In his 1995 poem Postlude to Seedings, Jerome Rothenberg invoked Walt Whitman in calling for the poet who should “arise among us” to be “the great translator & the joiner/of the whole”. Rothenberg himself, who has died aged 92, could justifiably have laid claim to that title.
As a poet, anthologiser and translator, he brought together scattered acts of the imagination from the past. His belief that “everything is possible in poetry” led him to map avant gardes both ancient and modern, as a means of showing “that our earlier ‘western’ attempts at definition represent a failure of perception we no longer have to endure”.
Born in Brooklyn, Jerome was the son of Polish parents, Esther (nee Lichtenstein) and Morris Rothenberg, who had emigrated to the US on the day of his grandfather’s death – a literal and symbolic break with his forebears’ Hassidism.
Growing up in the Bronx, where he spoke only Yiddish for several years, Rothenberg graduated from the City College of New York with an English degree in 1952. A master’s degree at Michigan was followed by US army service in Mainz, Germany (1953-55) and further postgraduate study at Columbia University, New York, until 1959.
By this time, Rothenberg had immersed himself in the American language adventure forged by William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, which flashed through the contemporary liberations of Beat and Black Mountain writing.
The second world war had been the defining event for his generation of poets, and Rothenberg shared their need to take what he saw as “drastic steps in looking for another form of expression”, in the face of “the corrupt language handed down to us, and connected with that disastrous period from which we were then emerging”.
Rothenberg’s first published work, a group of translations of poems from German, appeared in the Hudson Review in 1957. Thereafter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti commissioned a further sequence of translations, which his City Lights Press published as New Young German Poets in 1958, so marking the first appearance in English of figures such as Paul Celan and Günter Grass.
During this period, Rothenberg founded Hawk’s Well Press, publishing works by Robert Kelly and Diane Wakoski, as well as his first volume, White Sun Black Sun (1960). Complementing these activities, Rothenberg edited the magazines Poems from the Floating World and Some/thing, which drew attention to a rising generation of American voices, including David Antin, Jackson Mac Low and Paul Blackburn.
His work through the 1960s variously reflected his experiments with automatic writing, indeterminacy and collage in books such as The Seven Hells of the Jigoku Zoshi (1962) and Sightings (1968). Rothenberg’s growing concern for redefining the relationships between the primitive, the sacred and the modern led to the first of his seminal anthologies, Technicians of the Sacred (also 1968), which presented not only songs, but pictures, sound poetry, rituals and dreams with a huge range.
In 1952 he had married the anthropologist Diane Brodatz. They coined the term Ethnopoetics, a method of cultural investigation without reference to a proving centre, common to appraisals of the ethnic and the “other”.
From the perspective of the Allegany Seneca Reservation in western New York state, where the Rothenbergs had relocated in order to study Seneca Indian poetry, the west could no longer be regarded as a value system to be coercively maintained. This was borne out in their collection Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas, and a magazine, Alcheringa, co-founded with Dennis Tedlock, and devoted to oral poetries.
Drawing the incantations of non-technological societies alongside work of the avant garde, striking commonalities and secret generative links emerged, as, for example, in the African strain running through dadaism, and the echoes of the mystical Hebraic numerology, Gematria, in the experimental word-play of the OuLiPo novelists, including Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau. More significantly, Rothenberg demonstrated that the aesthetic sophistication of these archaic works cast eurocentric assessments of tribal practices into doubt.
This was achieved through his development of a system of “total translation”, whereby complex metaphors and “vocables” could be embedded within a web of cultural origins. Shamanic forms as alien to the English language as Navajo horse-blessing songs, with their nasal distortions and guttural cries, were rendered as visual analogues on the page, and given fantastic life via Rothenberg’s thick Bronx accent and hunched, rocking body: the embodiment of poet as prophet, and marvellous to behold.
Further anthologies followed. While America, A Prophecy (1973) examined the nation’s cultures through its poetries from pre-Columbian times, A Big Jewish Book (1978) uncovered sacred and secular Judaic sources, and Symposium of the Whole (1983) gathered statements from a trans-generational company of poets, in order to affirm that the “revolution of the word” is, to Rothenberg, “simultaneously a revolution of the mind and a revolution in the world itself”. In each case, Rothenberg unleashed works from prescriptive chronology and genre into rhizomic dialogue – a network more akin to a lattice than a tree – making of the assemblage what he described as “an expressive form” with “no discontinuity between that and the other writing that I did as a poet”.
Concurrent with this interest, he began to explore his own ancestral themes and the lost world of Jewish Europe in works such as the surreal vaudeville of Poland/1931, published in 1970, A Book of Testimony, published in 1971, and Esther K Comes to America (1931), published in 1974.
The series culminated in Khurbn (1989), the Yiddish term for the Holocaust, and Fourteen Stations (2002), which drew on the Hebrew numerological system of Gematria as a distancing mechanism for recording the stupefying horror of the Nazi concentration camps without recourse to cliche. The result, as with all of Rothenberg’s work, was emotional intensification.
After a variety of academic appointments, mostly in California and New York, from 1988 he was professor of visual arts and literature at the University of California, San Diego, and then emeritus. With Pierre Joris (vols 1 and 2) and Jeffery C Robinson (vol 3) he was a co-editor of what became a colossal four-volume survey of international modernism, Poems for the Millennium (1995-2013), emphasising a restless search for new forms of language, consciousness and social-biological relationships.
With his own poetry widely translated, Rothenberg continued to demonstrate his commitment to art as an instrument of change in “how we think and act as human beings ... because the consequences of closure & closed mind have been & continue to be horrendous in the world we know,” as he wrote in Pre-faces (1981).
He is survived by his wife and their son, Matthew.
• Jerome Rothenberg, poet, born 11 December 1931; died 21 April 2024
• This article was amended on 11 May 2024. Jerome Rothenberg’s mother was Esther rather than Estelle, and Khurbn is the Yiddish, rather than Hebrew, term for the Holocaust.
