Tribute to Jack Hirschman

My face-to-face meetings with Jack can unhappily be counted on the fingers of two hands. We were either on different continents or different coasts. But that does not mean that we had différents, as the French would say — across the miles, I always felt him to be a compañero of the first order. What I remember most clearly from our meetings is his amazing voice, the warmth — like a wrap-around bearhug — of his greetings & the absolute presence of the man, his laser-like focus, be that around a café table with a drink in hand or at a poetry reading. I miss him.

I first heard of Jack back in ’69 from Clayton Eshleman — who preceded him to the more or less happy hunting grounds by a bare six months — & who told me how important Jack had been for him at the U, for introducing an ignorant Midwestern boy to poetries from Europe & Latin America, thus starting his interest in translation — something Jack clearly kept doing for the rest of his life to innumerable young poets & just plain citizens. No matter any later differences, I can see them now hanging somewhere in the Bar of the Great Beyond, Clayton sipping a glass of Côte de Nuits, Jack a largish vodka, while the bartender, one Antonin Artaud, will let them know where both were right or wrong in bringing him into English.

Jack Hirschman & Neeli Cherkovski, 1976.

As an ex-European, I was not as flabbergasted as many ‘merikuns when Jack called himself a “communist:” among his & my generation in Europe & the non-euro southern world, that claim was normal for any poet/writer/artist worth his or her political salt.

If I riff off that word — communism —  I’d go to common, to the commons, those egalitarian places where things & ideas are put in common, shared, free of authoritarian selfish controls (from above or below). In our trade, the way this commons shows itself is as the field of language — which, says Jack, is “the house of Being” — & in the double-dance of poetry & translation on the wide floor of that communal longhouse. As against the egotistical self-centered ones who spend their lives writing about their own, well, navels & the dirt therein, a poet like Jack not only writes a major opus of out-looking, wide-open, world-welcoming  poetry but also a major opus of translations, bringing the work of countless poets into the so often benightedly monolingual consciousness of this country. You cannot separate the two activities — they are one & the same élan because, as I’ve said elsewhere, “Language itself is already translation,” & thus there is no writing that is not translation. & in the process of this life-long activity the single poet’s voice becomes a choir, a multitude of voices, demanding change. As he wrote in his Inauguration address: “I believe that translation is undoubtedly one of the most important human dispensations toward making the world a more consciously harmonious ground for brother- and sister-hood.” We do this because we have to, as he put it in one of his Arcanes,

… put a monkey-wrench 
into the total
mobilization of the Empire machine

Photo courtesy of Steve Wilson.

Here is one of Jack’s translations, which I included in my anthology of Maghrebi Literature; it is by the very very little known poet whom only someone as persistent & focused on a certain socially conscious poetry as Jack could have found: the Algerian poet Ismaël Aït Djaafar (1929-1995) & is from his single book from 1951: 

Wail of the Arab Beggars of the Casbah

I would like to break out in rage
in howling arm-raving rage
in a fury like people who know
how to rage

by smashing their
fists down on tables, breaking them
to get what they want
I want to cut loose
on account
of sweet little Yasmina
who didn't want to die
but who's dead
a few days ago
on the Rue Franklin Roosevelt.

Khouni Ahmed is a 42-year-old
beggar...
But with stomachs full, the children of Charlemagne
sing a song
they learn at school:
Frère Jacques! Frère Jacques!
Dormez-vous
Ding! Dung! Dong!

The cold is mute
The cold says nothing
It simply kills '
kills people
by natural causes;
it especially kills poor people who have only mattresses
of cardboard to sleep on
and wrapping
wrapping
wrapping
paper with which to cover themselves.

When it has a good day,
that goddamn current of icy air
which freezes every stone and wrapping-paper, and who's wrapped in
it,
twirling and romping on through
the arcades of the Rue de la Lyre,
Charlemagne,
hop-scotches
from male sleeper
to female sleeper
and from the sleeping child
to the sleeping old man
and from the tubercular sleeper
to the B.C.G. one,
and so on
for 500 yards of cardboard
and wrapping paper
and 127 mummified cadavers
in the arcades.

Before dying, little
Yasmina
slept there
with her little papa
who murdered her
simply
abruptly
with the fatherly pat
(and not at all nasty)
of a hardworking conscientious
peasant, who sows the tiny nine-year-old
seed
in the furrow
on the treads of a big truck passing
and grinding by.
(…)

Jack Hirschman, circa 2021.

Jack Hirschman in Bolinas, CA, August 2021.

And here we have, as Diane di Prima put it:

        “Jack Hirschman making the world a better place
            whether it likes it or not”

Travel well, Jack. You will always be with us, & we’ll keep learning from you.

Thank you.

Jack Hirschman