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Table of Contents
Total Translation
Rothenberg, Jerome. “Total Translation: An Experiment in the Presentation of American Indian Poetry” Rpt in Symposium of the Whole (381-393). Appears in Rothenberg Pre-faces and Other Writing New Directions, 1981.
Overview
This essay descrives the origins, process and justification for a novel method of translation and presentation. Addressing the performative and temporal qualities of oral performance, Rothenberg sets out consider how to represent “sounds that weren't, stricklty speaking 'words' … (which) tended to disappear or be attenuated in translation, as if they weren't really there. But they were there and werea at least as important as the words themselves” (382).
The approach blends a “close-listening” attention during transcription and the development of methods for visually representing aural phenomena on th epage.
Context of Performance and Transcription
Rothenberg's own total translations include collaboration with Richard Johnny Johns from the Seneca. See Shaking the Pumpkin also includes links to audio, which render graphical layouts that adopt techniques of concrete poetry.
In a retranslation of Navajo Horse Songs, the method is more akin to creating a performative score, where the reading text provides a guide for speaking aloud and capture the oscillation between semantic speech and vocables. This was earlier published in Alcheringa 1.1 along with a “Note” that prefigures the fuller discussion in this essay. First Horse Song of Frank Mitchell.
Influences and Correspondences
Rothenberg's framing of “Total Translation” informs many translations/ transcriptions published in the journal Alcheringa, including these exemplars.
See also the transcription / translation associated with Dennis Tedlock in _Finding the Center_ and _The Spoken Word and the Work of Written Interpretation_
