In Yiddish, khurbn is the word that says “total destruction,” by analogy with the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Antiquity and of the diaspora that ensued, knowing both Golden Ages and massacres. The Anglophone world designates this event under the term “Jewish Holocaust,” a semantic error on the vocable, and one that to my ears sounds indecent. For there was never a holocaust, neither on the side of the victims, who did not seek to immolate themselves, who had not chosen kiddush — ha-shem, death in the name of God, nor on the side of the executioners, who did not seek to sacrifice, but to annihilate. There was no holocaust; there was extermination.
By titling his cycle of poems Khurbn, Jerome Rothenberg gives back to the victims and the survivors the right to designate at least their own death by the word of their choice, and gives them back the dignity that this supposes.
In 1987, thirteen years after the publication of his book inspired by his ancestors, Poland/1931, a country where he had never set foot, Jerome Rothenberg went to Poland and in particular to the small town of Ostrów Mazowiecka, from which his parents had emigrated in 1920.
In Germany, after the war, where he is stationed at Mainz, in the fifties, he is already translating Celan, Günter Grass, among others. Back in the United States, he founds poetry journals such as Poems from the Floating World & Something.
His first volume of Poetry is titled Black and White (1960).
In 1972, leaving New York, he settles in the Allegany Seneca Reservation. For decades, Jerome Rothenberg was the figurehead of the American literary avant-garde. His poetry embraced and deployed the entire world, out of interest in diversity, multiplicity, the métissage of beings and cultures. An obstinate and tenacious refusal of any racial purity whatsoever. An approach he titled Ethno-poetry.
A series of anthologies — Technicians of the Sacred (1968), Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972), Poems from Africa, America, Asia and Oceania — mark the following period, as does A Big Jewish Book: Poems and other visions from Tribal Times to the Present, revised and reissued under the title Exiled in the Word (1977-1988). What was he seeking in these languages, metaphors, sensibility, poetic visions — what elsewhere? Can the poet’s unconscious know it?
Of a creativity, a fecundity, a luxuriance, Rothenberg’s poetry traversed this period like a hurricane, drawing in its wake numerous disciples during those turbulent years when “action painting,” “poetry performance,” and “street theater” inscribed a vitality unknown until then in the American artistic landscape — a vitality that Europe admired, but that it did not have the audacity to adopt.
As for me, from the age of twenty, I had begun to translate the Yiddish poetry of the Khurbn, of annihilation. Unconsciousness? Obsession? Who knows? Yiddish poetry after the Khurbn could not escape it. The annihilation of the people, the smothering and the definitive condemnation of its language in the gas chambers and in the exterminations by bullets doomed both the one and the other to total annihilation. And yet Yiddish literature, and above all poetry, was never so fecund. They inscribed themselves in a millennial tradition, that of the prophets of the Bible in their incessant quarrels with men and with their God, that of the trials brought by rabbis and rebbes — the most famous being that of Kotsk — against a rancorous and ferocious God, whom the prayers nonetheless invoked as merciful and benevolent.
The Lamentations on the pogroms, the massacres, and the expulsions had created a veritable canon of writing. The Yiddish poets, nourished on these writings from their childhood, could not abolish or obliterate it. And above all, faced with a deaf and mute world, they had no other interlocutor equal to their sufferings than this mythical God to apostrophize, to whom to hurl their anathemas — this God who, for most of the Yiddish poets, as for Jacob Glatstein, was “the God of their unbelief.”
Chance (?) had willed that I be a student, then a professor of American literature at the Sorbonne. A part of Rothenberg’s work was therefore known to me. The whole of it was impossible for me to master.
But already Rothenberg was entering a new phase of creation, more intimate, more personal, more secret: Poems for the Game of Silence, published by Bourgois in 19781, and Poland/312, among others.
I still live under the shock, the upheaval caused in me by the publication in 1966 of Khurbn. I have not ceased to translate and retranslate these poems, each title of which is in Yiddish, while continuing to translate from Yiddish other poems of the khurbn, stimulated by the fracture, the wrenching apart between the two poetries, in languages and traditions so different.
After having poetically traversed the world, Rothenberg returns to this non-place, to this blind point in the immensity of the universe, to Ostrów Mazowiecka.
With Khurbn, Rothenberg makes his voice heard alongside authors such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, prose writers such as Primo Levi or Robert Antelme, who sought to name the unnameable at the heart of the history of our time. But given his trajectory through universal literature and his diverse sensibilities, forms, Rothenberg forged a writing that pertains to no preexisting norm. Rothenberg forged, out of all his previous experiences, his personal canon.
He has no privileged metaphorical interlocutor like the Yiddish poets. The presences he addresses, in the familiar second person, are absences. Absences that he cherishes. What is prodigious is the diversity, semantic, lexical, including vocables foreign to American English, like German or Yiddish.
In his deploration over the abolished language, the severed language, the very instrument of the poet comes first. This shifting, disparate, composite, heterogeneous bouquet that Rothenberg composed all along his trajectory comes to trouble and to upend the reader. This unknown and murdered language, he addresses it in the familiar.
“Disaster in the mother tongue its words emptied of speech.”
The hollowing-out of the places where this language had currency, familiar, maternal, fraternal, with all the specific sensations that are part of it — the smells, the tastes, the apple, the cinnamon, the honey — the gestures, the intonations, the idiomatisms that run through it, specific or adopted from Europe, for Yiddish is Europe, in its way, as Kafka writes. This whole continent dies under the Nazi boot, and with it all that is human in man. All these annihilations, all these hollowings-out, all these abysses, he addresses them in the familiar.
What shall I tell you, sweet city? That the sickness is still in you That the dead go on dying that there is no end to dying?”
As for his bestially murdered uncle, he can say his suffering and his degradation only in his own language, dead though it is with him:
Dayn mames bruder farshvundn in dem khurbn un muz in mayn eygenem loshn redn loz mikh es redn durkh dir dos vort khurbn.
Mayne oygn zaynen blind fun mayn khurbn ikh bin yetst a peyger.3
In these three lines, the repetition four times of the word “khurbn” proclaims that it is the only adequate term, the vocable that says everything. He transmits it to his nephew as an inheritance.
In the polyphony of this writing, which mingles rhythms, verse, and prose, two tonalities dominate. The one elegiac and tragic, evoking the effacement of a world, loved, to whom he addresses himself and whom he addresses in the familiar, or who addresses him in the familiar.
The other brutal, full of anathemas (di toyte kloles) and pornographic curses, with scenes of pedophilia whose mawkish aspect dissimulates the basest instincts, the poet recoiling before no audacity, neither metaphorical nor realist. A degrading, scatological lexical field,
“women squatting on long boards to shit ‘like birds perched on telephone wires’ who smear each other with droppings.”
A foul, brazen, indecent language, which dehumanizes, animalizes beings, making them devour one another while stripping themselves of the vital indispensable, gold-panners for petty coins, as for crumbs of food that might perhaps have been salvific.
All the aspects of the khurbn are evoked in this cycle of poems. From horror to the lament and the elegy, to the anathema, from the uprising to the slaughter.
Rothenberg pushes the audacity to a total dehumanization of man — not of that spiritual being we like to see in ourselves, but a dehumanization of corporeality, by exposing to the air the bowels, the guts, the liver where an eye lodges, the lungs, the sex, stripping it of the skin, that protective membrane of its dignity.
The human species has lost its face. It is no more than shredded entrails without ties. A return to the tohu-bohu.
All that these times demanded or the shit of the poem Poured onto the wall and the floor The sex shredded genitals lacerated by the dogs’ claws”… No more a mystery the naked bodies then the bodies Deboned and rotten… … ” their long entrails hanging…
There then poses itself to the poet the essential question… what struggle his rage for beauty must wage in order to make a poem so ugly that it drives out the other voices.
For only this type of poem, that of Rothenberg, by its unheard-of violence, remains to save man within man, to save the human species by unveiling the extreme of suffering and of “ugliness.”
When, at his beginnings, Rothenberg burst forth in all directions and burst the world apart with him, he could not foresee where this frenzied race was leading him. But when the time of reckonings comes, in reading the whole of his writings, a diversity, but also a flawless coherence in the approach, strikes the reader. The multiplicity, the diversity, the métissage, the mixtures resulted in refuting forever the deadly purity.
This is what is called a destiny, this is what is called making an œuvre.
And the author underlines it himself: “I had not realized,” he writes, “that (Ostrów Mazowiecka) was some twenty kilometers from Treblinka…”; from the poet’s confrontation with the annihilation of his family was born Khurbn. “the first poems I heard at Treblinka were for me the clearest message of the very reason for my writing poetry. They are also the absolute refutation of ‘one can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz.’”
Notes
Poems translated by Didier Pemerle, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Jacques Roubaud.↩︎
Translated by Jean Portante and Zoë Skoulding, Paris, Caractères 2012.↩︎
“Your mother’s brother who disappeared in the khurbn must speak in my own language, let me through you say the word khurbn. My eyes are blind in my khurbn, I am now a carcass.”↩︎