Limits and possibilities of total translation in Jerome Rothenberg

Abstract This article offers a revision of the concept of total translation, a guiding principle upon which US poet-translator Jerome Rothenberg developed his work (1931-). The approach used here consists of an analysis of Rothenberg's practice as a translator, based on a reading of essays and translations by him, identifying and contextualizing some of the theoretical challenges he faced. One of the proponents of the movement known as ethnopoetics, Rothenberg was part of a generation that, from the late 1960s onwards, highlighted the poetic quality of Amerindian songs and narratives, drawing attention to how Indigenous verbal arts are organized in terms of parallelism, prosody and paralinguistics in the expressive forms under discussion. In the analysis developed in this article, I examine Rothenberg's translation of "The 13th Horse-Song of Frank Mitchell," a Navajo horse-song, which he did in partnership with ethnomusicologist David McAllester.