Rosmarie Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935. At age 10 she spent half a
year acting with a traveling theater, but was happy to settle for the
quieter pleasures of reading and writing which she has pursued in and out of
universities (Ph.D., U of Michigan, 1966),  in several countries, but mostly
in Providence, RI where she lives with Keith Waldrop (with whom she also
co-edits Burning Deck Press).   The  linguistic  displacement has not only
made her  into a translator, but gave her a sense of writing as exploration
of what happens between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures.

Select biblio:
Poetry:
The Reproduction of Profiles, NY: New Directions, 1987
Lawn of Excluded Middle, NY: Tender Buttons, 1993
A Key Into the Language of America, NY: New Directions, 1994
Another Language: Selected Poems, Jersey City: Talisman House, 1997
Well Well Reality [collaborations with Keith Waldrop], Sausalito, CA:
Post-Apollo Press, 1998
Split Infinites, Philadelphia, PA: Singing Horse Press, 1998
Reluctant Gravities, NY: New Directions, 1999

Fiction:
The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1987
A Form/ of Taking/ It All,            "        "       "   , 1990
reprinted in 1 paperback, with a new introduction, Northwestern UP 2001

Translations:
  Edmond Jabès,
The Book of Questions, 7 vols. bound as 2, Wesleyan UP,1991
The Book of Dialogue, Wesleyan UP, 1987
The Book of Shares, Chicago UP, 1989
The Book of Resemblances, 3 vols., Wesleyan UP, 1990-92
The Book of Margins by Edmond Jabès,, Chicago UP, 1993
A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, Wesleyan UP, 1993
The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, Stanford UP, 1996

The Vienna Group: Six Major Austrian Poets (with Harriett Watts), Barrytown,
NY: Station Hill,'85
Jacques Roubaud:Some Thing Black, Dalkey Archive, 1990
The Plurality of Worlds According to Lewis, Dalkey Archive, 1995
Friederike Mayröcker:Heiligenanstalt, Providence: Burning Deck,1994
With Each Clouded Peak by (with Harriett Watts, Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon
Press, 1998
Elke Erb:Mountains in Berlin: Selected Poems, "Dichten=," Providence:
Burning Deck, 1995
Emmanuel Hocquard:A Test of Solitude, Providence: Burning Deck, 2000



Rosmarie Waldrop interviewed by Randolph Healy

RH: Burning Deck recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary. Very few
presses last longer than a couple of years. Had you any idea when you and
Keith Waldrop founded it that it would still be around four decades later?

RW: Certainly not. We began as a magazine with the ambition to do 5 issues
per year. Instead, we actually managed to publish 4 issues in 5 years! This
didn't make us think far into the future! We switched to printing chapbooks
without a fixed schedule. But it was the founding of the National Endowment
for the Arts which, at the beginning, was very interested in small,
grass-roots efforts like ours, that made it possible to print more and
longer books. (Needless to say, the NEA's emphasis gradually changed to
favoring the bigger among the small presses; we haven't been able to get a
grant in many years). There have been moments when we were tempted to give
up the press, but Small Press Distribution would not continue to work with
the backlog if we had no new titles. We don't want to kill all those books.
So we're trapped.

RH:  Alongside your own poetry and fiction you are a noted translator. Would
you care to say something about this work and how it relates to your own
writing?

RW: I translate out of envy and pleasure in destruction.

I am not altogether joking. Envy provides the impulse. I'm much like August
Wilhelm Schlegel who admitted: "I cannot look at my neighbor's poetry
without immediately coveting it with all my heart, so that I am the prisoner
of continuous poetical adultery." Not every neighbor's poetry of course! But
I have been lucky in that I've been able to choose almost everything I've
translated. I have loved and coveted Jabès's work and that of Elke Erb,
Friederike Mayröcker, Oskar Pastior, Jacques Roubaud etc.

Destruction is unavoidable. Sound, sense, form, reference will not stand
twice in the same relation to each other. I have to break apart this
"seemingly natural fusion" of elements, melt it down to - what? The "genetic
code" of the work I have called it. It is a state in which the finished work
is dissolved back into a state of fluidity, of potential, of "molten lava."
In this state, a translator will be able, with a mix of imagination and
understanding, to penetrate into the work and re-create it--which then
becomes very much like writing.

The "molten lava" is a term used by the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos. He
has a lovely essay on translation or "transluciferation." Lucifer is his
angel of translation a) because the translator brings light and b) because
the good translator will not serve the "content that is so often considered
dominant in the way of an 'inner presence'" at the expense of form etc.

There is pleasure in the destruction because it makes the work "mine." It is
the same "no" to what already exists that is a crucial part of all making,
even making a translation. Destruction is part of creation. It provides the
energy.

And the process allows me to "write" things I could never write on my own.
It stretches my limits. And then, there is the enormous reward of reading
and working with the peculiar intensity of translation. My thinking and
writing has been "fed" enormously by the work of translating.

I think all poets should translate. For one thing, it should not be left to
the professors of languages. And it's the best thing to do in those times
when your own work isn't going well. So much better than moping about
writer's block.

RH:. I like the idea of translation as re-creation, involving a necessary
destruction. Trevor Joyce talks of his translation of the Irish poem _Buile
Shuibhne_, (The Poems of Sweeney, Peregrine) as a perversion of the
original. Then there's Thurber's  remark, on being told by someone that they
preferred his stories in French, "I'm afraid the translation is lost in the
original."

RW: Lovely!

RH: What would you consider your native language, as a writer? I'm thinking
something along the lines that although you speak and write English
considerably better than many of the natives of my acquaintance, does this
itself imply a subconscious act of translation?

RW: As a writer, my "native language" is English. I had made only the most
tentative, fumbling attempts at poems in German. Changing countries is a
global act of translation. But I think and dream in English.

RH: .Could you say something about your attitude to prose and verse? I find
it interesting the way you bring them together, while preserving
differences. In your prose poems, for instance, you eschew line endings,
foregrounding the prose, yet your use of paragraphs irresistably suggests
the stanza break.


RW: Yes, the paragraphs function as stanzas. In any case, of the two terms
yoked together in the name 'prose poem,' poem is  the more important.  It
needs to have a poem's density and intensity.

One of the attractions (though also a problem) of the prose poem is that it
is a step farther removed from the oral than verse, that its effects, its
rhythms are subtler, less immediate. That if it counts, it counts words or
sentences rather than stresses or syllables.

  I'm a bit puzzled why I more and more go to prose, because I like verse so
much: the way its rhythm rises from the tension between line and sentence;
the way it refuses to fill up all of the available space of the page,  each
line acknowledging what is not. It makes manifest that "to create is to make
a pact with nothingness" (Clark Coolidge). Or, as Heather McHugh put it:
"[poetry] is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page,
toward the unsung, toward the vacancy made visible, that worldlessness in
which our words are couched."

So for me one great challenges of the prose poem is to compensate for its
absence of turning, of margin. I try to place the vacancy inside the text. I
cultivate cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference. "Gap gardening,"
I have called it, and my main tool for it is collage. And to the natural
forward drive of the sentence I try to add the turn's double perspective,
its always looking back. I try to make my sentences breathe both forward and
backward.

But the real excitement is that the prose poem, even more than a poem in
verse, each time sets out into uncharted territory:" Moving on in the Dark
like Loaded Boats at Night, though there is no Course, there is
Boundlessness" (Emily Dickinson).