Jerome Rothenberg, aged 91, has made immeasurable contributions to American poetry over the past seven decades. Born in New York in 1931, he first came onto the scene in 1959 with New Young German Poets, the unintended fruit of his just-completed service in the US Army’s occupation of Germany. This collection of Rothenberg’s translations included poems by Paul Celan, the German-language Jewish author of “Death Fugue”, a work that single-handedly refutes Theodor Adorno’s scepticism about the viability of “poetry after Auschwitz”: it turns out there can be poetry after Auschwitz, even if we may not like what we see.
