My love of Diane Wakoski is to the credit of Jerome Rothenberg’s curatorial prowess. Rothenberg founded Hawk’s Well Press in 1952 while working as a translator of German poetry for The Hudson Review and City Light Books. With the help of David Antin he was the first to publish Wakoski (“Coins and Coffins” 1962). Discursive and metaphysical in her prose, Wakoski could not have been a first choice for publishers at the time. Rothenberg, even in his underling days, had the self-determination and acuity to amplify voice across different traditions and backgrounds; he would publish Technicians of the Sacred, a landmark tome anthologizing the esoteric and previously untranslated oral poetry of African, Asian, European and Native American communities. “I prioritized music, non-verbal phonetic sounds, dance, gesture and event, game, dream...a high poetry and art, which only a colonialist ideology could have blinded us into labeling ‘primitive’ or ‘savage,’” he writes. “I came very quickly, once I got started with them, to think of the anthologies, beginning with Technicians of the Sacred, as large, epical constructions or compositions. By the end of the 1960s ‘ethnopoetics’ was the name I gave to it, and having named it, it was something for which I carried some responsibility.” What does not cohere or ‘belong’ – this becomes his life’s work and, as any archivist knows, an arduous process relieved only by the promise of a new knowledge emerging. Rothenberg created and co-edited Alcheringa (translating to “Dreamtime” in Arunta, aboriginal language), a magazine for ethnopoetics into the early 1980s, again exploring interpretation and the hierarchies often at play with translation work by writers of divergent cultures.
“Alcheringa will not be scholarly, so much as a place where tribal poetry can appear in English translation and can act (in the oldest and newest of poetic) to change men’s minds and lives. We hope to combat cultural genocide in all its manifestations,” he writes in the first issue’s foreword. He includes his own initial translations of Navajo songs, Zunni epics, Yoruba praise poems and Tlingit odes to land. Each entry or translation work is prefaced by author’s process; tape recordings are transcribed and cited with reader turning over the nature of secondary sources. With so much predicated on listening Rothenberg does turn to sound and performance art, befriending composers Charlie Morrow and Pauline Oliveros for further hybridization of mediums and histories. Near the end of his life he remarks, “I found in poetry another way of speaking and thinking that allowed me to challenge the debasement of language...The reality of my childhood was marked by war and the threats of repressions and holocausts, carried forward by authoritarian governments, most of it in distant places but with other manifestations much closer to home. And there was a sense that language was being debased by the lies that were needed to make the killings and the cruelty possible.” Rothenberg chose the career of a poet over an anthropologist or a journalist. Whether this was a conscious decision or not, it speaks to an integrity and deep curiosity for language seen and heard as author intended.
-Katie Calderon