Over at his Jacket2-hosted blog, Charles Bernstein has posted Ernesto Livon-Grosman’s commentary on Jerome Rothenberg‘s anthologies, particularly Technicians of the Sacred. I’ve offered my criticisms of anthologies, particularly anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry, but I wanted to post Livon-Grosman’s points about the place of translation in Rothenberg’s anthologies, as a way of pointing to what else might be possible with anthologies–and with translations–even when not dealing with broad samples selecting from many writers, but with single-author collections, such as for instance soemone like Xi Chuan:

For an anthology that recovers, makes visible, and associate texts that were never seen before together, Technicians is less concerned with the search for an origin or the construction of a genealogy than with a practice. It is the search for a “know how,” for the techné that is anticipated in the title, that would make possible to read multiple texts not only together but in conjunction by way of those hinges that Jerry created. It does so by reconnecting Dadaist and Maori poetry and bringing together for the first time poets such as Lorca and Klebnikov for whom translation is one more way of writing. In fact, translation is for this anthology the meeting point of theory and practice where the way we read the poems is also the way we write the anthology and by doing so it retrieves a use value without ever loosing its metaphysical value. This is crucial because it would be tempting to confuse collecting with accumulating but what prevents this from happening is precisely the techné that shows that the sacred is always material, that there is no separation. Translation is for this anthology what supports its view of poetry as synchronic coexistence that frees us in the reading of the poems, among other things, of national boundaries.