{"id":8221,"date":"2012-04-29T13:39:57","date_gmt":"2012-04-29T17:39:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=8221"},"modified":"2012-04-29T13:39:57","modified_gmt":"2012-04-29T17:39:57","slug":"jr-prague-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/jr-prague-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"JR Prague Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview with Jerome Rothenberg<\/h2>\n
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27.04.2012<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u00a9 Petr_Machan_PragueWritersFestival_2012<\/div>\n
Jerome Rothenberg at the Prague Writers’ Festival<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Jerome Rothenberg<\/a> was a guest at this year\u2019s Prague Writers\u2019 Festival<\/a> and the acclaimed American poet spoke to me about his experience translating German and Czech poets, giving Nezval a voice in English and not speaking Yiddish with Paul Celan.<\/p>\n

Literalab<\/strong>: You\u2019ve translated a number of German poets such as Paul Celan<\/a>, and I was wondering what that experience was like and what effect it had on your own poetry.<\/p>\n

Jerome Rothenberg<\/strong>: When I do translation a lot of it works into my own sense of poetry and rhythm. Particularly with Celan there was a sense of a dialogue. I came on Celan, G\u00fcnter Grass<\/a> and others in the mid to late 1950s. I had been in Germany with the US Army and my German when I came back was as good as it would be.<\/p>\n

I started using it to do translation because I like translating. I had published some translations, actually rhyming translations, of an earlier German poet named Erich Kessler and got a message from Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights<\/a> books asking me if I\u2019d be interested in doing a translation of some new young German poets, which was interesting.<\/p>\n

So I think I was the first translator of Celan, the first of Grass, and I also translated Ingeborg Bachmann<\/a>. It was called New Young German Poets<\/em> (1959) and was the first collection I published. It came out about a year before my first book of poetry so the two things work together.<\/p>\n

Literalab<\/strong>: And what was it like meeting Celan?<\/p>\n

Rothenberg<\/strong>: Well, it was curious, and I\u2019ve written about it a little. It was in 1967, so that was eight years after New Young German Poets<\/em> came out. Someone had suggested for a small American press that I do a bigger book of Celan and I don\u2019t know that I was really wanting to do that. Celan\u2019s poetry had gotten more difficult, in some ways much more interesting, but I did want to meet Celan.<\/p>\n

We were going to Paris and he was teaching at the \u00c9cole normale so I wrote him there. We went to a nearby caf\u00e9 and we had a conversation for a few hours \u2013 and as I tell the story I don\u2019t know how much I have elaborated it since then. My German was not too good and his English was not too good, although we had both done translations from those languages.<\/p>\n

He was interrogating me about other people who wanted to do translations of his work. One of the things he was emphasizing was the Jewishness and not-Jewishness of the different translators. I carry away a memory of that being one of the focal points of the discussion. Then we left the caf\u00e9 and I asked him whether he spoke Yiddish and he said yes, though he had really learnt it during the war.<\/p>\n

So it was curious because I said I could speak Yiddish and he could speak Yiddish, and he was asking me questions about the Jewishness and so forth, and we had a language in common but never used it.<\/p>\n

continued here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview with Jerome Rothenberg 27.04.2012 \u00a9 Petr_Machan_PragueWritersFestival_2012 Jerome Rothenberg at the Prague Writers’ Festival Jerome Rothenberg was a guest at this year\u2019s Prague Writers\u2019 Festival and the acclaimed American poet spoke to me about...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,830,91,103],"tags":[433],"class_list":["post-8221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","category-poet","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-jerome-rothenberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8221"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8228,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8221\/revisions\/8228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}