1.
Dorota Czerner:
In 1970 Frank Stella was given a copy of Heaven’s Gates, a book on wooden synagogues by Maria & Kazimierz Piechotka, experts on Jewish architecture from the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. None of these buildings survived the war. Nonetheless, Stella was so fascinated by the geometry and what he later referred to as ‘interlocking-ness’ of the wooden constructions that an original series of abstract reliefs, known as The Polish Village, was born. So, momentarily putting aside your personal ancestral quest – do you see a resemblance to Poland / 1931?

I mean, in the fantasy aspect, as well as the distances traveled from the root-source, and the fact that so much of it has vanished.

Jerome Rothenberg:
I can see a connection there in our regard for the vanished, where Stella of course is most taken by the form and beauty of what he sees and what leads him to a series of hard-edged and gloriously colored images in response. For myself, by contrast, the work of Poland/1931 over all doesn’t base itself on formal principles or procedures and leaves room – very much so – for the dirty/soiled and ugly, the full range of what I describe as “ancestral sources of my own in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.” In this, if the imagination is involved in the construction of a fantasized Poland, it is reenforced by procedures of “investigative poetry” (American poet Ed Sanders’ term)and appropriation/collage – what Marianne Moore spoke of elsewhere as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Once let loose, this opens as well to the comic and ludic – dark humor, as I feel it, and dark game playing – and occasionally, mostly by translation, a fragment of the gorgeous and divine, from mystic sources mostly. And all of that informs my working in A Big Jewish Book as well, where I try to erase, as with other big books of mine, the boundaries between a mystical and secular poetics.

Still, thinking back to Stella and what you make of him, the closer resemblance is to my use of gematria, the numerological juxtaposition of letters and words, where I take a form of mystical exegesis I find in the ruins and turn it to my own purposes as a means of composition, alternately angelic and demonic, wherever it takes me. That would, however, take me a long time to explain.

2.
DC:
Unlike Stella’s cycle, your poems engage with what remains: the immaterial, the wisdom, the song. You once described Poland / 1931 as “an experimental attempt to explore, and recover, ancestral sources in the world of Jewish mystics, thieves, and madmen.”

In the chronology of your work Poland / 1931 comes at least a decade before Khurbn & Other Poems, which directly addresses the loss of life, the destruction. But even if much darkness is present in its undertone, your Poland (or Polands?) celebrates exuberance.

Did you feel a need to first affirm the continuity, to re-collect by drawing a live bridge between the
old and the new?

JR:
There’s a whole world there, and in so far as it came to me in bits and pieces, the fullness of what I was assembling did feel to me like an over-abundance and in that case an inescapable exuberance. I was also able to lose myself in that, the mystery of my life before my birth – the phantasmic “Poland” of “1931”, which I could only capture by imagining it into being. And yes, the Khurbn/Shoah/Holocaust was there beneath the surface and not quite mentioned, which made the life of what came before that much more turbulent and, as you put it, “exuberant.” All of that, I think, was in my mind while I was writing, without which a poem of this kind would have been more muted and paler than the reality I was trying to sense or create.

Also: the convergence of old and new has always been a concern for me.

3.
DC:
While working on Poland / 1931 I’ve become increasingly aware that the process of putting these poems into Polish, of all languages, may be furthering/amplifying your original project. I hope you won’t mind my saying that. In this case the translation takes place in front of a mirror. Probably more than in any translation. The language turns quite literally into a mirror.
You are a wonderful translator who speaks of the process as an important mode of composition. You maintain that the translation doesn’t threaten, on the contrary enhances the originality of your work as a poet.

What would be your advice to me?

JR:
My people were obviously from Poland or from a town in Poland but did not think of themselves in any meaningful way as Polish. The same for the language of course – my father had little of it; my mother, who went through a secular gymnasium, was educated in Polish but almost never used it in my hearing. Both however were fluent speakers and literate readers of Yiddish – the mother tongue or mamalushn, for which they were strong advocates. And in a curious way, while writing Poland/1931, I thought of myself as doing a translation, somehow, of an imaginary Yiddish ur-text, which could only make sense as a perfect and strongly idiomatic English — with some rare lapses, let me add, into a kind of cockeyed and comic dialect or accent.

In a Polish translation of course, the situation becomes more complicated, but my advice would be to emulate the straight English text as much as possible, using a literate but idiomatic Polish with occasional yiddishisms where that works for you and matches more or less what I was doing in English. Or better yet, think of the writer of the poem as a fluent Polish speaker imagining that he’s translating from a Yiddish original that doesn’t otherwise exist, and see what you come up with. I will trust you almost completely there – as long that is as it brings you pleasure.

P.S. On several occasions, poems from Poland/1931 were translated into Yiddish, which read to me like the otherwise imaginary urtexts that only then came into being.

4.
DC:
About the opening poem of Poland / 1931, “The Wedding”. It’s been translated into several languages. Five of the versions are collected under a single entry of the blog, Jacket2. This was the first poem of yours I tackled. There was a moment when the sheer force of accusatory questioning, aimed at Poland, that “poland poland poland…” made me wonder if the task was not above my paygrade.

But elsewhere you say:
“lightning is like oil the motor
once it starts keeps
running”

The poem works very much like this, once the reader’s imagination gets ignited with the initial image of a black wedding, the machinery of the underlying rhythmic structure pulls her through, all the way to the exiting line, the crow-ing conclusion… In this case my work was equally informed by the text itself and by your reading (as available online in the archives of PennSound.)

So first, can you say something about the importance this particular poem? Then, more specifically about the place that you’ve always given to performance in your poetic practice.

JR:
The poem and the “black wedding” image are crucial for me, but also the Yiddish translation by Amos Schauss, which I used along with the English on the PennSound recording and began to think of as the Yiddish urtext I was searching for. In its common usage there, the term “black wedding” has an ominous but somewhat comic side, in a more serious way a cleansing ceremony performed in a graveyard during a time of plague. Looking back at it, then. the “black wedding” touches off a series of mega-rituals with large, quickly shifting images to help me create a kind of Poland montage, a reality more Poyln (Yiddish) than Poland or Polska, or all of those realities coming together and racing toward what I wanted to be a fierce ending, with executions and gang-rapes and the sound of screeching birds. And beyond that, when I performed with musicians and composers like Bertram Turetzky and Charlie Morrow, among others, the rhythm of the juxtapositions allowed me to soar,as nothing before that really had.

Something, I hope, that would come into much else that I was writing then and after.

5.
DC:
One more observation about “The Wedding”, I want to mention hearing you read the same poem in Yiddish. It was a much later occasion, in an intimate room of a pandemic Zoom-gathering. It struck me as a more ironic interpretation. The whole thing took off in a different register, no less hardhitting, but almost resigned in a sense, and because of that even more expressive. It reminded me how Tadeusz Kantor would admonish his actors for taking a too ‘serious’ approach. He loved circus, dada, and equated the absence of humor with a lack of intelligence. I mention Kantor, specifically, because he dealt with similar material but from inside the Polish landscape, where
oftentimes humor was the only tool available to calibrate the human disasters (plural) of the country.

You are an American poet and thus are not building your Polish historical scenes from direct personal experience, but from conveyed memories. Nonetheless, the Absurdism is very much the same. Why the madmen? The Trickster? Is the Yiddish language, and Yiddish folklore one of the keys here?

JR:
The question of course brings me back to things that I’ve already touched on (at least that part of it concerning Yiddish) but put in the context of Kantor and others like him, opens it in other directions. For me the “mystics, thieves and madmen” were a shorthand for what was missing in the normative Yiddishkeit with which I was also familiar, so I made those things & others (political, social, sexual) the targets of my explorations in Poland/1931. For that I was grateful to the Poylish/Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom I met briefly along the way and whose writings opened up a world for me, with the idea that my writing here wanted a fullness of words and images, with no holds barred, to make it more inclusive, even in some ways to overturn stereotypes (both negative and positive) by adopting or adapting them.

So, the absurdism which you also mention signaled me from a whole range of sources, an image of the world I shared with many and that came to me newly as I was exploring Poland/Poyln. In the duration and aftermath of the wars and holocausts of the last century, it opened for many of us as a way – not the only way but a way – to view human existence and the unreachable and mindless universe as a whole. For myself it permeated all my work and thoughts in the 1970s, whether Dada, Seneca Indian, or Jewish/Poylish – more overtly with the Dada artists and the Indian tricksters and sacred clowns, less so with the mystics, thieves and madmen I was hoping to discover or create in Poland/1931. All of these connections are there when I look back at them, like that of “Yiddish Dada in the street” as it comes to me in “The Holy Words of Tristan Tzara” or the play between Jews and Indians in “Cokboy” – absurdist and real.

6.
DC:
the lines from “The Fish”:

“& so we live without associations
in the past we live
nourishing incredible polands”

… among many other fragments scattered throughout Poland / 1931 project the tenderness, maybe even love felt toward the old country. The photographs saved from the family album picture the grandmothers, young mothers, the tables set in the garden. … The sweeter the description, the larger the loss. Czesław Miłosz once said that in the early days a large portion of his American audience was made of Polish Jews. The Jewish intelligentsia came to his readings wanting to hear the cultural news from Warsaw. Growing up in New York, did you have any sense of this (complex & conflicted) yearning in your parents’ generation?

JR:
So much of this is in the past, so that it’s hard to reconstruct it. That it’s complex and complicated seems obvious to me, and that it has to do with the sharp divisions that existed for them between Poland and Poyln. That generation of course is gone now, and I find that I’m far older today than my parents were when I knew them. So, it’s always my construction that counts here and whatever incredible Polands I can pull together from a range of written/spoken sources, wherever found. So,looking back, the tenderness comes through most strongly in the language they spoke and nurtured, which was how I could observe it then on a day-by-day basis. And it’s why, when I finally turned to “holocaust” after my first visit to Poland in the late 1980s, I used the Yiddish word “khurbn” instead of Holocaust or Shoah. The short opening poem of that sequence is all about that:

in the dark word Khurbn
all their lights went out

and again:

that ancient & dark word
those who spoke it in the old days
now held their tongues

Still, there’s a lot of irony to get past before you land on it … and a lot of fantasy as well. The tenderness here, if that’s the right word, may have some of both.

7.
DC:
In April 1943 Milosz wrote a poem titled “Campo dei Fiori”. Easter Sunday, happy people in love, on a merry-go-round. In the background behind the wall, the Warsaw ghetto is on fire: “At times wind from the burning / Would drift dark kites along.” It is an important poem because an early testimony to the ongoing tragedy. However, from the point of view of the people who were fighting/and dying on the other side of the wall it seems oddly detached. Without once mentioning the Jews, it veers into universal humanism, the classics.

In “Murder Inc. Sutra” in the scene of the funeral of a young thug you describe “a choir like the Warsaw Synagogue / “led by Sirota…”

So, Gershon Sirota, who died about that time in 1943, could’ve been a dark kite from Miłosz’s lines.

Can we propose that Poland / 1931 fills some of the blanks left in Polish poetry? And that by putting the names to the lives as they were lived (before being lost) there, even if only through the anecdotal stories and memories of others who made it to the New World, some of the Polish Jewishness can be reclaimed? Even by simply repeating the words “Jew”, “Jewish” over and over, inside a poem.

JR:
If so, my intention was first to fill the blanks left in Yiddish/Poylish poetry, with the further hope that what you’re doing here may start to fill the Polish blanks as well. For that I need a plausible Polish voice to begin the project of its integration, hoping to make Poland richer, not poorer, in so doing – “nourishing incredible Polands,” as in the other poem of mine you mentioned earlier. And along with that, the repetition of the words “Jew” and “Jewish” reverberates for me as well – as it did for our friend Edmond Jabès, coming out of the depths, where it had lain hidden, as I wrote about it, for most of our lifetimes. Or my fellow American and diaspora poet David Meltzer: “The Jew in me is the ghost in me, hiding under the stairways.” Something of that also in Poland/1931: the poem called “A Connoisseur of Jews,” again with the irony forward. And that reflects of course the excitement and thrill of discovery I felt throughout the writing.

So: Poland/1931, Poyln/1931, Polska/1931 – all for me are necessary, and translation is the key to their interweaving and unlocking. And that I cry out the word “Poland” ten times in the opening poem might also be noted.

8.
DC:
I believe that Poland/ 1931 successfully carries the lore of the Jewish traditions between the Old & the New World also by portraying the daily excesses of life, its secret, or not so secret transgressions. We read about the ancestral scenes that may include pots in which fish and pork are made into one stew, sausages are dropped into the Shabbat cholent, or the wild nights spent in the gentiles’ brothels. Greedy rich men practice black magic. Famous Rabbis fornicate with willing shikhas. The sexual prowess of a certain Zadik is legendary, so is the size of his genitals. The killers from “The Murder Incorporated” carry the pictures of rabbis with big cocks… The language too combines the biblical with the vulgar, sometimes in the same poem.

Can we risk musing that a culture must be intensely alive to play with its own demons?

JR:
If the instances you mention are those of “demons,” the culture in which I place them was hostile as awhole to their display. For me of course one of the dominant ideas was to play with the demons I could find or invent, at a time when that kind of transgression was just starting to open up around us. In “The Student’s Testimony,” as an obvious instance, I let it rip or call it forth as best I can:

he was the last demon of ostrov
come back to visit & play
on my mind blowing delicious
bubbles of red soap into
the corners of the room
a furry singing little
demon with bulging eyes big
bulging balls & all
animal twisted into shapes
like rubber

And again:

“I love my demon” I would sing& we would share the backroom of
the synagogue guzzling
the gentiles’ beer &
snapping paperclips
against the rabbi’s silks reliving
the poland of old friendships pork & fish
boiling & stinking in a single
pot we would dip our hands
into & make our bellies
shine

If that was transgressive, vulgar and blasphemous by turns – or all together – that was of course how I wanted it.

9.
DC:
A query from my colleague, Jacek Dziubiński, who is translating “Cokboy”. He thought the Polish reader would be most intrigued by the continuous mixing of the different mystical traditions, in this case the Hasidic Judaism with Native American shamanism. We may add, both being endangered, marginalized traditions. We could ask if in some sense Poland / 1931 was not informed by your work in the field of ethnopoetics ? (with particular regard to the anthology Technicians of the Sacred.)

JR:
It was while composing Technicians of the Sacred and launching a field like ethnopoetics that I began to bring something like Poyln to surface in my work. By 1968 – a magical year for poets like me – I was setting it down in one of a number of short manifestos I had written during the 1950s and 60s:

A Third Manifesto 1968

I think of myself as making poems that other poets haven’t provided for me & for the existence
of which I feel a deep need.

I look for new forms & possibilities, but also for ways of presenting in my own language the
oldest possibilities of poetry going back to the primitive & archaic cultures that have been
opening up to us over the last hundred years.

I have most recently been translating American Indian poetry (including the “meaningless”
syllables, word distortions & music) & have been exploring ancestral sources of my own in the
world of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.

I believe that everything is possible in poetry & that our earlier “western” attempts at definition
represent a failure of perception we no longer have to endure.

For me, then, the work in Technicians and again in Shaking the Pumpkin and A Seneca Journal was contiguous with Poland/1931 and A Big Jewish Book – an absurd ambition to bring all things together while honoring the differences. And it’s my sense of the need to do this – and the dangers of not doing it – that drives the absurdist and angry narrative of “Cokboy,” in which I cast myself as “a jew among the Indians” and bring together or tear asunder whatever is in my reach.

And certainly – but in A Big Jewish Book especially – I give the mystic and beautiful as much space as the ugly and demonic.

10.
DC:
With Khurbn you decided to speak directly about what is most often referred to as the Holocaust. Along with Piotr Rypson’s translation of the poem, we include here what you wrote about your 1987 trip to Poland, the experience of seeing what’s left of ulica Miodowa and hearing the voices of the dead, the dybbuks.

I want to connect it with the coda of the “Student’s Testimony” (from “Poland /1931”) the lines that seem to allude to the tragic fate of your family and specifically your uncle who took his own life:

his own shadow
was more than he could bear the war
came & he ran from it
back in the cellar drinking
too much he grew thin
the great encounter ended it
in flames the candelabrum rose did it become
a heart
that broke into sparks & letters
a shower of ruined cities from which
my demon
vanished fled from the light when I was born

This moment, December 12, 1931, happened 90 years ago.

Dare I ask you if, despite the darkness gathering on the political horizon today, in Poland and elsewhere, we can still hope that one poet who is born “to write his mother’s name in light” has some power to send the demons away?

JR:
Despite and despite, I move like many others between light and darkness, hope and despair, and aware too, at this late point in my life, that the future remains as unknown at the end as it was at the beginning. The demon, sadly, hasn’t yet been banished or, better yet, tamed or integrated, and may never be; and the times we live in, as I wrote in a poem to and for Diane, “are never right.” So, it remains a struggle between light and darkness, where the darkness leaves us blind to start with and the light, if left unquestioned, maybe even more so. And I realize, looking back, that something like that play of light and darkness has remained the very center of my work: Whether it was true or not.

---

Internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer Jerome Rothenberg (born in 1931 in New York – 2024) has published over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as America: A Prophecy (with George Quasha), Shaking the Pumpkin, and Poems for the Millennium (with Pierre Joris). His final anthology, The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present (co-edited with Javier Taboada), was published posthumously in October 2024.

A dominant presence in American poetry and poetics for half a century, in his work Rothenberg has always sought in the deepest realms of human experience to bring a clear word. His poems are marvels of colloquial immediacy and prophetic intensity.

His explorations of ethnopoetics resulted in such game-changing anthologies as Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin, as well as studies and translations of Native American poetries. His commitment to exploring the world of Jewish experience produced his Holocaust-minded poems in the books Poland/1931 and Khurbn & other Poems, as well as A Big Jewish Book and Exiled in the Word. He was the first English translator of Paul Celan.

Jerome Rothenberg was Professor Emeritus of University of California at San Diego.

Dorota Czerner (born 1966 in Wrocław, Poland) completed her studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. An essayist, poet, translator. Since 2003, she has been a co-editor of “The Open Space magazine”, published in Red Hook, NY.

Dorota Czerner a poet who entangled her European roots with the Hudson River light. Her live performances, created in collaboration with contemporary classical composers and video artists, embrace the discovery of ecosystems built around and inside the poetics of the spoken word. Fireflies (for spoken voice, chamber ensemble, video, and electronics) — the three-part collective composition inspired by the natural phenomenon of synchronous fireflies with her libretto — had two realizations in The National Opera Center, NYC. Czerner’s current project, Story of the Face (2022), is built around a short play about female identity, masks, image and self-image, with which composer Jon Forshee constructs a dynamic landscape from the poet’s own voice, computer-generated sounds, and live acoustic instruments. Premiered at The Maverick Concerts in Woodstock, NY, in August 2022, it will be presented at the Electrowave in Colorado Springs, 2025.

Her selected works can be read in InFiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016), “Perspectives of New Music”, “Current Musicology”, the literary magazines: “House Organ”, “Metambesen”, “The Doris”, “Blazing Stadium”, “SALT”, and the chapbooks: Desert Poems and Before the Body of the Mind/The Swan 19 (the Kelly Writers House, 2022).

Dorota Czerner’s polish translation of Jerome Rothenberg’s Poland/1931 was published by “Chidusz” (Wrocław, Poland, 2022.) Dorota Czerner’s current translation-in-progress includes the work of a Polish Roma poet, Bronisława Wajs “Papusza”.

---

Acknowledgments
This conversation was conducted in December 2021/January 2022 to accompany the publication of Dorota Czerner’s translations into Polish of Jerome Rothenberg’s poems from Poland/1931, to be published in the Jewish magazine “Chidusz” (2/2022, Wrocław, Poland). A selected fragment appeared with the current title “On Poland/1931 & the Pathways of Translation” on Jerome Rothenberg’s blog POEMS and POETICS (February 8/2022), and Jacket2 (February 11/2022). This publication was made possible with the support of the Polish Cultural Institute in New York, with special thanks to Bartek Remisko for his advocacy and commitment to the project.

Lead image: Open Space cover
Jerome Rothenberg, photo by Dirk Skiba
Dorota Czerner, photo courtsey of Dorota Czerner