddhist wanderers and ”divine madmen,” along with poems and
related language works from dialects and "nation languages," thieves'
cants and other argots or vernaculars, working class and lumpen poetries,
popular and newspaper poetry, sermons and rants, glossolalia and glossographia,
slogans, graffiti, private writings (journals and diaries) or semi-private
(correspondence, blogs, or social-networkings), and the "art of the insane"
(Art Brut) that marked the early turning of
avant-garde artists and poets to the idea of an "outside" poetry and
art. The work as a whole, I then suggested, might be
taken as another step toward what I elsewhere called an "omnipoetics" and an "anthology
of everything."
In all of this – it
seems obvious to me in the present context – the role of translation is crucial
– both as commonly understood and sometimes in more radical or experimental
forms. In the early days of
ethnopoetics, for example, where so much of the work to be translated was oral
and performative, Dennis Tedlock and I explored the possibilities of what I was
then calling “total translation.” The
challenge here was to account in translation for elements of the oral original
beyond the semantic or lexical: sound and gesture and other aspects of voice
and performance. In Tedlock’s case the
work at hand consisted of spoken narratives he had gather from Zuni Indian
speakers, which would otherwise be translated as prose, but here Tedlock’s crucial
and highly influential breakthrough was to attend to the fluctuations of the
voice and to the pauses or silences, the crucial role of the breath, in all
human speech. Both in the transcription
of the original Zuni and in his subsequent translation into English, he used a
verse-like lineation to account for these: a line break for short pauses/silences
and a strophe break for longer ones. He
also used capital letters to indicate loudness and italics for softness, along
with other indicators of qualities not otherwise evident in the written English
versions.
In my version of “total translation,”
by contrast, I worked with songs rather than speech, moving from written
translations to markedly performative ones.
For this I began in the
Summer of 1968 to work simultaneously with two sources of American Indian
poetry. Settling down a mile from the Cold Spring settlement of the Allegany
(Seneca Nation) Reservation at Steamburg, New York, I was near enough to
friends who were traditional songmen to work with them on the translation of
sacred and secular song--poems. At the same time the great American
ethnomusicologist David McAllester was sending me recordings, transcriptions,
literal translations and his own freer reworkings of a series of seventeen
"Horse Songs" that had been the property of Frank Mitchell, a Navajo
singer and ritualist from Chinle, Arizona (born: 1881, died: 1967).
The big question,
which I was immediately aware of with both poetries, was if and how to handle
those elements in the original works that weren't translatable literally. As
with most Indian poetry, the voice carried many sounds that weren't, strictly
speaking, "words." These tended to disappear or be attenuated
in standard translations, as if they weren't really there. But they were
there and were at least as important as the words themselves. In both Navajo and
Seneca many songs consisted of nothing but those "meaningless"
vocables (not free "scat" either – to use the common jazz term – but
fixed sounds recurring from performance to performance). Most other songs had
both meaningful and non-meaningful elements, and such songs (McAllester told me
for the Navajo) were often spoken of, qua title, by their meaningless
burdens. Similar meaningless sounds, Dell Hymes had pointed out for some
Kwakiutl songs, might in fact be keys to the songs' structures: "something
usually disregarded, the refrain or so--called 'nonsense syllables' . . . in
fact of fundamental importance . . . both structural clue &
microcosm."
Here, then, I will
stop reading from text for a while, and move toward a description and
performance of one of the “total translations” from Navajo.
[Describes and performs Horse Song 13]
To
continue, then, with a further, likely final, work of recovery and discovery,
in which translation will again have a central, essential place.
What
I’m now composing, along with my co-editor Heriberto Yépez, is a
transnational/multilingual anthology or grand
collage of the poetry of the Americas, both north and south and drawn from
the diversity of languages on the two great continents. We aim to approach the project with the same
openness that I and my co-authors were able to exercise in the Millennium
series, to see this in some way as a particularized extension of Poems for the Millennium. Too often, the
idea of America and American poetry and literature is limited to work written
in English within the present boundaries of the United States. While this has been modified in several
recent anthologies by the inclusion of some poetry translated from indigenous
North American languages, there has never been a full-blown historical
anthology of American poetry or literature viewing north and south together in
a larger transnational vision of what “America” has meant in the history of our
hemisphere and of the world. Such a
vision of another America, deeply rooted in its pre-Conquest past and in the
writings of its early European colonizers, comes to us from poets such as the
Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, writing circa 1903 of
“our America, which has had poets
from the ancient
times of Netzahualcoyotl
… the America of
the great Moctezuma, of the Inca,
our America
smelling of Christopher Columbus,
our Catholic
America, our Spanish America.”
Or from José
Martí, while feeling the oppression of Cuba’s stronger neighbor to the north,
who wrote: “The pressing need of our America is to
show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent, swift conquerors of a
suffocating past.” Their Spanish America
constitutes a declaration of independence from the other, English America and
should be taken as such. But the
complexity grows even greater, shaped both by conquest & migration
For the two of
us, one a poet from Mexico and the other from the United States, the
idea of a still larger America(s), made up of many independent parts, has been
a topic of continuing shared interest.
Since there currently exists no single volume of “American” poetry or
literature that takes such an expansive view of its subject matter, we find ourselves
free to make a new beginning, an experiment through anthologizing to explore
what results might follow from a juxtaposition of poets and poetries covering
all parts of the Americas and the range of languages within them: European
languages such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, including creoles and
pidgins, as well as a large number of Indigenous languages such as Mapuche,
Quechua, Mayan, Mazatec, and Nahuatl, and occasional immigrant languages such
as Italian, Yiddish, German, and Chinese. While our sense of “America” along these
lines would extend and amplify the European metaphor of the Americas as a “new world,” we also recognize and
embrace the reality of 2000 years or more of (native) American indigenous
poetry and writing. It is precisely such complexities and
contradictions, even conflicts, that will engage us here.
For
me, anyway, this would seem to be a kind of culminating work and one that I
feel is necessary as we in America and the greater world pass through a period
in which the ideals of diversity and multiculturalism are called into question
and attacked at the highest levels of government and state-directed power. For this, translation, in all its forms, is
our greatest tool toward a more truly “human poetics” (as David Antin once
named it) and the excitement of fullness and diversity in all our lives and
works. So, if any of you would like to assist
Yépez and me in the current trans-American project, you should know that any
input would be welcome in what can or should be a communal work-in-progress.
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