Willis Barnstone (born November 13, 1927) is an American poet, religious scholar, and translator. He was born in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Oakland, California. He has translated works by Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pedro Salinas, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος).
Education
He completed his secondary education at Stuyvesant High School, the George School, and Phillips Exeter Academy before receiving degrees from Bowdoin College (B.A., 1948), Columbia University (M.A., 1956) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1960). He studied at the University of Mexico (1947), the Sorbonne (1948–49) and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (1952–53). In high school and college he volunteered with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee in Aztec villages south of Mexico City. In 1973 he studied Chinese at Middlebury College in their summer language program. He taught in Greece at the end of the Greek Civil War from 1949 to 1951 and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War from 1975 to 1976. He was in China in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution. A decade later he was Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University, 1984–1985.
Family
Barnstone details autobiographical memories in his memoirs and poetry. As a child, Willis and his family lived on Riverside Drive in New York City. He went to the World Series with his father to see Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth play. In spring 1939, Joe (an elevator operator in his apartment building) took him upstairs to Ruth's apartment on the 18th floor. He was in his Boy Scout uniform. A newspaperman handed him a pile of baseball diplomas which the Babe would give out the next day at the 1939 World's Fair to raise money for poor school kids. The picture appeared on the front page of the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News.]
Barnstone's daughter and son are also poets, translators, and scholars Aliki Barnstone and Tony Barnstone.
Career
Teaching Positions
Willis Barnstone's first teaching position was instructor in English and French at the Anavryta Classical Lyceum in Greece, 1949–50, a private school in the forest of Anavryta north of Athens, attended by prince Constantine, the later ill-fated king of Greece, who was then nine years old. In 1951 he worked as a translator of French art texts for Les Éditions Skira in Geneva, Switzerland. He taught at Wesleyan University, was O'Connor Professor of Greek at Colgate University, and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Spanish at Indiana University where he has been a member of East Asian Languages & Culture, and the Institute for Biblical and Literary Studies. He started Film Studies and courses in International Popular Songs and Lyrics and Asian and Western Poetry at Indiana.
Anthologies of Women's Literature and World Literature From Antiquity to Now
Barnstone co-edited sweeping literary anthologies from antiquity to modern day, with his children Aliki Barnstone and Tony Barnstone. The 1980 anthology A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now opens with the Sumerian language poet Enheduanna (2300b) and features women poets from each continent and literary epoch until 1980; later editions of the anthology end with a section on contemporary American poets, including Audrey Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, June Jordan, Brenda Hillman, and Leslie Scalapino.
The 1999 Prentice Hall anthology Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1990 pages in length, opens with a section on Asia from Vedic period (1500 to 200 B.C.) to Haruki Murakami (1940-). The section on Near Eastern and North African literature opens with The Shipwrecked Sailor (2040 B.C.) and ends with writings by Mohamed Mrabet (1940-). The Sub-Sahara spans oral creation myths to ends modern era writers Ben Okri, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J.M.Coetzee, Mia Couto, Dambudzo Marechera. The Americas section features Pre-Columbian era poems in Quiche-Maya and Quechuan languages through to the 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean authors, including Derek Walcott, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, V. S. Naipaul and Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams (poetry collection).