{"id":15772,"date":"2025-02-11T19:59:57","date_gmt":"2025-02-11T18:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?p=15772"},"modified":"2025-04-21T15:00:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T13:00:38","slug":"jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2025\/02\/11\/jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Jerome Rothenberg and Dorota Czerner: A Conversation \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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1.
Dorota Czerner:<\/strong>
In 1970 Frank Stella was given a copy of Heaven\u2019s Gates<\/em>, 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 \u2018interlocking-ness\u2019 of the wooden constructions that an original series of abstract reliefs, known as The Polish Village<\/em>, was born. So, momentarily putting aside your personal ancestral quest \u2013 do you see a resemblance to Poland \/ 1931<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jerome Rothenberg:<\/strong>
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<\/em> over all doesn\u2019t base itself on formal principles or procedures and leaves room \u2013 very much so \u2013 for the dirty\/soiled and ugly, the full range of what I describe as \u201cancestral sources of my own in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.\u201d In this, if the imagination is involved in the construction of a fantasized Poland, it is reenforced by procedures of \u201cinvestigative poetry\u201d (American poet Ed Sanders\u2019 term)and appropriation\/collage \u2013 what Marianne Moore spoke of elsewhere as \u201cimaginary gardens with real toads in them.\u201d Once let loose, this opens as well to the comic and ludic \u2013 dark humor, as I feel it, and dark game playing \u2013 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<\/em> as well, where I try to erase, as with other big books of mine, the boundaries between a mystical and secular poetics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2.
DC:<\/strong>
Unlike Stella\u2019s cycle, your poems engage with what remains: the immaterial, the wisdom, the song. You once described Poland \/ 1931<\/em> as \u201can experimental attempt to explore, and recover, ancestral sources in the world of Jewish mystics, thieves, and madmen.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the chronology of your work Poland \/ 1931<\/em> comes at least a decade before Khurbn & Other Poems<\/em>, 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Did you feel a need to first affirm the continuity, to re-collect by drawing a live bridge between the
old and the new?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
There\u2019s 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 \u2013 the phantasmic \u201cPoland\u201d of \u201c1931\u201d, 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, \u201cexuberant.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also: the convergence of old and new has always been a concern for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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3.
DC:<\/strong>
While working on Poland \/ 1931<\/em> I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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\u2019t threaten, on the contrary enhances the originality of your work as a poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What would be your advice to me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
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 \u2013 my father had little of it; my mother, who went through a secular gymnasium<\/em>, was educated in Polish but almost never used it in my hearing. Both however were fluent speakers and literate readers of Yiddish \u2013 the mother tongue or mamalushn<\/em>, for which they were strong advocates. And in a curious way, while writing Poland\/1931<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s translating from a Yiddish original that doesn\u2019t otherwise exist, and see what you come up with. I will trust you almost completely there \u2013 as long that is as it brings you pleasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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4.
DC:<\/strong>
About the opening poem of Poland \/ 1931<\/em>, \u201cThe Wedding\u201d. It\u2019s been translated into several languages. Five of the versions are collected under a single entry of the blog, Jacket2<\/em>. This was the first poem of yours I tackled. There was a moment when the sheer force of accusatory questioning, aimed at Poland, that \u201cpoland poland poland\u2026\u201d made me wonder if the task was not above my paygrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But elsewhere you say:
\u201clightning is like oil the motor
once it starts keeps
running\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n


The poem works very much like this, once the reader\u2019s 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\u2026 In this case my work was equally informed by the text itself and by your reading (as available online in the archives of PennSound<\/em>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So first, can you say something about the importance this particular poem? Then, more specifically about the place that you\u2019ve always given to performance in your poetic practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
The poem and the \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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 \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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 \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something, I hope, that would come into much else that I was writing then and after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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5.
DC:<\/strong>
One more observation about \u201cThe Wedding\u201d, 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 \u2018serious\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
The question of course brings me back to things that I\u2019ve 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 \u201cmystics, thieves and madmen\u201d 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 not the only way but a way \u2013 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 \u2013 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<\/em>. All of these connections are there when I look back at them, like that of \u201cYiddish Dada in the street\u201d as it comes to me in \u201cThe Holy Words of Tristan Tzara\u201d or the play between Jews and Indians in \u201cCokboy\u201d \u2013 absurdist and real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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6.
DC:<\/strong>
the lines from \u201cThe Fish\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c& so we live without associations
in the past we live
nourishing incredible polands\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 among many other fragments scattered throughout Poland \/ 1931<\/em> 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. \u2026 The sweeter the description, the larger the loss. Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz 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\u2019 generation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
So much of this is in the past, so that it\u2019s hard to reconstruct it. That it\u2019s 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\u2019m far older today than my parents were when I knew them. So, it\u2019s always my<\/em> 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\u2019s why, when I finally turned to \u201cholocaust\u201d after my first visit to Poland in the late 1980s, I used the Yiddish word \u201ckhurbn\u201d instead of Holocaust or Shoah. The short opening poem of that sequence is all about that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

in the dark word Khurbn
all their lights went out<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

that ancient & dark word
those who spoke it in the old days
now held their tongues<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, there\u2019s a lot of irony to get past before you land on it \u2026 and a lot of fantasy as well. The tenderness here, if that\u2019s the right word, may have some of both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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7.
DC:<\/strong>
In April 1943 Milosz wrote a poem titled \u201cCampo dei Fiori\u201d. Easter Sunday, happy people in love, on a merry-go-round. In the background behind the wall, the Warsaw ghetto is on fire: \u201cAt times wind from the burning \/ Would drift dark kites along.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cMurder Inc. Sutra\u201d in the scene of the funeral of a young thug you describe \u201ca choir like the Warsaw Synagogue \/ \u201cled by Sirota\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, Gershon Sirota, who died about that time in 1943, could\u2019ve been a dark kite from Mi\u0142osz\u2019s lines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can we propose that Poland \/ 1931<\/em> 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 \u201cJew\u201d, \u201cJewish\u201d over and over, inside a poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
If so, my intention was first to fill the blanks left in Yiddish\/Poylish poetry, with the further hope that what you\u2019re 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 \u2013 \u201cnourishing incredible Polands,\u201d as in the other poem of mine you mentioned earlier. And along with that, the repetition of the words \u201cJew\u201d and \u201cJewish\u201d reverberates for me as well \u2013 as it did for our friend Edmond Jab\u00e8s, 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: \u201cThe Jew in me is the ghost in me, hiding under the stairways.\u201d Something of that also in Poland\/1931<\/em>: the poem called \u201cA Connoisseur of Jews,\u201d again with the irony forward. And that reflects of course the excitement and thrill of discovery I felt throughout the writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So: Poland\/1931, Poyln\/1931, Polska\/1931 \u2013 all for me are necessary, and translation is the key to their interweaving and unlocking. And that I cry out the word \u201cPoland\u201d ten times in the opening poem might also be noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8.
DC:<\/strong>
I believe that Poland\/ 1931<\/em> 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\u2019 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 \u201cThe Murder Incorporated\u201d carry the pictures of rabbis with big cocks\u2026 The language too combines the biblical with the vulgar, sometimes in the same poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can we risk musing that a culture must be intensely alive to play with its own demons?<\/p>\n\n\n\n


<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
If the instances you mention are those of \u201cdemons,\u201d 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 \u201cThe Student\u2019s Testimony,\u201d as an obvious instance, I let it rip or call it forth as best I can:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI love my demon\u201d I would sing& we would share the backroom of
the synagogue guzzling
the gentiles\u2019 beer &
snapping paperclips
against the rabbi\u2019s 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If that was transgressive, vulgar and blasphemous by turns \u2013 or all together \u2013 that was of course how I wanted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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9.
DC:<\/strong>
A query from my colleague, Jacek Dziubi\u0144ski, who is translating \u201cCokboy\u201d. 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<\/em> was not informed by your work in the field of ethnopoetics ? (with particular regard to the anthology Technicians of the Sacred<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
It was while composing Technicians of the Sacred<\/em> and launching a field like ethnopoetics that I began to bring something like Poyln to surface in my work. By 1968 \u2013 a magical year for poets like me \u2013 I was setting it down in one of a number of short manifestos I had written during the 1950s and 60s:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A Third Manifesto 1968<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


I think of myself as making poems that other poets haven\u2019t provided for me & for the existence
of which I feel a deep need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


I have most recently been translating American Indian poetry (including the \u201cmeaningless\u201d
syllables, word distortions & music) & have been exploring ancestral sources of my own in the
world of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


I believe that everything is possible in poetry & that our earlier \u201cwestern\u201d attempts at definition
represent a failure of perception we no longer have to endure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For me, then, the work in Technicians and again in Shaking the Pumpkin and A Seneca Journal was contiguous with Poland\/1931<\/em> and A Big Jewish Book<\/em> \u2013 an absurd ambition to bring all things together while honoring the differences. And it\u2019s my sense of the need to do this \u2013 and the dangers of not doing it \u2013 that drives the absurdist and angry narrative of \u201cCokboy,\u201d in which I cast myself as \u201ca jew among the Indians\u201d and bring together or tear asunder whatever is in my reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And certainly \u2013 but in A Big Jewish Book<\/em> especially \u2013 I give the mystic and beautiful as much space as the ugly and demonic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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10.
DC:<\/strong>
With Khurbn<\/em> you decided to speak directly about what is most often referred to as the Holocaust. Along with Piotr Rypson\u2019s translation of the poem, we include here what you wrote about your 1987 trip to Poland, the experience of seeing what\u2019s left of ulica Miodowa and hearing the voices of the dead, the dybbuks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to connect it with the coda of the \u201cStudent\u2019s Testimony\u201d (from \u201cPoland \/1931\u201d) the lines that seem to allude to the tragic fate of your family and specifically your uncle who took his own life:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

This moment, December 12, 1931, happened 90 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cto write his mother\u2019s name in light\u201d has some power to send the demons away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JR:<\/strong>
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\u2019t 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, \u201care never right.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer Jerome Rothenberg<\/strong> (born in 1931 in New York \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jerome Rothenberg was Professor Emeritus of University of California at San Diego.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dorota Czerner<\/strong> (born 1966 in Wroc\u0142aw, Poland) completed her studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. An essayist, poet, translator. Since 2003, she has been a co-editor of \u201cThe Open Space magazine\u201d, published in Red Hook, NY.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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) \u2014 the three-part collective composition inspired by the natural phenomenon of synchronous fireflies with her libretto \u2014 had two realizations in The National Opera Center, NYC. Czerner\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her selected works can be read in InFiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016), \u201cPerspectives of New Music\u201d, \u201cCurrent Musicology\u201d, the literary magazines: \u201cHouse Organ\u201d, \u201cMetambesen\u201d, \u201cThe Doris\u201d, \u201cBlazing Stadium\u201d, \u201cSALT\u201d, and the chapbooks: Desert Poems and Before the Body of the Mind\/The Swan 19 (the Kelly Writers House, 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dorota Czerner\u2019s polish translation of Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s Poland\/1931 was published by \u201cChidusz\u201d (Wroc\u0142aw, Poland, 2022.) Dorota Czerner\u2019s current translation-in-progress includes the work of a Polish Roma poet, Bronis\u0142awa Wajs \u201cPapusza\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n\n\n\n

Acknowledgments<\/strong>
This conversation was conducted in December 2021\/January 2022 to accompany the publication of Dorota Czerner\u2019s translations into Polish of Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s poems from Poland\/1931, to be published in the Jewish magazine \u201cChidusz\u201d (2\/2022, Wroc\u0142aw, Poland). A selected fragment appeared with the current title \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d on Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Lead image: Open Space cover
Jerome Rothenberg, photo by Dirk Skiba
Dorota Czerner, photo courtsey of Dorota Czerner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1.Dorota Czerner:In 1970 Frank Stella was given a copy of Heaven\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":15788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-literature","category-polish-jewish"],"yoast_head":"\nJerome Rothenberg and Dorota Czerner: A Conversation \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2025\/02\/11\/jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"pl_PL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jerome Rothenberg and Dorota Czerner: A Conversation \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"1.Dorota Czerner:In 1970 Frank Stella was given a copy of Heaven\u2019s 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. 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None of these buildings survived the war. Nonetheless, Stella was so fascinated by the geometry and what he later referred to as \u2018interlocking-ness\u2019 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 \u2013 do you see a resemblance to Poland \/ 1931?\\nI 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.\\nJerome 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\u2019t base itself on formal principles or procedures and leaves room \u2013 very much so \u2013 for the dirty\/soiled and ugly, the full range of what I describe as \u201cancestral sources of my own in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.\u201d In this, if the imagination is involved in the construction of a fantasized Poland, it is reenforced by procedures of \u201cinvestigative poetry\u201d (American poet Ed Sanders\u2019 term)and appropriation\/collage \u2013 what Marianne Moore spoke of elsewhere as \u201cimaginary gardens with real toads in them.\u201d Once let loose, this opens as well to the comic and ludic \u2013 dark humor, as I feel it, and dark game playing \u2013 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.\\nStill, 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.\\n2.DC:Unlike Stella\u2019s cycle, your poems engage with what remains: the immaterial, the wisdom, the song. You once described Poland \/ 1931 as \u201can experimental attempt to explore, and recover, ancestral sources in the world of Jewish mystics, thieves, and madmen.\u201d \\nIn 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. \\nDid you feel a need to first affirm the continuity, to re-collect by drawing a live bridge between theold and the new?\\nJR:There\u2019s 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 \u2013 the phantasmic \u201cPoland\u201d of \u201c1931\u201d, 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, \u201cexuberant.\u201d 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.\\nAlso: the convergence of old and new has always been a concern for me.\\n3.DC:While working on Poland \/ 1931 I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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\u2019t threaten, on the contrary enhances the originality of your work as a poet.\\nWhat would be your advice to me?\\nJR: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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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.\\nIn 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\u2019s translating from a Yiddish original that doesn\u2019t otherwise exist, and see what you come up with. I will trust you almost completely there \u2013 as long that is as it brings you pleasure.\\nP.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.\\n4.DC:About the opening poem of Poland \/ 1931, \u201cThe Wedding\u201d. It\u2019s 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 \u201cpoland poland poland\u2026\u201d made me wonder if the task was not above my paygrade.\\nBut elsewhere you say:\u201clightning is like oil the motoronce it starts keepsrunning\u201d\\nThe poem works very much like this, once the reader\u2019s 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\u2026 In this case my work was equally informed by the text itself and by your reading (as available online in the archives of PennSound.) \\nSo first, can you say something about the importance this particular poem? Then, more specifically about the place that you\u2019ve always given to performance in your poetic practice.\\nJR:The poem and the \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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 \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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 \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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.\\nSomething, I hope, that would come into much else that I was writing then and after.\\n5.DC:One more observation about \u201cThe Wedding\u201d, 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 \u2018serious\u2019 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, whereoftentimes humor was the only tool available to calibrate the human disasters (plural) of the country.\\nYou 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?\\nJR:The question of course brings me back to things that I\u2019ve 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 \u201cmystics, thieves and madmen\u201d 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.\\nSo, 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 \u2013 not the only way but a way \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u201cYiddish Dada in the street\u201d as it comes to me in \u201cThe Holy Words of Tristan Tzara\u201d or the play between Jews and Indians in \u201cCokboy\u201d \u2013 absurdist and real.\\n6.DC:the lines from \u201cThe Fish\u201d:\\n\u201c& so we live without associationsin the past we livenourishing incredible polands\u201d\\n\u2026 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. \u2026 The sweeter the description, the larger the loss. Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz 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\u2019 generation?\\nJR:So much of this is in the past, so that it\u2019s hard to reconstruct it. That it\u2019s 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\u2019m far older today than my parents were when I knew them. So, it\u2019s 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\u2019s why, when I finally turned to \u201cholocaust\u201d after my first visit to Poland in the late 1980s, I used the Yiddish word \u201ckhurbn\u201d instead of Holocaust or Shoah. The short opening poem of that sequence is all about that:\\nin the dark word Khurbnall their lights went out\\nand again:\\nthat ancient & dark wordthose who spoke it in the old daysnow held their tongues\\nStill, there\u2019s a lot of irony to get past before you land on it \u2026 and a lot of fantasy as well. The tenderness here, if that\u2019s the right word, may have some of both.\\n7.DC:In April 1943 Milosz wrote a poem titled \u201cCampo dei Fiori\u201d. Easter Sunday, happy people in love, on a merry-go-round. In the background behind the wall, the Warsaw ghetto is on fire: \u201cAt times wind from the burning \/ Would drift dark kites along.\u201d 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.\\nIn \u201cMurder Inc. Sutra\u201d in the scene of the funeral of a young thug you describe \u201ca choir like the Warsaw Synagogue \/ \u201cled by Sirota\u2026\u201d\\nSo, Gershon Sirota, who died about that time in 1943, could\u2019ve been a dark kite from Mi\u0142osz\u2019s lines. \\nCan 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 \u201cJew\u201d, \u201cJewish\u201d over and over, inside a poem.\\nJR:If so, my intention was first to fill the blanks left in Yiddish\/Poylish poetry, with the further hope that what you\u2019re 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 \u2013 \u201cnourishing incredible Polands,\u201d as in the other poem of mine you mentioned earlier. And along with that, the repetition of the words \u201cJew\u201d and \u201cJewish\u201d reverberates for me as well \u2013 as it did for our friend Edmond Jab\u00e8s, 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: \u201cThe Jew in me is the ghost in me, hiding under the stairways.\u201d Something of that also in Poland\/1931: the poem called \u201cA Connoisseur of Jews,\u201d again with the irony forward. And that reflects of course the excitement and thrill of discovery I felt throughout the writing.\\nSo: Poland\/1931, Poyln\/1931, Polska\/1931 \u2013 all for me are necessary, and translation is the key to their interweaving and unlocking. And that I cry out the word \u201cPoland\u201d ten times in the opening poem might also be noted.\\n8.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\u2019 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 \u201cThe Murder Incorporated\u201d carry the pictures of rabbis with big cocks\u2026 The language too combines the biblical with the vulgar, sometimes in the same poem.\\nCan we risk musing that a culture must be intensely alive to play with its own demons?\\nJR:If the instances you mention are those of \u201cdemons,\u201d 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 \u201cThe Student\u2019s Testimony,\u201d as an obvious instance, I let it rip or call it forth as best I can:\\nhe was the last demon of ostrovcome back to visit & playon my mind blowing deliciousbubbles of red soap intothe corners of the rooma furry singing littledemon with bulging eyes bigbulging balls & allanimal twisted into shapeslike rubber\\nAnd again:\\n\u201cI love my demon\u201d I would sing& we would share the backroom ofthe synagogue guzzlingthe gentiles\u2019 beer &snapping paperclipsagainst the rabbi\u2019s silks relivingthe poland of old friendships pork & fishboiling & stinking in a singlepot we would dip our handsinto & make our belliesshine\\nIf that was transgressive, vulgar and blasphemous by turns \u2013 or all together \u2013 that was of course how I wanted it.\\n9.DC:A query from my colleague, Jacek Dziubi\u0144ski, who is translating \u201cCokboy\u201d. 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.)\\nJR: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 \u2013 a magical year for poets like me \u2013 I was setting it down in one of a number of short manifestos I had written during the 1950s and 60s:\\nA Third Manifesto 1968\\nI think of myself as making poems that other poets haven\u2019t provided for me & for the existenceof which I feel a deep need.\\nI look for new forms & possibilities, but also for ways of presenting in my own language theoldest possibilities of poetry going back to the primitive & archaic cultures that have beenopening up to us over the last hundred years.\\nI have most recently been translating American Indian poetry (including the \u201cmeaningless\u201dsyllables, word distortions & music) & have been exploring ancestral sources of my own in theworld of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.\\nI believe that everything is possible in poetry & that our earlier \u201cwestern\u201d attempts at definitionrepresent a failure of perception we no longer have to endure.\\nFor 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 \u2013 an absurd ambition to bring all things together while honoring the differences. And it\u2019s my sense of the need to do this \u2013 and the dangers of not doing it \u2013 that drives the absurdist and angry narrative of \u201cCokboy,\u201d in which I cast myself as \u201ca jew among the Indians\u201d and bring together or tear asunder whatever is in my reach.\\nAnd certainly \u2013 but in A Big Jewish Book especially \u2013 I give the mystic and beautiful as much space as the ugly and demonic.\\n10.DC:With Khurbn you decided to speak directly about what is most often referred to as the Holocaust. Along with Piotr Rypson\u2019s translation of the poem, we include here what you wrote about your 1987 trip to Poland, the experience of seeing what\u2019s left of ulica Miodowa and hearing the voices of the dead, the dybbuks.\\nI want to connect it with the coda of the \u201cStudent\u2019s Testimony\u201d (from \u201cPoland \/1931\u201d) the lines that seem to allude to the tragic fate of your family and specifically your uncle who took his own life:\\nhis own shadowwas more than he could bear the warcame & he ran from itback in the cellar drinkingtoo much he grew thinthe great encounter ended itin flames the candelabrum rose did it becomea heartthat broke into sparks & lettersa shower of ruined cities from whichmy demonvanished fled from the light when I was born\\nThis moment, December 12, 1931, happened 90 years ago.\\nDare 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 \u201cto write his mother\u2019s name in light\u201d has some power to send the demons away?\\nJR: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\u2019t 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, \u201care never right.\u201d 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.\\nInternationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer Jerome Rothenberg (born in 1931 in New York \u2013 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.\\nA 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.\\nHis 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.\\nJerome Rothenberg was Professor Emeritus of University of California at San Diego.\\nDorota Czerner (born 1966 in Wroc\u0142aw, Poland) completed her studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. An essayist, poet, translator. Since 2003, she has been a co-editor of \u201cThe Open Space magazine\u201d, published in Red Hook, NY.\\nDorota 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) \u2014 the three-part collective composition inspired by the natural phenomenon of synchronous fireflies with her libretto \u2014 had two realizations in The National Opera Center, NYC. Czerner\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\\nHer selected works can be read in InFiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016), \u201cPerspectives of New Music\u201d, \u201cCurrent Musicology\u201d, the literary magazines: \u201cHouse Organ\u201d, \u201cMetambesen\u201d, \u201cThe Doris\u201d, \u201cBlazing Stadium\u201d, \u201cSALT\u201d, and the chapbooks: Desert Poems and Before the Body of the Mind\/The Swan 19 (the Kelly Writers House, 2022).\\nDorota Czerner\u2019s polish translation of Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s Poland\/1931 was published by \u201cChidusz\u201d (Wroc\u0142aw, Poland, 2022.) Dorota Czerner\u2019s current translation-in-progress includes the work of a Polish Roma poet, Bronis\u0142awa Wajs \u201cPapusza\u201d.\\nAcknowledgmentsThis conversation was conducted in December 2021\/January 2022 to accompany the publication of Dorota Czerner\u2019s translations into Polish of Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s poems from Poland\/1931, to be published in the Jewish magazine \u201cChidusz\u201d (2\/2022, Wroc\u0142aw, Poland). A selected fragment appeared with the current title \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d on Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s 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.\\nLead image: Open Space coverJerome Rothenberg, photo by Dirk Skiba Dorota Czerner, photo courtsey of Dorota Czerner\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"pl-PL\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2025\/02\/11\/jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2025\/02\/OS-mag-24-cover-1.jpeg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2025\/02\/OS-mag-24-cover-1.jpeg\",\"width\":1500,\"height\":1941},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2025\/02\/11\/jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Jerome Rothenberg and Dorota Czerner: A Conversation \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/\",\"name\":\"Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku\",\"description\":\"Instytuty Polskie\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"pl-PL\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/c732b2695ee92026d080eec35471c7f1\",\"name\":\"stypulkowskaa\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"pl-PL\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a29bb1802c91e057084d5d112dd59dc4?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a29bb1802c91e057084d5d112dd59dc4?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"stypulkowskaa\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/author\/stypulkowskaa-2\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Jerome Rothenberg and Dorota Czerner: A Conversation \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2025\/02\/11\/jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation\/","og_locale":"pl_PL","og_type":"article","og_title":"Jerome Rothenberg and Dorota Czerner: A Conversation \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","og_description":"1.Dorota Czerner:In 1970 Frank Stella was given a copy of Heaven\u2019s 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. 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None of these buildings survived the war. Nonetheless, Stella was so fascinated by the geometry and what he later referred to as \u2018interlocking-ness\u2019 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 \u2013 do you see a resemblance to Poland \/ 1931?\nI 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.\nJerome 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\u2019t base itself on formal principles or procedures and leaves room \u2013 very much so \u2013 for the dirty\/soiled and ugly, the full range of what I describe as \u201cancestral sources of my own in a world of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.\u201d In this, if the imagination is involved in the construction of a fantasized Poland, it is reenforced by procedures of \u201cinvestigative poetry\u201d (American poet Ed Sanders\u2019 term)and appropriation\/collage \u2013 what Marianne Moore spoke of elsewhere as \u201cimaginary gardens with real toads in them.\u201d Once let loose, this opens as well to the comic and ludic \u2013 dark humor, as I feel it, and dark game playing \u2013 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.\nStill, 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.\n2.DC:Unlike Stella\u2019s cycle, your poems engage with what remains: the immaterial, the wisdom, the song. You once described Poland \/ 1931 as \u201can experimental attempt to explore, and recover, ancestral sources in the world of Jewish mystics, thieves, and madmen.\u201d \nIn 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. \nDid you feel a need to first affirm the continuity, to re-collect by drawing a live bridge between theold and the new?\nJR:There\u2019s 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 \u2013 the phantasmic \u201cPoland\u201d of \u201c1931\u201d, 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, \u201cexuberant.\u201d 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.\nAlso: the convergence of old and new has always been a concern for me.\n3.DC:While working on Poland \/ 1931 I\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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\u2019t threaten, on the contrary enhances the originality of your work as a poet.\nWhat would be your advice to me?\nJR: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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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.\nIn 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\u2019s translating from a Yiddish original that doesn\u2019t otherwise exist, and see what you come up with. I will trust you almost completely there \u2013 as long that is as it brings you pleasure.\nP.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.\n4.DC:About the opening poem of Poland \/ 1931, \u201cThe Wedding\u201d. It\u2019s 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 \u201cpoland poland poland\u2026\u201d made me wonder if the task was not above my paygrade.\nBut elsewhere you say:\u201clightning is like oil the motoronce it starts keepsrunning\u201d\nThe poem works very much like this, once the reader\u2019s 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\u2026 In this case my work was equally informed by the text itself and by your reading (as available online in the archives of PennSound.) \nSo first, can you say something about the importance this particular poem? Then, more specifically about the place that you\u2019ve always given to performance in your poetic practice.\nJR:The poem and the \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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 \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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 \u201cblack wedding\u201d 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.\nSomething, I hope, that would come into much else that I was writing then and after.\n5.DC:One more observation about \u201cThe Wedding\u201d, 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 \u2018serious\u2019 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, whereoftentimes humor was the only tool available to calibrate the human disasters (plural) of the country.\nYou 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?\nJR:The question of course brings me back to things that I\u2019ve 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 \u201cmystics, thieves and madmen\u201d 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.\nSo, 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 \u2013 not the only way but a way \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u201cYiddish Dada in the street\u201d as it comes to me in \u201cThe Holy Words of Tristan Tzara\u201d or the play between Jews and Indians in \u201cCokboy\u201d \u2013 absurdist and real.\n6.DC:the lines from \u201cThe Fish\u201d:\n\u201c& so we live without associationsin the past we livenourishing incredible polands\u201d\n\u2026 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. \u2026 The sweeter the description, the larger the loss. Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz 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\u2019 generation?\nJR:So much of this is in the past, so that it\u2019s hard to reconstruct it. That it\u2019s 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\u2019m far older today than my parents were when I knew them. So, it\u2019s 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\u2019s why, when I finally turned to \u201cholocaust\u201d after my first visit to Poland in the late 1980s, I used the Yiddish word \u201ckhurbn\u201d instead of Holocaust or Shoah. The short opening poem of that sequence is all about that:\nin the dark word Khurbnall their lights went out\nand again:\nthat ancient & dark wordthose who spoke it in the old daysnow held their tongues\nStill, there\u2019s a lot of irony to get past before you land on it \u2026 and a lot of fantasy as well. The tenderness here, if that\u2019s the right word, may have some of both.\n7.DC:In April 1943 Milosz wrote a poem titled \u201cCampo dei Fiori\u201d. Easter Sunday, happy people in love, on a merry-go-round. In the background behind the wall, the Warsaw ghetto is on fire: \u201cAt times wind from the burning \/ Would drift dark kites along.\u201d 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.\nIn \u201cMurder Inc. Sutra\u201d in the scene of the funeral of a young thug you describe \u201ca choir like the Warsaw Synagogue \/ \u201cled by Sirota\u2026\u201d\nSo, Gershon Sirota, who died about that time in 1943, could\u2019ve been a dark kite from Mi\u0142osz\u2019s lines. \nCan 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 \u201cJew\u201d, \u201cJewish\u201d over and over, inside a poem.\nJR:If so, my intention was first to fill the blanks left in Yiddish\/Poylish poetry, with the further hope that what you\u2019re 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 \u2013 \u201cnourishing incredible Polands,\u201d as in the other poem of mine you mentioned earlier. And along with that, the repetition of the words \u201cJew\u201d and \u201cJewish\u201d reverberates for me as well \u2013 as it did for our friend Edmond Jab\u00e8s, 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: \u201cThe Jew in me is the ghost in me, hiding under the stairways.\u201d Something of that also in Poland\/1931: the poem called \u201cA Connoisseur of Jews,\u201d again with the irony forward. And that reflects of course the excitement and thrill of discovery I felt throughout the writing.\nSo: Poland\/1931, Poyln\/1931, Polska\/1931 \u2013 all for me are necessary, and translation is the key to their interweaving and unlocking. And that I cry out the word \u201cPoland\u201d ten times in the opening poem might also be noted.\n8.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\u2019 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 \u201cThe Murder Incorporated\u201d carry the pictures of rabbis with big cocks\u2026 The language too combines the biblical with the vulgar, sometimes in the same poem.\nCan we risk musing that a culture must be intensely alive to play with its own demons?\nJR:If the instances you mention are those of \u201cdemons,\u201d 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 \u201cThe Student\u2019s Testimony,\u201d as an obvious instance, I let it rip or call it forth as best I can:\nhe was the last demon of ostrovcome back to visit & playon my mind blowing deliciousbubbles of red soap intothe corners of the rooma furry singing littledemon with bulging eyes bigbulging balls & allanimal twisted into shapeslike rubber\nAnd again:\n\u201cI love my demon\u201d I would sing& we would share the backroom ofthe synagogue guzzlingthe gentiles\u2019 beer &snapping paperclipsagainst the rabbi\u2019s silks relivingthe poland of old friendships pork & fishboiling & stinking in a singlepot we would dip our handsinto & make our belliesshine\nIf that was transgressive, vulgar and blasphemous by turns \u2013 or all together \u2013 that was of course how I wanted it.\n9.DC:A query from my colleague, Jacek Dziubi\u0144ski, who is translating \u201cCokboy\u201d. 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.)\nJR: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 \u2013 a magical year for poets like me \u2013 I was setting it down in one of a number of short manifestos I had written during the 1950s and 60s:\nA Third Manifesto 1968\nI think of myself as making poems that other poets haven\u2019t provided for me & for the existenceof which I feel a deep need.\nI look for new forms & possibilities, but also for ways of presenting in my own language theoldest possibilities of poetry going back to the primitive & archaic cultures that have beenopening up to us over the last hundred years.\nI have most recently been translating American Indian poetry (including the \u201cmeaningless\u201dsyllables, word distortions & music) & have been exploring ancestral sources of my own in theworld of Jewish mystics, thieves & madmen.\nI believe that everything is possible in poetry & that our earlier \u201cwestern\u201d attempts at definitionrepresent a failure of perception we no longer have to endure.\nFor 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 \u2013 an absurd ambition to bring all things together while honoring the differences. And it\u2019s my sense of the need to do this \u2013 and the dangers of not doing it \u2013 that drives the absurdist and angry narrative of \u201cCokboy,\u201d in which I cast myself as \u201ca jew among the Indians\u201d and bring together or tear asunder whatever is in my reach.\nAnd certainly \u2013 but in A Big Jewish Book especially \u2013 I give the mystic and beautiful as much space as the ugly and demonic.\n10.DC:With Khurbn you decided to speak directly about what is most often referred to as the Holocaust. Along with Piotr Rypson\u2019s translation of the poem, we include here what you wrote about your 1987 trip to Poland, the experience of seeing what\u2019s left of ulica Miodowa and hearing the voices of the dead, the dybbuks.\nI want to connect it with the coda of the \u201cStudent\u2019s Testimony\u201d (from \u201cPoland \/1931\u201d) the lines that seem to allude to the tragic fate of your family and specifically your uncle who took his own life:\nhis own shadowwas more than he could bear the warcame & he ran from itback in the cellar drinkingtoo much he grew thinthe great encounter ended itin flames the candelabrum rose did it becomea heartthat broke into sparks & lettersa shower of ruined cities from whichmy demonvanished fled from the light when I was born\nThis moment, December 12, 1931, happened 90 years ago.\nDare 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 \u201cto write his mother\u2019s name in light\u201d has some power to send the demons away?\nJR: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\u2019t 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, \u201care never right.\u201d 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.\nInternationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer Jerome Rothenberg (born in 1931 in New York \u2013 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.\nA 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.\nHis 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.\nJerome Rothenberg was Professor Emeritus of University of California at San Diego.\nDorota Czerner (born 1966 in Wroc\u0142aw, Poland) completed her studies in philosophy at the Sorbonne. An essayist, poet, translator. Since 2003, she has been a co-editor of \u201cThe Open Space magazine\u201d, published in Red Hook, NY.\nDorota 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) \u2014 the three-part collective composition inspired by the natural phenomenon of synchronous fireflies with her libretto \u2014 had two realizations in The National Opera Center, NYC. Czerner\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\nHer selected works can be read in InFiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016), \u201cPerspectives of New Music\u201d, \u201cCurrent Musicology\u201d, the literary magazines: \u201cHouse Organ\u201d, \u201cMetambesen\u201d, \u201cThe Doris\u201d, \u201cBlazing Stadium\u201d, \u201cSALT\u201d, and the chapbooks: Desert Poems and Before the Body of the Mind\/The Swan 19 (the Kelly Writers House, 2022).\nDorota Czerner\u2019s polish translation of Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s Poland\/1931 was published by \u201cChidusz\u201d (Wroc\u0142aw, Poland, 2022.) Dorota Czerner\u2019s current translation-in-progress includes the work of a Polish Roma poet, Bronis\u0142awa Wajs \u201cPapusza\u201d.\nAcknowledgmentsThis conversation was conducted in December 2021\/January 2022 to accompany the publication of Dorota Czerner\u2019s translations into Polish of Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s poems from Poland\/1931, to be published in the Jewish magazine \u201cChidusz\u201d (2\/2022, Wroc\u0142aw, Poland). A selected fragment appeared with the current title \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d on Jerome Rothenberg\u2019s 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.\nLead image: Open Space coverJerome Rothenberg, photo by Dirk Skiba Dorota Czerner, photo courtsey of Dorota Czerner"},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"pl-PL","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2025\/02\/11\/jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2025\/02\/OS-mag-24-cover-1.jpeg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2025\/02\/OS-mag-24-cover-1.jpeg","width":1500,"height":1941},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2025\/02\/11\/jerome-rothenberg-and-dorota-czerner-a-conversation-on-poland-1931-the-pathways-of-translation\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Jerome Rothenberg and Dorota Czerner: A Conversation \u201cOn Poland\/1931 & the Pathways of Translation\u201d"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#website","url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/","name":"Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","description":"Instytuty Polskie","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"pl-PL"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/c732b2695ee92026d080eec35471c7f1","name":"stypulkowskaa","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"pl-PL","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a29bb1802c91e057084d5d112dd59dc4?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a29bb1802c91e057084d5d112dd59dc4?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"stypulkowskaa"},"url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/author\/stypulkowskaa-2\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15772"}],"version-history":[{"count":103,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16071,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15772\/revisions\/16071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}