Translations from Japanese by Jerome Rothenberg & Yasuhiro Yotsumoto
[The project to translate Nakahara Chuya into English continued recently (July 2014) with a meeting in Yamaguchi, Japan, of a number of interested poets & translators – plans to be announced. My own collaborative work with Yasuhiro Yotsumoto will hopefully continue from this point onward, for which the following poems & comments are only a beginning. (J.R.)]
Translation from the Polish Manuscripts by Harris Lenowitz
NOTE. As a time of growing dislocations & deconstructions, the eighteenth-century saw changes of mind that reached into isolated corners of Europe, far removed from the strongholds of both the Enlightenment & the “natural supernaturalism” & radical mysticisms that were among the marks of an emerging Romanticism. The messianic Frankist movement as it affected eastern European Jews involved, like its literary & western counterparts, a shift in language & its attendant symbols that resembled the shifts emerging as well in the dominant cultures.
[The following work began with Jack Foley’s writing “between the lines” of Michael McClure’s famous poem, “For the Death of 100 Whales,” first recited at the famed Six Gallery reading in 1955 San Francisco. With my own proclivity toward collaborative writing & thinking I came into the process a few months after Foley, which stretches the time frame of the final work to the almost present. Typographically McClure’s original poem appears in roman type, Foley’s respones in italic, & mine in bold italic. The McClure poem of course is the true jewel in the crown, and “the rest,” as someone said, “is commentary.” (J.R.)]
[NOTE. The text that follows is a further installment from Bloomberg-Rissman’s epic assemblage, Zeitgeist Spam, a work constructed (almost) entirely, he tells us, from words or sounds appropriated from other writers. In the present instance the over-all source is Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Assemblage of Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Present, which he & I have recently completed as Poems for the Millennium, volume 5, for publication later this year by Black Widow Press. The subsection of Zeitgeist Spam, “In the House of the Hangman,” itself in multiple installments, derives its title from an essay by Theodor Adorno: “In the house of the hangman one should not mention the noose; one might be suspected of harboring resentment.”]
Poems and poetics