Willis Barnstone
Willis Barnstone was born in Lewiston, Maine, and
educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, and Yale. He 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'Conner Professor of Greek at Colgate University, he is
Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana
University.
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His publications include 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), a memoir With Borges on
an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Illinois, 1993),
Algebra of Night: Selected Poems - 1949-1998 (Sheep Meadow,
1999), The Apocalypse (New Directions, 2000), Life Watch
(BOA, 2003). Border of a Dream:Poems of Antonio Machado
(Copper Canyon, 2004) and The Gnostic Bible (Shambhala,
2003).
His literary translation of The New Covenant: The Four
Gospels and Apocalypse (Penguin Group, 2002) was an April
Book of the Month selection. The complete New Covenant
(commonly called the New Testament) will appear in 2006 with
Norton. In it he has restored the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew
names of all persons and place. The majority of the
scripture, he has translated in blank verse. Also in spring,
Shambhala Books will publish in English and facing Greek:
Sweetbitter Love: The Poems of Sappho.
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A Guggenheim, fellow, he has been the recipient of many
awards over the years, including NEA, NEH, Emily Dickinson
Award of the Poetry Society of America, W. H. Auden Award of
the New York State Council on the Arts, the Midland Authors
Award, three Book of the Month Selections and four Pulitzer
Prize nominations for poetry. His work has appeared in
American Poetry Review, Doubletake, Harper's, New York
Review of Books, Paris Review Poetry, New Yorker, and the
Times Literary Supplement.
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