9

RESUMO

As tradições orais atraíram diversos poetas, tradutores, antropólogos e etnógrafos a partir

de meados do século vinte. Permeados pela proposta modernista, poetas como D. H.
Lawrence buscaram novas formas poéticas para capturar o ritual, que são os elementos
performáticos da arte oral nativa com o objetivo de ressaltar os valores estéticos contidos
nos textos de culturas tradicionais pré-colombianas. O presente Trabalho de Conclusão
de Curso se propõe a analisar as contribuições da teoria de etnopoética e sua tradução
ético-estética, em especial as antologias de artes orais astecas compiladas por Jerome
Rothenberg. Trata-se de uma pesquisa bibliográfica que se inicia nas narrativas de
Bernardino de Sahagún a fim de retratar a figura do poeta (o técnico do sagrado, segundo
Rothenberg) e sua relevância à origem e continuidade da comunidade. Também discutirá
a função da tradução nesse contexto, reconhecendo-a como criação e crítica literária.
Nessa interpretação semiótica, a tradução revela importantes mecanismos ao apresentar
uma noção de cultura ao leitor. O resultado desse processo foi chamado de Tradução Total
(total translation), termo cunhado por Jerome Rothenberg. Por fim, debateremos a noção
de ‘primitivo’ entre línguas e culturas.

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.

The "poetics of the forest", or "literatures

Picture 1: Aztec musician (Codex Borbonicus, p.
4) of the forest", have always been present in
 10

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.

This is the theoretical background to which the artistic movement of

Ethnopoetics becomes relevant. Under the tutelage of Jerome Rothenberg, who coined
the term in 1968, the movement consisted of a group of poets, translators, linguists, and
anthropologists, who were concerned to hear and read the poetries of distant others,
outside the Western tradition as we know it. Not merely the words printed on white paper,
but their oral performance as they are spoken, sung, or chanted. I intend to investigate the
extent to which this translation project converge and diverge from other anthologies in
English, addressing issues that extend to the poetic work of authors/translators. As a
divergence factor, I intend to explore how Jerome Rothenberg redesigned the concept of
‘anthology’, as well as the theoretical background for Ethnopoetics.

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.

In the 1950s, Jerome Rothenberg started the counter-cultural movement of

Ethnopoetics with a significant ethical charge. In retrospect of that time, Rothenberg
writes, “the awakening – in & after World War II – brought a convergence of the need
 11

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?

My main objective is to provide a comprehensive review of the anthology of

Aztec poetry translation, undertaken by Jerome Rothenberg (1968; 1972). I also intend to
briefly investigate the ethnography of Aztec civilization; consider classical anthologies
of Aztec poetry; consider the Ethnopoetics movement, specially their understanding of
ethical translation, and review the Aztec poetry anthology by Jerome Rothenberg,
presented in Technicians of the Sacred (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin (1972).

The pioneering work of Jerome Rothenberg is the primary source of this

research, since the author has not only carried out his own anthology of Aztec oral poetry,
but has also published numerous essays and manifestoes in which he discusses the
elements of Ethnopoetics.

Rothenberg’s pioneer intake on the ethnography of Amerindian verbal arts defies

the mainstream Western ideas regarding poetry, authorship, and originality. The author
does so by challenging the concept of individual authorship, receiving a poetic tradition
of a community rather than an individual poet. In fact, the second number (form the first
volume of the New Series) of Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics, the collaborative journal which
became the voice of the movement, presents a brief anthology of Language Poetry with
the works of nine poets, compiled by Ron Silliman (1975, p. 104), who credits the
importance of said anthology not to the quality of one given author, but rather to the
“tendency in the work of many”, changeling the concept of ‘originality’.
 12

2. BERNARDINO DE SAHAGÚN AND THE FLORENTINE CODEX:

HISTORIA GENERAL DE LAS COSAS DE NUEVA ESPAÑA
Come not thus with your gunnes & sword, to invade as foes
What will it availe you to take that perforce you may quietly have with love,
or to destroy that provide your food?...
Lie well, & them sleepe quietly with my women and children, laugh, & I will
be merrie with you - POWHATAN, to Capt. John Smith. (ROTHENBERG,
1972, p. 93)

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

I will briefly discuss the Florentine Codex: Historia

general de las Cosas de Nueva España. The work was
compiled between 1540 and 1585 and intended to record the
pre-conquest culture.

It is comprised in impressive 2,400 pages ordered

into twelve books, presenting more than 2,000 illustrations
Picture 2: image of Aztec feather
painter from the Digital Edition (NICHOLSON, 1983). The 16th century copy of Sahagún’s
of the Florentine Codex
research study is held it the Laurentian Library of Florence,
Italy. The original was lost, possibly destroyed in 1577, when the Spanish authorities
confiscated all investigations regarding the Aztec world, for they had not received the
work positively. In these twelve volumes, Bernardino de Sahagún discusses specific
topics on Nahua’s spiritual beliefs and organised religion system, appreciation of
astronomy (e.g., the sun, the moon, and the stars), divination practices, prayers and
enchants, and the typical rhetorical formulation of traditional discourses in Náhuatl. After
almost half a century, Historia General… remains the primary source of knowledge
regarding Aztec history, economy, and society prior to ‘discovery’.

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 thirty years, anthropologists Arthur J. O. Anderson (1907-1996) and Charles

E. Dibble (1909-2002) worked on the first (and since then, definite) version of the Codex
in English, finally published in 1975 by the University of Utah Press in association with
the School of American Research, named General History of the Things of New Spain.
Professors Anderson and Dibble received the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle, the
highest honour of the Mexican government, as well as the Order of Isabella the Catholic
(Orden de Isabel la Católica) and the title of Commander (Comendador) from the King
of Spain.

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.

General History of the Things

of New Spain (1982) Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España (2014)

Book 1 The Gods Libro 1 De los dioses

Book 2 The Ceremonies Libro 2 De las ceremonias
Book 3 The Origin of the Gods Libro 3 Del principio que tuvieron los dioses
De la astrología judiciaria o arte adivinatoria
Book 4 The Soothsayers Libro 4
indiana
Book 5 The Omens Libro 5 De los agüeros y pronósticos
Rhetoric and Moral
Book 6 Libro 6 Retórica y filosofía moral
Philosophy
The Sun, Moon, and Que trata de la astrología y filosofía natural que
Book 7 Stars, and the Binding of Libro 7 alcanzaron
estos naturales de esta Nueva
the Years España
De los reyes y señores y de la manera que
Book 8 Kings and Lords Libro 8 tenían
en sus elecciones y en el govierno de sus
reino
De los mercaderes, oficiales de oro y piedras
Book 9 The Merchants Libro 9
preciosas y pluma rica
De los vicios y virtudes de esta gente indiana y
The People, Their Virtues de los miembros de el cuerpo, interiores y
Book 10 and Vices, and Other Libro 10 esteriores, y de las enfermedades y medicinas
Nations contrarias, y de las naciones que a esta tierra
han venido a poblar
Que es bosque, jardín, vergel de lengua
Book 11 Natural Things Libro 11
mexicana
Trata de cómo los españoles conquistaron a la
Book 12 The Conquest of Mexico Libro 12
ciudad de México


Professor Norman McQuown, from the Anthropology department at the

University of Chicago, offers an insightful review of the English version from Anderson
and Dibble, as well as a comparison of other editions available to the general public:

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.

It is conceivable that all editions of Sahagún’s work intend to provide an accurate

transliteration and translation of the Náhuatl text but our concern is, in fact, considerably
more than an accurate rendition of the original: in view of Jerome Rothenberg’s
commentaries (1965), we are considering the fragments as oral and performative arts, Commented [O2]: How about “oral and performative arts”?

which is not an obscure concept from poetry, and the art of language itself.

We are not, however, contemplating the micro-genre of verse, whose primary

characteristic is to be distinguished from plain prose. The first issue of Some/thing4, edited Commented [O3]: VERY GOOD

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”.

poetry, a measure-by-placement-&-displacement, not far from our own” (p. 2).

Jerome Rothenberg considered these fragments as ‘found poetry’, an adaptation

of ‘found-object6’. The discussion of whether these definitions meet the requirements for
poetry is not at all superfluous, but a fundamental issue for the concept of genre. However,
we set a definite boundary between the concept of genre and the definition of genre –
which is considerably dismissive and culturally established, e.g., the ‘good poem’
according to Aristotle in Poetics (1996). It is equally irrelevant that the narratives had not
been transmitted as poems, because “it should be clear by now”, concludes Jerome
Rothenberg (1965, p. 2), “that poetry is less literature than a process of thought & feeling
& the arrangement of that into affective utterances. The conditions these definitions meet
are the conditions of poetry”. Commented [O9]: Now this is something! But it is odd how he
takes what would seem a situational concept (found art = art that is
“found” in random places, i.e., becomes art by view of the finder)
but thinks it as a essential element of that objetct = that is, “X has
What follows is the depiction of a cave by an Aztec. Rather than a simple been art all along” (which is absolutely not a situational view).

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

I translate, then, as a way of reporting what I’ve sensed or seen of another’s

situation: true as far as possible to “my” image of the life & thought of the
source (ROTHENBERG, 1983, p. 383)

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).

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) expanded this “information-conveying process”

(FANO, 1968, p. 3) in six “distinctive features” (JAKOBSON, 1971, p. 570): (1) the
Context; (2) the Message from (3) Sender to (4) Receiver; (5) the Channel, either physical
or psychological, between 3 and 4; and (6) the Code, that is “fully, or at least partially,
common to the addresser and addressee” (p. 571), those who will code and decode the
message. From Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) to Jakobson, this debate is limited
from the minimal sound unit of meaning (the phoneme) to the largest unit of analysis –
the sentence. Despite of being able of generating limitless statements, this model falls Commented [O10]: Discourse Analysis will go further to say
the “text” is the largest (and thus, their focus of analysis).
7
short in analysing anything prior to a sentence or beyond it, i.e. the vocable ,
Por si, isso é algo que falta na FALEM, alguém que seja do Critical
Discourse Analysis. Esse povo geralmente é legal hehe (e
combinations of sounds or letters, regardless of meaning. The syllable Re is meaningless politizados com power relation pra cá e pra lá).

unless it is put in context: Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si. The Navajo Horse-Songs, as well as

their music for the Sioux Grass Dance, are composed of vocables.

Antin and Rothenberg speak of a pursuit for meaning, as they engage in a

language investigation. I intend to present a brief panel of the literature in linguistics Commented [O11]: This end part sounds odd. Perhaps “as they
engage in a language investigation”.
published in the first half of the twentieth century because it was the basis available for Commented [O12]: Daqui em diante vc arruma.

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.

definitely an influence. The semiotician described the structure of a semantic universe

with all possible meanings a given ethno-linguistic community could utter in their system
of value. Because this universe would be exceedingly vast to be analysed, we move to the
notions of semantic micro-universe and discourse universe in order to provide a narrative
that enables us to apprehend signification and how they produce meaning.

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.

The importance of interpretation in the scope of translation is now objectively

evident. Therefore, the result of a translation activity is bias to cultural interpretation,
since “translation is a process of recoding involving two equivalent messages in two
different codes” (p. 233).

In the Introduction of The Scandals of Translation: towards an ethics of

difference (1998), Lawrence Venuti criticises the relationship between hegemonic, i.e.
dominant, cultures over developing, i.e. subordinate, cultures: “the focus on the
marginality is strategic. It assumes that a study of the periphery in any culture can
illuminate and ultimately revise the center” (p. 4).

Throughout the book, language is presented as a “collective force” towards a

relationship of power, especially the case of the English Language. Cultural Studies,
whose concentration lays on political dynamics, has promoted the identity-forming power
of translation. This is called ‘the cultural turn’, “the fact that cultural identity is the
decisive factor in constructing the specificity of a certain society” (SEGERS, 2000, p.
367). Correspondingly, culture as “learned behaviour, socially transmitted and
cumulative in time, [...] paramount as a determinant to human behaviour”
(HALLOWELL, 1960, p. 316). Jakobson’s ‘semiotic turn’ could be described as the
threshold between Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.

My attempt with this discussion is to draw a theory of translation from the

perspective of XIX-XX century linguistic and anthropological studies, e.g., the semiotic
turn, and the cultural turn. I have found it as a suitable path to provide context to Total
Translation as introduced by Jerome Rothenberg in 1969.

Venuti provides a practical example of the matter at hand: Courier, a monthly

UNESCO magazine, published an article in April 1990 for the promotion of intercultural
understanding. According to Venuti, “The English translation is extraordinary for its
 21

ideological slanting against pre-Columbian Mexicans, whose oral culture is represented

as inferior” (1990, p. 2). ‘Antiguos mexicanos’ (ancient Mexicans) was translated as
‘Indians’, “distinguishing them sharply from their Spanish colonizers”; ‘sabios’ (wise Commented [M16]: Aqui realmente foi um erro. No livro está
“colonizer”.
men) as ‘diviners’, “opposing them to European rationalism; and ‘testimonias’
(testimonies) as ‘written records’, “subtly privileging literacy over oral traditions”. Commented [O17]: Wow!

I take in consideration the independent elements in the process of

communication and production of meaning according to Jakobson, but also the discourse
choices of the translator and editors, sanctioning the maintenance of a subordinate identity
for Mexican peoples. The translator acted in favour of a domesticating practice, “enabling
a process of mirroring or self-recognition” (VENUTI, 1990, p. 70).

Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) was definitely not persuaded to this

notion of hierarchy for culture and languages. Boas was the first researcher to use the
word ‘culture’ in its plural form in English – see ‘Franz Boas and the culture concept in
historical perspective’ (STOCKING, 1966, p. 867-882), possibly for the use in German
(Kulturen).

In Alternating Sounds (1899) and Handbook of American Indian Language

(1911), Boas presents an examination on the “anatomy of misreadings” (1911, p. 42),
particularly in regards to meaningful sounds, i.e., vocables. Professor John Leavitt, from
the anthropology department at the Université de Montréal, debates language and culture,
and comments on Franz Boas’ observations:

The speaker of a given language expects to find familiar patterns when

confronting a new one […]. We […] mishear sounds, misattribute meanings,
and misconstrue grammatical forms in a different language because of our own
legitimately acquired prejudices as speakers of our own language (LEAVITT,
2014, p. 204).

In ‘Sketch of the Kwakiutl language’, originally published in 1900, Boas uses a

Kwak’wala grammar compiled by a Christian missionary to criticise how pieces of
Kwakiutl had been forced into the structure of English Parts of Speech. Boas also argues
in favour of what today is called ‘translatability’, insisting that one is able to speak of any
subject within the limits of their languages, taking advantage of paraphrases and
borrowed vocabularies at times. Linguist Alton Becker (1995, p. 7) indicates what may
prevent us from doing accordingly:
 22

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:

Whenever a translation of Plato, even the most recent translation, is compared

with the text, it will be surprising and irritating, not because the voluptuousness
of the Platonic style has vanished on being translated but because of the loss
of three-fourths of those very things in the philosopher’s phrases that are
compelling, that he has stumbled upon in his vigorous thinking, that he has in
the back of his mind and insinuates along the way. For that reason — not, as is
customarily believed, because of the amputation of its beauty — does it interest
today’s reader so little. How can it be interesting when the text has been
emptied beforehand and all that remains is a thin profile without density
or excitement? [Bolding is ours]

Miseria y Esplendor de la Traducción is originally from 1937. The English

version (by Elizabeth Miller) can be found in the anthology compiled by Lawrence Venuti
(2000). The following topic, which is a case study on Jerome Rothenberg’s Commented [O18]: ?? something wrong here.

ethnotranslation of the Horse-Songs, is a possible response to the question proposed by

Ortega y Gasset.

Total Translation

In the summer of 1968, ethnomusicologist David McAllester (1916-2006) sent

Rothenberg a series of recordings and transcriptions, which were his attempt to re-write
the Horse-Songs, by Navajo singer Frank Mitchell (1881-1967). “My first concern was
with the translation process itself”, says Rothenberg (1983, p. 381).

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

The opposite of ‘total translation’, in Rothenberg’s theory, is ‘translation-for-

meaning”, which is possibly the one Ortega y Gasset decried in 1937. According to
Rothenberg, this sort of translation practice, “under the best circumstances […] is no more
than partial translation”.

Said differentiation is particularly expressive concerning Navajo Horse-Songs,

sung by horsemen travelling through the night as a tribute to their horses, in the attempt
to create a cover of protection from negative spirits. Naturally, the translator’s initial
challenge is to decide whether or not to handle the elements which are not translatable
literally. The voices in the poem carry sounds that are not words per se, and earlier
translators had decided to attenuate them or simply disregard them completely. “But they
were there & were at least as important as the words themselves” (ROTHENBERG, 1983,
p. 382).

Following McAllester’s transcription as reproduced in Symposium of the Whole

(ROTHENBERG, 1983, p. 384), the opening line of the seventeenth Horse-Song reads:

“dzaadi silá shi. dzaadi silá shi. dzaadi silá shi”.

Translated literally by Rothenberg as:

“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”.

We can appreciate these variations following David McAllester’s transcription:

Transcription of the phrase as it is Transcription of the phrase as it is sung

spoken
1 dzaadi silá shi dzo-wowode sileye shi
2 dzaadi silá shi dza-na desileye shiyi
3 dzaadi silá shi dzanadi sleye shiya’e
 24

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.

Furthermore, the materiality of the translation must meet the paralinguistic8

elements of oral poetry. This practice demands an experimental orthography and spatial
disposition in order to convey the strength and unity of performance:

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.

Jerome Rothenberg provides the social context, some aspects of composition,

and his intentions towards a total translation of the following verse from the Horse-Songs:

“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”.

Commented [O20]: Whats with all these blank spaces?

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

The word was coined in ancient Greece (ανθολογία), in reference to the

collection (λέγα) of flowers (ανθο ). In fact, such definition was still valid in the second
half of the eighteenth century, as evident in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English
Language (2003). According to the entry, anthology as a collection of interrelated
writings that centres on a topic was perceived as a secondary meaning. The earliest
example available is the Garland of Meleager, a collection of epigrams, which dates to
 27

about 80 BCE. Meleager collected the work of almost 50 Greek poets (DI LEO, 2004, p.
85) in a critical anthology.

The adage ‘bouquet of the best flowers’ is a captivating metaphor: an anthology

is an assemblage of the best texts that provides a detailed outline of a given literary form,
period, or subjective, to the reader. In addition, anthologies hold an imperative role in
canon formation, often implicated in various political and cultural agendas.

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”.

As an alternative, Rothenberg proposes an anthology with the following three

envisioned features: (1) “a way of laying out an active poetics at meet their
“conservatizing, which is true in every collection he edited. The anthologies were not
intended to be “canonical” (as in a final word on the matter), nor the complete
compendium of such poetics: “it had to be a flawed book – a compendium of absences as
well as presences” (p. 25). By avoiding comprehensive essays on both the topic and
content of every publication, the editor evaded the enticement of an academic article.

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

(2) A grand assemblage, “ semblagejust read to a number of co: Jerome

Rothenberg reviews the creative process of a poet, “who may also be dancer, singer,
magician, whatever the event demands of him” (1985, p. xxviii), arguing that a poem is
able to foster “the most seemingly contradictory propositions” due to a series of
techniques mastered by the poet who fuses such propositions. The example is as follows:

Poet & man

man & world
world & image
image & word
word & music
music & dance
dance & dancer
dancer & man
man & world

Although it may seem as a catalogue of open images, “there’s a sense-of-unity

that surrounds the poem, a reality concept that acts as a cement, a unification of
perspective linking”. A similar assessment is accurate in the composition of an anthology:
the collection is intended to be coherent in the presentation of accentuating elements that
combine the whole.

Unity is achieved […] by the imposition of some constant or “key” against

which all disparate materials can be measured. A sound, a rhythm, a name, an
image, a dream, a gesture, a picture, an action, a silence: any or all of these can
function as “keys” (p. xxvii).

These constants enable Rothenbergage, a dream, a gesture, a picture, an action,

a silence: any or all of these can function as any or apccentuating elements that combine
the wholegnts that Tzara, Gary Snyder,'Definitions for Mandy' (p. 462) is followed by
poetries from Africa, Asia and Oceania; In Symposium of the Whole (1983), Levi-Straus
shares the pages with Carl Jung, Antonin Artaud, and Dennis Tedlock. The subjects
complement each other and are expanded throughout the anthology, which is a process
comparable to the composition of a poem. Therefore, “a kind of art form in its own right”
(ROTHENBERG, 2008a, p. 18). These constants, or keys, brought to awareness in the
twentieth century, provide a sense of continuity and unity in the structure of pre-
Colombian Nahuatle oral narratives9.

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

For an avant-garde movement that understands art as collaboration, an

anthology is a (3) manifesto: “to present, to bring to light, or to create works that have
been excluded or that collectively present a challenge to the dominant system-makers or
to the world at large”.

Jerome Rothenberg published his first anthology-assemblage in 1967, the

paramount Technicians of the Sacred: a range of poetries from Africa, America, Asia,
Europe & Oceania (1985), with instances of poetry strange to the Western literary canon:
oral poetry from tribal cultures, and what had been labelled as ‘primitive poetry’.
Rothenberg and the Ethnopoetics movement were instrumental in the reception of native
– and yet foreign – poetries. Looking back in order to ensure a future. Like Wisakedjak,
the Cree Indian trickster, Rothenberg compiled, translated, and composed poems as story-
cycles connected by certain “keys”. Each story by Wisakedjak, each poem by Rothenberg,
is from the collective memory of everyone who has told it and may change each time it
is recollected to be told again. The quotation of Gertrude Stein in the Prologue of Origins,
from Poems for the Millennium (ROTHENBERG; JORIS, 1995, p. 733), depicts
Ethnopoetics’ resolution in presenting a conjunction of ‘the new’ (modernist poems) in a
comparison to ‘the old’ (ancient and culturally distant poems):

As it is old it is new and as it is new it is old, but now we

have come to be in our own way which is a completely
different way.

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”.

Therefore, Ethnopoetics was interested in recording text versions of oral poetry,

bringing it newly to the present mainly in the form of anthologies. In his talk at the
Modern Language Association, December 1995, Jerome Rothenberg described this effort
of compiling anthologies as an instrument of change. Also, in an interview to Fact-Simile
(2008, p. 5), the author confirms this notion by saying “throughout all […] the anthologies

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

In The Audible Word: Sounding the Range of Twentieth-Century American

Poetics (2000), Kenneth Sherwood discusses the novel approach to poetry (and
translation) of Ethnopoetics:

Ethnopoetics produced a heightened awareness of: the artfulness of oral poetry,

the importance of theorizing transcription and translation, the existence and
substantiality of oral traditions (often counter to the Western canon), and the
ways in which peoples’ verbal arts illuminate their cultures […]. As a literary
project, Ethnopoetics begins with an acknowledgment of the limitations of a
western model of literature and the particular texts celebrated in the terms of
that model. It revalues rich, traditional poetries in formal, philosophical and
spiritual terms—thereby enhancing the domain of poetry (SHERWOOD,
2000, p. 100)

Sherwood’s remarks represent the current academic appreciation of

Ethnopoetics and Ethnotranslation. Even though it was clearly an underground
movement, decades have passed since the famous Statement of Intention in Alcheringa
#1. Then and now, Ethnopoetics is considered as a project greatly invested in the variety
and importance of oral poetries, with poets and ethnographers occupied in providing
accurate transcriptions and translations that would be able to re-evaluate poetry beyond
the Western canonical view, now considered as limited.

Alcheringa (dreamtime) & the journal in Ethnopoetics

Aranda (sometimes Arunta) refers to a language group of at least eleven different

aboriginal tribes with distinct dialects living in the desert areas of central Australia.
Despite being a postcontact denomination, Aranda and Arunta are commonly accepted
names. Their spirituality is focused on dreamtime (also dream time, and dream-time),
which refers to a ‘time out of time’, or ‘everywhen’, in allusion to a time when the land
was inhabited by the ancestral figures.

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.

Alcheringa / Ethnopoetics, “the first magazine of the world’s tribal poetries”

(TEDLOCK; ROTHENBERG, 1970, p.1),
published from 1970 to 1980, was co-edited by
Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock until 1976
when Rothenberg decided to leave the magazine to
foundeNew Wilderness Letter, yet another journal
of poetry. The New York based magazine was
intended to be published twice a year10, and could
be purchased by only $1.50 in the fall of 197011.
The publication and payment of contributore fall of
1970ne was intended to be publishedfrom the

Picture 3: Cover of Alcheringa #1 Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, at the

(fall of 1970)
University of Boston. The magazine started in
association with the Stony Brook Poetics Foundation, and was distributed to bookstores
by the Book People.

Alcheringa / Ethnopoetics succeeded two magazines: Stony Brook (edited by

George Quasha), and some / thing (co-edited by Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin).
Both Technicians of the Sacred and Stony Brook came out in the fall of 1968. In fact, an
excerpt of Rothenberg’s Technicians was published in that first issue, and his name was
listed in the magazine’s masthead as advisory editor specialising in “Ethnopoetics”.
Dennis Tedlock (2010) says Jerome Rothenberg coined the term after being urged by
George Quasha “to find a name for what he was doing”.

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

Tedlock remembers how he came to find both publications at Moe’s Books, in

Berkeley, US. At the time, he was translating a piece from Shiwi’ma, the language spoken
at the Pueblo of Zuni in New Mexico, and sent a scripted translation to Jerome
Rothenberg, whose response was “speedy, positive, and enormously encouraging”.
Although the Ethnopoetics section in Stony Brook 3-4 (1970, pp. 288-327) was already
full, Rothenberg added an announcement on the first page that Tedlock’s translation
would appear in the following issue, which turned out never being published. As good
luck would have it, Alcheringa / Ethnopoetics was conceived after this first interaction.
In the summer of 1970, Alcheringa was assembled and published in Santa Fe, California.
The following four issues of the Old Series (1971-1974) were published in New York
City. The eight issues of the New Series were sponsored by Boston University, which
made it possible for a minor magazine to reach the impressive circulation of 2,000 copies.
In 1980, the university withdrew funding without notice, bringing an end to the project.

Alcheringa gave voice to an exceptional group of scholars, poets, essayists,

translators, ethnologists, and critics over thirteen issues in the course of ten years. Apart
from contemporary poetics and poetry, a number of essays were published regarding the
problematics of translation, as well as interviews with poets and performers. The
magazine was able to discuss the sacred and poetic elements of language, introducing
tribal ontologies to the Western urban public.

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.

By “not […] a scholarly journal”, Tedlock and Rothenberg conceivably intended

to emphasise the practical spirit of the publication. Translators would generally provide
an introduction followed by the translation of the material itself. Similarly, the
anthologies compiled by Jerome Rothenberg always presented at least a short paragraph
with further information regarding a given translation.
 34

The magazine was created with the following purposes:

— by exploring the full range of man’s poetries, to enlarge our understanding

of what a poem may be

— to provide a ground for experiments in the translation of tribal/oral poetry

& a forum to discuss the possibilities & problems of translation from widely
divergent culture to encourage poets to participate actively in the translation of
tribal/ oral poetry

—to encourage ethnologists & linguists to do work increasingly ignored by

academic publications in their fields, namely to present the tribal poetries as
values in themselves rather than as ethnographic data

—to be a vanguard for the initiation of cooperative projects along these lines
between poets, ethnologists, songmen, & others

—to return to complex/ “primitive” systems of poetry as (intermedia)

performance, etc., & to explore ways of presenting these in translation

—to emphasize by example & commentary the relevance of tribal poetry to

where we are today: thus, in Gary Snyder’s words, “to master the archaic &
the primitive as models of basic nature-related cultures... knowing that we are
the first human beings in history to have all of man’s cultures available to our
study, & being free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek out a
larger identity”

—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

—to combat cultural genocide in all its manifestations.

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.

Primitive means complex

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) worked primarily in logic, and was deeply

concerned with the philosophy of language. In his Philosophical Investigations (2009), Commented [O23]: The two things are deeply intertwined in the
analytic tradition.
posthumously published, Wittgenstein (p. 2) discusses how Augustine (354-430), the
early Christian theologian, provides us a picture of the essence of human language. In his
Confessions, Augustine describes how he was able to express his own ideas by repeatedly
observing the elders naming objects and moving towards them. Eventually the theologian
figured that those objects were named after the sound uttered by the elders when pointing
at them. Further, voice inflection and body motions can express our state of mind when
 35

seeking, rejecting, or avoiding something. After reading this description, Wittgenstein

formulates that every word must carry a meaning, which is naturally associated to such
word. Therefore, it can only be the object for which the word stands. At this point, the
Austrian-British philosopher imagines a ‘complete primitive language’ (vollständige
primitive Sprache) of just four words, whose purpose is solely to assist the
communication between a builder and his assistant.

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an

assistant B. A is building with building-stones (Bausteinen): there are blocks,
pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which
A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words
“block”, “pillar”, “slab” and “beam”. A calls them out; – B brings the stone he
has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call (WITTGENSTEIN, 2009, p. 2).

Both Augustine and Wittgenstein describe an instructional system of

communication that employs the linguistic sign as we know from Ferdinand de Saussure’s
Course in General Linguistics (2011), with the concept of meaning and a sound-image.
A sign is a recognisable combination of a signifier (significant, the form which the sign
takes) with a particular signified (signifié, the concept it represents).
In Augustine’s description: “as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper
places […], I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified” (Confessions, I.
Commented [O24]: É interessante notar que essa não é a
concepção do Saussure. Essa é a versão que foi empregada pelo
Jakobson e pela semiótica. Para o Saussure no Course o significante
é psíquico-mental, um tipo de vocalização mental, e não algo
impresso. Mas na literatura todos nós simplesmente aceitamos a
leitura do Jakobson (que Barthes e galera levaram adiante). Não há
prob, só é legal estar ciente disso.

8., apud WITTGENSTEIN, 2009, p.2). The language exposed in Philosophical

Investigations (2009) presupposes an established labour division, hence the
communicational roles.

The dialog offered by Wittgenstein raises a question of plausibility: why would

a community invent words solely for the purpose of building? It must be, necessarily, a
community of builders and helpers. In addition, both characters would not be aware of
any other communication skill other than asking and delivering "cubes, columns, tiles and
beams." Actually, we are dealing with a language game (Sprachspiel) that can help us
elucidate three topics that are central to this research: language, production of meaning,
and the notion of 'primitive language'.

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.

During his tenure at the University of Cambridge, Professor Wittgenstein used

to dictate notes to his collaborator and lover, Francis Skinner. In 1958, Rush Rheesem
(1905-1989) assembled these notes in two volumes: The Blue Book (lectures from 1933
to 1934) and The Brown Book (lectures from 1934 to 1935). Rheesem (1958, p. 23) states
that the notes were part of Wittgenstein’s preliminary studies to Philosophical
Investigations, published in 1953. We can read an early account of this imaginary
language in an original document preserved in the library archives of the University of
Pittsburgh: “let us imagine a society in which this is the only system of language” (p.1).
However, in the published version of The Brown Book (1969, p. 81), the author actually
refers to “people living in a primitive state of society”. Despite the subsequent
philosophical development in the course of the book, we must now argue the
anthropological fact that populations of simple material culture would never present a
simple language.

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 conviction of a ‘primitive’ language is commonly associated to the idea of

primitive – less developed – people, one that had been extensively defended by Western
social scientists by the end of the nineteenth century and all the way through the twentieth
century.
 37

The case in point is provided by Kimball Young, grandson of Brigham Young,

founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), in his Social
Psychology: an analysis of social behaviour (1930). In chapter 10, ‘Language and social
interaction’ (p. 203-232), Kimball Young, who became the president of the American
Sociological Association in 1945, contends:

It has been a common notion that the language of primitives is peculiarly

inefficient, that these peoples reveal their mental inferiority in their language.
It is held that agglutinative types of language are less capable of expressing
abstract thought than our own; and it is further thought that there is some
parallel between the language of primitive peoples and that of small children
(YOUNG, 1930, p. 210).

According to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), 5 million

Indians lived in Brazil in the fourteenth century, before European colonisation. They were
divided in 1,400 tribes, and spoke 1,300 different languages. For being considered
inferiors and in need of salvation, these peoples were victim of cultural genocide. The
missionaries and European colonisers never attempted to preserve the linguistic richness,
customs, myths, folktales, or botanic knowledge of the natives.

By “agglutinative types of language”, sociologist Kimball Young infers that the

morphological typology12 of some languages accuse the primitive limitations of their
speakers. Examples of agglutinative languages are: Nahuatl (Aztec/Mexico); Huasteca
(Mayan/Mexico); Mapudungun (Mapuche Indians from Chile and Argentina); Salish
(tribes from the west coast of Canada); Turkish; Japanese, Tupi-Guarani itself, and all the
languages spoken by Native Americans. The comparison of the “language of primitive
peoples” to “small children” makes apparent Young’s determination in disseminating
slanders, as if the aforementioned languages exist solely to convey enough
communication to carry out chores, similarly to the a ‘complete primitive language’
imagined by Wittgenstein.

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.

As demonstrated in this section, the Avant-guard movement of Ethnopoetics

offers a novel approach to the primitive13 by challenging Western aforementioned ill-
advised suppositions by proposing that “primitive means complex” (ROTHENBERG,
1985, p. xxv).

Ethnopoets and ethnotranslators have not reproduced tribal poetries in order to

demonstrate how far we have supposedly grown and developed as cultural society.
Neither has presented Amerindian poets as ‘noble savages’ and most responsive to nature,
patronising and downgrading their sophistication in comparison to literate Western poets.

Jerome and Diane Rothenberg write a didactical preface to Symposium of the

Whole: a range of discourse toward an ethnopoetics (1983), in which they describe how Commented [O26]: Pô, simpósio do buraco é fogo...

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).

The movement of Ethnopoetics has raised awareness to the Western ill-gotten

gains from ethnicities by dialoguing and ultimately recognizing the correlation between
contemporary poetic works and the diversity of their poetries. It has also challenged the
Western canon by re-evaluating the sense of ‘primitive’, proven as imperative for
postcolonial studies and the literature of the 20th and 21st century. It is a defiance against
the primacy of Western tradition simply by considering the other as part of a ‘symposium
of the whole’, where Western tradition is not privileged over other traditions; instead, it
is in open dialogue with foreign traditions.

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:

The Aztecs benefited from meticulous chroniclers, eloquent poets, and

philosophers. Thankfully, we have an abundance of writings from this time
period, and these give us plenty of evidence of the sophistication of Aztec
poetry, which was known as in xóchitl, in cuicatl, or flowers, songs.

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.

A vast literature is available with vivid descriptions of Aztec feasts by

overwhelmed conquerors, friars, and historians. There are pictoglyphic books, codices,
and mural paintings with detailed pictures of priests, poets, musicians, gods and
goddesses. According to Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World, an anthology by Miguel Leon-
Portilla (2000), the paints illustrate the topics of oral poems:

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):

I sing the pictures of the books

And see them widely known,
I am a precious bird
For I make the books speak,
There in the house of the painted books

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

The thesis was able to provide a comprehensive review of works in linguistics

and literature from the first half of the twentieth century, in order to retrace the readings
of Jerome Rothenberg prior to the development of his theory of ethnopoetics.

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).

Therefore, ethnopoetics emerges as an analytical technique:

To the recording of texts as massive documentation, with linguistics as a means

to the ends of Ethnography and aesthetic appreciation, we can now add […]
the influence of structural linguistics on our ability to perceive poetic structure
(HYMES, 1981, p. 59).

This is the basis for Rothenberg’s concept of anthology as a new ground,

composed of pre-existing elements, and collected by means of constant keys, against
which all disparate materials can be measured” (ROTHENBERG, 1985, p. xxvii). A work
oriented by the analysis of speech acts with implicit patterns that allow the reader to
appreciate the “artistry and subtlety of meaning otherwise invisible” (HYMES, 2003, p.
96).

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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