Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone (born November 13, 1927) is an American poet, religious scholar, and translator. He was born in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Oakland, California. He has translated works by Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pedro Salinas, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος).
He completed his secondary education at Stuyvesant High School, the George School, and Phillips Exeter Academy before receiving degrees from Bowdoin College (B.A., 1948), Columbia University (M.A., 1956) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1960). He studied at the University of Mexico (1947), the Sorbonne (1948–49) and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (1952–53). In high school and college he volunteered with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee in Aztec villages south of Mexico City. In 1973 he studied Chinese at Middlebury College in their summer language program. He taught in Greece at the end of the Greek Civil War from 1949 to 1951 and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War from 1975 to 1976. He was in China in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution. A decade later he was Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1984–1985.
Barnstone details autobiographical memories in his memoirs and poetry. As a child, Willis and his family lived on Riverside Drive in New York City. He went to the World Series with his father to see Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth play. In spring 1939, Joe (an elevator operator in his apartment building) took him upstairs to Ruth's apartment on the 18th floor. He was in his Boy Scout uniform. A newspaperman handed him a pile of baseball diplomas which the Babe would give out the next day at the 1939 World's Fair to raise money for poor school kids. The picture appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News.]
Barnstone's daughter and son, Aliki Barnstone and Tony Barnstone, are also poets, translators, and scholars.
Willis Barnstone's first teaching position was instructor in English and French at the Anavryta Classical Lyceum in Greece, 1949–50, a private school in the forest of Anavryta north of Athens, attended by prince Constantine, the later ill-fated king of Greece, who was then nine years old. In 1951 he worked as a translator of French art texts for Les Éditions Skira in Geneva, Switzerland. He taught at Wesleyan University, was O'Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University where he has been a member of East Asian Languages & Culture, and the Institute for Biblical and Literary Studies. He started Film Studies and courses in International Popular Songs and Lyrics and Asian and Western Poetry at Indiana.
Barnstone co-edited sweeping literary anthologies from antiquity to modern day, with his children Aliki Barnstone and Tony Barnstone. The 1980 anthology A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now opens with the Sumerian language poet Enheduanna (2300b) and features women poets from each continent and literary epoch until 1980; later editions of the anthology end with a section on contemporary American poets, including Audrey Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, June Jordan, Brenda Hillman, and Leslie Scalapino.
The 1999 Prentice Hall anthology Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1990 pages in length, opens with a section on Asia from Vedic period (1500 to 200 B.C.) to Haruki Murakami (1940-). The section on Near Eastern and North African literature opens with The Shipwrecked Sailor (2040 B.C.) and ends with writings by Mohamed Mrabet (1940-). The Sub-Sahara spans oral creation myths to ends modern era writers Ben Okri, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J.M.Coetzee, Mia Couto, Dambudzo Marechera. The Americas section features Pre-Columbian era poems in Quiche-Maya and Quechuan languages through to the 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean authors, including Derek Walcott, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, V. S. Naipaul and Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams (poetry collection).
The 2003 anthology Literatures of Latin America traces the history and evolution of literature in Latin America and the Caribbean. The book contextualizes literatures in Quechuan, as well as in Carib, Quiché-Maya, and Nahuatl languages. Much of the anthology, however, features Spanish language writers, as varied as Spanish Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Cuban nationalist leader José Martí, and 20th-century playwright Reinaldo Arenas. Among the scope Latin American women poets and intellectuals, the anthology spans religious and secular writings from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to 20th-century authors Gabriela Mistral, Clarice Lispector, Julia de Burgos, Giannina Braschi, Luisa Valenzuela, Isabel Allende, and Laura Esquivel.
Barnstone also edited Artes Hispánicas/Hispanic Arts, a bilingual journal he founded on Spanish and Portuguese art, literature, and music (published biannually by Macmillan Books and Indiana University). Two of its issues were published simultaneously as books: The Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, guest editor Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and Concrete Poetry: A World View, guest editor Mary Ellen Solt. In 1959 he was commissioned by Eric Bentley for the Tulane Drama Review to do a verse translation of La fianza satisfecha, an obscure, powerful play by the Golden Age Spanish playwright Lope de Vega; his translation, The Outrageous Saint, was later adapted by John Osborne for his A Bond Honoured (1966). In 1964 the BBC Third Programme Radio commissioned him to translate for broadcast Pablo Neruda's only play, the surreal verse drama Fulgor y muerte de Joaquin Murieta (Radiance and Death of Joaquin Murieta), which was also published in Modern International Drama, 1976.
Barnstone's biblical work is The Restored New Testament, Including The Gnostic Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Judas. In this annotated translation and commentary, he restores the Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew names to their original form. For Pilate, Andrew, Jesus and James, one reads Pilatus, Andreas, Yeshua, and Yaakov. To reveal the poetry of the New Testament, in the gospels he lineates Jesus's words as verse and renders Revelation and the Letters of Paul into blank verse. In his introduction he calls Revelation (Apocalypse) the great epic poem of the New Testament. The Library Journal in its 7/15/09 issue wrote, "In an achievement remarkable by almost any standard, and surely one of the events of the year in publishing, renowned poet and scholar Barnstone has created a new and lavish translation—almost transformation—of the canonical and noncanonical books associated with the New Testament. In part a continuation of his work in The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament (2002) and The Other Bible (2005), and in many ways the completion of the pioneering efforts of other modern translators like Robert Alter, Reynolds Price, and Richmond Lattimore,... The high bar Barnstone has set for himself is the creation of an English-language Scripture that will move poets much as the 1611 King James Version moved Milton and Blake. Only time will tell if Barnstone has achieved his goal, but his work is fascinating, invigorating, and often beautiful."
Jorge Luis Borges had already lost his sight in 1968 when Barnstone met him backstage at the 92nd Street Poetry Center in New York after a poetry reading he had arranged for the Argentine poet. This resulted in a long-standing literary friendship and partnership that lasted for most of their lives. In 1975–76 in Buenos Aires he collaborated with Borges on a translation of his sonnets into English. In his poem "A Blind Man", the viewpoint character (a blind Borges) looks at an infinite mirror:
After returning to the United States, they went together to the universities of Indiana, Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago to give talks (charlas) that appear in Borges at Eighty: Conversations (1982). In his memoir biography of Borges, Barnstone describes the genesis of a short story that would appear posthumously. One morning at dawn he went to poet's apartment. From there to the airport to fly to the Andean city of Córdoba:
In 1996 Barnstone published a sequence of 501 sonnets, including this poem on Adam and Eve who live the first morning of the globe:
Borges commented: "Four of the best things in America are Walt Whitman's Leaves, Herman Melville's Whales, the sonnets of Barnstone's The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets, and my daily corn flakes--that rough poetry of morning."
Moonbook and Sunbook: Poems, North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2014
In 2003, the University of Evansville created the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize in his honor. This award, which is conferred on an annual basis, is given to the best translation of a literary work from any other language into English. The contest is judged by Barnstone himself. The prize is $1,000 and the winning poem is also published in the Evansville Review. A list of winners can be found here.