 Come on in, please have a seat. It's my pleasure to introduce our second keynote speaker of this 38th annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association. I'm going to do that in just a second. I have a couple of announcements. First, a big thank you to the NEA National Endowment for the Arts for helping us put on this event. Is Moe Sheriff still around? He's not here. If you see Moe, yesterday was his birthday. He arrived on his birthday. So you might, Moe came from Washington just to be at this conference, and he traveled on his birthday. And I forgot to wish him a happy birthday yesterday. So if you see him, please do that. Thank you to the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona for sponsoring this evening's event. And I want to announce that they have a residency, a two-week residency coming up. The summer residency for poets, details are on their website. Submissions are going to be from January 15th to April, I believe, 3rd? 3rd, is that correct? Anybody from the Poetry Center here? Anyway, I think that's right, and it is on their website. Also, I'm sorry, board members for ALTA. We need to meet at 7.30 tomorrow morning. We were going to meet at 8, so it's only 30 more minutes. So you grab something at the breakfast and bring it in with you. Same room we met in this morning. Sorry about that. We're just not going to finish. Also, I want to announce it's in the program, but several people have been asking. Next year's conference is in the program. We're at which page it is on. It is on page. I should know it immediately. ALTA 39, it's on page 41, and it is called Translation and Crossing or Crossings. I'm not sure about that S. We're still thinking about that. And it is in Oakland, California, so it's in the Bay Area. I believe it's in a downtown Marriott Hotel, so it's like a 10-minute boat ride to San Francisco. It is October 6th to 9th, and so it's earlier in October than we've been meeting, and also there is a change. Please notice this. The 6th to the 9th includes a Sunday. And that was what the hotel could give us. And so rather than starting on Wednesday evening, the pre-conference event, we're going to be starting everything on Thursday. There won't be anything on Wednesday. So some people who always have trouble getting there midweek will be happy, and others will be, I don't know, sad. I don't know why you would be sad. We're just including a Sunday in the conference. So please note that when you're thinking about your travel plans for next year. All right, those are the end of the announcements. Oh, this is a big program. I feel like those readers who are looking for things in their book, oh, it's a really good poem. Hold on a second, let me look for it. All right, so our second keynote. Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, and performer with over 90 books. That's 9-0, books of poetry and 12 assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry, such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium, volumes one to three. In addition to the numerous translations that appeared in these anthologies, his work as a translator, beginning with new young German poets in 1959, has included books of translation from Lorca, Nezval, Schwitters, Gomringer, and Picasso. Selections from many of them brought together in writing through translations and variations in 2004. His most recent big books are Eye of Witness, a Jerome Rothenberg reader, and Barbaric, Vast and Wild, Poems for the Millennium, volume five, both published by Black Widow Press. A new book of poems, A Field on Mars, poems 2000 to 2015, is scheduled for publication in Jusca, two publishers, Press Universitaire de Rouen et du Havre in joint English and French editions. Please join me in welcoming Jerome Rothenberger. It's really a great pleasure to be here, among so many translators. I've never been in a situation like this before, and I really look forward to it and to bring up questions here about translation as it enters into the composition, the work of poetry, with a particular reference, of course, to my own work. And I thought, in some sense, to dedicate it to millennia of translator poets. I don't know if, for other writers, a translation plays that big a role. But translator poets go back to Catullus, transcreating Saffo from Greek to Latin, Chaucer as translator of Boetius and Le Romain de la Rose, Chapman and Pope and Dryden, Shelley and Rosetti and Swinburne, Baudelaire's Poe and Baudelaire's de Quincy, Herldelin, Sophocles, Neavals, Goethe. And then all the poets of the previous century coming into the present, many of them contemporaries of mine. About this, I could go on and on, but that's not why I'm here. So I would call this, or I've tentatively titled it, translation without limits and the limits of translation. And I would like to talk, however briefly or not, about the ways in which translation has served me as a form of composition and as an underpinning for much of my work as a poet and a writer. I have never thought of myself as a professional translator since my grasp of any language other than English has been limited. And I'm also very modest about that. It's maybe not been that limited. And that has made any translation that I've worked on a slow and sometimes very indirect process, often too in the case of languages that are exotic from our point of view in collaboration with other translators. I have not as a rule added to or subtracted from the original when translating as a rule, but within those limits I have thought of myself as a poet using translation as a means for making poems or bringing new poems into English. And also, of course, to spread the word about the poets and work being translated. Even more than that, I have a need, I emphasize a need to translate and by translating to connect with the work and thought of other poets, a matter of singular importance to me and what I have long taken to be my project and the central activity of my life as a poet. I do not think of this as in any way unusual, although it's taken me a long time to recognize it for what it is. Many writers, but poets in particular, inherit and carry forward the works of those who came before them. In my own case, the work I've done with ethnopoetics and with the construction of anthology assemblages along with a devotion to the experimental as a basis for my writing has made such considerations still more central to my practice. Looking back at it now, it seems inevitable to me that I would have gotten as engaged as I did with translation and for translation to have had the influence it did on the work I was doing. A part of that work, of course, was directly connected with the opening of such a field as ethnopoetics. My own efforts had followed others in the use of collage and appropriation as a way of opening our individual or personal poetry to the presence of other voices and other visions besides our own. I came to think of all of that, appropriation, collage, translation in ideological terms. Long before our time, Whitman in Leaves of Grass had set the task very plainly. Through me many long dumb voices, voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves, voices of the disease and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs, voices of cycles of preparation and accretion, and of the threads that connect the stars and of wounds and of the father's stuff, and of the rights of them the others are down upon of the deformed, trivial, flat, foolish, despised, fog in the air, beetles rolling, balls of dung. This was in the section of Leaves of Grass called Song of Myself, that bringing together of the individual voice with a sense of a total and suppressed humanity. And it was reborn for us, for me certainly, in Charles Olson's rant, say, against the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, or in Robert Duncan's call for a new symposium of a whole, a new totality among my immediate predecessors and near contemporaries. I have practiced translation in one form or another for more than 50 years now. My first published book, in fact, was New Young German Poets in 1959, a year before my own first book of poetry. That book included first-time translations into English from poets like Paul Celan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günther Gras, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Helmut Heisenbüttel, who would become major German authors in the decade that followed. In the 1960s, I adapted Ralph Hochutz's play, The Deputy, Del Stelfeträte, for its Broadway performance, did further translations from Enzensberger's poetry, and began to make occasional translations of Dada poets like Hans Arp and Richard Hülsenbeck from German and Tristan Saar and Francis Picabia from French. I had also become engaged with translations from Spanish modernists, much of it from my own recreation and as a way to better to understand the work at hand. And from 1960 on, I began to use translation as a way to channel material into publications and readings, performances of my own. So looking back to that, first very serious translations for me, I think part of what I was after was a translated version while keeping close to the original that allowed me to perform it. I needed a performance version. We were coming into the performance of poetry on our own. And did it read a lot? Did it perform? I mean, that was one of the things. I translated some early Télan, the most notable poem of his at that time and probably for many, even thereafter. The Death View, Todes Fuge. So I'm gonna read just the opening of Death View in German and then the English. Schwarze Milch der Früh, wir trinken sie abends, wir trinken sie mittags und morgens, wir trinken sie nachts, wir trinken und trinken, wir schaufeln, ein grabenen Lüften, da liegt man nicht eng. Ein Mann wohnt im Haus, der spielt mit den Schlangen, der schreibt, der schreibt, wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland, dein goldenes Haarmarkeräter. Er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne, er feit seine Röden herbei, er feits seine Juden hervorlesst, schaufeln ein graben der Erde, aber vielt uns, spielt auf zu dem Tanz. Black milk of morning, we drink you at dusk time, we drink you at noon time and dawn time, we drink you at night, we drink and drink, there's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes, who writes when it's nightfall, nach Deutschland, your golden hair, Margarita, you write, sit and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing, he whistles his dogs to draw near whistles, his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand, he commands us play up for the dance. Black milk of morning, we drink you at night, we drink you at dawn time and noon time, we drink you at dusk time, we drink and drink, there's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes, who writes when it's nightfall, nach Deutschland, your golden hair, Margarita, your ashen hair, Schulermiet, we scoop out a grave in the sky where it's roomy to lie, he calls Jabba deep in the soil, you men, you other men sing and play, he tugs at the sword in his belt, he swings at his eyes are blue, Jabba your spades deeper, you men, you other men play up again for the dance. Black milk of morning, we drink you at night, we drink you at noon time and dawn time, we drink you at dusk time, we drink and drink, there's a man in this house, your golden hair, Margarita, your ashen hair, Schulermiet, he's cultivates snakes, he plays, he calls play that death thing more sweetly, death is a straw boss aus Deutschland, he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly than hover like smoke in the air, then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it's roomy to lie, black milk of morning, we drink you at night, we drink you at noon time, death is a straw boss aus Deutschland, we drink you at dusk time and dawn time, we drink and drink, death is a straw boss aus Deutschland, his eye is blue, he hits you with leaden bullets, his aim is true, there's a man in this house, your golden hair, Margarita, he sets his dogs on a trail, he gives us a grave in the sky, he cultivates snakes and he dreams, death is against straw boss aus Deutschland, your golden hair, Margarita, your ashen hair, Schulermiet, and that at least became part of the reading of the repertory for me, so of course I published it in New Young German Poets. And translating from Spanish, the poem by Pablo Neruda, that he gives the English title Walking Around, and there's a kind of variation on that, you know, I give the title of the English translation as Walking Around, I don't know what Neruda was picking up on with the title, but I have the sense that there's some kind of, you know, pop relevance in that, you know, and you know, looking towards elements of the Yankee culture. Sucede, que me canso de ser rompre, sucede, que entro en las sasterias y en las cines, marchito un peletable, como un cisne de fiel tro, navigando en un agua de origen y ceniza. It just so happens that I'm tired of being a man. It just so happens that I walk into tailors shops and movies withered and penarable, flannel swan that steers across a sea of origins and ashes. The odors from a barber shop can start me bawling. I only want a little rest from stones and wool, I only want to see my last of institutes and gardens of merchandise, of eyeglasses, of elevators. It just so happens that I'm tired of my feet and my nails and my hair and my shadow. It just so happens that I'm tired of being a man. And yet how delightful it would be to threaten some accountant with the head of a lily or murder a nun with a blow on the ear. How beautiful to go through the streets with a green knife and holler out loud till I die of frostbite. I don't want to keep on being a root in the darkness, a resolute pill pulled from all sides till a dream leaves me shaking, dragged down through the seeping bowels of the earth, absorbing and thinking stuffed with food every day. I don't want all that grief on my shoulders. I don't want to keep on as a root in a tomb, alone underground the wine cellars stocked with the dead, frozen stiff half gone with the pain. So the day called, Monday starts burning like oil when it sees me pull in with my face of a jailhouse and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel and leaves tracks of hot blood in the direction of night. And it shoves me into certain dark corners, into certain moist houses, into hospitals with a bone sail through the windows, into certain shoemaker shops with their odors of vinegar, into streets full of terrible holes. There are birds the color of sulfur and horrible guts that swing from the doors of houses that I hate. There are false teeth forgotten in a coffee pot. There are mirrors that ought to be crying from shame and terror. There are umbrellas wherever I look and poisons and belly buttons. I walk around with my calm, with my eyes, with my shoes, with my anger, with my memory failing. I move on. I wander through offices and orthopedic shops and courtyards where clothes are hung from a wire, underdraws, towels and nightgowns that cry, slow tears full of dirt. I'm balancing a few things up here. So there was for me a kind of channeling. That was what I was looking towards. And where the channeling turns up most clearly in my own work, assuming it is my own work, is in the acts of translation that are an underpinning for the big books, the anthologies or assemblages, beginning with technicians of the sacred and shaking the pumpkin in the early 1970s. It was there that I could let rip for the first time with those voices and find myself absorbing, thrillingly, something that was far more than myself. And the translation led me also to an interplay with poets closer to my own time, Schritters, Lorca, Nezval, Nakaharachuya, among those I've done in abundance, and finally, most surprisingly, to me, Picasso. For me too, the big books were a kind of assemblage a grand collage in Robert Duncan's phrase, very much like the translations in terms of what they allowed me to do or to be. In the big books, the ethnopoetic ones in particular, I was engaged with a range of processes related to but not always identical with that of translation. Some of those processes involved the enhancement of previously existing translations, while others, the more interesting from my perspective, involved experimental forms of translation with perhaps an emphasis on the translation of oral poetry and conversely, a visual poetry, a fascination with what had been thought of as untranslatable forms of poetry. In the 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell from Sources in Navajo, I engaged in what Dennis Tedlock and I were calling total translation, going beyond the semantic level to try to find equivalents for the non-lexical, untranslatable vocables in Navajo's song and even most outrageously for me, equivalents for the music, the melodies by which the words and sounds were carried. Other Indian song poems, these mostly from the Seneca, were short combinations of words and sounds which I chose to translate as a kind of visual, concrete poetry in order to bring across the curious complexity of otherwise simple or minimal forms by calling up an image of similar minimal forms in our own, presumably sophisticated and developed arts of language. I also found a way to sing them, to sing the Seneca poems later. So first there were translations that resemble that if you can think back to when concrete poetry was really a going enterprise. And in shaking the pumpkin, the Indian book, they appear at the very beginning of the book. But then I found that I could sing them also. Things come along and surprise you. And along the same lines, while working with contemporary poems that were themselves experimental, I undertook the translation of a large group of often minimal poems by the German concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, finding those curious vehicle to get down to some fundamentals about the nature of both poetry and translation. So for this, I'm going to introduce for me an instrument of translation. And perform translation of a Seneca Indian ceremonial poem song that opens a ceremony that the Seneca's called Shaken the Pumpkin, that sometimes isn't identified in the old anthropological literature, songs for the society of the mystic animals. The are coming, the animals are coming, the animals are coming, the animals are coming. And that was translated with Richard Johnny-John, traditional singer and song maker and my adopted father. Since I've had time with the assistance of the great American ethnomusicologist, David McAllister, I began the translation of a series of horse songs, horse blessing songs from the Navajo. And there, in that Seneca song, there's one word, you know, although the Seneca's are a very verbal people, you know, but it's a delivered cut down to a song with one word, you know, dayon d'awachi, yeah, they are coming or coming. Subject not even specified, which I expanded into the animals are coming for your benefit. The Navajo songs are longer, a combination of words and previously untranslatable vocabals and word distortions and, of course, they're all sung. So first I translated for meaning and for some of the sounds and then I had to find, to complete the translation, to make it a total translation, a way of dealing with the music. And so I translated the music into my voice and I'll sing a shortened version of the first horse song of Frank Mitchell. The song is very, from one to the next, between blue images and white images. The first horse song is blue. The story behind it is the hero God, enemy slayer, is sent by his mother changing woman, the earth goddess, to the house of his father, the sun god. And in the first horse song, he identifies himself, boy raised in the dawn, describes the house from which he comes and to which he goes, a blue stone house, a blue stone home, shining home, swollen home, and just give you a lead into it. I'll do a short version of what we would then call in total translation. When can all are now summer there and mine? Oh, can some gwing there are mine? Oh, can some gwing there are mine there? Mm, mm, gone, all are now summer there and mine. Oh, can some gwing there are mine? Oh, can some gwing there are mine there? Mm, mm, can't be, cause I was a boy raised in the dawn and them there are mine? Oh, can some gwing there are mine there? Mm, mm, can't and in the house the shining gwing, can and some there are mine? Oh, can and some gwing there are mine there? Mm, mm, can and in the swollen house is red as blown and munt, some there are mine? Oh, can and some gwing there are mine there? Mm, mm, can with my feathers that are blue? Mm, mm, can and some there are mine? Oh, can and some gwing there are mine there? Mm, mm, can with those bearded horses that are blue? Mm, mm, can and some there are mine? Oh, can and some gwing there are mine there? Mm, mm, can with those horses that are blue stone? Mm, mm, can and some there are mine? All gone and some green there are mine there. Mm, mm, gone with jewels of every kind to be he there. Mm, mm, some there are mine all gone and some green are mine there. Mm, mm, gone with sheep of every kind to be he there. Some there are mine all gone and some green there are mine there. Mm, mm, gone with men of every kind to be he there. Are mine all gone and some green there are mine there. Mm, mm, gone and everything that's gone before and brewery walk upon. Mm, mm, some there are mine all gone and some green there are mine there. Mm, mm, gone my horses are living to be old and blessed not. Mm, mm, some there are mine all gone and some green there are mine there. Mm, mm, gone because I am the boy who blesses to be and mm, mm, some there are mine. All gone and some green there are mine there. Mm, mm, gone all are now summer there and mine. All gone and some green there are mine all gone and some green there are mine there. Mm, mm. Yeah, it was something I never thought I would be doing. Yeah, but that's where these things take you. And that's good. So all of that remains central to me, the translations I mean, and those other suppositions and legitimate acts of othering, something like what the great Portuguese poet Haroldo de Campos called transcreation, those other legitimate acts of othering that underlie my total project. So what I'm talking about, I'm going to be talking about is a continuum, you know, translation, you know, and these other things that I'll be talking about and that forms in my mind something called, something called othering. In the Lorca Variations, a series of poems from the early 1990s, I took a step beyond translation by writing with Lorca or my translation of Lorca's book length, early book series of poems called The Sweets. Taking that as my source, isolating his nouns and other words, which were by then my own in English, and systematically recasting them into new compositions. So this is translation, you know, fairly straightforward, but I try to make it sound good, called, I think in the Spanish, simply Newton, you know, and in the translation that I did, a Newton suite. As a suite, it's made up of a number of smaller poems, and it's very playful, you know, and one comes to realize is, you know, not simply the Lorca of Intensities, the Lorca of the Imagination, you know, but the Lorca of Play, the Lorca of the Fancy. Newton's Nose, onto the nose of Newton, a large apple falls, a meteor of truth, last fruit to dangle from the tree of science, and Big Newton scratches his Saxon nostrils, a white moon over these barbaric strings of lace, the beech trees. In the woods, the gnomes astride their secrets, tear their beards out, they tie up death and make the echoes mislead men with mirrors. In a corner lies the secret, in the open dead, his companions mourn him a blue boy with iron feet, a glowing star between his eyebrows, his companions mourn him, and the green lake trembles in the wind. Harmony, waves rhyme with sighs and stars with crickets, a tremble in the cornea, the whole cold sky, a dot, a synthesis, infinities. But who joins waves with sighs and stars with crickets? Just hope these geniuses be missing something, the proofs keep drifting by among us. The philosopher's last walk, Newton was taking a walk, death had followed him, strumming his guitar. Newton was taking a walk, the worms gnawed through his apple, the wind hummed in the trees, the river beneath the branches. Wordsworth would have cried. The philosopher was striking unimaginable poses, was waiting for another apple. He ran along the road, he stretched out by the water, he saw how his face would sink in the moon's reflection. Newton wept and high up in a cedar, two old owls yammered. Slowly in the night, the wise man went back home. He dreamt enormous pyramids of apple. Question. Why was it the apple and not the orange, or the polyhedral pomegranate? Why this virgin fruit to clue them in, this smooth and gentle pippin? What admirable symbol lies dormant at its core? Adam, Paris, Newton, carry it inside their souls, and fondle it without a clue to what it is. The law of variations, 11, Newton, prose poem, three parts. One, the man had green feet that vaulted them into the open and could flaunt their secrets. Lace brushed lightly against their nostrils as the apple tree loomed over Newton with its fruits. It is so Saxon to find gnomes with string, to watch your echoes drifting off in secret, your lost companions jangling irons in the wind. Not every boy has such sad eyebrows, nor would every corner spare an inch for death. In the woods the moon showed Newton where the truth lies, covering his nose. He slammed into a meteor named Newton. He mistook it for a science that was white, like beech trees or like beards, but once he caught it in his mirror, saw it turn blue again. At length it looked like every other star or lake. Two, every wise man considers himself another Newton, a philosopher musing beside trees and water going for a walk, pulling genies out of waves in the sky, with which sigh makes a perfect rhyme. Their corneas are focused on infinity and disregard the lowly cricket just as Newton did, and just as Newton knew the wind or words worth knew a certain word to be the night's reflection, so apples floating on a wave of crickets make a synthesis more powerful than stars. Philosophers should play guitars then, reaching for those apple branches where the moon's a lowly apple. Pyramids adorned with owls express a kind of harmony, and stars are dots and are a proof of death more powerful than worms. What if the river strikes a pose? The cedar will show a face that brings it home. Three, there isn't a clue that the fruit into which Adam bit was an apple and not his lady's breast. Above them Pegasus kept flying past, all in the name of sciences. The virgin handed him a second apple, which Adam turned into a questioning of history. Deep in its core, the virgin saw souls rise and fall. The symbol Newton later found inside a pomegranate. Only a child can play with apples and touch beauty. Newton and Adam both were satisfied with Eve's reply. The first she gave when she woke up in chains, her innocence laid by, Paris in the other tale, held up an orange. In another series of poems, Gamatria, I used a traditional Jewish form of connecting words by numerological methods and a word list of numerically arranged words and phrases from the Hebrew Bible to make a poetry as with the Lorca variations that I thought was both personal to me and was created by means that shared in what Blake saw as the most sublime act to set another before you. And still more recently, in a work published in 2004, a book of witness I have used the first person voice, the pronoun I to explore whatever it is that we say for ourselves, not only my personal self, but that of all others and by that process can even and meaningfully put identity into question. But I think what I'll do is read from the Gamatrias. And this was with the assistance of a book by a man called Locke's Gamatria, the Spice of Torah. A computerized listing of all the words in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament arranged according to their numerological value in a system where every letter is also a number. So just the, you know, going by the numbers, the numerical values of individual words, you know, and then, you know, also making computations, adding words on to words, allowed me to write a series of usually minimal poems. So from, you know, part of the collected Gamatria, the number is 50. His red, unclean blood, earth and water, the atom, the man, fat and bloody, the angel one, a star shall uncover, the angel two, his king, the number is 96. Gamatria 105, man the blasphemer, man the bold locust, 120. Your stuff, title, your stuff, my stuff is unclean, the plague, hands begot thee. But then I found later that I could make extended use of these in a series of poems that I wrote. You know, and notice doing the Gamatria, of course, using this source computerized text, these are all biblical words, that already creates a sound and a series of echoes. A friend was memorializing the Holocaust in a series of monumental charcoal drawings, drawings, aerial views of 14 of the death camps and wanted poems to accompany that. He was going to take it out of another book of mine. I said, no, I will make poems using Gamatria and the hebraicized names of the concentration camps and going through and finding my words there. The first station, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Now the serpent. I will bring back their taskmasters, crazy and mad, will meet them deep in the valley and be subdued, separated in life, uncircumcised, needy, shoes stowed away, how naked they come, my fathers, my fathers, angry and trembling. Since you have destroyed their faces remembered, small in your eyes, shut down, soiled, see a light, take shape in the pit, someone killed, torn in pieces, a terror, a God, go down deeper. I realize 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 by that word, othering a word that 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 40 and more years ago. Translation is, of course, at its best the joyful acceptance of influence, the looking for influence and shared voices in the process of creation and transcreation, therefore my love of translation. 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 overall experience of collaboration goes well beyond translation, works with artists and musicians, with editors and book designers, with performance troops 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 and art. This idea of an avant-garde, at least as I conceived it, is or was the work of individuals acting together and effort somehow in common even if performed one by one. There are times, of course, when an individual proclaims himself or herself to be an avant-garde, but I don't believe that there are strictly speaking avant-garde of one. There are great and 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-garde probably to no one's advantage. Strong individuals like that, I now believe, were not only influential in forging their avant-garde, but were responsible as well for the ephemeral nature of what they had created. In that sense, it's also possible that avant-garde are destined for short lives, hellbound for self-destruction, or an aspect, maybe, of what Tristan Sarah might have had in mind when he told us that the true datas are against data. Cooptation by the art market or the book market or the academic market is, of course, another factor to consider. In addition, I thought of the big books of mine, 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 a 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 and activity that I 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 through translation and collages, that's also othering, and I've spoken about them elsewhere. But every translation enters into a collaboration wanted or unwanted with the source of the translation. 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 all of this was obvious. Technicians of the sacred 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 and my own competence outside of the European sphere was non-existent. On two principal occasions, I came more properly into the translator's roles, those from the Seneca and the Navajo that I've already shown. 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 Lavnezval, where Milo Sovak was my co-translator. In addition to which, the ample books of poetry from Schwidders 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, including Jill Levine and Diane Rottenberg, who are present here. 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 beautifully centuries ago. Metaphase, paraphrase, imitation, three procedures with varying degrees of departure from the original. Or put another way, I'm mindful of the observations nowhere 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 work act of translating, setting another before me, Blake's most sublime act, 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 of my own. The Lorca variations, which I mentioned 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 two-fold 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, not in Spanish, but in English, called I Have Witnessed Jerome Rothenberg Reader, the retrospective nature that worked 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 McLo 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 and 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. So I'll read a poem from the early 1960s for a series of poems called The Seven Hells of the Djigokuzoshi, traditional Japanese scroll of hells. And I played off the traditional titles given to the hells and those images. The second hell of thieves, where thieves are ground in mortars, I'll just read the opening of this and then the variations I play on it. The thieves, the thieves, the lovely thieves are no more. The shore is washed by the sea, the sea is combed by the wind. The wind sleeps all day in the chimney, it moves through the house in the evening, it wakes us, it opens the door for the sea. It walks where the thieves walked, it leads us into a night without windows. Comfort me, stay with me, light of my eyes, the lovely thieves are no more. Variations on the hell of thieves, the thieves, the thieves, the lovely thieves are no more. When a wind blows in from the sea, a door swings open and light white as hell nearly blinds us. Night begins later, the skin on my fingers flakes off, a rank wind shakes the ladders we climb on, the earth more distant for which we still hunger the sea, filling up with our tears, our voices lost in the wind. Thieves who scour our shores at evening, whose voices sound under our windows, whose tears hide our pain cry out with one voice, one voice past shadows and windows, one voice for earth, one voice for water, and thieves dressed like thieves, a hell like no other, a house overlooking the sea on a night when coins ring, and death has a voice like a thieves voice, earth returning to earth, then to water, a voice thieves disemble in dreams, thieves in a sea and a chimney, down which thieves clamber, more thieves in the snow, skin and hair growing white, a shadow that thieves spill like blood, like the voice from a stone, the voice of the dying, thieves and voices, shore, wind and sea, tears and eyes, fingers spinning a thread in fear of the sky and the earth, the thieves lost at sea, a grave and a stone left for thieves, where thieves vanish. The final experience of translation, however, of being translated, 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 two, I ran into a problem compounded by an element of mind play. You see what I'm saying? Of course you all know. Heaven and sky are the same word in Spanish or French or German. Esprit covers both spirit and mind, and you can't give me mentality, and mind is very special to me. There's, I think, no real equivalent to it. So, yeah, I ran into a problem compounded by an element of word play when I included a short sentence in a series of manifesto propositions for which the translation could never be handled properly. So it's a manifesto. I will change your mind. Esprit doesn't do it. I will change your mind, as very lightly said, to lose the lightness of the English idiom is to make my manifesto into a kind of bluster that I'm not intending. I'll change your mind, but of course it also means I will change your consciousness, your mind in that sense. And that presents an obstacle, so that was interesting. An unresolved. Or there is another instance where I speak of mind changing into spirit, but I think there I was deliberately laying a trap. I did another example in a line and a poem title, The Sky That Harbors Heaven, which would in Spanish come out to be El Cielo that harbors El Cielo, which is a kind of interesting thing in itself, but not the same. Well, you know, there's sometimes an attempt to get, change heaven into paradise, but they're not the same thing. Also in poems, there are... I don't use structural rhyme very much, but poems that I write are laced with rhymes. And in one series of recent poems, now being translated into French, there's the basic poem, but in the manner of Emily Dickinson, if you know Emily Dickinson's, you know, multiple readings for her poems and those little fascicles that she made, I have some alternate readings for the words in the poem itself, and sometimes they rhyme. Results run backward, gathering in force until they end up in some sort of cavern miraculously well-lit and everyone there feels surprised and wonder. They are more like phantoms and like little men, a symptom of the way they cough and breathe, bob and weave. From the depths the girl at center rises, edges toward the stupid man, a stupid man, and calls him father. She is a distant runner trained to smash against the wind and carry on until someplace draws nigh, where the whole point of speed is relaxation and execution. It fits in lessons are predicament until though no final strategy permits it, even so ebb and flow. My hand in yours allows a sleep in which each dream is like a hole in paradise, a holy paradigm. The more you fall through it, stall in it, the more it takes you to the birth of time, of rhyme. And I particularly wanted time and rhyme to come together, but they do in rhyming in a way that they don't when you can't rhyme those words. So that's the problem we're still facing with that. The translator tries, thomp and shunt. But I don't want to go after, I don't want to make the relation to shunt a song, you know, time and rhyme. Okay. An even clearer instance is a poem from a series that draws on images from Goya's master work, Capriccio's, and we're then translated into Spanish by Mexican poet, Terebert Riepes. 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 coincidences in English as a point of departure to seed the entire poem with rhymings. A donkey and a monkey. Disciples of a donkey, do they come to learn attitudes and platitudes stamped on their reptile minds? That parrot, this carrot, are other signs for sure. A donkey and a monkey facing off Capriccio's that the monkey plunks on la guitarra. Soundlessly, the donkey following in wonder, strangers clapping hands and crying, hey, ole, a donkey like a monkey reads a book, a monkey like a donkey listens, he sees a pair of donkey faces, lines of aes across a chalkboard, easy aces, donkey silhouettes in gray, a spunky donkey in a coat, his muzzle pressed against the dead man's chest, the best he has to show, hello, Capriccio's. Yeah, so I mean, you know, donkey and monkey were a gift, but then we were faced with, doesn't work that way in Spanish. And there was consultation, and Heriberto as translator, he's very close to me, so, you know, we could talk it through, and what we came up with, un asno yun chango, and I think maybe if we had pushed it further, it could have been mico and burrico, you know, but then, you know, spunky and funky, all of those other good words. Yeah, one line, if I could, there's a rhyme that I pick up from, in the way I do, from another Japanese poet, translated by another friend, Hiroaki Sato, which Sato gives in English, it's that parrot, this carrot. Well, we couldn't do anything with that in Spanish, so we changed it to Esapaloma estagoma. Now, of course, that's, you will say, that's not translating the English. No, not really translating, we're doing what's necessary. You know, and that seemed, and since it's my poem to start with, you know, Harry Pertho had to go ahead to do that. I mean, that's, you know, so there is the possibility where there's a working together, you know, between the poet of the original and the poet of the translation, you know, to work out things, to do a certain degree of rewriting, for the change of translation, the transformation into another language. So, yeah, since we were very close, we worked on several of the rhymes together, and at a couple of points, we rewrote the Spanish. It strikes me that more was possible here, you know, and maybe we'll get back to that in the years ahead. So I will close then if the time allows. Yeah, and it does. I will close then 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. I'm quoting myself. That's probably bad form. Amos Shals, a translator whom I met briefly and who was a rabbi and teacher at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, worked up a translation of the poem into Yiddish, possibly with my assistants, possibly not. What resulted from my perspective was a perfect match for the English and allowed me the pleasure in performance to top off the range of Jewish works I was pursuing at that time, what the poet David Meltzer called my Yiddish surrealist, Vordville. For this I remain grateful to Shals, who is no longer alive, for a gift of translation beyond any that I ever had, either then or later. I'll read it first in English and then in Yiddish. Poland 1931, the wedding. My mind is stuffed with table cloths and with rings, but my mind is dreaming of Poland, stuffed with Poland, the imagination to a black wedding, a naked bridegroom hovering above his naked bride. Mad Poland, how terrible thy Jews at weddings, thy synagogues with campfire smells and omens, thy thermos bottles, thy electric fogs, thy braided armpits, thy underwear alive with roots, oh Poland, Poland, Poland, Poland, Poland, Poland. Thy bells wrapped in their flowers toll, how they do offer up their tongues to kiss the moon, old moon, old mother, stuck in thy sky, thyself, an old bell with no tongue lost utter. Oh Poland, thy beer is ever made of rotting bread, thy silks aren't linens, merely thy tradesmen dance at weddings, where fanatic grooms still dream of bridesmaids, still are screaming past their red mustache as Poland. We have lain awake in thy soft arms forever, thy feathers have been bombed to us, thy pillows capture us like sickly wounds and guard us, let us sail through thy fierce weddings, Poland, let us tread thy markets where thy sausages grow ripe and full, let us bite thy peppercorns, let thy oxen's dung be sugared to thy dying Jews. Oh Poland, oh sweet resourceful restless Poland, oh Poland of the saints unbuttoned Poland, repeating endlessly the triple names of Mary. Poland, Poland, Poland, Poland, Poland, have we not tired of thee, Poland? No, for thy cheeses shall never tire us, nor the honey of thy goats. Thy groom shall work ferociously upon their looming brides, shall bring forth executioners, shall stand like kings inside thy doorways, shall throw their arms around thy lintels, Poland, and begin to crow. Polen, 1931, der Krasne. Mein Miach ist ungestuppt mit Tischtachern, mit Fingerlack, aber mein Miach, Holum von Polen, ungestuppt mit Polen, in dem ihn gebracht, so schwarze Krasne, an Aketer Chossen schwebt über sein Aketer Kala, mit tierwtiger Polen, wie schrecklich dein Jägen auf Krasnes, deine Schulen mit Kampferreches und Mandeln, deine Thermacen, deine elektrisch Tumanen, deine Unterwäsche lebte ich mit Wusteln, Hol Polen, Polen, Polen, Polen, Polen, wie deine Glocke angewickelt mit Blumen klingen, wie sie offen in ihre Zungen zu kischküchen, die Lewone, alte Lewone, alte Mama, geblieben stecken in dein Himmel, du allein, an alte Glocke und a Zunge auf verleuerener Äther. Oh Polen, dein Bier ist tommet gemacht und verfoltert heute, deine Seiden ist leidenbläuse, deine Socher im Tanzen auf Krasnes, wochers Sonnen im Kanäum fantasieren noch, wegen Kala schreiendig noch, durch sehr räuter Wontzes Polen, mit seinen gebliebenen Waken, deiner wehrer Armsäufe ebbeck, deiner fehlenden Sangeven für uns balsam, deiner Kischels fangen uns wie kränkliche Trachten und hitten uns, noch mich ducke sädeln, deiner wilder Krasnes Polen, da wir treten, da wir merken, wo deinem Wursten wachsen reif und fulde, da wir beißen, deiner Pfefferkorn soll dein Ochsen misst sein Zucker vor deiner geustes Dicke Jeden. Oh Polen, oh sisse Umzuckerdicke und ruhige Polen, oh Polen von der Heleke und knäppel dicke Polen, krasendeck und euher die Dreiecke nehmend von Maria. Polen, Polen, Polen, Polen, Polen, Seine mir nicht mitgeworren von dir Polen. Nähn, weil deine Käsen, weil uns Kehl nicht mitmachen und nicht der Honig von deiner Ziegen, deiner Ochsen, sondern arbeiten. Und züchricke, aber sehr schwebelicke Kales, während Kindlen mit Henker, während ständen wie Kelligen in deiner Tieren, verlarumnemen deine Beistittlach-Prollen und unheben Krain. Thank you everybody, and thank you very much to Jerome Rothenberg for an absolutely fantastic performance. There are books of his in the lobby, if you would, he's going to be available to talk a little bit in the lobby and maybe sign a few, so if you would like to, these are books that are not necessarily available at the book fair, at the book exhibit, at the hotel, so if you want one of those. Also Cafe Latino, don't forget those of you who are not, if you haven't had enough poetry this evening yet, or translated literature, at Cafe Passee. That starts at 8.30, okay? So thanks once again for coming and thank you Jerome Rothenberg.