In Fond Memory of Jerry Rothenberg (1931-2024)

I am still on my “book break”, but I wanted to share here a brief notice in memory of my friend and great inspiration, the poet Jerry Rothenberg, who died late last month. You can read his full obituary here.

I saw Jerry only twice in person, once for a lovely lunch at his home in Encinitas in 2018 with his wife, Diane, and once again at the New York Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, which he had helped to found in the early 1960s. I corresponded with him fairly regularly for a few years. He is the one who convinced me, or perhaps strong-armed me, into taking on the project of doing an edition of Sakha Olonkho epic for the University of California Press series, “World Literatures in Translation”, for which he served as an adviser. For this, but not only for this, I have Jerry to thank for much of the course my life has taken over the past six or seven years.

But beyond just those things that might find their way onto a CV, Jerry convinced me, in a deep and mysterious way of which I am only slowly becoming conscious, to come out in the world as whatever it is that I am, and that part of what I am is someone who works in a poetic vein. A poet, I believe such people are called in the agential form.

He convinced me that translation is, though often undervalued, itself a kind of poetry. You can’t translate a poem without writing another poem. And he convinced me, much more generally, as part of this coming-out, that I may as well open up and be honest about the all-consuming interest I have, as he had, in thinking about the range of human experience in a way that cuts rather deeper than whatever is on offer in the collective “bourgeois etiquette manual” that is most contemporary academic philosophy, openly to go in search of layers of the human that are more primordial and deep-seated — to learn for example to appreciate the full wisdom of the words recorded in Technicians of the Sacred, even if here they are only a faint written trace of the living traditions Jerry attempted to capture.

I think Jerry’s work in the 1970s on “total translation” of traditional rites and practices that are poetic, but that are so much more than that besides —as for example Navajo dances—, amounts to one of the most interesting efforts at expanding the scope and potential of writing that has ever been attempted. I could also tell you again of how Jerry turned into a bear that night at St. Mark’s —I would dare to say “literally”, but you might misunderstand that— in his performance of a traditional Seneca chant. But you’ll have to find that story on your own.

I’ve written about Jerry’s work on a number of occasions, and it would be a violation of my “book break’s” terms to go looking for those now or to seek to sum them up again. I will share a link to the last piece I wrote about him, which also provided me an occasion to speak with Nick Cave, another disciple of Jerry’s, and to discover a bit of that man’s generous spirit as well.

Jerry had talked about including one of my early Olonkho translations in a subsequent edition of Technicians. I don’t know what came of that, but I think I’ll close here with an excerpt of the piece he first read from me, which is what initially brought us into contact and again, as I’ve said, changed my life.

Rest In Peace, Brother Poet!

—JSR

Photo credit: Diane Rothenberg

From Модун Эр Соҕотох [Brave Er Soğotox, or, literally, Brave Man Alone], recited by Vasiliï Osipovich Karataev in 1982, and first published in Якутский героический эпос. Памятники фольклора народов Сибири и Дальнего Востока, Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1996. 

Far beyond 
The highest peak 
Of my former years,
Well beyond
The repellent ridge
Of my previous years,
Quite beyond the border
Of the cold windy days 
Of my bygone years,
Beyond the range 
Of perilous ridges 
Of my outrun years,
My tribe of men,
Still unacquainted, began to speak,
My tribe of Yakuts began to converse,
Not yet knowing each other,
My uraangkhai Yakuts
Dressed in coats like urasas
With words flowing like water,
With soles flat on the ground
When they met, 
Not yet talking of this or that,
My seers in the flesh 
With stained bone,
Shamans of my tribe
Not yet auguring the future;
My lady Mother Earth
Was still the size of a grey squirrel’s claw
Spreading out and stretching,
Generating and growing,
Like the suede of the ear
Of my two-year-old doe 
Turned inside out,
Spreading out and growing,
Gradually outspreading: so it happened, they say. 
(Hey!)
And so,
If you push her, she does not flinch,
If you press her, she does not bend,
So sturdy she became, 
My dark black bedrock of soil,
Growing strong, she was born: so it happened. 
My dark black bedrock of soil,
Surrounded by indestructible cliffs,
The Araat Sea swelling,
The unsubsiding sea bounding
With seven walls,
With seven beams,
Mother Earth, my land,
Thus was she born: so it happened.
(Hey!) 
This Mother Earth,
Land of mine,
Connected by roots,
Fortified by grass,
Entangled by woods,
Where the fulvous bear digs his den,
Where the wide black taiga spreads,
Where the elk grazes, 
And the black taiga spreads out in all directions:
This is how they founded
My Mother Earth, my land: so it happened.