To Still Write A Poem... Instigation on Ethnopoetics

First:  Questions of Barbarism and Poetic Colonization

Theodore Adorno said famously, “To still write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  I think ethnopoetics must be understood, in part, in the context of Adorno and of Rothenberg’s response to him.  Embedded in his poem Khurbn, Rothenberg answers, “…after Auschwitz, there is only poetry.”  What does it mean for ethnopoetics that it was born, at least in part, as a direct response to the attempt to silent Rothenberg’s own languages, and how does this effect the politics of ethnopoetics?

On the Kelly Writer’s House blog (http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Rothenberg/Signature/Rothenberg-Jerome_and_Morrow-Charles_Signature_02.mp3), I found an interview by Mara Gordon with Rothenberg in which he discusses Khurbn at length.

Q: We've talked a lot about the spectrum of Holocaust art and literature in this class, having read Art Spiegelman's "Maus" earlier in the semester, and our professor Al being "obsessed" (self-described) with various representations of the Holocaust. You've quoted Adorno's famous line about no poetry being possible after Auschwitz; no metaphor, no language (a metaphor in and of itself) is adequate to describe genocide. At the other end of the spectrum is Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List -- an oft-quoted trope in our class to represent "bad" Holocaust art: art that is too authoritative, too confident, too simple. It's almost silly to refer to Schindler's List and Khurbn in the same sentence, but they have more in common than the idea that no art should exist -- can exist -- that refers to the Holocaust. Where do you fall in this debate? What were some of your concerns writing Khurbn (and to a lesser extent, Poland/1931) and how did you approach them as a writer?

 

JR: I'm writing this in Berlin, where the Holocaust still haunts all of the Germans I've been with – even the younger ones – so that gives us a kind of common ground. For me, although it was far away from me while it was happening, the Jewish disaster was very vivid, and the sense of loss was also unavoidable. I think it was a presence behind the push I was feeling into poetry, but it didn't enter directly for close to 25 years after the war, while I felt an unwillingness to claim somebody else's suffering as my own or to tie the question of identity (Jewish or otherwise) to a kind of death cult. In the course of assembling Technicians of the Sacred, however, I began to consider the possibility of writing an ancestral poetry of my own – taking a pass at a form of ethnic writing that I otherwise thought of as degraded. The book that came out of that was Poland/1931, and I wrote it (or thought I did) without a direct reference to "holocaust" but with a sure sense that "holocaust" was the underlying subtext. For this I had to dig pretty deeply – "investigate," to use Ed Sanders' favorite word – to make a fantasy world that had some degree of credibility. I was more interested anyway in the archaeology of the Jewish life than in its destruction, and I wanted not to idealize it but to construct it with a regard for its dark and dangerous side – "the world of Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen" that I've mentioned elsewhere. (A Big Jewish Book from the mid 1970s is an ethnopoetic extension of the same impulse.) That intention was helped along further by an early meeting with Isaac Bashevis Singer and a later one with Paul Celan. The conversation with Singer raised the issue of cruelty – rhyming at the time with what we were reading in Artaud – and let me push forward a sense of the absurd / comic / demonic that was waiting to come to surface. For this I needed a further range of investigations to bring the reality – the fantasy – to light and to allow other voices to speak or (if that were possible) to drown out my own.

 

A central question for me, as for Lindsay, has been about the ways in which much of Rothenberg’s work could be seen as appropriation.  In this interview, he says, “…I felt an unwillingness to claim somebody else's suffering as my own…”  This seems, in some ways, in opposition to his willingness to claim other’s words as his own, and to rework them to his own purposes.  (See Linsday’s blog on his “translations” of Native American poetries.)

I have come to believe that there IS a saving impulse in Rothenberg’s work; a working toward something admirable that forces the risk of appropriation in an attempt to rid poetry of the silencing insistence that the poet may only speak in a voice to which he has been granted access by virtue of his identity. 

In Rothenberg’s 1994 talk, “Ethnopoetics at the Millenium” ( http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/ethnopoetics.html ), he warns, “…as that time unfolds, we see again the dark side of that strange force I used to speak about as ethnos - the side that shows up (in Bosnia, Rwanda, elsewhere) in a terrible conjunction with the nation-state, erupting into ethnic violence & hatred. I would therefore be wary - & hope you will be too - of the politics of ethnic exclusivity, to insure thereby that our ethnopoetics will not stop with a useful but centrifugal multiculturalism but will push (again) toward anintercultural (centripetal) future.” 

I’m going to steal the first line of Professor Dennis Tedlock’s syllabus (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/tedlock/syllabi/ethnopoetics.html ).  “Ethnopoetics is a decentered poetics, an attempt to hear and read the poetries of distant others, outside the Western tradition as we know it now.”  If we consider this definition, and pay attention to Rothenberg’s own warnings about ethnos, I think an argument can be made that Rothenberg is accessing, rather than appropriating, and that this accessing is an act of both including and preserving.  I think it even likely that there is a distinction in his praxis between cultural imperialism and a very dismodern sense of the radical interdependency of all peoples.

Is it possible for an act that would clearly be recognized as colonizing—such as the “translation” of the poetry of an oppressed people by a person in the dominant culture that, among other things, made changes intended to create a work more pleasing to the esthetics of that culture—can be rescued from being an act of aggression or colonization by the theory behind it? 

Listening for this question:

http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Rothenberg/Signature/Rothenberg-Jerome_and_Morrow-Charles_Signature_02.mp3

Two:  Endangered Languages, Translation, and Yiddish Poetry

Perhaps because so much of Rothenberg's poetry is accompanied by Klezmer music, or perhaps just because it is a personal interest of mine, I found my reading of A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values heavily colored by my surprise at the centrality of, and reliance upon, a specific sort of translation in Ubu web's collection on ethnopoetics curated by Rothenberg himself.

I was surprised, having read the theoretical texts first, to find that Rothenberg's poetry is largely devoid of Yiddish in spite of the fact that he includes many other conventions of post-Shoah Jewish literature.  And, while it's true that Yiddish makes some very brief cameos in some of his work (particularly in the title of Khurbn), I found myself asking, "Where is this endangered language, and how does its ommission speak to the Poetic Rights and Values?

In the section entitled "Signifagance of Translation," the authors make the very interesting assertion:  

Translating certain poetries from lesser-spoken or stateless languages and dialects into more dominant languages has been important because it has given poets who desire it a chance to have their work more widely read. On the other hand, if performed with care, it can also be extremely important to translate poetry written in dominant languages like English, Spanish, or Mandarin, into lesser-spoken tongues like Navajo, Ki’che, or Tibetan. While people all over the world begin to have increasingly more access to one another’s cultural traditions through travel and media, poetry may also find a significant role in helping to share worldviews and lifeways between many different language communities.

It seems to me that something key is missing here.  The authors talk about the role of existing works--in both their original languages and in translation--in the creation of shared world views.  What they fail to discuss, and seems to me of great importance, is the role of new work written in endangered languages.  

I'm surprised to see that Yiddish is not on their list of endangered languages.  It is, in fact, a language kept alive primarily by the insistance of Jewish poets, writers, playwrites, and musicians.  Born of a very specific time and place, it no longer functions as a first language in the way it did in pre-Shoah Europe.  Other languages, notably Gaelic, which have been simlilarly displaces as primary languages also continue mostly as a language of the literature of identity:  these languages allow for the expression of ideas unique to the cultures in which they are (or were) spoken, and permit a sort of linguistic subversion within the dominant culture whose language has subsumed them.

What does it mean, then, that ethnopoetics seems so comfortable with translation and puts so little emphasis on the creation of new poetry (and other literary forms) to be the agent of perservation for endangered languages?

The listening for this section is by the Yiddish poet, Itzak Manger.  Here, I link to the page containing both the sound file for his reading of oyf der stantsye Kolomey and to the translation, transliteration, and original text of the poem.  The authors of A Declaration of Poetic Rights and Values deal with the related issue of translating work that also includes some ceremonial or musical component, but they don't touch on the act of transliteration itself.  How does the recreation of the sound of a poem--perhaps, even, the creation of a "sound poem" version of a the original?--differ from translation?  What does it add to have both?  Why is transliteration so conspicuously absent from the conversation?

Listening (and looking):

http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/czernowitz-voices-manger.htm