Revisiting Technicians of the Sacred

Talking with a professor the other week, I came to learn that, when broken down, the term “translatio” (“across/carry”) is a classical rhetorical term for the Greek word, “metaphor (“across/bear”). In light of this knowledge, I came to appreciate the brilliance and hilarity of The Tablets, a work that owns not only its expression, but also its origin/inspiration and its interpretive/critical reception. By confining the terrain of meaning to the text itself, Schwerner suggests, “It’s all right here…everything to feel, everything to understand…it’s all present in the text.” But, it isn’t. The Tablets shows us ellipses, stutterings, gaps galore. And so it seems there is much to be “carried across” within a single text, a single voice, a single poetic vision.

Revisiting The Technicians of the Sacred for this week, I was struck by Rothenberg’s prefatory note that “[…] the carry-over (by translation or interpretation) necessarily distorts where it chooses some part of the whole that it can meaningfully deal with”(xx). So, it seems that the carry-over, the metaphor, the translation…any re-articulation or re-presentation...will necessarily change the “original.” In class, like a swarm of bees, we have hovered around the idea of the “original” as a mere construct that makes translation possible. Thus, what is altered in a translation is simply an illusory notion, the notion of an original and definitive starting point. What does it mean to re-articulate, re-present an illusion? In a self-reflexive, tongue-in-cheek manner, Schwerner forces us to question this question…and, thereby, to meditate upon our motivations, interests, and tendencies as translators…and in this meditation lies the “honey” of it all.

It was fun and enlightening to review The Technicians of the Sacred this weekend. I enjoyed remembering how I approached the text the first time (my notes still in the margins) and to recognize how my perspective on Rothenberg, ethnopoetics, translation, and this class in general has changed. I looked over my marginal notes, all marked by a frustration with paradoxes and discrepancies which I now understand are necessary, and I realized that I must’ve condensed the discourse of ethnopoetics to the level of the primitive in an attempt to understand, even dominate, it. But, what is seemingly primitive (the ethnopoetic debates) is, indeed, complex, not to mention humbling in its provocative limitlessness.

Unlike my interpretive perspective, my particular attractions to Technicians of the Sacred have remained the same. I still love the idea of challenging the boundary between poetry and the world in which it “lives” by including taxonomies as literature. I’m also very fond of the picture songs, which require a new kind of reading, one not limited to the dynamics among the graphic image, its conceptual anchor(s), and the reader’s particular associative investment. This new kind of reading, with pictures atop words, forces a kind of interaction/exchange/dialogue within the solitary, monologic act of reading. Lastly (it must be said) I adore the particular brand of scatology found in Technicians of the Sacred. Rather than dropping curse words (and, thereby, neutering the would-be perversity with overt self-consciousness), these poems harness the truly transgressive in the form of good ol’ potty mouth.