Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone was born on November 13th, 1927 and is currently 97 years old. Willis Barnstone was born in New York City, New York, USA. Barnstone attended Bowdoin College where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree, Columbia University where he received a Master of Arts degree and Yale University where he received a Ph.D. degree. He also studied at the University of Mexico, the Sorbonne and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Willis Barnstone is a translator, religious scholar, and poet. He has translated works by Antonio Machado, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Luis Borges, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and some fragments by Sappho and Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher.

His first teaching job was as instructor in French and English at the Anavryta Classical Lyceum in Greece at the tail end of the Greek Civil War from 1949 to 1951. He also taught in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War from 1975 to 1976.

In 1951, he worked as a translator of French art texts for Les Editions Skira in Geneva, Switzerland.

Jorge Luis Borges had already lost his vision in 1968 when Willis met him for the first time backstage at the 92nd Street Center in New York after this poetry reading that he arranged for the Argentine poet. This meeting resulted in a long-standing literary partnership and friendship which lasted for most of their lives. They collaborated in 1975-76 to translate some of Borges’ sonnets into English.

After they returned to America, they traveled to universities of Harvard, Indiana, Chicago, and Columbia in order to give talks which appear in Borges at Eighty: Conversations.

Willis, along with his kids Tony and Aliki, co-edited sweeping literary anthologies from antiquity to present day.

The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice is a pioneering and lucid book that explores the theory and history of literary translation as an art form. Arguing that literary translation goes well beyond the transfer of linguistic information, he emphasizes that imaginative originality lives just as much in the translation as in the source material, a view which skews conventional ideas of artistic primacy.

He starts by dealing with general issues of fidelity, literalness, and originality: with translation being aesthetic transformation, metaphor, and recreation. He examines as well at translation as a traditionally stigmatized genre. Willis then discusses the history of translation, using as a paradigm the Bible, which is the most translated book in the whole world. He traces it from its original Hebrew and Greek to Jerome’s Latin and the English of Tyndale and then the King James Version.

Citing the way that authors will intentionally mistranslate for political and religious purposes, Willis gives fascinating insights into how, by altering the names in the Gospels, Jesus and the Virgin Mary stop being Jews, the Jews become villains, and Christianity becomes an original instead of a mere translation.

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Willis Barnstone: F.A.Q