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ABSTRACT
The oral traditions became appealing to a number of poets, translators, anthropologists,
and ethnographers in the twentieth century. Permeated by the modernist theory, poets like
D. H. Lawrence sought new poetic forms to capture ritual & myth, which are the
performative elements of native oral arts, in order to highlight the aesthetic values within
the texts of pre-Columbian traditional cultures. This undergraduate thesis intends to
investigate the contributions of ethnopoetics movement and Jerome Rothenberg’s theory
of translation, especially the anthologies of Aztec oral arts. It is a bibliographical research
that considers the narratives of Bernardino of Sahagún as a primary source to capture the
importance of poets – the technicians of the sacred, according to Rothenberg. It will also
debate the role of translation in this context, recognising it as a work of creation and
literary criticism. In this semiotic interpretation, the translation process reveals important
mechanisms in presenting a notion of culture to the reader. The result of this process was
named Total Translation by Jerome Rothenberg. Finally, this research will discuss the
notion of 'primitive' between languages and cultures.
INTRODUCTION
The Aztec year was comprised in a cycle of 18 months and 20 days – the last
five were considered as ominous. The tōnalpōhualli (‘calendar’ in Náhuatl, the Aztec
language) established all festivities interweaved in the life of the peoples living in
Mesoamerica in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries C.E. All ceremonies were
conducted by poet-singers, the xochitlahtoanime (‘those who speak with the flowers’)
and the musicians, or cuicapicque.
essential works of universal literature, which is naturally true to the body of Brazilian
literary tradition. However, the reader almost never had direct access to these sources, Commented [O1]: Be careful with these generalizing
statements. And it would be wise to quote 2 works that illustrate this
and even when it happened, the stories were treated as "literary texts" with a particular that you are saying.
poetic structure, which means: translations that privileged the content rather than the
stylistic form of Amerindian poetry.
In his two seminal texts entitled Totality and Infinity (1991) and Otherwise than
Being: or beyond essence (1981), the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described
how conventional philosophy operates from an ontological presupposition. In other
words, Levinas suggests that philosophical frameworks prioritise the self, adopting an
anthropocentric, humanistic, or self-orientated mind-set. This significant contribution is
noted in the reconfiguration of poetry towards an ethical, other-oriented approach, which
is the case of Ethnopoetics.
For Levinas, the conventional primacy of the ontological over the ethical, or the
self before the other, promotes violence and hostility. It is a bias that leads one to
totalitarian thinking and to predatory modes of representation that adopt the reductive
agency of conceptualization and categorization. Therefore, Aztec oral poetry has been
traditionally translated by means of Western standards, neglecting the richness of
Amerindian poetry as it is presented in ethnographies.
for poetry as a truth-bearing (deconstructing) language and a need to do away with racism
& a culture of ethnic rankings” (1994, p. 565).
In summary, there is the need for a better understanding of how translators have
approached Aztec oral poetry. More specifically, the following research questions need
to be addressed: why Aztec poetry lacks a foreign appealing in traditional anthologies?
And what are the characteristics of Ethnopoetics that offer a novel intake on Aztec poetry
translation?
Pope Paul III (born Alessandro Farnese) came to the papal throne in 1534, briefly
after the sack of Rome, and took upon himself the incumbency of fighting the Protestant
Reformation. In May 1537, Paul promulgated Sublimis Deus (the sublime god), a papal
encyclical on the enslavement and evangelisation of indigenous peoples of the Americas,
referred to as “Indians of the West and South” (PAUL, 1537). The bull follows and cites
the royal decree by Charles V of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor from 1530, which
prohibited the enslavement of indigenous (MAXWELL, 1975, p. 78). Paul declares the
13
indigenous peoples to be rational beings who have soul and therefore calls for their
evangelisation. Although seen as a blunt condemnation of slavery by the Catholic Church,
historian John Francis Maxwell, in Slavery and the catholic church: the history of catholic
teaching concerning the legitimacy of the institution of slavery (1975) firmly indicates by
means of a documental research that Pope Paul III sanctioned slavery in South America,
Africa and Asia, despite of Sublimis Deus (p. 138).
Answering said call for evangelisation, and inherently intended to expand the
catholic flock, the Franciscan Order sends friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) to
Mexico-Tenochtitlan1 in 1529, just eight years after the fall of their civilisation due to
Spanish forced occupation, led by Hernan Cortes, allied with Tlaxcalan tribes to conquer
the Aztecs/ Nahua.
Sahagún was born and raised in Spain, attending the University of Salamanca,
“principal center of culture in Western Europe” (LEON-PORTILLA, 2002, p. 37), where
he studied Latin, History, Philosophy, and Theology, and eventually joined the priesthood
in 1525. He learnt Nahuatl2 and dedicated his life to the study of Aztec/Nahua culture and
history, which granted him the title of first anthropologist3 (p. 24), someone who puts
himself in ‘someone else’s shoes’. Bernardino de Sahagún intended to assume the internal
logic of a foreign mentality – in part with great discomfort to his own – in order to
understand the world where other people lived. The friar developed strategies to gather
and validate knowledge from the elders of Tlatelolco, Texcoco, and Tenochtitlan, who
agreed in disclosing the teachings of their schools – Calmécac and Telpochalli. He
documented their beliefs, behaviour, and cultural cosmology, explaining the findings
within the Aztec logic. There are three preserved codices with the text in Náhuatl and
Spanish, two in Madrid and one in Florence.
1
The capital of the Aztec empire: founded in 1325; destroyed by the Spaniards in 1521; now the site of
Mexico City.
2
The language of any of various peoples of ancient origin ranging from South-Eastern Mexico to parts of
Central America, including the Aztecs.
3
See also: Sahagun and the birth of modern ethnography: representing, confessing, and inscribing the
other (Klor de Alva, 1988).
14
High-resolution scans of the Florentine Codex, in its entirety and with all
illustrations, are available since 2012 at the World Digital Library (wdl.org), sponsored
by the Library of Congress.
For this research, I have consulted the 1982 edition along with the standard
Spanish edition (2014) for further linguistic comprehension. The table below presents the
structure of the Codex and also offers a comparison which displays the few discrepancies
of both aforementioned versions in rendering a title for each book. Said discrepancies
15
should be taken lightly and serve to elucidate further our comprehension of each volume,
for Sahagún named each chapter within the books but chose not to assign a tittle for the
books themselves.
A spot check of certain portions of the English version gives strong evidence
for careful and conscientious literality in the translation. This alone constitutes
a tremendous step forward. Sahagún's own Spanish versions were synoptic at
best, inaccurate at worst. Spanish editions based on these earlier versions
improved them by the exercise of imagination and literary talent, not by careful
consultation of the Nahuatl originals on which they were based. The French
version and the English were straight translations of the full Spanish text. Only
the German translations, though fragmentary, were conscientious and careful
versions of the Nahuatl originals. Anderson and Dibble have now extended this
tradition to Sahagún's work as embodied in the Florentine Codex
(MCQUOWN, 1980, p. 237).
The author refers to the Spanish editions of the codex as "synoptic" for they have
failed to present a novel translation of the preserved text. Instead, there are a series of
revisions of previous editions to the Spanish to date. As a result, they were increasingly
16
further distant from the codex text. Although not the original Nahuatl manuscript, the
Florentine codex is the earliest copy available yet – dating from the sixteenth century C.E.
which is not an obscure concept from poetry, and the art of language itself.
by Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin in the spring of 1965, opens with ‘Aztec
5 Detesto o erro de achar que “poesia e prosa” são opostos. Prosa é
uma questão formal (como o verso). Poesia não é uma questão
formal. Logo, logo a relação é entre verso e prosa.
Definitions: found poems from the Florentine Codex’ (ROTHENBERG, 1965, p. 1-7).
Commented [O4]: The highlighted sentence seems incomplete.
Antin (2011, p. 9) clarifies what motivated them to include a sequence of Aztec
definitions translated from Náhuatl and Spanish together with contemporary poets:
What led us to publish them as poetry was our strong sense of struggle of these
Aztec survivors of their crumbled empire to explain to this Franciscan friar,
and probably to themselves, the meaning of the ordinary Nahua words that
represented their experience of the world. This seemed very much like what
we as contemporary poets were trying to do. And we were not alone in this sort
of meaning search. Many poets and anthropologists were translating and
retranslating tribal poetries from all around the globe.
4
From 1965 to 1968, the magazine published several conceptual artists and avant-garde poets such as
George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, and Gertrude Stein. The covers were designed by artists like
Robert Morris, Andy Warhol and George Maciunas. Their intention was to rethink the literary genre
through the heterogeneity of the published texts. For such, David Antin and Jerome Rothenberg applied
their reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (2009), in particular the Language Game
theory, where forms of language are connected by "family resemblance" (p.26), to combine in anthologies
using the assemblage concept developed by painter Jean Dubuffet (GRAHAM-DIXON, 2011). The "basis
of inclusion was affiliation with any [family] subgroup with which a new candidate shared a fundamental
feature" (ANTIN, 2011, p. 254). The ‘fundamental trait’ would not be morphological as in Wittgenstein
(2009), but in regards of a “productive line” (ANTIN, 2011, p. 246) in poetics.
5
David Abram Antin, born in New York City in 1932, started his career as a translator of fiction and
scientific texts, then started to experiment with poetry. In the early 1960s, Antin became a representative
poet and critic, writing the first meaningful articles on the art of Andy Warhol and Robert Morris. He
improvised ‘talk poems’ in readings and exhibitions, and became a professor, head of the experimental Art
Department, and gallery director at the University of California, San Diego. Antin was a major influence
for the movement of Conceptual Photographers, and used found or ‘readymade’ texts to address issues of
language. In ‘Definitions for Mendy’, he transcribes definitions for ‘lost’ from both an English dictionary
and an insurance handbook, creating a poem about the death of a friend. David Antin passed away in
October 11, 2016, from a broken neck. I am writing these words almost a year later, still saddened by the
lack of commotion for his absence: “your definition of the real is more like a hope about things that should
prove to be real/ the real is like a construction/ something that builds piece by piece/ and then it falls on
you or you move into it” (1976, p. 7).
17
Thus, this search for meaning is the first element to suggest the presence of
literature in their narrative. Rothenberg choses to analyse the eleventh book (“Natural Commented [O5]: Why do you (and Rafael) use the British
spelling?
things”), which presents a glossary of earthly items: “the elders’ minds & words are drawn Commented [M6R5]: AL YANKEE COLONIALISTA,
DECIMOS: ¡LIBERE A GUANTÁNAMO!
toward definitions of the most ordinary debris of their lives” (ROTHENBERG, 1965, p.
Foi como aprendi e é o único sistema que tenho internalizado.
1). In his preface, Rothenberg offers a short account of the Nahua civilisation collapse, Prefiro manter. Há uma pequena estranheza quando leio em outros
textos, mas dá agonia quando vejo o meu próprio assim. Parece que
and the scattering of “that archaic system, fixed in ritual & myth”. What could have urged escrevi errado...
the elders to describe their landscape to Sahagún, but a “need to preserve the potency of
the real by a regular overturning of primary beliefs”? This is the eleventh book; thousands
of pages have described all gods, all omens, all sacrifices, all their knowledge of
astronomy, and how they had lost their empire. Now, perhaps from a primary need for
orientation, a compilation of definitions for simple things of life – a rock, a bird, a plant,
a tree, a precipice: “it is deep-a difficult, a dangerous place, a deathly place. It is dark, it Commented [O7]: Is this right?
Commented [M8R7]: Yep!
is light. It is an abyss”. A mushroom: “it is round, large, like a severed head”. According Rothenberg marca essas variações no próprio texto. Por exemplo, a
pessoa poderia ter dito “as arma chegaram” e ser traduzido por “the
to Rothenberg, “we can draw close to them, can hear in these ‘definitions’ the sound of gunnes are here”.
topological description, the passage shows a “productive line” (ANTIN, 2011, p. 246) of
poetics. This line, made manifest by Antin and Rothenberg, suggests this ethnographic
6
A found object (or objet trouvé) is a natural or man-made object, or fragment of an object, that is found
(or sometimes bought) by an artist and kept because of some intrinsic interest the artist sees in it. It is a
form of anti-art featured in the Dada movement, as in the Fountain by Marcel Duchamp (1917).
18
excerpt to be received as oral art. In fact, its artistic value is incremented as it is read in a
poetry anthology.
The Cave
It becomes long, deep; it widens, extends, narrows. It is a constricted place, a
narrowed place, one of the hollowed-out places. It forms hollowed-up places.
There are roughened places; there are asperous places. It is frightening, a
fearful place, a place of death. It is called a place of death because there is
dying. It is a place of darkness; it darkens; it stands ever dark. It stands wide-
mouthed, it is wide-mouthed. It is wide-mouthed; it is a narrow-mouthed. It
has mouths which pass through.
I place myself in the cave. I enter the cave (ROTHENBERG, 1985, p. 24).
3. TRANSLATING A CULTURE
Language is indispensable for oral arts, and part of the core of every society. In
this section, I will briefly debate how one is able to communicate their customs and
beliefs, their group culture, and personal needs. In addition, I intend to demonstrate how
a translator is able to render said customs and beliefs into a different set of language.
With the first process in mind, Karl Bühler (1879-1963) spoke of three
representational functions of language (Sprachtheorie): (1) Expressive, the sender’s point
19
of view; (2) Conative, the receiver’s point of view; and (3) Representational, the reality
and context of the linguistic phenomenon. Bühler refers to this process as the Organon
Model (1990, p. 35).
both Antin and Rothenberg as they developed a critical thinking on extending the literary Commented [O13]: Here is something you do a little too often
in such a short text = say what you will be doing. Its ok that you do
that a few times, but I think it needs to be a bit less. Don’t need to
genres and the understanding of poetics. Algirdas Greimas (1917-1992) was most fix that for this text. It’s one of those advices for the future.
From this linguistic standpoint, the effort of the translation process is to indicate
what elements are shared by two distinct systems. Such comparative investigation is a
7
In a broad sense, any meaningful sound uttered by a speaker. More specifically: “a word considered only
as a combination of certain sounds or letters, without regard to meaning” (Dictionary.com Unabridged,
2018). They are not necessarily considered words, e.g., the English vocable of denial, uh-uh (/ˈʌʔə/)
(DANESI, 2004, p. 39). The anthropological process of carrying out meaning by means of sound is an
originating force of language because certain phonic traits would eventually be built into words as we know
them. For instance, the use of nasals to designate denial is due to the nasal character of grunting
(SWADESH, 1971, p. 193).
20
tendency in modern linguistics, an attempt to find origins common to all languages, and
also what specific system reflects individual world views. This is the ‘semiotic turn’: On
Linguistic Aspects of Translation (JAKOBSON, 1959, p. 232) offers the distinction of
three types of translation: “intralingual”, the interpretation of verbal signs using the same Commented [O14]: Is this like this?
Commented [M15R14]: Errata.
language signs; “interlingual”, the interpretation of signs from one language to another;
and “intersemiotic”, e.g. the interpretation of a painting in words.
Our general tendency is to “read into” our experience of a distant language the
familiar things that are missing, all the silences, and then we claim that these
things are “understood,” “implied,” or “part of the underlying logical
structure” of these languages.
This is the case of Rev. Alfred J. Hall, who published his “treatise on the
grammar” (BOAS, 1900, p. 708) of Kawakutl Indians in 1889, with no regards to their
phonetic system. We have established the foremost place of interpretation in decoding
information, and how such practice is conditioned on the receiver’s cultural bias,
preference and predisposition. We would enquire that the amount of culture impressed in
language can be visible in translation. In the words of Ortega y Gasset (2000, p. 62), a
piece of translation “that is ugly” (‘que se fea’), and “a technical artifice that brings us
closer to the work without ever trying to repeat or replace it”, in reference to the translated
text of Plato:
Total Translation
I attempted a number of ‘total translations’ from the horse songs – total in the
sense that I was accounting not only for meaning but for word distortions,
meaningless syllables, music, style of performance, etc. The idea never was to
set English words to Navajo music but to let a whole work – words & music –
emerge newly in the process (ROTHENBERG, 1985, p. 550).
23
“Over-here it-is-there (&) mine. Over-here it-is-there (&) mine. Over-here it-is-
there (&) mine”.
“Translate only for meaning”, says Jerome Rothenberg, “& you get the three-
fold repetition of an unchanging single statement”.
The leading trace of Navajo oral arts is the sharp departure from their spoken
language form. There is a minor variance each time the sentence is chanted, “thus three
different sound-events, not one-in-triplicate”.
The challenge certainly lies on transposing this ritual-song to the printed page,
for a translation-for-meaning would not entail a phonetic change that does not imply any
semantic meaning. Therefore, Rothenberg's anthology is not merely an effort to rescue a
Native American poetics, but a total re-creation of all its elements: sounds, pauses,
intonations, and so forth. There is certainly a considerable difference between a
‘translation-for-meaning’ and what is proposed by Rothenberg as “Total Translation: an
experiment in the presentation of American Indian Poetry” (1983, p. 381).
Let me try, then, to respond to all the sounds I’m made aware of, to let that
awareness touch off responses or events in the English. I don’t want to set
English words to Indian music, but to respond poem-for-poem in the attempt
to work out a “total” translation – not only of the words but of all sounds
connected with the poem, including finally the music itself. Commented [O19]: Faltou uma referência aqui. De onde é isso
do Rothenberg?
Translations should account for this differentiation between the pragmatic use of
language, and the additional element of performance in oral arts, here evident in the use
of vocables.
The Horse-Songs are part of a speech act, a situation with a social context. For
instance, most people are not able to precise how many times they pronounce the word
‘yes’ in a given day, but saying “yes” in a wedding ceremony is somewhat memorable.
This is part of the study developed by Dell Hymes (1927-2009) in Foundations in
Sociolinguistics: an ethnographic approach, from 1974.
My intention was to account for all vocal sounds in the original but – as a more
“interesting” way of handling the minimal structures & allowing a very clear,
very pointed emergence of perceptions – to translate the poems onto the page,
as with “concrete” or other type of minimal poetry (ROTHENBERG, 1983, p.
385).
8
Paralinguistics means ‘alongside linguistics’ (from Greek: παρα) and it was first introduced by George
Trager in ‘Paralanguage: a first approximation’ (1958, pp. 1-12). It is the branch of linguistics (conversation
analysis) that considers non-verbal aspects of human communication. These aspects include nuance
variations of pitch, tone, and volume of voice, as well as the rhythm of speech (prosody). “We speak with
our vocal organs, but we converse with our entire bodies […]. Paralinguistic phenomena occur alongside
spoken language, interact with it, and produce together with it a total system of communication”
(ABERCROMBIE, 1968, p. 192).
25
In Concrete Poetry, both the linguistic and paralinguistic elements of the poem
are arranged for visual effects. Thus, we can speak of the materiality of oral arts, their
production of meaning and form.
“The animals are coming by heh eh heh (or heh eh-eh-eh he)” (1983, p. 386).
The verse is part of the introduction for the ceremony, and it is sung by the
ceremonial leader. The song is enriched by a physical performance.
The melody & structure of the first nine are identical: very slow, a single line
of words ending with a string of sounds, etc., the pattern identical until the last
go-round, when the song ends with a grunting expulsion of breath into a weary
“urgh” sound. I had to get all of that across: the bareness, the regularity, the
deliberateness of the song, along with the basic meaning, repeated vocables,
emphatic terminal sound, & […] a little something of my own.
Rothenberg pictures this verse set in its own page to assist the reader in
welcoming the slowness of the performance, “the deliberate pacing of the original”.
T
h
e
The animals are coming by
n
i
26
m HEHEHHEH
a HEHEHHEH
l HEHUHHEH
s
HEHEHHEH
HEHEHHEH
T HEHEHHEH
h HEHEHHEH
e HEHUHHEH
The doings were beginning HEHEHHEH
o
HEHEHHEH Commented [O21]: O melhor modo de não desconfigurar estas
i coisas é colocando como imagem (mesmo isso signifique digitar no
n word, tirar um print, colar no paintbrush e dai colar de volta aqui... o
único prob é aumentar e diminuir, mas é garantido).
g
Commented [M22R21]: A versão final estará em .pdf.
s
4. ANTHOLOGY AS MANIFESTO
about 80 BCE. Meleager collected the work of almost 50 Greek poets (DI LEO, 2004, p.
85) in a critical anthology.
Jerome Rothenberg (2008a) distinguishes two types of anthologies: the ones that
anticipate a broadening of the poetics to date by regarding the past and thus enriching the
present; and those compiled under a false pretence of closure and authority – no anthology
could ever disregard the demand for criticism and revision.
The latter, also referred as “canonical anthologies” (p. 18), work as “the great
conservatizing force in our literature(s) […] against which – as artists of an avant-garde
– many of us have had to struggle”. The poet’s remarks denounce a group of conservative
critics who will only admit poets and poetries that meet their “conservatizing thrust”,
rejecting “those moves that challenge too overtly the boundaries of form & meaning or
that call into question the boundaries (genre boundaries) of poetry itself”.
Actually, each entry has an endnote that provides the appropriate ethnographic
context followed by brief yet clarifying commentaries. Furthermore, the endnote allows
readers to relate the piece of ethnopoetics they had just read to a number of contemporary
works – “an early revival of Gertrude Stein & a mix of new & old voices, of the modern
& the postmodern: André Breton, Diane Wakoski, Tristan Tzara, Gary Snyder, Anne
Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Simon Ortiz, Hannah Weiner” (p. 19).
28
9
In addition to Rothenberg’s anthology, we must make reference to the critical edition of Cantares
Mexicanos by Miguel León-Portilla (2011). This codex, also collected by Sahagún in the mid-16th century,
is the oldest Nahuatl manuscript available (DEFOSSE, 2011, p.1). The fragments of songs, transcribed by
29
At the time, this group of poets and translators established that being avant-garde
implied a form of militancy, which required “an immersion in the here & now & a
scanning of the remote […] to look for new readings & meanings”.
Sahagun upon hearing them from the elders, also present a sense of continuity and unity along the anthology
edited by León-Portilla.
30
I’ve […] composed, there’s been this sense of the anthology functioning as a kind of
manifesto, a polemical work”.
Nevertheless, the author’s effort to compose a comprehensive anthology goes further than a
manifesto-assemblage for laying out the poetics with example and commentaries. Since Technicians of the
Sacred (1985), the Rothenberg reader is presented with the anthology itself, followed by the editor’s
commentary on each entry. Therefore, the movement of Ethnopoetics considers an anthology to be a
manifest towards the reception of poetics that had not seem to be in compliance with Western standards
for poetry. Indeed, the movement made new venues and territories of poetry available for
the reader and the academic community. More importantly, Ethnopoetics provided a
foundation on which anthologies could benefit the culture of those who first performed
the stories.
5. ETHNOPOETICS
31
According to American sociologist Robert Bella (2013), the ancestral figures are
clearly distinct from gods, for having no control over nature and for not being worshiped
but solely revered. The term in Arandic that renders all the above is Alcheringa. The name
first appeared in the speech delivered by Francis Gillen at the 1896 Engwura Festival, and
later in the book Native Tribes of Central Australia (BALDWIN; GILLEN, 1899). Gillen
describes Alcheringa as “the name applied to the far distant past with which the earliest
traditions of the tribe deal” (p. 72), and “the dim past to which the natives give the name
of the ‘alcheringa’.” (p. 119). It is a mythic world that existed at the dawn of time and is
32
somehow accessed in our days, revealed as a parallel world whenever we dream and
whenever someone speaks or sings the myth comprised in Alcheringa.
10
Exceptions in 1970, 1972, 1973, 1978, and 1980, with only one issue. The magazine was not published
in 1974 and 1979.
11
In the summer of 1971, a two-year subscription cost $5.50. The price went up to $9.50 a few months
later. The annual subscription rate cost $7.00 (1975, 1976), and $9.00 (1977, 1978) per person; $10.00
(1975, 1976), and $14.00 (1977, 1978) for institutions. Single copies of the New Series (after 1975) were
sold at $3.50 (1975), $4.50 (first issue of 1976), and $4.95 for the remaining issues. Back issues (Numbers
1-5 in the old series, 1970-1973) were available at $5.00 from 1975 to 1978, and the last remaining issues
were available at $2.50 each in 1980. In 2018 (at the time of this research), a few paperback issues were
still available at Amazon.com, e.g., New Series Volume 2, Number 2 (1976) for $34.95. all issues are
available online at www.ethnopoetics.com, and all audio tracks are available at
www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alcheringa.php.
33
The magazine was introduced to the public with a bold Statement of Intention
(TEDLOCK; ROTHENBERG, 1970, p. 1), one that would challenge the standards and
establishments in poetics, becoming a beacon to a generation of poets and translators.
As the first magazine of the world’s tribal poetries, ALCHERINGA will not
be a scholarly “journal of ethnopoetics” so much as a place where tribal poetry
can appear in English translation & can act (in the oldest & newest of poetic
traditions) to change men’s minds & lives. While its sources will be different
from other poetry magazines, it will be aiming at the startling & revelatory
presentation that has been common to our avant gardes.
—to be a vanguard for the initiation of cooperative projects along these lines
between poets, ethnologists, songmen, & others
—to assist the free development of ethnic self-awareness among young Indians
& others so concerned, by encouraging a knowledgeable, loving respect among
them & all people for the world’s tribal past & present
In 2010, Dennis Tedlock and Jon Cotner organised the entire archive of
Alcheringa and made it available online. All issues can be read online in high quality
(ethnopoetics.com) or downloaded in portable format (.pdf). The files also allow word-
search, which is a valuable tool for researchers. All images and audios are available in
high resolution and can also be downloaded.
Speakers create, adapt, modify, and maintain a language that is not independent
from their reality and ordinary lives. As Wittgenstein indicates: "speaking a language is
a way of life" (p.35). This reasoning enables us realise how colonialism has not only
36
degraded cultures and civilisations, but also instituted a hierarchy for languages and,
ultimately, their speakers.
Every community has a language that will attend their needs: it is in fact a hoax
that the Eskimo have a vocabulary with dozens of entries for ‘snow’ (KRUPNIK, 2010, Commented [O25]: Sério? Sempre contam essa como verdade.
Depois me explica.
p. 385), but it does not mean they do not present an impressive level of detail to describe
it. Is it plausible to assume that the English language cannot be considered complete nor
developed for its limitation to describe the same variety of ‘snow’? The obvious answer
of this proposition allows us to lucubrate that the Eskimo–Aleut languages could
discourse credit card fraud if it were part of their culture. Any language is as good as any
other to express the needs of its community. Linguist Randolph Quirk advises “we must
always beware the temptation to adopt a naive parochialism which makes us feel that
someone else's language is less pleasant or less effective an instrument than our own”
(QUIRK, 1968, p. 72).
The discussion so far has been able to address issues like language, the
production of meaning, completeness, and the misled notion of social-linguistic
superiority. I can now resume my studies on poetries and Ethnopoetics, considering
12
“An agglutinative language is a language in which words are made up of a linear sequence of distinct
morphemes and each component of meaning is represented by its own morpheme (BICKFORD; DALY,
1996, p. 6). Agglutinative languages are regarded as simpler for their high rate of affixes and suffixes
(morphemes) per word, e.g., ‘comí’(Spanish). The suffix ‘-í’, agglutinated to the root ‘com-‘, means that
the subject of verb is in the first person, singular, masculine, simple past: ‘I ate’. These languages are
particularly regular, with very few irregular verbs.
38
another observation of Professor Kimball Young: “the languages of the primitives […]
are less capable of expressing abstract thought than our own”. It is still the case of an
instrumental language that could never express beauty or poetic thought.
the industrial West plundered the ‘worlds’ beyond their boundaries. Such cultures were
eventually described as “’primitive’ and ‘savage’—a stage below ‘barbarian’”
(ROTHENBERG; ROTHENBERG, 1983, p. xi).
In 2014, Jerome Rothenberg told the San Francisco Gate that “Poetry exists
everywhere, and takes many different forms” (SFGATE, 2014). The preface of the first
13
The word "primitive" is used with misgivings & put in quotes, but no way around it seems workable.
"Non-technological" & "non-literate," which have often been suggested as alternatives, are too emphatic in
pointing to supposed "lacks" &, though they feel precise to start with, are themselves open to question. Are
the Eskimo snow-workers, e.g., really "non"- or "pre-technological"? And how does the widespread use of
pictographs & pictosymbols, which can be "read" by later generations, affect their users' non-literate status?
(ROTHENBERG, 1985, p. xxv).
39
edition of Technicians of the Sacred (1985, p. xxvi) clarifies that the poetry of traditional
cultures also demands “the manipulation (fine or gross) of multiple elements”, therefore:
“primitive means complex” (p. xxv).
According to the author, critics and translators may have also been negligent: “if
this [poetry] isn’t apparent, it’s because the carry-over (by translation or interpretation)
necessarily distorts where it chooses some part of the whole that it can be meaningfully
deal with” (p. xxvi). There is an explanation in Gestalt, or the angle one chooses to read
the poetries of primitivism: “if you expect a primitive work to be simple or naive, you
will probably end up seeing a simple or naive work” (ibid). The suggestion here is that
such negative or inferior connotation of ‘primitive’ oral poetry is due to the value system
present in Western literate society: “measure everything by the Titan rocket & the
transistor radio, & the world is full of primitive peoples” (p. xxv).
But still, to reconsider the threshold of language borders in view of poetics and
a novel sense of ethics, demands a comprehensive curiosity. In fact, even Jerome
Rothenberg, a poet himself, admits how much he had yet to discover from the poetries of
non-state cultures such as the Aztec’s: "there was a sense I had that what we knew about
poetry was really very limited," (SFGATE, 2014). The Nahuatle life was enriched by oral
arts: countless rituals, mythology, poetry, and music. Regarding the Aztec society
demands for poetics, writer Zain Deane (2011, p. 81) states:
Jerome Rothenberg perceives Aztec oral arts as significant and central to their
society. Aztecs admitted the possibility of sacred in nearly everything. This trait is shared
by other archaic cultures with similar world-view, rooted in rituals and myth.
Rothenberg’s landmark anthology of Aztec oral poetry is meant for readers with
a clear sense of acknowledgement and consideration for the sophistication of such
‘archaic’ works of art and artists. An ethnopoet/ethnotranslator avoids the attempts of
incorporating primitive oral poetry into the contemporary, which seems to be the case of
Ezra Pound’s use of Chinese poetry, and T. S. Elliot’s use of Buddha’s Fire Sermon in
The Waste Land (2010). Jerome Rothenberg accesses the past reflecting ethically on
‘primitive’ poetries in order to recognise difference rather than sameness.
40
As we have established, the word “primitive” has been mostly used to separate
the oral poetry of non-state cultures from the supposedly superior (more developed) art
of the West. To conclude this section, I intend to describe the richness of Aztec poetic
heritage.
One can identify […] the signs of water, shells, flowers, footprints, interlaced
bands (the glyph of movement?), circles, human or animal heads, stylized
feathered eyes, hearts, hands, trumpet conchs, and several other signs. Some
scholars […] see […] graphemes conceived to be “read” following their linear
arrangements.
Even with the written language and their paintings, orality14 is the most striking
feature of Aztec artistic production. The books served as an aid to poetic performance, as
we see in this poem collected by Sahagun (LEON-PORTILLA, 2000, p.5):
This passage serves as proof of the role poetry played in Aztec society, being
able to preserve their pre-Hispanic history. Their ‘primitive’ poets were able to make
history books sing.
14
“Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (especially
writing and print) are unfamiliar to most of the population” (ORALITY, 2018). This is the concept provided
by the contributors of Wikipedia, which exemplifies the notion that oral-centred communities must lack
technology, development, and full democracy. And yet, the generation of the iPad and the Mars Rover still
rather listen to a joke than to read it on a full HD screen. This is true because paralinguistic attributes are
imperative for a joke.
41
CONCLUSION
Since ‘Aztec definitions: found poems from the Florentine Codex’ (Some/thing,
1961), Rothenberg’s effort as a researcher and essayist has been focused in the
ethnography of contextualised, found speech events. This research established how
aforesaid theory can be perceived as an accepted unfolding of the Linguistic Turn, a major
development in Western understanding of philosophy and language. As previously stated,
the linguistic studies to date would analyse up to the syntax of a sentence. However, after
Zellig Harris’ ‘Discourse Analysis’ (1952), “a method for the analysis of connected
speech (or writing)” (p. 1), “beyond the limits of a single sentence at a time” (p. 2), the
field of linguistics became a domain for more complex functions, such as the aesthetic.
The sentence is definitely not the only device able to convey meaning: rituals and myths
are independent presentational forms that produce meaning. These forms shape our social
(and symbolic) reality: “speaking a language is a way of life” (WITTGENSTEIN, 2009,
p. 35).
Technicians of the Sacred: a range of poetries from Africa, America, Europe &
Asia, originally published in 1968, did not just promote such poetries, but actually brought
them into light. It is a paramount work because it became the archetype for all succeeding
researches in ethnopoetics. “This involves the acceptances (by poet & hearers) of an
42
indefinite extension of narrative time, & the belief that language (i.e., poetry) can make-
things present by naming them (ROTHENBERG, 1985, p. 441). As we have established,
the composition of these anthologies followed the procedures of composing a poem,
including the power of bringing the ancestral voices in Nahuatle to present by naming
them, which has been the work of Jerome Rothenberg, the foremost technician of the
sacred.
43
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