Willis Barnstone, GPC 2011-2012
Willis
Barnstone, born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, the
Sorbonne, SOAS, Columbia
and Yale, taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in
Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution he
went to China where he was later a Fulbright Professor at Beijing
Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). Former O’Connor
Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is Distinguished Professor
Emeritus of English Literature and Spanish at Indiana University. He
divides his time between Bloomington, Indiana, and Oakland, California.
His publications include Poems
of Exchange (L’Institut Français d’Athènes, 1951), Modern
European Poetry (Bantam, 1967), The
Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984), Poetics
of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (Yale, 1993), Funny
Ways of Staying Alive (New England, 1993), The
Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (New
England, 1996), With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Illinois,
1993), Algebra of Night: Selected Poems 1948-1998 (Sheep
Meadow, 1999), The Apocalypse (New
Directions, 2000), Border of a Dream: Poems of Antonio Machado (Copper
Canyon, 2003), The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala,
2003), and The Poems of Jesus Christ (Norton, 2012). His literary translation of The
New Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse (Riverhead,
2002) was an April Book of the Month selection.
A Guggenheim fellow, he has been the recipient of many awards over the
years, including NEA and NEH grants, the Emily Dickinson Award from the
Poetry Society of America, the W. H. Auden Award of the New York State
Council on the Arts, the Midland Authors Award,
and four Book of the Month selections. His work has appeared in
magazines including APR, Doubletake, Harper’s,
New York Review of Books, Paris Review, Poetry, The New Yorker and The Times
Literary Supplement.