|
|
Richard Howard
|
|
|
|
Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
|
 Trappings
: New Poems by
Richard Howard
Richard Howard has
always been a poet of marvelous and multiple personae. In the
course of 10 volumes of verse he has spoken in the voices of John
Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Edith
Wharton, and Robert Browning--not to mention the less cultivated,
more homicidal narrator of "At Bluebeard's Castle." In Trappings,
he continues in this vein of poetic ventriloquism. "Family
Values," for example, finds the blind Milton dictating to his
daughters, who grow quite vocal in return. Here is Anne,
protesting her duties as a recording angel:
It is always I who must relieve
my sister where she stands, taking the words
from him, terrible words out of the air
as they come, unceasing, to us. I sit,
sewing the while, until our Deborah
fails, and when the silence falls, I begin.
The playful convolutions of speech, the faint
inflections of character--these are Richard Howard's
stock-in-trade. Yet the most effective pieces in Trappings
are those in which the poet speaks for (more or less) himself.
"The Job Interview" recalls a nerve-wracking encounter
with André Breton, whose Nadja the young poet hoped to
translate. Given the surrealist panjandrum's "legendary
loathing of queers," Howard kept his sexual preferences
strictly under wraps. Forty years later, his
translation "is still in print, and people still hate
queers. / I allay that heart of mine with the words / Breton wrote
to Simone, first of his wives / (and a Jew like me): / criticism
will be love, or will not be." This is about as close as
Howard, a formalist to his fingertips, will ever get to the
confessional mode. But the simplified syntax and first-person
directness suit him well--and while he'll always remain an
essentially dramatic poet, it's a pleasure to see Richard Howard
go head-to-head with (as he writes in "At 65") that
"garrulous presence / we sometimes call the self." --James
Marcus (Amazon.com)
 Incidents
by Roland
Barthes,
Richard Howard (Translator)
In 1979, just after having written skeptically
on the question of whether a journal was worth keeping "with
a view to publication," Roland Barthes began to keep an
intimate journal called "Soires de Paris" in which he
gave direct notation to his gay desire in its various states of
excitation, panic, and despair. Together with three other
uncollected texts by Barthes, including an earlier journal he kept
in Morocco, this remarkable document was published in France after
its author's death under the title of Incidents. Richard Howard's
translation now makes the volume available to readers of English.
"I gave him some money, he promised to be at the rendezvous
an hour later, and of course never showed up. I asked myself if I
was really so mistaken (the received wisdom about giving money to
a hustler in advance!) and concluded that since I really didn't
want him all that much (nor even to make love), the result was the
same: sex or no sex, at eight o'clock I would find myself back at
the same point in my life."
Richard Howard, poet, translator, and Professor
of English at the University of Houston, has translated ten of
Barthes's works.
|
|
From Writers Institute
Excerpt:
Richard Howard, poet, translator and critic was
born in Cleveland, Ohio on October 13, 1929. An only child, he
came to regard books as “ideal playmates” and resolved to be a
poet himself at the age of four. He received a B.A. from Columbia
University in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952. A growing interest in
modern French poetry led to further graduate study at the Sorbonne
from 1952 to 1953.
After returning to the United States, Howard
supported himself first as a lexicographer and then as a
translator of French. Since 1958, he has translated more than one
hundred fifty books and has earned recognition as one of the truly
authoritative translators of modern French literature. His work
reads like a list of France’s leading writers, including Robbe–Grillet,
de Beauvoir, Breton, Gide, Camus, Barthes, Reynard, Genet and
Cocteau...
|
|
|
|
|
|
Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
|
|
