The Rexroth hoax, on first reading, highlights the case of translation as cultural forgery. But the forgery model—drawing on analogies to the connoisseurial practice of authentication—tends to reduce complex conceptual distinctions between plagiarism, counterfeit, and copy to a familiar discussion of “autographic”authenticity. According to Nelson Goodman, “a work of art is defined as ‘autographic’ if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine.”In the Rexroth case, where there is an “autographic” reproduction of an absent original, the forgery model breaks down. What might be substituted in its stead is a genetic model of textual reproducibility that defines the translation as the clone of a clone (or clone of a code), that has effectively severed its primordial connection to an original subjective signature. At issue here is the way in which the notion of originality is complicated by what scientists have referred to as replication parameters. These become clear in questions around whether a program that reproduces daughter programs (as in the case of the Tierra program, “born” of the “Ancestor” computer code 85), should be considered a form of life, or whether the notion of original life should be strictly reserved for metabolizing cells whose DNA is replicated in the clone. In fabricating a text out of the codes of “Japanese-ness”-in-translation, Rexroth, I would submit, experimented with the literary equivalent of cloning from code.

Reading the Marichiko poems as models of genetic reproduction without origin points to the way in which Rexroth’s very notion of poetic creation was entwined with theories of eschatology, parthenogenesis, metempsychosis, and reincarnation. During the early 1940s Rexroth immersed himself in the writings of Meister Eckehart, English mystics of the late Middle Ages, St. John of the Cross, Ouspensky, Madame Blavatsky, and Jacob Boehme's The Signature of All Things (the title of which Rexroth took over for one of his own collections of poetry). According to Linda Hamalian: “Since childhood Rexroth had experienced ‘occasional moments of vision . . . momentary flashes of communion with others’where time and space did not exist” (H 125). This passion for Western mysticism provided a natural transition to Zen Buddhism. Rexroth discovered Arthur Waley's The Way and Its Power, Chinese Taosim, Tantric Buddhism, hatha and kundalini yoga (H 125). The title poem of The Phoenix and the Tortoise—the culminating masterwork of this period—is imbued with hybrid mysticism: the poetic subject acts as a conduit channeling the spirits of “ruined polities,” from ancient Greece to the shores of California, where the body of a dead Japanese sailor has washed up, confirming fears of what will happen in the internment camps that were set up in California in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The corpse seems to make eye contact with the poet, and as he watches with “open hard eyes,” the poet experiences a shock of self-identification: “Me—who stand here on the edge of death, / Seeking the continuity, / The germ plasm, of history, / The epic’s lyric absolute.”

Genetic models of textual reproduction might seem far-fetched if it were not for the fact that Rexroth’s own way of describing the creative process were not so eerily compatible with them. In his preamble to The Phoenix and the Tortoise he wrote: “I have tried to embody in verse the belief that the only valid conservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, the supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of the creative process. I hope I have made it clear that I do not believe that the Self does this by an act of Will, by sheer assertion. He who would save his life must lose it” (PT 9). The self-perpetuating force of bios is introduced in a literal way as synonymous with poetic reproduction. Rexroth’s evocative notion of “unlimited liability” suggests an ethics of responsibility to the future, with poetry operating as agent and guarantor of the work of art’s reproducibility. And the phrase “he who would save his life must lose it,” while obviously a kind of tao, also brings out that aspect of cloning that carries the megalomaniac dream of infinite self-preservation at the expense of an originary, signature identity. Consider, in this regard, an extract from Rexroth’s epic poem, The Phoenix and the Tortoise, that defines “the person”as a condition of uniqueness, embodied in perfect surrogacy: “The fulfillment of uniqueness / In perfect identification, / In ideal representation, / As the usurping attorney, / The real and effective surrogate” (PT 19). The mystic self, infinitely iterated through history, is defined here as an original form of futural being whose signature is preserved in a copy or clone, itself characterized legalistically as a “usurping attorney”; a guardian, if you will, of the original trust. In this sense the clone succeeds in leasing rather than appropriating or fully embodying an original subject.

In the introduction to The Phoenix and the Tortoise, Rexroth also claimed that the poem “proceeds genetically or historically” (PT 9). But the textual genetics described by Rexroth is less like developmental evolution or hereditary transmission, and more like what we might now, in a digital era, call sampling. Rexroth sifts through the classical archive, paraphrasing and pastiching Hellenistic, Byzantine, and Latin Roman sources. Sometimes he draws directly from Martial,

at other moments he avowedly treats his source material more freely, inserting paraphrases from antiquity inside larger poems, and allowing the citation pieces to, in a sense, reprogram the new cell into which they have been placed. (As Gina Kolata reminds us: “In cloning, scientists slip a cell from an adult into an egg with its genetic material removed. The egg then reprograms the adult cell’s genes so that they are ready to direct the development of an embryo, then a fetus, then a newborn that is genetically identical to the adult whose cell was used to start the process. No one knows how the egg reprograms an adult cell’s genes.”) This reprogrammed work, depending on where one stands on the ethics of cloning, could either be condemned as a tissue of plagiarized fragments,22 or hailed as a new translational form that, following Walter Benjamin’s ascription, ensures the original’s glorious afterlife.

Benjamin’s theory suggests that the genetic paradigm extends the view of translation as literary testate or inheritance to a philosophy of writing that defines translation as a mechanism of textual reproducibility. In this scheme, the significance of origins and originality cedes to grander concerns over the work of art’s messianic perpetuity. Rexroth’s faux Japanese translations, might, in these terms, seem more legitimate: their inauthentic originality deemed the price worth paying for a form of japonisme that bequeathed new life to American poetry. According to this reading, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Cid Corman—all of whom credited Rexroth’s Buddhist psesudotranslations as a source of inspiration—spawned the regional/ecological/spiritual aesthetic of California Beat poetry.