A Seneca Journal

In his 1978 classic, A Seneca Journal, Jerome Rothenberg continued the journey of his earlier Poland/1931, but under vastly altered circumstances. Those circumstances, no less real for their repositioning in time and space, involved a profound response to two years in Salamanca, a railroad town on the Allegany Seneca Reservation in western New York State. Going there as a poet in an ongoing search for the human and particular, Rothenberg in A Seneca Journal remains always aware “of who I am, while being drawn toward and affected by a place as never before.” The original four sections of this remarkable assemblage of mixed poetry and prose set geography, history, and myth (“my own and theirs”) against a contemporary landscape of bridges and cars and the all-pervasive deforming power of a dam “not built by beaver / master builder” but by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. To the original edition of A Seneca Journal this Nine Point reissue now adds a final section by Rothenberg and Seneca singer Richard Johnny John of translations from the Senecas’ “Society of the Mystic Animals,” a riveting example of what Rothenberg later came to call “total translation.”