XXV. Interview with... Gabriel Rosenstock, Transcreationist
Born in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick in 1949, Gabriel Rosenstock studied at University College Cork, where he associated with the Innti group of poets.
He is a poet, tankaist, playwright, haikuist, novelist, essayist, and author/translator of over 300 books, mostly in Irish (Gaelic).
He is a Lineage Holder of Celtic Buddhism, Former Chairman Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann, Corresponding Member Hellenic Authors’ Society, Member of Board of Advisors to Poetry India, Honorary Life Member Irish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Association, Honorary Member of the short-lived European Haiku Society.
He taught haiku at the Schule für Dichtung (Poetry Academy), Vienna, and Hyderabad Literary Festival. He is a prolific translator into Irish of international poetry (among others Ko Un, Seamus Heaney, K. Satchidanandan, Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, Hilde Domin, Peter Huchel etc.), plays (Beckett, Frisch, Yeats) and songs (Bob Dylan, Kate Bush, The Pogues, Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen).
He lives in Dublin.
Website: SHOP | rosenstockandrosenstock
Twitter: here!
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To call you a prolific writer seems pallid and far short of a lofty mark. At the risk of being prosaic, how did you begin working with these specific poetic forms - tanka and haiku? In what three significant ways has your poetic ethos changed over your career? What are the possibilities and limitations of contemporary poetry and contemporary readerships, in your view?
I’m an Anarchist so I don’t give a fiddler’s fornication what others think of me. I don’t give a damn what I think about myself either. So, whether I push myself into various projects, or drift into them, who knows? I used to work in a State-run outfit called An Gúm, as a lowly assistant editor. Very low. Almost invisible. If I went any lower I'd have been a Desert Father. In fact, I was there almost 25 years before an opportunity arose to climb the ladder – to the next rung – and maybe bring home a slightly better pay packet. I didn’t get the promotion, so I left to write and to translate full time. I saw no future in being a wage slave. About 9 minutes into this filmed version of one of my books, a conversation with a little-known Daoist poet, I make an indirect comment on the absurd nature of the civil service.But, to be fair, An Gúm taught me something about children’s books. I write a lot for kids. I translate nonstop. It’s a great way to stay linguistically limber. Bricolage can help as well, if you’re desperate…
I started creating primitive collages during my tea breaks in An Gúm and sending them to my fellow-bard, the incredible Cathal Ó Searcaigh. I used anything that came to hand . . . there wasn’t much, a paper clip etc. During another extended tea-break, I translated a document into Irish (which nobody ever read) about a sewage plant. But it didn’t go to waste. The knowledge picked up – and the phraseology acquired – was stored away, until I could use it – in a love poem, or a poem for children. I like writing for children because they appreciate a bit of anarchism. The poet should be a bit like the ‘fool for Christ,’ outside of what Martin Buber calls ‘the social order’. Now, as to the future of poetry and poetic audiences, readerships, etc. Well, it’s a bit like the Irish builder who arrives to fix a wall and says, ‘Ah, no, no. All this has to come down . . .’ Among the poets I have transcreated in Irish and who speak to me are Ko Un from South Korea, K. Satchidanandan from Kerala and Kristiina Ehin from Estonia. A lot of today’s Anglophone poetry, however… I can’t read beyond the first two lines. Too many poets seem to be clones of each other these days.
Photo-tanka, G. Rosenstock (2023)
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, and I think it’s fair to say, been entranced in the reading of your work. It is through your work that I was introduced to several poetic forms I was previously unfamiliar with. Not so much ekphrastic poetry, or haiku. But certainly tanka, both alone and in conjunction with Irish ideas, words, histories, and techniques. For those unfamiliar, what is tanka, how did you first encounter it, and what is it about the form that appeals most to your sensibilities?
I have been aware of tanka for a very long time and I have written about it. I didn’t take to writing tanka until a few years ago as I didn’t like the notion of boxing a poem into 31 syllables or less. But once I started, the formula of 5-7-5-7-7 was a liberating one rather than a constriction. Nine times out of ten, I succeeded in writing hundreds of tanka that were both spontaneous and filled with a bhakti flavor, that is to say, a devotional spirit. The spirit of devotion shown to a Muse, a god or goddess is symbolic, in my view: the focus of the devotion is the birthless, deathless Self. Take a tanka that came to me yesterday:
hey there, monkey-face
sitting quietly in a tree
come, come to me
i am You & You are me
Hanuman, leap to my heart!
hé, 'aghaidh an mhoncaí
i do shuí go ciúin i gcrann
tar chugam láithreach bonn
mar a chéile sinn, a stór
Hanúmán, buail fút im chroí!
I tried chanting that in an Indo-Celtic style. My friend the Glasgow-based Irish composer Derek Ball embellished my Indo-Celtic chant to Hanuman. Hanuman is a bilingual tanka in Irish and English (5-7-5-7-7 syllables, chanted in Indo-Celtic style). I wished I had thought of it 40 years ago. It may look like a devotional poem to Hanuman but in fact it’s just a reminder to an entity, the evanescent me, to stay firmly In tune with Reality, which is the transcendent Self. I remember listening to the American master of devotional chant, Krishna Das, who suggested in an interview that he really didn’t know the various entities whose names he was chanting; their inner sweetness revealed themselves to him as their mantric names were chanted. The notion of poetry as mantric was explored by Sri Aurobindo and I believe that the great yogi may have benefitted from some insights gleaned from his conversations with an Irish poet, the enigmatic James Cousins.
The Invisible Light by R. & G. Rosenstock (2012)
Speaking of reading, I listened to your recitation of ‘Six Tanka to Her’. My lack of comprehension of Irish (Gaelic) emphasized the sounds, their shape and color. Furthermore, it made me think about listeners for whom listening often comes to mind when people typically think of poetry. How does oralirt and your bilingualism find affinity with other cultural literary and oral forms like Tanka?
Well, tanka were once chanted, or stylistically recited, as I’ve said. Depictions of Irish bardic recitations show us a reacaire (reciter) and the ubiquitous harp as accompaniment. Irish is an ancient language. Its written form makes it the oldest literary language in Western Europe after Greek and Latin. What of its Indo-European prehistory, myths and cosmology? Without being cultish about it, I think poetic forms such as tanka should embrace the cloak of ritualism.
The free tanka books I have published with Cross-Cultural Communications, New York, on the EDOCR platform await other artists – musicians, singers, filmmakers, choreographers etc – to reinterpret them, if they find them of interest.
I invited the late Francisco X. Alarcón, a Chicano poet, to Ireland for the bilingual launch of one of his books I had translated, Cuerpo en Llamas (Body in Flames) and it was hair-raising to watch and listen as he burned sage in a seashell and, shaman-like, chanted an invocation in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, before we read from the book. There was a man who knew what the sacredness of language is. For me, the Irish language is a native, living, ancient stream: a goddess, in fact. What Anglophone poet views his language or art in such terms? The Muse deserves nothing short of passionate, inventive adoration. Do you think she’ll visit the lukewarm, the skeptic who is still trying to figure out if she exists or not?
In “The Task of the Translator”, Walter Benjamin asserts that “it is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work”. As an approach or dao of excavating meaning, that has both open and hidden associations with transliteration, translation, and adaptation, how do you go about making transliterary choices? How do you match words across lexicons?
It’s instinctual. If you are familiar with Gaelic poetry and song, you will know that it is full of exquisite rhyme, half-rhyme, assonance and the like which would sound somewhat archaic in English. So, there are no exact equivalents because we are talking about vastly different landscapes. Only rarely does the English language (post-Tennyson) offer the ear the sonorousness with which Irish is blessed. Perhaps the last great example is Richard Burton performing in the 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas.
From Géaga Tré Thine (2012) by G. Rosenstock.
Reviewing “Bone and Marrow: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern Ed. Samuel K. Fisher & Brian Ó Conchubhair”, you state:
My first impression is that too many scholars and not enough poets, poet-translators and true lovers of poetry were involved, resulting in an historical walk through fields of Irish poetry, but very little by way of fragrant wild flowers on the path for the Anglophone reader who is looking for poetic experiences.
While I extract this quote out of context, there is an interesting substrate I want to tease out. Put short: how does one both create and discover poetic experiences in today’s world in a way that rebuffs meaningless cyclicality and the overall circuitousness of cynicism?
One of the consequences of steeping oneself in haiku and tanka, reading, writing and transcreating these forms, is the recovery of innocence, the delight of perceiving phenomena as though for the first time. Creative Writing Courses are a waste of time and money, in my view. They will not burnish the mirror of the soul. They will not help in the recovery of our child-like innocence and passion for play.
In the same critique, you also state that “Mícheál Mac Liammóir would grace any anthology but he was a man who invented his own history”. For those unfamiliar, who was he and how did he achieve this? How do the transliterary and creative endeavors you’re involved in allow or disallow you to do the same or similar?
Well, he was an Englishman who recreated himself as an Irishman at a time when many pathetic Irishmen were metamorphosing into being Englishmen. He was a seminal figure in Irish theatre, not only as an actor but as a costume designer, and whatnot, who wrote poetry in Irish and illustrated a magnificent book of Celtic myths. He was born in London in 1889 as Alfred Lee Willmore. I love these caterpillars who turn into butterflies. He was a gay icon, a polyglot and the type of Gaelic Renaissance man who was the opposite, in many ways, to the stereotypical language revivalist.
Many of the poets you compare, conjure, call and condemn in that piece I’m unfamiliar with. You state that “not everyone can expect to be ceremoniously crowned with a wreath!”. It made me think of canonicity, inclusion, exclusion, and access. Do you see the role of translator as, in some way, a bequeather of wreaths, as an agent of influence and change of canonicity? If so, what is, if at all, the translator's responsibility to both source and produced text?
Oh! For me it’s part of a brotherhood or sisterhood. By translating or transcreating texts, you join a loose brotherhood or sisterhood; you are linked to them because in an intimate way, you have entered their visions and dreams, the fibre of their bring, in a ritual or initiation of ‘transcreation’. I’ve compared it to a blood transfusion in the past.
You assert, with brio and candor, “poets should not follow trends and anthologists should prioritize poems that will never go out of fashion, whether those poems rhyme with their view of history or not. They must also take risks, of course” [...] “Must all poetry be local, or even national, or be a recognisable continuation of something? A flowering and reflowering of tradition, saecula saeculorum? Would such a premise automatically exclude non-Irish forms [...], genres such as haiku and tanka?”. What criteria would you offer to determine a timeless poem?
A timeless poem is one that remains true for everyone who has a beating heart, and who is variously puzzled, saddened and overjoyed by the mysteries of the human heart. They needn’t necessarily reflect timeless religious truths, such as the poems found on Poetry Chaikhana, but they must reflect the truth of human longing and existence, not in a clichéd fashion but in a manner which shows they have come from the forge with the sound of the anvil still in the air.
Does your interest in let’s call them currently non-canonical forms like tanka and haiku (relative to the Irish literary canon) stem, in part from an attempt to contravene or overleap what you describe as an obsession - a primarily American obsession - with perhaps the jingoistic, ethnic, and more broadly propagandistic phantasies of Irish history?
It was the Beat generation that began to popularize haiku and tanka in the West, Kerouac, Rexroth, Ginsberg, Snyder et al. They saw it as a critique of crass materialism, ecocide, bellicosity, consumerism and so on. Zen teachers such as D. T. Suzuki and Sunryu Suzuki created an appetite for the arts of the Far East. A bunch of those poets attempted to levitate the Pentagon. Time to repeat that operation! As to Irish history, it’s not jingoistic or propagandistic to try to get to the truth of it all. The real skilled propagandists were the British and the Anarchist Berkman had a few things to say about their work!
From The Selborne Haibun (2022) G. Rosenstock.
The intro to The Selborne Haibun (2022) describes the haibun form as follows:
Haibun combines a prose poem with a haiku. The haiku usually ends the poem as a sort of whispery and insightful postscript to the prose of the beginning of the poem. Another way of looking at the form is thinking of haibun as highly focused testimony or recollection of a journey composed of a prose poem and ending with a meaningful murmur of sorts: a haiku. The result is a very elegant block of text with the haiku serving as a tiny bowl or stand for the prose poem. A whole series of them in a manuscript look like neat little signs or flags—a visual delight.
What is it you think propels your recurrent fascination and engagement with Japanese poetic and literary forms? Are there particular ways in which they allow you to think and express that you don’t encounter elsewhere? If so, what are these features/aspects and why do you think it is that they seem to speak so fluently with Irish forms and styles of poetic expression?
Both tanka and haiku are disciplines and a Way of Life. Maybe I need these disciplines. I don’t want to overthink why I need them. We brush our teeth and do stuff like that, without asking why.
From Rising Flame of Love (2022) by G. Rosenstock
The 17th piece in that collection strikes me: “he no longer breathes through nose, mouth or ears . . . Aristotle Writers, copying from one another, make Aristotle say that goats breathe at their ears; whereas he asserts just the contrary: —Ἀλκμαίων γὰρ οὐκ ἀληθῆ λέγει, φάμενος ἀναπνεῖν τὰς αἶγας κατὰ τὰ ὠτά”. It made me think of Odysseus, emulation hath a thousand sons that one by one pursue. Is there, for you, a recurrent figure of emulation when it comes to both your creative and translation practice?
Who do I emulate? I have no heroes. (I once admired Crocodile Dundee)
From Rising Flame of Love (2022) by G. Rosenstock
I noted that the collection includes several pieces about birds. My favorite piece about a bird is by Hopkins, “The Windhover”. Do you have a favorite bird? Do you have a favorite piece about a bird?
I love The Wild Swans at Coole by Yeats and, naturally, I have translated it into Irish.
In Rising Flame of Love: Tanka with Indian Matchboxes (2021), you elide Tanka with vintage Indian matchboxes, and bilingual Ekphrastic Tanka in Irish and English. It’s hard to stop reading, joining, feeling and imagining - the matchbox images become their own Tarot, the accompanying text is like a coded decoding of the relationship between love and fire, night and sigh and scorch. This was my experience. A cursory glance at your body of work reveals not only a multifaceted interest in variegated and indeed interrelated - both explicitly and implicitly - forms, but also media, like painting, photography, and video. It got me thinking: if there were no encumbrances whatsoever, what form or combination of forms have you yet to try that you’d like to, and what would such an attempt look, sound, read, or feel like?
From Rising Flame of Love (2022) by G. Rosenstock
I’d love to collaborate with other artists. For instance, I wrote haiku in response to postage stamps and they were sung by Caitriona O’Leary:
Throughout your oeuvre that I’ve experienced, there are recursive concerns and interests: Irish history, war, rebellion, revolution, love, the Far East, birds, nature. All of which are, in my view, imbued with a kernel of longing, perhaps even frustration, and also at once a kind of beautiful resignation. This may be a broad question to end on, but what, as a recursive means of expression, has poetry allowed you in terms of longing and resignation? Is the poem a manifestation or the search for it?
I’m entering a phase now in which I am focusing more and more on Anarchism:
Black Flag
Better to have no flags
none at all
but if we must have one
let it be black
black as sloes
black as soot
black as pitch
black as coal
black as the sole of my shoe
black as the black of my nail
black as the arse of the pooka
black flag of Anarchism!
To Hell with all your colours
red green orange
blue yellow et cetera
all conflicting with one another!
Flags of the world
cease fluttering
rest darkly under the cloak of night
peacefully sleepfully
black as the black panther
black as Black ’47
black as a black clam
black as a cormorant
black as a carrion crow
black as a black cherry
black as a black diamond
black as a black tulip
black as a black dwarf
black as a black hole
black as a black honey bee
black as a black urchin
black as the cockroach
black as my Dark Rosaleen
black as Dublin
black as black oak
black as black magic
black as the potato blight
black as the devil’s coach horse
black flag of Anarchism!
Bratach Dhubh
B'fhearr gan bratach a bheith ann in aon chor
bratach ar bith
ach más gá bratach a bheith againn
bíodh sí dubh
chomh dubh le hairne
chomh dubh le súiche
chomh dubh le pic
chomh dubh le gual
chomh dubh le bonn mo bhróige
chomh dubh le dubh m'ingne
chomh dubh le poll an phúca
bratach dhubh an Ainrialachais!
Go hIfreann le bhur ndathanna
dearg uaine oráiste
gorm buí et cetera
agus iad i ngleic lena chéile!
A bhratacha uile na cruinne
ná bígí ar foluain níos mó
bígí suanmhar faoi bhrat dubh na hoíche
suanmhar sámh síochánta
chomh dubh le pantar dubh
chomh dubh le ’47 an Bhróin
chomh dubh le breallach dubh
chomh dubh leis an gcailleach dhubh
chomh dubh leis an gcaróg dhubh
chomh dubh le silín dubh
chomh dubh le diamant dubh
chomh dubh le tiúilip dhubh
chomh dubh le habhac dubh
chomh dubh le dúpholl
chomh dubh leis an mbeach dhubh
chomh dubh le cuán mara dubh
chomh dubh le ciaróg dhubh
chomh dubh le Róisín Dubh
chomh dubh le Dubhlinn
chomh dubh le dair dhubh
chomh dubh leis an ealaín dhubh
chomh dubh le dubh na bprátaí
chomh dubh leis an deargadaol
bratach dhubh an Ainrialachais!
From Rising Flame of Love (2022) by G. Rosenstock
