Richard Howard
Poet, essayist, and translator Richard Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. He studied at Columbia University and the Sorbonne, and, early in his career, worked as a lexicographer. He served as the poetry editor of The Paris Review from 1992 to 2004. His first collection of poems, Quantities, was published in 1962. His landmark volume of essays Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969) characterized the poetics of a major generation of American poets. Howard won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Untitled Subjects and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. A major translator from the French, Howard's version of Les fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire won the American Book Award; he also translated important works by Roland Barthes, André Breton, Emil Cioran, André Gide, and many others, including The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In 1982, the French government named him a Chevalier of l'Ordre national du Mérite. He is professor emeritus of professional practice of writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
On having been a precocious child: "Of course, what precocity gave, socialization took away, and I hope the rather nasty designation 'precocious child' faded away before (at least!) adolescence."
Stanzas in Bloomsbury: Mrs. Woolf entertains the notion of a novel about Lord Byron
Issue no. 100 Summer-Fall 1986
. . . wanting to build up my
imaginary figure with every
scrap I could find, when
The Sun (Translator)
Issue no. 82 Winter 1981
Late in this cruel season when the sun
scourges alike the city and the fields,
parching the stubble and sinking into slums
Epigraph for a Banned Book (Translator)
Gentle reader, being—as you are—
a cautious man of uncorrupted tastes,
lay aside this disobliging work,
"You Used to Be Jealous... " (Translator)
You used to be jealous of our old nurse
who sleeps, warm heart and all, beneath the sod.
We ought to bring her flowers, even so.
A Strange Man's Dream (Translator)
Have you felt—I have—a pain that you enjoyed?
Do they say about you, too: "How strange he is!"
—I was dying, and a special agony
"I Prize the Memory..." (Translator)
I prize the memory of naked ages when
Apollo relished gilding marble limbs
whose agile-fleshed originals achieved
Duellum (Translator)
Two warriors have engaged in combat: swords
Hash and clash together; blood is spilled.
Such passages of arms are the result
Carrion (Translator)
Remember, my soul, the thing we saw
that lovely summer day?
On a pile of stones where the path turned off,
Parisian Dream (Translator)
It is a terrible terrain
no mortal eye has seen
whose image still seduces me
Meditation (Translator)
Behave, my Sorrow! let's have no more scenes.
Evening's what you wanted—Evening's here:
a gradual darkness overtakes the town,
Confession (Translator)
Once, indulgent lady—only once
you lay your lustrous arm
on mine (against the darkness of my soul
The Offended Moon (Translator)
Worshipped once, discreetly, by our sires
as Cynthia, the lamp of secret haunts,
and still attended through blue landscapes by
The Head of Hair (Translator)
Ecstatic fleece that ripples to your nape
and reeks of negligence in every curl!
To people my dim cubicle tonight
The Abyss (Translator)
Pascal had his abyss, it followed him.
But the abyss is All—action and dream,
language, desire!—and who could count the times
Twilight: Daybreak (Translator)
Dreams come now, bad dreams, and teenage boys
burrow into their pillows. Now the lamp
that glowed at midnight seems, like a bloodshot eye,
Spleen (II) (Translator)
No chest of drawers crammed with documents,
love-letters, wedding-invitations, wills,
a lock of someone's hair rolled up in a deed,
Jewels (Translator)
My darling was naked, or nearly, for knowing my heart
she had left on her jewels, the bangles and chains
whose jingling music gave her the conquering air
Romantic Sunset (Translator)
The sun is all very well when it rises—then
who minds returning its abrupt salute?
But fortunate the man who still can find
The Mask (Translator)
It is a legacy of Tuscan skill;
see how the holy sisters, Power and Grace,
sustain this woman's beauty in a form
To the Reader (Translator)
Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust
torment our bodies and possess our minds,
and we sustain our affable remorse
With a Potpourri from Down Under
Anything but rotten, such flowers are ill
named, remaining exempt from the compost fate
by a decorum of fatigue, keeping still
It is the movement that disturbs the line,
Thickening the form,
Turning into warm
L'invitation au Voyage
Wandering with you the shore
Which parallels our river
Like a second thought,
Earlier today, we announced that Richard Howard will receive The Paris Review's 2017 Hadada Award. To celebrate, we're sharing "On Tour," a poem by Howard from our Summer 1956 issue. It is the movement that disturbs the line.
Thickening the …
Introduction to Paris Review Poets from the Fifties
After forty-five years, as W.S. Merwin says, "the sentence continues." Here are a sheaf of poems from some of the original contributors to The Paris Review, which may serve--though many more of the original contributors are still writing poems--to inscribe upon the tablets of memory a certain continuity, a certain faith.
Introductory Note to Ten New Poets
So disparate, so distinct, even, are the new poems, the new poets who appear in all their multitudes in the office mail, so docile in their return-addressed envelopes yet so indubitable in their variety and delicacy that it would be defamatory for the poetry editor to claim more, in a generalizing way, about this particular clutch of poems than his own taste, his own delight in their particular virtues, their singular vitalities.
from a new translation of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time
The great works are ageless, but their translations date; indeed, as Walter Benjamin remarks, the subsequent translations of great works mark their stages of continued life.
In Memoriam: James Merrill