Jerome Rothenberg, a poet, translator and anthologist whose efforts to bring English-language readers into contact with creative traditions far outside the Western establishment — a field he called ethnopoetics — had an enormous impact on world literature and made him a hero to rock musicians like Nick Cave, Jim Morrison and Warren Zevon, died on April 21 at his home in Encinitas, Calif. He was 92.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Matthew Rothenberg.
By ethnopoetics, Mr. Rothenberg meant poetry from Indigenous and other non-Western cultures, often rendered in ways very different from the strictly textual, including oral, performance, ritual and myth.
He introduced the idea in 1967 with his book “Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries From Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania,” a wide-ranging anthology that introduced readers to ancient Egyptian coronation events, Comanche peyote songs and Gabonese death rites.
Such work, he said, was just as complex and vibrant as the Western canon, if not more so. He went on to deepen his argument across scores of books, many of them anthologies, in which he wove together different traditions — Jewish mysticism, American Indian, Dada — and then connected and contextualized them with extensive commentary.
“I’ve expanded my searches into forms of poetry that have been hidden from our view but have much to teach us about the sources and resources of poetry that would allow us to fill out the picture,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2017. “I also believe that the new forms of poetry developed by our own experimental poets can allow us to see a greater range of poetry in places and cultures distant from us.”
“Technicians of the Sacred” quickly found its place on college literature reading lists and has been reissued, with new material, in two subsequent editions. It became a core text for poets and musicians looking to explore ritual and meaning beyond the conventions of their genres.
Mr. Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors, loved the book so much that he was reportedly buried with a copy. When Mr. Zevon moved in with his future wife, ”Technicians of the Sacred” was the only book he brought, relying on its hundreds of entries for ideas.
“For someone always looking for inspiration, they were an incredible resource,” Mr. Cave said in a phone interview. “I could look and find ideas that worked beautifully in rock ’n’ roll.”
Mr. Rothenberg published several books of his own poetry, but he also saw translation and anthologizing as creative acts in themselves. He said that his anthologies were not an attempt to create a new canon, but instead were selections meant to highlight hidden connections among seemingly disparate works.
“He was the ultimate hyphenated person: poet-critic-anthologist-translator,” Charles Bernstein, a poet and professor emeritus of English at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview.
Mr. Rothenberg insisted on performance as a frequent part of what he called “total translation,” and even late into his 80s he could be found onstage reading, often in venues far removed from the standard poetry recital. In 2017, he presented several poems during a burlesque-vaudeville show in San Diego sponsored by an organization called the Poetry Brothel.
His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and he wrote several books exploring the enthnopoetics of Jewish mysticism, starting with “Poland/1931,” a collection of his poetry that he published in 1970, and continuing through “Khurbn” (1989), about the Holocaust, and “The Burning Babe” (2005).
“Poland/1931” was a celebration of what Mr. Rothenberg called “Jewish mystics, thieves and madmen,” and he performed parts of it in jazz clubs and other venues, sometimes accompanied by wailing voices.
It was also, he added, an often irreverent look at juxtapositions in his own life, as the son of Eastern European immigrants who spent two years living among the Seneca Indians of western New York State, where his wife, Diane, an anthropologist, was conducting research. In one poem, “Cokboy,” he wrote:
saddlesore I came
a jew among
the indians
vot em I doink in dis strange place
mit deez pipple mit strange eyes
could be it’s trouble
could be could be
Jerome Dennis Rothenberg was born on Dec. 11, 1931, in New York City. His parents, Morris and Estelle (Lichtenstein) Rothenberg, operated a dry goods store in the Bronx, where Jerome grew up speaking Yiddish at home.
He received a bachelor’s degree in literature from the City College of New York in 1952 and a master’s in the same subject from the University of Michigan a year later.
He married Diane Brodatz in 1952. Along with their son, she survives him, as do two granddaughters.
Mr. Rothenberg spent two years in Germany with the Army, then returned to New York, where he began writing poetry and continued translating. In 1959, he published “New Young German Poets,” his first book and the first time the work of Günter Grass, Paul Celan and others appeared in English.
He mixed with other poets in the vibrant New York scene of the 1960s, crossing paths, and sharing influences, with writers in the Language, Deep Image and Fluxus movements.
After teaching at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan in the late 1960s, he lived with his wife and young son on the Seneca Nation reservation from 1972 to 1974.
Mr. Rothenberg later taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the State University of New York at Binghamton, but he spent most of his career at the University of California, San Diego.
He eventually took emeritus status. But instead of slowing down, he used his newfound free time to increase his productivity. Over the course of his career he wrote more than 80 books and recorded more than a dozen spoken-word albums.
At his death he had more titles on the way. In June, Tzadik Records will release “In the Shadow of a Mad King,” a recording of Mr. Rothenberg’s poems about Donald Trump, and in October, the University of California Press plans to publish “The Serpent and the Fire: Poetries of the Americas From Origins to Present,” co-written with Javier Taboada.
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