Jerome Rothenberg

Poems and poetics

Jerome Rothenberg

A selection of books translated into other languages 2000–2021

announcement circa 2013 of a selected poems in Romanian
Announcement circa 2013 of a selected poems in Romanian.

[The dream, shared with many, was of a poetry that could reach across borders and languages, for which translation of course was the primary tool and the translators the ones who made it happen.  For me the process began even earlier than the forty twenty-first-century works that I’m highlighting here, my first translated books being Vroege Gedichten (Early poems), translated into Dutch/Flemish by Jan Mysjkin in 1960, and Poemas Gorky (The Gorky poems), translated into Spanish by Sergio Mondragón and Margaret Randall in 1966.

Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada

El libro de las voces (a new book from Mexico)

[Just published by Mangos de Hacha and Universidad Autónima de Nuevo León in Mexico, the book consists of extended interviews along with poems, essays, correspondence, and performance & visual works, selected and translated from English by Javier Taboada. What follows is the English version of my own preface and opening poem, to give a small sense of what the book is intended to include. (J.R.)]

 

Jeffrey Robinson

On 'The Big Book of Homelessness'

People who have experienced homelessness have collaborated to make a medieval-style illuminated manuscript, based upon The Book of Hours, describing their daily lives. 

 

Rochelle Owens

'Patterns of Animus,' Part Three, 'The Ludwig Skulls'

[A continuation from earlier postings on Poems and Poetics of Rochelle Owens’s new masterwork, Patterns of Animus. (J.R.)]

 

In 1863 Beethoven’s body was exhumed for autopsy, the head

removed and the skull studied for medical research.

Toward a poetry and poetics of the Americas (33)

'The Fall of Tenochtitlán,' 1521

The Great Tenochtitlán by Diego Rivera
The Great Tenochtitlán by Diego Rivera

[It’s now the 500th year exactly since the conquest and sacking of the imperial Aztec city of Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés and allies, concerning which the following segment from the gathering of “The poetry and poetics of the Americas,” assembled by Javier Taboada and me, as it will appear in the final version.

            A work still in progress.]