R is for Rosmarie Waldrop:
Poet, Translater, Publisher
1935 to present
She has been called an “avant garde doyenne” whose greatest influences were found in Rainer Rilke, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein.
I found it intriguing and again, sad on my part, that Rosmarie Waldrop is described by the Poetry Foundation as “a forceful presence in American and international poetry for over forty years” yet I have never heard of her until I searched and searched and searched for a woman whose first name started with R who was successful yet relatively unknown.
She has written more than twenty books and translated even more than that. She translated from French and German, her native language, to English. She spent a year in Paris in 1970. She befriended many avant garde poems during her residency, becoming especially close to Edmond Jabès. She has translated more than a dozen of his poetry collections. In 1993 she was awarded the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award for her translation of Jabès’s The Book of Margins. She was also named “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” by the French government.
Listen to these words she said in response to being asked a question about Edmond Jabès Book of Questions: “Mark the first page of the book with a red marker for in the beginning the wound is invisible.” The wound is certainly the wound of the Jewish people, but Jabès almost immediately widens it to the wound of the human condition. He sees the Jew’s “otherness” as exemplary for the condition of individuation. We are all “other” than the rest of creation and, as individuals, “other” than our fellow humans.”
How can I have never heard of this woman until now? She and I seem to have so many of the same thoughts.
Besides being an poet and translater, she and her husband, Keith Waldrop began Burning Deck Magazine in 1961. The magazine evolved into Burning Deck Press, one of the most influential publishers for innovative poetry in the United States.
This blog post is an entry in the A to Z Challenge. Each day in April (except Sundays) I will be featuring a woman in literary history. If you click on the logo below, you will be introduced to the writing of more than a thousand bloggers writing on a wide variety of topics in April, all from A to Z!
Julie Jordan Scott has been a Life & Creativity Coach, Writer, Facilitator and Teleclass Leader since 1999. She is also an award winning Actor, Director, Artist and Mother Extraordinaire. She was twice the StoryTelling Slam champion in Bakersfield. She teaches a teleclass/ecourse "Discover the Power of Writing & Telling Engaging, Enlightening Stories" which begins again April 19, 2012. Find details by clicking this link.
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