POETRY & LITERATURE

Home > POETRY & LITERATURE > Clayton Eshleman

• Tweet
• Outlook
• ICAL
• PRINT
• Email
• Submit Changes

• RSS

• Official Website
• Add to My Favorites

Clayton Eshleman

Presented by University of Notre Dame Creative Writing Program at University of Notre Dame, South Dining Hall

March 22, 2007

Add Review/Comment
Comment on Facebook

Enjoy a joint poetry reading from Clayton Eshleman with Johannes Goransson. Clayton Eshleman will give a talk on the Vallejo translation saga and give a joint reading with University of Notre Dame poet Orlando Menes who will read Vallejo’s poetry in the original. On March 22nd, Eshleman will read original poetry along with internationally renowned poet, Johannes Goransson, in a joint reading. All three events are free and open to the public. The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo is the first translation of the complete works of Peruvian Poet César Vallejo (1892-1938) made available to English speakers. Vallejo is considered one of the greatest Spanish-speaking poets of the twentieth-century. Clayton Eshleman was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. The summers of 1958 and 1959 he spent in Mexico, where he began translating Neruda. While a graduate student at Indiana University he also met Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, and Paul Blackburn. He accepted an instructorship with the University of Maryland in their Far-Eastern Division (Japan, Taiwan, Korea) teaching literature and composition to armed forces personnel. Eshleman moved to Kyoto in the spring of 1962 and began his apprenticeship in poetry: a translation of the 110 poems that Vallejo wrote in Paris between 1923 and 1938. He became good friends with Gary Snyder, Cid Corman and the lithographer Will Petersen, all of who were living in Kyoto at this time. From Corman he learned a good deal about translation and literary magazine editing. Upon returning to the States, Eshleman moved back to Bloomington, Indiana, where he worked on an anthology of Latin American poetry. Eshleman and his wife moved to Lima in August, finding a small apartment in the Miraflores area. A complicated 9 months ensued: Eshleman was offered the chance to start a bilingual literary magazine by the Peruvian North American Institute, which he called Quena, but the magazine first issue of some 300 pages was suppressed by the Institute because it supposedly contained political material. Eshleman moved to New York City in the spring of 1966 where he worked at the American Language Institute at New York University. In 1967 he took over Joanne Kyger's loft at 36 Greene Street, and founded the literary review, Caterpillar, which he edited until moving to southern California in 1970 as part of the original faculty in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts While in Los Angeles, Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia co-translated Vallejo's Spanish Civil War poems. Eshleman is now a professor at Eastern Michigan University working in the English Department where he taught poetry workshops. Over the past decade, five collections of his translations, five collections of his poetry, and two collections of essays have been published. Over the years he has published his writing and translations in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and given readings of his work at over 200 universities. He is now Professor Emeritus at EMU. In 2004 Black Sparrow Press will bring out a new collection of poetry, My Devotion, and Soft Skull will bring out a revised and expanded version of his 1988 selected translations, Conductors of the Pit. The talk on Vallejo will take place on March 21 at 4:30 pm in the Hesburgh Center Auditorium, his bilingual reading with Orlando Menes is at 8:00 pm in the Hospitality Room of South Dining Hall and his joint poetry reading with Johannes Goransson will take place on March 22,nd also at the Hospitality Room of South Dining Hall. All three events are on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Location: Reckers, Hospitality Room