Indigenous, Immigrant, & Multilingual American Poetry-A ModPoSloPo Course 2/8/2020 – 4/4/2020
Map to the Course Resources on this Site
- Access-the-Course-Map for Students New to Coursera online and SloPo Courses
- Course Overview with Sample Poems and Sample Discussion Thread
- The Library
- Week One and Two Materials: Ethnopoetics & Shaking the Pumpkin
- Jerome Rothenberg Assemblage of Materials: From Ethnopoetics to his own poetry and his work on A Big Jewish Book — texts, audio, video.
- The Q&A with Jerome Rothenberg
- Week Three Materials: Contemporary American Indian Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Pacific Islander Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Contemporary Caribbean Anglophone Poetry
- Week Five Materials: Contemporary African-American Poetry
- Week Six Materials: Contemporary Latinx-American Poetry and Performance
- Week Seven Materials: Contemporary Asian-American Poetry
- Week Eight Materials: The Ghazal, Contemporary Middle-Eastern and South-Asian Poetry
- RETURN TO COURSERA COURSE SITE PAGE
Q & A with Jerome Rothenberg
- 15 Flower World Variations. The poems I refer to have several charming features. There is also a strange disquiet about a threatened world. It is beautifully translated. At the same time I am intrigued by the speaking voice, perhaps by the gender, the emotion, the tradition behind this kind of writing. I would love to have Rothenberg comment on this if he finds time.
JR: The originals of course are neither spoken nor written, but songs orally transmitted. So, as with more familiar songs whose words are written down and published without the accompanying music (by Shakespeare, by Campion, by Robert Burns, & others), the words when written down can also make a poetry, in the original languages but also in translation. What I was doing, then, in the Flower World poems and elsewhere, was to try to carry forward as many elements of the originals as possible, and particularly in this case, the way the words and phrases repeat themselves, within each poem and between the poems as well. The poetry, then, is in the repetitions and the rhythms, the push, as Gertrude Stein points out so nicely, toward“the inevitable seeming repetition in human expression … not repetition, but insistence.”
- The Sapir-Whorf Stronglinguistic hypothesis (which emerged in part due to early 20th-century anthropological studies of American Indian languages)predicts the impact of particular properties of language on consciousness — specifically, that it has a massive impact on how the mind who thinks with that language and communicates to others through it understands time/truth/relations …(vs. the Weak hypothesis championed by Chomsky et al which basically just ignores it, arguing that the existence of “language” itself it the important thing, not the distinctions among languages.) In the explanation you sent us it seems like Chomsky’s view may be better grounded in reality. Does Mr Rothenberg feel that Sapir-Whorf is substantive its own right or perhaps discredited by the work of Chomsky and other modern linguists?
JR: I can see the value here, both in Chomsky’s deep grammar and in the Sapir-Whorf uncovering of the special or surface traits of individual languages. So, those surface differences are as valuable for the poetry as the underlying universal grammar. Likely even more so. Also: while the surface differences are crucial to the poetry as such, they present the greatest challenge to the translator-poet, having no immediate equivalent in his own language to what’s built into the grammar of the other language. In that way it resembles the challenge of going from stress-based rhythms in a language like English into the rhythms of a comparatively stress-free language like Japanese – or even a closer language like French, if it comes right down to it.
- Could you say more about your idea that “translation is a form of composition?”
JR: To begin with, when you engage as a poet with the translation of poems (“a small (or large machine made of words,” as William Carlos Williams put it), you’re faced by the need not only to get the meaning and intention right, but to create a full work, a vehicle to carry meaning & sometimes more importantly, to be a “machine made of words” in its own right. In that sense the translation becomes a response and an homage, as it were, to the original maker: a poem-derived-from-a-poem and answerable at its best to the language in which it’s newly re-composed. There are anyway stages in this – from the most literal to the extremes of variation and appropriation that Haroldo de Campos (great experimental Brazilian poet) calls “transcreation” and that I call “othering.” In some ways, as I suggest in Writing Through, my book of “translations & variations,” most of what we call poems and poetry can be viewed as acts of translation.
A cautionary note here: There are times when we want translation to concentrate on meaning and not be distracted by sound and structure, though in what I’m stressing poetry is not what gets lost but what gets found or re-invented in translation.
- Can you provide examples of how, as you indicate, “the unconscious speaks to the unconscious” (Gitenstein, 135) within a few specific poems that you have written?
JR: This goes back, I think, to my old “deep image” (neo-surrealist) days and the sense of excitement that certain words and images in juxtaposition could deliver before (if ever) the conscious mind could explain or rationalize the connection. The well-known example was Lautreamont’s description of a young boy “as beautiful as the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Here of course there’s a comic edge to it, whereas with Breton or Lorca, say, it was really something else.
5. The first time I met a real, live translator I must have been about ten or eleven years old. She worked for the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and visited my father, a Church of Scotland minister in Shetland, quite regularly over a period of a few years.
She worked mostly in Western Africa, and I grew to learn of her work learning local languages in order to create scriptural texts and ultimately Bibles. In many cases Mary and her colleagues were the first people to write the language down. I remember being very impressed.
A few decades down the line and I’m much more ambivalent. I’m sure they believe Christ’s love is acting through them, but I’m not as convinced that Christ (I speak as an unshakeable agnostic [which is probably some kind of oxymoron]) is the type to march in and demand that his Gospel be notated before anything else in the host culture.
So from what Jason has so generously taught us of your work in the late ’60s, I am full of admiration for you and your colleagues’ service in performing a kind of ‘reverse Wycliffe’, enriching the anglosphere with these treasures from across the Americas (and indeed as far as your own work in translation is concerned from across the world). May our souls be saved.
After all of which, something I’m intrigued to find out about is your reception from the Navajo, the Hopi, the Inuit. Whilst I’m painfully conscious I’ve barely scraped the surface of this ouevre, it seems clear that many of the ‘texts’ in Shaking the Pumpkin are as much devotional as poetic. Nathaniel Tarn’s initiation/apprenticeship to a Mayan priest/monk sticks in my mind, though right now my finger diffidently fails to find it in the materials. Were you met with any suspicion, or hostility? It would be more than reasonable, given the history (which again I’ve barely scraped). How did you win their trust and support in your engagement with their heritage?
And if it’s not greedy, I’m also constantly fascinated by the relationship between poet-translators’ different practises. Did the ground covered in ‘Shaking the Pumpkin’ inform ‘Poland, 1931’? Do stylistics, subject matter and general energy from your ethnopoetic works inform your own process when you sit down to create? It’s a subject which fascinates me. What little translation I’ve done, though far less expansionary than the texts it’s been my great privilege to explore with everyone in these past few weeks, is something I feel hugely contributory to any merit in my personally authored pieces.
Thank you so much for your time right now, and for your devotion and example over the years.
JR: My close associations were all with the Senecas, where we lived for a couple of years and traveled back and forth – from New York City – for another decade. With close friends, there was a general acceptance of what I was doing as a poet. particularly among the younger ones, and with someone like Richard Johnny John a close collaboration on Shaking the Pumpkin and related matters. (So also with two or three others.) On the other hand, thee was a general feeling that we not get too specific in our rendition of ceremonial works, and variations on that kind of critique were widespread at that time, though I was given a pass by many – Senecas and others – and that of course was very welcome. About the impact on Poland/1931 and my other writings and performances, it was what it was, but obviously a presence. It’s curious too that I finished both Poland and A Big Jewish Book while we were on the reservation. Shaking the Pumpkin too,of course, and A Seneca Journal toward the end.
6. Just back from a seminar in Gestalt therapy. Im just starting to listen to the audios. I hear some overtones that remind me of Tuva singing. Am I just imagining it??
JR: I’m not sure when I became aware of Tuva singing, though I know that I felt a resemblance, whether accurate or not, to the music I made for performance versions of the Navajo horse songs. It pleases me, though, to think of any possible comparison.
7. I like how Silko says language is story and Ortiz vouches for the pragmatic legitimacy of expression in the conquerors language. I think of language as a universal and so am skeptical of some of what Whorf seemed to imply. I think we can all sense stuff in our experience that there aren’t necessarily words to accurately describe. I’m confused about some of the horse song background. Did JR ever meet Mitchell? How did it come about that JR sang his songs? I kinda assume someone, like maybe Mitchell okay’d it. It’s like how in the beginning of Shaking the Pumpkin the informant says to Boaz that the corn people have a good song and that he refuses to tell it.
JR: No, I never met Frank Mitchell, but the songs were passed to me privately by David McAllester, a great ethnomusicologist, along with written transcriptions, word-by-word translations, and notations on the divergence of words & sounds from ordinary Navajo. What I thought to do with them was what I called “total translation,” bringing across not only the words but also other elements: non-semantic vocables, word distortions, and (finally) and finally my own equivalent to the musical or sound quality of the original – but the translation geared or adjusted to English throughout. In that sense I was translating and composing simultaneously.
8. There are so many tribes it feels stupid to talk about native Americans as if that were a single category. There is this kinda persistent & pernicious myth that native peoples were here but all disappeared or something. Anyways, it’s my subjective experience, and this is probably a stupid generalization, or maybe it’s from the genocidal experience, that native folks have a refined humor that’s a bit wry, droll and deadpan. Am I being a complete idiot to come out with this? I guess I’m trying to figure out how to ask JR about similarities and differences between Jewish and Native American humor. Cause when you talk orality and story telling then most speakers will put humor in there somehow. It’s a human thing and a healing thing I think, at least it can be. But stuff like that is not necessarily good question material cause it’s so over generalized. But it’s still stuff that goes through my mind. I’m Jewish but maybe I’m not cause I don’t practice. I once said to an uncle that I thought I was a cultural jew and he told me there was no such thing.
JR: Someone could do a whole book on this, ut tht would be way beyond me. Only a few things I would call attention to.
You’re right about the multiple tribes or nations, but also for many (and for good historical reasons) there’s also a sense of pan-Indianness and a shared experience of dispossession.
And about the humor, it’s often alluded to and also acts, I think, as an antidote to the stereotyped image of the stony-faced Indian. My own experience is that it also enters into ongoing rituals as an over-all spirit of play and, as people say, high-jinks, the high point involving the ritual clowns who are a part of so much traditional ceremonialism – that and the presence in narrative of the sacred and often transgressive Trickster figure, in many different guises. In those ways, pleasure and having-a-good time are much more prevalent than sin and guilt, which is part of their ongoing and real appeal.
About the Jewish comparison, my own poetry at one point touched very much on this, but too complicated to lay out here.
Indigenous, Immigrant, & Multilingual American Poetry-A ModPoSloPo Course 2/8/2020 – 4/4/2020
Map to the Course Resources on this Site
- Access-the-Course-Map for Students New to Coursera online and SloPo Courses
- Course Overview with Sample Poems and Sample Discussion Thread
- The Library
- Week One and Two Materials: Ethnopoetics & Shaking the Pumpkin
- Jerome Rothenberg Assemblage of Materials: From Ethnopoetics to his own poetry and his work on A Big Jewish Book — texts, audio, video.
- The Q&A with Jerome Rothenberg
- Week Three Materials: Contemporary American Indian Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Pacific Islander Poetry
- Week Four Materials: Contemporary Caribbean Anglophone Poetry
- Week Five Materials: Contemporary African-American Poetry
- Week Six Materials: Contemporary Latinx-American Poetry and Performance
- Week Seven Materials: Contemporary Asian-American Poetry
- Week Eight Materials: The Ghazal, Contemporary Middle-Eastern and South-Asian Poetry
- RETURN TO COURSERA COURSE SITE PAGE