A Bridge Connecting Worlds: Remembering Jerome Rothenberg

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

I first read Jerome Rothenberg as an 18-year-old in Chile in the mid-1960s when El Corno Emplumado / The Plumed Horn, an extraordinary Mexican magazine that connected the avant-garde poetry of the United States and Latin America, sent me a book they had published: The Gorky Poems / Poemas a Gorky. Inspired by the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the poems read as a crumbling bridge connecting the political, social, and literary spheres of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant community, to which Rothenberg’s parents belonged. Chile was one of the Latin American countries that had received Jewish and Palestinian refugees after the Second World War, and my family was one among many that welcomed these refugees, so Jerry’s work resonated with me.

Shortly afterward, in 1969, Sergio Mondragón, co-editor of El Corno Emplumado, invited me to come to the United States for the translation into English of my first poetry book. During that trip, I found Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and was immediately struck by its beauty and power. In Latin America, we were already reading Indigenous poetries in translation, a process that deepened in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, in the northern and southern hemisphere, in the spirit that Jerry called “the second great awakening of experimental modernism.” Even among the extraordinary translations emerging at the time, Jerry’s work stood out as different. He saw Indigenous verbal and sound creations within the total concert of world poetries from the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania, as an ongoing shamanic journey, a ritual system unfolding across continents and time. Poetry was, for him, a creation of language, of the community of the living, of our poetic ancestors, and of the land itself.

Early on, in the ’60s and ’70s, he and Dennis Tedlock developed the concept of “total translation” as a way to move “beyond the semantic level to try to find equivalents for the non-lexical vocables.” They envisioned translating not just words but also sound play, and their work became a generative force. Undoing reductive Western ideas of what poetry was or could be, they expanded the universe of the possible for translation, poetry, and performance. Many extraordinary works were born from this experimentation, which continues to inspire artists and poets around the world.

It took courage to sustain such a belief in poetry and translation during the U.S. culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, when translation and cross-cultural work were often derided or misconstrued as appropriation rather than as bridges connecting worlds. To this oversimplification, Jerry opposed his self-definition: 

saddlesore I came
a jew among
the indians
vot em I doink in dis strange place
mit deez pipple mit strange eyes
could be it’s trouble
could be    could be

It was certainly trouble, as many questioned the right of others to learn from Indigenous masters, as Jerry had at the Seneca reservation in upstate New York, where he, his wife Diane, and their young son lived for a couple of years in the 1960s. I think this experience opened him to a different way of being, as he put it, in a field “larger than oneself,” where poetry can be delivered in true “gathering[s] of the tribe,” as collective healing, transformative events.

I witnessed Jerry’s ability to engage in a convivial exchange with others during our Sudamérica performance tour of Latin America (2004), when Diane, Jerry, and I traveled through Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, meeting poets and artists. In these gatherings he often performed his own version of the “13th Horse Song of Frank Mitchell (White),” a Navajo composition he transformed by finding English equivalents of the original, in a sort of sonic alchemy. This horse song became a kind of opening for encounters in many places, where people gathered as in ancient times, on dunes, or in city bars, to commune with the spirit of poetry beyond borders. Jerry turned 73 years old during the trip, and his energy was astounding. Even though he sometimes protested like a true New Yorker, he climbed huge mountains of sand, along with me and Diane, to reach the summit of the tall dunes of Concón in Chile and face the Pacific Ocean, where an American warship stood guard, as if to say: we still own you. Still, we chanted a new verb I’d created on the spot: adunarse, meaning “to join and become a dune,” unifying humanity with the earth.

Looking back at Jerry’s majestic Technicians, and its subsequent editions and translations, I wonder if his primary desire was to translate the untranslatable, as he did with his re-translation of the 15 FLOWER WORLD VARIATIONS: A SEQUENCE OF SONGS FROM THE YAQUI DEER DANCE (Membrane Press, 1984). When I first read it I felt it was the most beautiful poem I’d ever encountered. Immediately, I translated it into Spanish. Orally composed and recorded in the ’40s in Tucson, Arizona, the deer songs transported me back to my childhood in the Andes mountains. In the Yaqui poem, the voice of the speaker shifts constantly from the singer to those of the animals and plants, becoming a song of multiple perspectives, as if the Yaqui poem itself was an exquisite translation of a human and nonhuman exchange celebrating the Sonora desert where it was composed. I spent 30 years meditating on this poem and the art of translation it proposed, and that long journey became my Deer Book (Radius, 2024), a book-animal, or animal book, encompassing many traditions, which I dedicated to Jerome Rothenberg.

At the end of his life, in one of his last interviews, Jerry lamented that the powerful view of the ’60s—that poetry could serve expanded social/political/philosophical functions—seemed to have faded away. In a dehumanized world prone to violence and the suppression of free expression, the art of keeping alive the beauty of the “impossible” translation of threatened oral and written poetic traditions is more important than ever. To listen to and read oral poetries and participate in the collective Indigenous poetry-dance rituals still being performed today, despite the brutal extermination of people, animals, and ecosystems, is to join in an urgent cry for action.

With his work as a poet, translator, and anthologist, Jerome Rothenberg set in motion spheres of action and sensibility that continue to serve as forces of liberation in our world, enacting poetries deeply engaged in the transformation of language and consciousness.