RESEARCH PROJECT PROPOSAL

Ritual and myth in Aztec oral arts: Ethnopoetics variations in Jerome

Rothenbergs translations.

Adviser: Izabela Guerra Leal, Ph.D.

Joint adviser: Otvio Tavares, Ph.D.
Student: Mrcio de Carvalho.

Introduction

This research intends to review the development of the Ethnopoetics

movement, an ethicist-aesthetic practice in contemporary American poetics, led

by Jerome Rothenberg, particularly the anthology of Aztec oral poems. We

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, we intend to

investigate how Jerome Rothenberg redesigned the concept of anthology, as

well as the theoretical background for Ethnopoetics.

Justification

A number of literary works is inspired by indigenous verbal arts,

considered a resource of aesthetic renewal. The indigenous costumes, such as the

anthropophagy practice amongst the Tupinamb tribe, which is far beyond any

literary matter, raised a multitude of inquiries regarding the relationship

between the self and the other.

It has become relevant to investigate the extent to which the study and

translation of indigenous verbal arts function as a source of critical and aesthetic

reflection, demanding the attention of anthropologists, ethnologists, linguists,

and also of poets. Nowadays, we perceive a group of scholars that is suited to

theorise the rich Amerindian cultural heritage, which is still little known and

rarely published.
 The "poetics of the forest", or "literatures of the forest", have always been

present in 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, and even when it happened, the stories were treated as

"literary texts" with a particular poetic structure, which means: translations that

privileged the content rather than the stylistic form Amerindian poetry.

This is the theoretical background to which the aesthetic movement of

ethnopoetics becomes relevant. Under the tutelage of Jereome Rothenberg, who

coined the term in 1968, the movement consists in a group of poets/translators

who are 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. More

importantly, these poems will not resemble Homer nor Shakespeare because they

shall not follow the high European culture standards for poetry.

Problem statement

In his two seminal texts entitled Totality and Infinity (1994) and Otherwise

than being: or beyond essence (1999), the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas

described how conventional philosophy operates from an ontological

presupposition. In other words, Levinas suggests that philosophical frameworks

prioritize the self, adopting an anthropocentric, humanistic, or self-orientated

mind-set. His significant contribution may be seen in the reconfiguration of

poetry towards an ethical, other-oriented approach: the translation 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 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:

1. Why Aztec poetry lacks a foreign appealing in traditional

anthologies?

2. What are the characteristics of Ethnopoetics that offer a novel intake

on Aztec poetry translation?

Objectives

The long term goal is to provide a comprehensive review of the

anthology of Aztec poetry translation, undertaken by Jerome Rothenberg (1968,

1972). In order to meet the aforementioned goal, the study has the following sub-

objectives:

1) Investigate the ethnography of Aztec civilization;

2) Consider classical anthologies of Aztec poetry;

3) To consider the Ethnopoetics movement, specially their

understanding of ethical translation;

4) To review the Aztec poetry anthology by Jerome Rothenberg,

presented in Technicians of the Sacred (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin
(1972).
Literature review

In Search of the Primitive (PAUL, 1986) is a valuable earlier text to start

thinking about how Ethnopoetics challenged the Western canon by re-evaluating

the primitive. Such re-evaluation demonstrates why it is imperative for

contemporary poetry. Furthermore, A Review of Ethnopoetics (TURNER,

1978) further elucidates the political environment of Ethnopoetics and how it

challenges the primacy of Western tradition using its attention to the other as part

of a symposium of the whole, as stated by Jerome Rothenberg, where Western

tradition is not privileged over other traditions; instead, the Western tradition is

put into a dialogue with other traditions.

The contributions of Jerome Rothenberg for the Avant-guard movement,

by challenging Western-centred standards for poetry, are discussed by Rosa

Alcal (2004, p. 8):

transcription, translation, and performance, rather than merely

derivative of or subordinate to original texts or dependent upon written
sources, are foundational and foremost in the development of
innovative poetries. Moreover, these innovations are the direct result
of each poets engagement with tradition as an evolving dialogue
dependent upon social relations. In order to understand the ways in
which poetry emerges from and is the result of translation,
transcription, and performance, conventional ideas regarding
authorship and originality are challenged.

Rothenbergs pioneer intake on the ethnography of Amerindian verbal

arts challenges 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 seventh issue of Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics (the collaborative

magazine which became the voice of the movement) presents a brief anthology

of Language Poetry compiled by Ron Silliman, including the works of nine poets.

Silliman (1975, p. 104) points the importance of such anthology not to the quality
of one author, but in the tendency in the work of many, which challenges the

role of originality.

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)

Sherwoods 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.

The work of these poets/translators encourages a cultural interaction

between people and texts. Due to the inherent openness of Ethnopoetics, there

had been an effort to locate it within the paradigms of literary schools. Sharon

Nelsons dissertation, Jerome Rothenberg: Technician of the Sacred (1980), argues

that the body of poetry by Jerome Rothenberg is actually a return from

Modernism to Romanticism:

The basis of Ethnopoetics is the belief that poetry is a significant event

at the centre of and centered in a vision of the universe which admits
the possibility of sacrality of everything; and this point of view is
believed to be shared with or parallel to that world-view common to
 archaic cultures or those which still retain tribal roots and rituals
(NELSON, 1980, p. 70).

There is 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 is the case (according to Ethnopoetics) of

Ezra Pounds use of Chinese poetry, and T. S. Elliots use of Buddhas 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.

Regarding the term archaic, mentioned by Sharon Nelson (1980, p. 70),

Rothenberg defines it as:

(1) the earlier phases of the so-called higher civilizations, where poetry
& voice still hadnt separated or where the new writing was used for
setting down what the voice had already made; (2) contemporary
remnant cultures in which acculturation has significantly disrupted
the primitive modes; & (3) a coverall term for primitive, early high,
& remnant (ROTHENBERG, 1985, p. 24).

This primitive poet by no means lacks the ability to grasp the empirical

differences of things. Rothenberg seems pleased with Ernst Cassirers An Essay

on Man (1972):

Although, in their conception of nature and life these differences are

obliterated by a stronger feeling: the deep conviction of a fundamental
and indelible solidarity of life that bridges over the multiplicity and
variety of their single forms (CASSIRER, 1972, p. 186).

The aforementioned is true to Aztec poetry, as the voice of a poet blends

to an eagle, and life is felt as an unbroken and continuous whole. Jerome
Rothenberg named this poet as technician of the sacred.
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