Christopher Middleton (poet)


John Christopher Middleton was a British poet and translator, especially of German literature.

Life

Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, United Kingdom in 1926. Following four years' service in the Royal Air Force, he studied at Merton College, Oxford, matriculating in 1948. He then held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King's College London. In 1966 he took up a position as Professor of Germanic Languages & Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, retiring in 1998. Middleton published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. He received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation.
Middleton married Mary Freer in 1953; they had two daughters and a son. They divorced in 1969. Middleton died on 29 November 2015.

Works

  • The Pigeons and the Girls
  • Poems
  • Nocturne in Eden
  • The Vision of a Drowned Man
  • Torse 3
  • Nonsequences
  • Our Flowers & Nice Bones
  • The Fossil Fish
  • Briefcase History
  • The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon
  • Pataxanadu and Other Prose
  • Céleste, Orange Export Ltd., collection Chutes
  • Bolshevism in Art and Other Expository Writings essays
  • Anasphere: le torse antique
  • Carminalenia
  • The Pursuit of the Kingfisher essays
  • 111 Poems
  • Serpentine Two Horse Wagon going by
  • Selected Writings
  • The Balcony Tree
  • On a Photograph of Chekhov
  • Intimate Chronicles
  • The Swallow Diver
  • Jackdaw Jiving
  • The Redbird Hexagon
  • Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations
  • Twenty Tropes for Doctor Dark
  • The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems
  • The Anti-Basilisk
  • Collected Poems
  • ''Collected Later Poems''

Translations