Richard Sieburth
Richard Sieburth is Professor Emeritus of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University. A translator and editor, Sieburth retired in 2019 after 35 years of teaching at NYU and 10 years at Harvard.
Sieburth is an authority on French renaissance poetry, European romanticism and literary modernism in general, particularly on the life and work of Ezra Pound. In addition to his numerous editions of the works of Pound for New Directions and the Library of America, he has published translations of Nostradamus, Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Büchner, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Eugène Guillevic, and Jacques Darras. He has also published translations into French of American poets such as Michael Palmer.
Early life and education
Sieburth obtained a BA from the University of Chicago in 1970 and a PhD from Harvard University in 1976.Awards
Sieburth was made a Chevalier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques in 1985, elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and received an Annual Award in Letters from the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 2017, while his forthcoming Late Baudelaire has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship for Translation. Among many honors, he received the PEN/Book-of the Month Translation Prize in 2000 for his Selected Writings of Gérard de Nerval and his translation of Maurice Scève's Emblems of Desire was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Prize and the PEN Poetry Translation Prize in 2003. He was twice shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, in 2007 for Stroke by Stroke and then in 2010 for The Salt Smugglers, while his translations of Eugène Guillevic's Geometries was shortlisted for the Three Percent Poetry Translation Prize in 2012. Most recently, his A Certain Plume received the 2019 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation and his Songs from a Single Eye was longlisted for the 2020 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation.Selected works
Authored books
Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont Signs in Action: Ideograms of Pound and Michaux- ''Weights and Measures/Poids et mesures''
Editor
- Ezra Pound: A Walking Tour in Southern France: Ezra Pound Among the Troubadours
- Ezra Pound: Poems & Translations
- Ezra Pound: The Pisan Cantos
- Ezra Pound: The Spirit of Romance
- Ezra Pound: New Selected Poems & Translations
- Benjamin Constant: Adolphe translated by Alexander Walker
Translations
Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin Nights As Day, Days As Night by Michel Leiris Sun by Michael Palmer Gerard de Nerval – Selected Writings Emergences/Resurgences by Henri Michaux Emblems of Desire: Selections from Maurice Scève's "Délie" ; 2nd revised ed.,- The Fullness of Time: Poems by Gershom Scholem Lenz by Georg Büchner Stroke by Stroke by Henri Michaux - includes two Michaux texts: "Stroke by Stroke" and "Grasp" The Salt Smugglers by Gérard de Nerval Geometries by Eugène Guillevic The Prophecies by Nostradamus Love Sonnets & Elegies by Louise Labé Songs from a Single Eye by Oswald von Wolkenstein. Second, revised edition Nights as Day, Days as Night by Michel Leiris Greetings from Angelus: Poems by Gershom Scholem A Certain Plume by Henri Michaux War Songs by Antarah Ibn Shaddid Aseroë by François Dominique Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed by Charles Baudelaire John Scotus Eriugena at Laon & Other Poems by Jacques Darras Frail Riffs by Michel Leiris IWickerwork by Christian Lehnert I
Other
The Cenci by Antonin Artaud, performed at the Ohio Theater in New York City in February 2008.- Louise Bourgeois, Psychoanalytic Writings, in Laratte-Smith, ed., The Return of the Repressed: vol. 2
- Jacques Darras, A L'Ecoute: Entretiens avec Richard Sieburth sur la poésie de langue anglaise et sa traduction Sqizo: A Film about Louis Wolfson, directed by Duccio Fabbri.