“The Language of Shamans”: Jerome Rothenberg’s Contribution to American Indian Literature

The University of North Dakota h . s. M c A l l i s t e r “The Language of Shamans”: Jerome Rothenberg's Contribution to American Indian Literature The publication of Shaking the Pumpkin, Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology of “Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas,” was a revolutionary event in the history of translating what is variously called “traditional,” “primitive,” “aboriginal,” and “oral” American Indian poetry. Rothenberg’s book contains a body of translations in which the non-European nature of the original texts is not merely alluded to in a scholarly introduction, but re-created in the very translations them­ selves. Like his other anthology, America: A Prophecy, Shaking the Pumpkin has received a great deal of criticism for both form and content. Rothenberg’s critics have raised a number of questions about the book, and their reviews have ranged from qualified disapproval to vehement assault. I would like to outline and reply to certain of these criticisms before turning my attention to the principles of translation implicit in Rothenberg’s two most detailed contributions to the anthology, “The Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell” (pp. 350-53)1 and the Seneca cycle, “Shaking the Pumpkin,” from which the book takes its name. A brief but thorough survey of anthologies, in the January, 1974, issue of the ASAIL Newsletter, quotes Louis Untermeyer’s comments on George Cronyn’s American Indian Poetry: 1Shaking the Pumpkin, ed. Jerome Rothenberg (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1972). All references will be to this edition. 294 Western American Literature If Mr. Cronyn is a genuine student of Indian folklore, he is to be blamed for not having made the volume more communicative and less cryptic; many of these songs cry aloud for nothing so much as footnotes. Nor is one assisted materially by the arbitrary arrangement of words and a pretentious typography that is foreign to our native (sic) — though it may be native to Ezra Pound, ‘H.D.,’ and Richard Aldington. Mr. Evers, the author of the survey, goes on to say that Untermeyer might well be speaking to Rothenberg, adding that Rothenberg has failed to find that middle ground between footnote-riddled ethnology and living poetry. William Bevis makes a similar point in his “American Indian Verse Translations,”2 criticizing Rothenberg’s “blind attention to content” and the blithe nonelucidation to be found in the Commen­ taries at the back of the book. These strike me as appropriate criticisms, and Bevis balances his negative reaction with the comment that when Rothenberg approaches the job of translation responsibly, as he did in the Horse Songs, his results “are a delight.” Certainly the book would be improved if Rothenberg would double its size by including in the Commentaries ethnographic data not readily available to the student — or, for that matter, to the instructor. While the materials he has collected can be appreciated in the relative vacuum his cavalier disinterest in footnotes creates, our comprehension and appreciation would be aug­ mented by the provision of a cultural context. Other criticisms have been less reasonable; the most representative of these is a review which appeared in Parnassus: Poetry in Review The reviewer attacks Rothenberg for his “interest in the scatological,” and calls the book a good “introduction to some of the vagaries of contemporary non-Indian poetry, especially as these poets reveal their spiritual hollowness,” referring to Armand Schwerner and Michael McClure specifically and by implication to the Concrete movement, Charles Olson, Snyder, Ginsberg: the sources of the aesthetic implicit in many of Rothenberg’s editorial judgments. The latter criticism I see no point in answering, but the complaint about scatology is one that needs reply, because it has occurred elsewhere, among readers more sympathetic to Rothenberg’s interests and intentions. 2College English XXXV (March, ’74), 699 ff. ■ !Kenneth Fields, “Seven Wells: Native American Harmonies (American Indian Poetry),” Parnassus: Poetry in Review II (Spring/Summer, ’74), p. 194 ff. H. S. McAllister 295 There is an unusual amount of scatology and sex in the book, compared to other such collections, but the reason for this is simple: scatology and sex have always been there, but only recently have the collectors and ethnographers been willing to discuss them...