Anthony Kerrigan


Anthony Kerrigan was an American translator, poet, and literary critic best known for his multi-volume editions of Miguel de Unamuno in English for the Bollingen Series and for editing and introducing the first complete U.S. edition in English of Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones. He won the National Book Award in Translation in 1975 for Unamuno's The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith, and was also a 1974 finalist for The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations.

Life and career

Kerrigan was born in Winchester, Massachusetts, and died in Bloomington, Indiana, aged 72.
A later profile summarized his background and early years, noting his Massachusetts origins and childhood in Cuba before his adult career as a translator of Spanish and Latin American literature.
From the 1960s onward Kerrigan became closely associated with the Bollingen Series at Princeton University Press, serving as editor-translator to Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno, a seven-volume undertaking in the Bollingen Series LXXXV.
In 1962 Grove Press published the first complete English-language edition of Borges's Ficciones in the United States. Kerrigan served as editor and wrote the introduction to that volume.
Kerrigan was a Senior Guest Scholar at the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, during the 1980s, where he continued editorial and translation work. Among his later projects was a new annotated English translation of José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, edited by Kenneth Moore and with a foreword by Saul Bellow. He also translated and annotated Borges and María Kodama's Atlas.
Kerrigan's papers, including correspondence and manuscripts related to his translations of Borges, Camilo José Cela, Reinaldo Arenas, Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno, are held at the University of Notre Dame's Hesburgh Libraries.

Works

Poetry

  • Lear in the Tropic of Paris.
  • Espousal in August. Limited ed., 125 copies.
  • At the Front Door of the Atlantic. With a Picasso frontispiece.

    Selected translations and editorial work

  • Editor and introduction, J. L. Borges, Ficciones.
  • Editor/translator : Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno. Princeton University Press. 7 vols..
  • Translator, Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations. National Book Award finalist.
  • Translator, Miguel de Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith. National Book Award winner.
  • Translator/annotator with introduction, José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses.
  • Translator/annotator, Jorge Luis Borges, Atlas.

    Honors

  • National Book Award for Translation, for Unamuno's The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith; finalist for The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations.

    Legacy and archives

Kerrigan's influence on the reception of Unamuno and Borges in the English-speaking world has been noted in critical and scholarly discussions of twentieth-century translation from Spanish. His papers are housed at the University of Notre Dame's Hesburgh Libraries.