Introduction:
On the day when death will knock at thy door what wilt thou offer to him?
Oh, I will set before my guest the full vessel of my life⸺ I will never let him go with empty hands.
All the sweet vintage of all my autumn days and summer nights, all the earnings and gleanings of my busy life will I place before him at the close of my days when death will knock at my door.[i]
Tuning with Rabindranath Tagore, Jerome Rothenberg has placed the vessel of his life before him at the close of his days. I would like to explore the vessel, full of essence of his autumn days and summer nights, and invaluable earnings and gleanings of his poetic journey, because Rothenberg was tuned with Lorca’s “Ghazal of Dark Death”⸺ “I want to sleep the sleep of apples/ far away from the uproar of cemeteries”[ii]. Since Jerome Rothenberg is an ultimate ‘hyphenated’ poet⸺ critic-anthropologist-editor-anthologist-performer-teacher-translator, as said by Charles Bernstein, his vessel is full of multiple types of work. As Rothenberg is an internationally known poet, there will be lot of people to give the full spectrum of his work. I would like to explore here for his translation part only, which has created the bridge between Rothenberg and me, and as a bilingual poet, translation matters to me.
Poetics of Writing Through:
Is it possible to reflect the reality? What is reality at all? Reality is the material world, created by human being, the world of artificial things, which can be circumstances, or social situations. On the other hand, the world of natural things, the part of our Mother Nature, is unreal. A human is not merely real, but much of him is unreal⸺ this unreal truth is the ultimate reality. We know that reality comes before mind and matter. Reality conceives mind and matter, and helps us to realize its existence. Yet reality is imperceivable within the boundaries of matters, within the reason of mind. Only its multidimensional counterfactual reflections can be felt deep in the heart of our consciousness. Why is the Newton’s apple on the other side of V/s fence? It not only gives the signal of scientific consciousness but also takes the credit to hit Rothenberg’s nose via Lorca’s Suites to conceive his poetics of Writing Through[iii].
It was Covidic time, 2020, I was working on Jerome Rothenberg’s works, Suites[iv] and The Lorca Variations[v], and I was specially attracted by his process of making poetry⸺ variations from translation. He used elements of Lorca’s vocabulary from Suites, translated from Spanish to English by himself, to create a new series of his own poems as Lorca Variations. This process of writing poetry is very much coherent with my own experimental process of writing a critique on other poet’s work, which I do in the form of a series of poems. This unconventional process of literary criticism has made it possible to create my three books of poetry in Bengali. After all, a poem is to turn on its music needed to trigger a reader’s mind to resonate with its rhythm. A poem is to trigger readers’ fantasy and imaginations, and to intensify their thoughts and reflections so that they could get/write their own poems. Yes, the reflections, with which we have started our discourse here, and surprisingly the triggering happens by the Newton’s apple, i.e. gravitation. But this time it is the pull of gravity of the poet’s thought, which enables us to find the infinite possibilities of our harmonious relationships with the multidimensional reality, for geting the affirmation with our desires and dreams.
Federico Garcia Lorca is the first poet that Rothenberg translated in his teenage, which is a ballad or romance called “Preciosa y el Aire”. Although it was never published, it initiated his association with Lorca. He started his translation work of Lorca’s Suites, one of the most charming and melodious of all of Lorca’s poem series, and then he conceived the idea of Lorca Variations. The variations are ‘a way of coming full circle into a discovery that began with Lorca & for which he has stood with certain others as a guide & constant fellow-traveler’, as Rothenberg describes at the back cover of the book.
Let us explore Lorca’s Suites, which plays the orchestra to create an aesthetic resonance between Lorca and Rothenberg, where Rothenberg’s emotional experience is not causal like affection, but a kind of union, not in the sense of uniformity but of inner harmony⸺ a harmonious relationship where he stands high with his unique identity, which is the true freedom of harmony.
The first poem of “A Newton Suite” is “Newton’s Nose” where “Onto the nose of Newton/ a large apple falls./ A meteor of truths”. Why apple⸺ that is the question. What is there in this symbol that tangles the angle of Newton’s Anglo-Saxon nose? The apple is nothing but a symbol to name the gravitation, care of Newton, the meteor of truth from the tree of science, the pulling force of gravity by which everything attracts towards each other in our world and universe, even the attraction between Lorca and Rothenberg.
However, apple is also to name Adam, who “ate an apple from the virgin Eve”, although Rothenberg’s variation says, “There isn’t a clue that the fruit into which Adam bit was an apple & not his lady’s breast”. The cluelessness of apple is because “Adam, Paris, Newton/ carry it inside their souls/ & fondle it without a clue/ to what it is”. This, indeed, resonates with the fact that the truth of apple or gravitation from the tree of knowledge remains a mystery after so many years of scientific studies.
Although the fall of Adam from Eden garden to our world is an imaginative myth, a special theory of causality comes into action here. The cause is the pull of gravity of Lorca’s thought about the heaven-made vice of the virtue-giver God. The effect is the descent of our forefather, not the mythical forefather from heaven, but the innovative forefather of “anoriginal” (in Andrew Benjamin’s sense to refuse the originality of translation) poetics of translation in our poetic world, whom we know as Jerome Rothenberg. With this single symbol, the symbolist Lorca has presented the conflict between his own scientific consciousness and religious belief and of course that of Newton as well. And the very conflict has tugged at Rothenberg’s heartstring to sow the seed of Lorca Variations.
Lorca writes his Moments of Song, “The reflected is the real….The real is the reflected.”[vi] This is the reflection from the mirror, placed “In the Woods” to mislead men. The world of gnomes lies on the other side of science and astride their secrets. They try to distract the son of science from revealing the mystery with the help of his mirror. But the very mirror becomes the guiding moon that “showed Newton where the truth lies”, although Newton’s Nose “is so Saxon to bind gnomes with string, to watch your echoes drifting off in secret, your lost companions jangling irons in the wind”,⸺ another reflection from Rothenberg’s lens of language.
Human relationships weave the fabric of our own existence where the knowledge of relationships is our experience, and we express the thought of relationships through language. A poet’s third eye is always in the quest for the new relationships, because interwoven relationships sow the seed of changes, the process of becoming something, the reason for our existence. As a reader, Rothenberg responds outside the assumed frames of the predefined thoughts, and he discovers new meanings with the power of his imagination. His subjective experience through reading is charged with the energy of his mind, the gravitational force of his thought. When a word is uttered, we see its mental image and tend to engage ourselves to describe it. But the use of words in a poem is not to describe but to connect to an event, not to mean but to hint at its secrets. This interconnection emerges from the harmonious relationship with every entity in our world, living or inanimate, and this is the very root of our survival. This is the secret, this is the mystery that science may not be able to understand fully, rather science has to stand under our Mother Nature In the Woods to find where the truth lies.
The mirror of genomes is actually placed in our inner in that reflects our reality. Science sheds the necessary light for reflection and all our arts and poems explore the images, reflected by the mirror. It’s a ‘mental image’ as per Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations[vii] on language, which resonates with Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists and cosmologists in history⸺ ‘Our perception… is not direct, but rather is shaped by a kind of lens, the interpretive structure of our human brains.’[viii] The vision of the eyes becomes an abstract thought by filtering through a poet’s imaginations, dreams, and perspective values of life. To express this thought, the poet creates the sensations of words. When we explore our consciousness through these sensations, a series of chronological images strikes our mind like the logics of music, and play the melody of a poem. The mental image becomes a musical rhythm with the touch of the magical power of the poet’s imaginations.
Both Lorca and Rothenberg use their scientific consciousness to explore the apple of Newton, the founder of modern science. However, both the poets under discussion have passed three hundred years since Newton, to sing their song of science beyond classical raga. Space and time are neither separate nor absolute Newtonian entities now, rather both of them linked together to get their life in the space-time of Albert Einstein. So naturally, the poet’s experience as an observer of the events in our world or occurrences of words in their poems has to account for space-time.
The fusion of art and science, the harmony of our belief and truth— the conflict of these thoughts creates the resonance between Lorca and Rothenberg. It’s not to echo in linear resonance, but to find the entanglement that marry the scientific materiality of apple with the aesthetic sensations of our dreams and beliefs with moon, gnomes, and our own world. The materiality of apple lies in the gravitational force for determining the relationship of motion between the innumerable galaxies, stars, and planets of the universe where we are also a part of it. In addition, so many tides of thoughts arrive in a poet’s mind due to interaction between moon and mind, because the attractive force of gravity is in action between each one of us in this vast universe.
A poet’s journey is to find a new relationship where an individual, a finite being, realizes his freedom of harmony with infinite universe. It is because, every individual’s unfamiliar imaginations, distinct feelings, and reasoning, in finite aspect, with our multidimensional reality and its inevitable sequence of happenings, makes the sum total of the universe in infinite aspect[ix], as Tagore reveals. The poets In the Wood pull at the very center of our concept of realism with the gravity of their thoughts, to decenter it with their new inventions, and they try to go beyond the boundaries with infinite possibilities. When science is at war with itself, the poets create a poetic realism where the objective realism of classical physics seems to merge with the subjective realism of quantum physics.
It reminds me of the poem “Apple Ghumiye Achhe”[x] (The Sleeping Apple) by Swadesh Sen (1935-2014), an Academy awarded Bengali Poet of Kaurab group. Swadesh didn’t play any romance with the apple, rather he invokes us to wake the sleeping apple with our teeth, to look into the object, not in its symbol but in its inner essence, where folic acid plays its scientific action to rebuild the health of the red blood cells of the conventional Bengali poetic world.
The journey of science from Newton to Einstein, from Lorca to Rothenberg, is to probe into the truth, to unveil the mysteries of the whole universe in one hand, and on the other hand, to reveal the secret of Maya. This is the illusion that plays in our mind between our concept of reality and the manifestation of phenomenal reality. Lorca’s probing into realism drew his attention towards Einstein’s theory of relativity, signaled him to venture into lyrics of reality, (in Peter Gizzi’s sense) to ensure the reality of the lyrics as a means to uncover mystery, presence, and intimacy. It is to look into the face of reality with its reflection on the mirror of science. This, indeed, resonates with his lecture of 1929, “the struggle between scientific reality and imaginative myth, in which⸺ thank God⸺ science wins. For science is a thousand times more lyrical than any theogony”[xi].
But wait a sec, the very God has placed the mirror between his created world and us for the reflection of reality. Although science sheds the light for reflection, but reality never follows the laws of reflection. The angles of incidence never become equal to the angles of reflection in our life, because all laws are governed by God, an intelligent Being (as per Newton’s Principia), who always makes impulsive decisions without feeling guilty for the harm he causes. And Lorca’s poem starts right on the top of this inequality.
Lorca met Albert Einstein in 1916 during his stay at the Residencia de Estudiantes (Student Residence) in Madrid. This cultural institution of Spain formed the intellectual connections between many brilliant young thinkers, writers, and artists of the early 20th century. Einstein used to visit very often as a distinguished guest and speaker in this institution. It was here that Lorca, along with his distinguished friend painter Salvador Dali and filmmaker Louis Buñuel, came into contact with Einstein’s newly discovered general theory of relativity. Newton’s law of gravitation is capable of conceptualizing reality in three-dimensional space but is unable to integrate the concept of time, because in Newton’s three dimensional Euclidean space both time and space are two separate absolute entities, fixed and never changing, and also independent of observer. However, being influenced by Einstein’s space-time theory of relativity Lorca pushed the absolute to uncertainty to tune in with our ever-changing, and observer-dependent reality. So the apple that falls on Newton’s Saxon nose, and the mirror that mislead men In the Wood, both have to take a turn for transformation from its causal determinism to move towards indeterminacy, to reflect Lorca’s poetics of symbolism on the mirror of his scientific consciousness. Then from Lorca to Rothenberg another transformation, not transformation but variations, not variations but “othering”, Rothenberg’s poetics called Writing Through.
A great synthesis occurs between Lorca’s scientific consciousness and aesthetic sensation of his poetic theory of imagination, as he says in his lecture “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion”:
For me, imagination is synonymous with discovery. To imagine, to discover, to carry our bit of light to the living penumbra where all the infinite possibilities, forms, and numbers exist…. when the limits of his imagination become unbearable and he wants to free himself from his enemy – the world – he passes from desire to love. He goes from imagination, which is a fact of the soul, to inspiration, which is a state of the soul. He goes from analysis to faith, and the poet, previously an explorer, is now a humble man who bears on his shoulders the irresistible beauty of all things.
The truth of the actual reality and the consciousness of its irresistible beauty have created the quantum coherence between the voices, processes, and thoughts of the thinkers, from Newton to Einstein, from Einstein to Lorca, and from Lorca to Rothenberg. The physical experiences transform into imaginary experiences for creating virtual realization and virtual imagination by our mind, where possibilities come into action with particular, incomparable, unique imagination of a poet. Rothenberg’s journey starts from this point ⸺The Lorca Variations⸺ other reading or other interpretation, a step beyond translation but with an idea of translation, “othering”, in Rothenberg’s term.
Anything that a person desires to have outside of his body to nourish his soul is called ‘other’. The observer wants to go beyond the differences between himself and the ‘other’. In poetry, the perception of this difference gives birth to new meanings and new values. The experience of this external difference through “othering”, through different forms of poetry, engenders the perception of ‘internal difference’[xii] in Dickinson’s sense. And with the ‘Slant of light’ of this perception the poet records the sound track of reality of his present moment, the moment where he dwells with his own traditions, cultures, politics, languages, love, and losses, and creates an endless infinite rhythm to trigger our mind for resonating with the tune of his poems. This resonance is the beauty that renews our soul. The coherence of this thought about poetry between Lorca and Rothenberg makes possible “Newton’s Nose” to fuse “In the Wood” to show Newton where the truth lies, why the apple tree loomed over Newton, and eventually takes altogether a new form of Rothenberg’s poem “Newton”:
The men had green feet that vaulted them into the open where they could flaunt their secrets. Lace brushed lightly against their nostrils as the apple tree loomed over Newton with its fruits. It is so Saxon to bind gnomes with string, to watch your echoes drifting off in secret, your lost companions jangling irons in the wind. Not every boy has such sad eyebrows, nor would every corner spare an inch for death. In the woods the moon showed Newton where the truth lies. Following his nose he slammed into a meteor named Newton. He mistook it for a science that was white — like beech trees or like beards — but once he caught it in his mirror, saw it turn blue again. At length it looked like every other star or lake. [xiii]
It’s a unique process of writing a homage to Lorca with his new and unprecedented technique of translation as composition that fused onto the same plane of composition as translation. In Rothenberg’s own words:
Composition and translation form a continuum in my work⸺ that when I translate I often feel that I am simultaneously composing, and when I compose⸺ certain works more than others⸺ I realize that I am drawing from other voices or the work of others equally important, who are my predecessors or contemporaries[xiv].
So to form a continuum of both translation and composition in his poem Rothenberg does his experiment on the elements of Lorca’s vocabulary. He rearranges the nouns and adjectives of his translated poems Suites in a variety of ways, to compose his own poems of Lorca Variations, where the meaning of words plays an Alice-in-Wonderland venture, because all words are multi-layered, dynamic, and full of possibilities of its innumerable meanings. His “methods used resemble chance operations but with a margin of flexibility, with total freedom in the case of verbs and adverbs, with occasional addresses to Lorca himself imbedded in them”, as Rothenberg writes in the preface of The Lorca Variations.
It’s a kind of transcreations, in Brazilian Haroldo de Campos’ sense. Etymology of translation (Latin translatio) gives a sense of “carrying across”, but this transcreation is much more than carrying across of the original meaning of a poem. The essence of Lorca’s original poem is reflected in Rothenberg’s mind, and is assimilated through his own experience and perception of the multidimensional reality of life in his own space-time. Since perception of life is very much in the mind of the beholder, there will be different possibilities of expressions as per different individual’s perceptions. Then, by the process of reconstruction, Rothenberg creates variations to get altogether a fresh new poem. It is not a complete deviation from the original feelings of Lorca’s poem, but a turning, an “othering”, that resonates with the essence of the Lorca’s poem but with an extension with the help of his expansive consciousness, where imagination becomes the main aesthetic tool. As a result, Lorca variations becomes the poems of his own that “both are & aren’t mine, both are & aren’t Lorca”, as Rothenberg describes it. On one hand, it pushes the poet with the decentering centrifugal force toward the boundless diversity to call upon the birds of possibilities. On the other hand, it brings perfect harmony of the secrets and mysteries of his own reflected realities with our interconnected relationships. It’s an extraordinary tuning between outward diversity and inward harmony by his unique science of variations, the poetics of Writing Through.
Poetics of Divagations:
European Space Agency’s ExoMars 2016 mission was to search for signs of past and present life on Mars. And Rothenberg’s A Field On Mars: Divagations & Autovariations[xv], published in the same year, 2016, goes further to discover a new resolution on the field on Mars. He moves Into a Deeper Space of the field on Mars to probe into the reality of life, and as “A Further Witness” he finds that “the lonely dead/ stare out at us/ they learn/ to play/ a game/ & teach us/ how to read/ the times/ before/& after”. The poet understands life backwards (in Kierkegaard’s sense) but to live forwards he senses the psychological arrow of time (in Hawking’s sense) which is the direction in which he remembers the past. Time flows like a stream, expanding infinitely. The poet’s remembrance doesn’t let him to stop, rather push him into continuous reality, where the future is coming towards us and moves the waves of present towards the past:
Where time* is endless all we know *rhyme
as time dissolves, the future & the past *as rhyme
become a timeless present. *rhymeless
[Poem: Divagation(20)]
“A FURTHER WITNESS”, which I translated in Bengali, is dedicated to Anselm Hollo, a Finnish poet and translator who was a friend of Rothenberg since 1961. Rothenberg started writing the poems of this chapter during Anselm’s last days on his deathbed in 2013. The poems not only resonate with the sorrows of our separations, but also inspire us to share the names of friends, to share our thoughts infinitly. Rothenberg writes his note for this concept of sharing⸺ we cannot deny the mystery of life and death hang over all, but what we can give each other in this little time of our life is the precious thing that remains with us.
A Field on Mars is a field of poetry, which shares our thoughts, because “all things possess intelligence & a share of thought”, as Rothenberg cited from Empedocles of Acragas in his epigraph of the chapter “A FURTHER WITNESS”. The poet gives a hint in the preface that this is a field, which was fertile, and considered sacred, in the past. However, it has suffered desecration/desiccation by the hostile wind of times and many other hands of the present age. Now the field is battered, looks like a lone field on Mars. However, a visionary poet like Rothenberg can’t stop there, rather declares the future⸺ “A Thought Once Thought Survives”. Though the poet feels pain by seeing “how silent are/ the young & hale/ the pale blind worshippers among the graves/ for whom/ the names & faces of our dead/ will make no sense”, he calls for us to sing the song of “The Names of Friends We Share”:
…the living/ & the dead/ together/ take my hand/ in yours/ & we will find/ a passage/ to a world/ the mind/ remembers/ & the heart/ can share/ the resolution/ that the dead man/ saves for us/ absent a face (p-215)
This is where Rothenberg’s poetics of sharing, because poetry is an “activity shared with all who are the users and makers of our common language”, as Rothenberg says in his lecture[xvi], to see translation as a collaborative activity⸺ collaboration of poets, collaboration of languages. But where this collaboration takes place?⸺ “Inside My Mind & Yours”⸺ by sucking and chewing the word, emerging on its own, poet gives life to the words so that their conscious existences show a sign of the blood in droplets on a glass, the very lens that shapes our perceptions inside my mind and yours. This is the place, A Field on Mars, a field for poets, where “a liquid air/ too hot/ for comfort still/ white fire on black fire/ black on white”. The experimental poetry is never be in a comfort zone, because their alternative points of view challenge the conventions, laid down by an authority, and professes their own mantra that becomes anew with ever-emerging aesthetics.
A Field on Mars carries a subtitle Divagations & Autovariations, which is not only subtitle but also the title of Rothenberg’s process of making poetry. He defines his divagations as an activity of “a digression, a turning aside of your course or attention or concern” and of going beyond reasoning to put aside subject matter. It is not only the title of his process but also the philosophy of his poetic journey that leads to Ethnopoetics, coined by him in 1968. In general, Ethnopoetics is to develop oral poetries of tribal and ancient cultures, but Rothenberg’s Ethnopoetics discovers a new means of translating oral poetry. He explores the literature and songs of tribes around the world (mainly American Indian tribes), and collects various poetries and songs, which forms the very root of their cultures and traditions, but made obsolete and abandoned by the dominant politics of language. Rothenberg not only collects them, but also translates them, edits them, where his principle of Divagations & Autovariations comes into action. It is not a complete deviation from the existing tradition but a turning, keeping coherence with the inherent sound of the words, essence of the languages, inner life of the traditions and cultures, and works against homogenization by the authority.
An innovative poet like Rothenberg who dreams of the freedom from the known to open up a new trail in an unknown terrain, can’t obey any institutional or religious authority that wants to control the human life with its fashion of virtue, where “Virtue’s a kind of despair, masquerading as care,”[xvii] as Bernstein says. Rothenberg believes in his own religion, bound neither by doctrine, nor by dogma. He declares himself as “anti-religion”, when religion is only a fixed & inflexible set of beliefs and rituals without innovations. However, when there is a glorious clash of symbols in the language of religion, Rothenberg is a religious collagist, more specifically, he is anti-religious collagist as a poet, where both are seem to be same as a state-of-mind.[xviii]
This kind of religious belief takes the challenge of transformation with the poet’s magical power of imagination, to open up different possibilities of experimentation on the transformable values of our cultural references, and social context. As a result, Rothenberg’s poetics of translation with its ethically charged imagination transforms his collected and edited poems to a new form, a new style of poetry, which acknowledge their own heritage, and at the same time, making them poems of present moments, where we dwell with our multidimentional reality. Rothenberg calls it ‘total translation’ that goes beyond the semantic level to try to find equivalents for the non-lexical vocables in the songs of the tribes. It’s not only the translation of words but the presentation of the melody, carried by the words and their sounds, that is, a presentation of a “full verbo-vocal-visual spectrum”. Consequently, we get Rothenberg’s poetry that carries all the essence of the past, but at the same time, a new note of our present, sighs of our lone hostile world. The bare beauty of the words and their sounds that invokes the soul of silence, embodied in human language, opens up a discourse and counter-discourse in the mind of the poet. Gradually, the poet arrives at an internalized language, from which a “self voice” emerges⸺ “I want to speak in my own voice but others intervene & speak through me”.
The great sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins begins with a line⸺ “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”, but Rothenberg responds to the sonnet with a sense of negation, because after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Hopkins’s line has appeared to Rothenberg with a distortion as, “The world is charged with the terror of God.” The variation of ‘grandeur’ to ‘terror’ comes not only to respond to the tyrannical form of religion, but also comes from his intuitive mind that does the investigation of the word ‘grandeur’ through hermeneutic numerology, a traditional Jewish kabbala form of connecting words to find the meaning of the scriptures. He found an interesting fact that, “the letters in the Hebrew god-name aleph-lamed-vav-hey (eloha) add up numerically (= 42) to the Hebrew word bet-hey-lamed-hey (behalah), “terror, panic, alarm”. That they also add up to kvodi (“my glory”) only intensifies the problematic.”[xix] When he applies the numerological method to Hopkins’ immanence, ‘grandeur’ becomes ‘terror’ that forces him to conclude “On God” as “Where God breaks into what I write or think, it is the terror that admits him”. It’s the Rothenberg’s poetics of Divagations & Autovariations that presents the old image with its silent absence, with its celebration of words, with its melody of sound. It’s “to celebrate all that we have in common—in the way we cry,* (* we die) the sound & impulse shared by all—& noted as the source of song”[xx]. It is to create a poetic planet by sharing our thoughts infinitly with his poetics of divagations, with his poetics of Writing Through.
About Jerome Rothenberg:
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally known ‘hyphenated’ poet: critic-anthropologist-editor-anthologist-performer-teacher-translator. He was born in New York in 1931 and died on 21st April 2024 at the age of 92. He was a professor of visual arts and literature at the University of California, San Diego and received an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York. He received a number of awards, Guggenheim fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Awards, PEN Center USA West Awards, PEN American Center award, Alfonso el Sabio Translation Award, American Book Award. He is the author of enumerable books: Poland/1931, That Dada Strain, The Lorca Variaitons, Khurbn, Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, Revolution of the Word, and Poems for the Millennium, to name a few. Since the late 1950s, he has been involved with various aspects of poetry performance, including a theatrical version of his book, Poland/1931, by H
[i] Poem no. 90, Gitanjali (Song Offerings) by Rabindranath Tagore, London: Printed at the Chiswick Press for “The Indian Society”, 1912.
[ii] Poem “Ghazal of Dark Death” from Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition by Federico Garcia Lorca, edited by Christopher Maurer, Powell’s City of Books, 1988. The poem is from The Tamarit Divan, translated by Catherine Brown. In the same collection, Rothenberg translated Suites by Lorca.
[iii] Writing Through: Translations and Variations, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
[iv] Suites by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated from the Spanish by Jerome Rothenberg, Green Integer, 2000
[v] The Lorca Variations by Jerome Rothenberg, published by New Direction, 1993
[vi] Poem “Sesame” from Suites, translated by Jerome Rothenberg, Green Integer, 2000.
[vii] Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein, tr. by G. E. M. Anscombe, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, G. H. Von Wright, Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1958.
[viii] The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Mlodinow Leonard, 2010, London: Bantan Books, Transworld Publisher, p-62.
[ix] Essay “The Problem of Self”, included in his essay collection Sadhana (The Realization of Life), 1913.
[x] Swadesh Sen-er Swadesh (Homeland of Swadesh Sen), a collection of poems by Swadesh Sen, edited by Barin Ghosal, Kaurab publication, 2006.
[xi] “Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion” lecture by Lorca, translated by Christopher Maurer, Harper’s Magazine, Sept, 2004.
[xii] Poem of Emily Dickinson ‘There’s a certain Slant of light’, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
[xiii] Poem “Newton”, no-1, from The Lorca Variations by Jerome Rothenberg. 6 numbers of poems of the section A Newton Suite from his earlier translation work Suites, by Lorca, he makes 3 numbers of his own poem “Newton” with serial name 1, 2, 3. He was awarded PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Awards for this book.
[xiv] Conversation by Jerome Rothenberg with Charles Bernstein, Cecilia Vicuña, Régis Bonvicino and Marjorie Perloff, posted by Regis Bonvicino, the editor of Sibla Magazine, 10th Mar, 2022. Source: https://regisbonvicino.com.br/jerome-rothenberg/
[xv] A Field on Mars: Divagations & Autovariations by Jerome Rothenberg, published by Presses universitaires de Rouen, 2016
[xvi] “Translation as Composition / Composition as Translation” by Jerome Rothenberg, a lecture delivered on the occasion of receiving the Alfonso el Sabio Translation Award from San Diego State University on March 22, 2004.
[xvii] Poem “The Darkness He Called Night” Topsy-Turvy by Charles Bernstein, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021, p-127.
[xviii] The Riverside Interviews 4, with Gavin Selerie (ed.) and Eric Mottram (London:Binnacle, 1984), 74, as cited by Bernstein in Pitch of Poetry.
[xix] Essay “On God” by Jerome Rothenberg, prepared for a conference on “God and Grace” in London, sponsored by Cambridge and Notre Dame Universities. https://jacket2.org/commentary/jerome-rothenberg-four-books-progress-book-gods
[xx] Poem “Divagation (18)” from A Field On Mars by Jerome Rothenberg