Background
Armand Schwerner was born on May 11, 1927, in Antwerp, Belgium, and immigrated to the United States in 1935.
Cornell University, Cornell, New York, United States
Armand Schwerner studied at Cornell University.
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
Armand Schwerner studied at Columbia University
(Original literary translations of the entire corpus of cl...)
Original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.
https://www.amazon.com/Sophocles-Women-Trachis-Electra-Philoctetes/dp/0812216539/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(The edition which includes all twenty-seven tablets that ...)
The edition which includes all twenty-seven tablets that Schwerner had completed at the time of his death, along with the poet's own commentary on the work in the form of Journals/Divagations.
https://www.amazon.com/Tablets-Armand-Schwerner/dp/0943373565/?tag=2022091-20
Armand Schwerner was born on May 11, 1927, in Antwerp, Belgium, and immigrated to the United States in 1935.
Armand Schwerner studied at Cornell and Columbia universities and earned his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees at Columbia.
Schwerner’s performances of The Tablets series were well known; according to the New York Times, Schwerner “could produce many distinct voices from one breath to the next. He could also use his mastery of rhythm (he was an accomplished clarinetist) to create an audible stir in an audience, which at times made it seem that his poems were speaking from the floor, the balcony and the rafters all at once.” During the 1980s, the Living Theater staged versions of The Tablets. Schwerner himself wrote for the stage, including a version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes.
Schwerner taught for many years at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. He was active in PEN America and on the board of the Tibetan Museum in Staten Island.
(The edition which includes all twenty-seven tablets that ...)
(Original literary translations of the entire corpus of cl...)
1998Schwerner had a love for the different nuances in language and his work includes aspects of Tibetan Chant, American Indian and Hawaiian verse, and verbiage from ancient clay tablets.
Schwerner was gregarious and his performances were so effective that the sound often seemed to be coming from the floor and the audience enjoyed the exchange of energy.
Quotes from others about the person
“It was given to Schwerner, perhaps to a greater extent than any of his fellows, to understand the deep irony and uncanny pathos that informed the ethnopoetic project at its most serious - which is also to say, at its most grandly comic. Schwerner embraced the universalizing spirit of ethnopoetics - the dream of total translation, total performance, total synchronicity - while at the same time implicitly acknowledging its impossibility.” - Norman Finkelstein
“More than anything, the key to Armand's work is its diction, tonally and lexically so accurate and finally so moving. For a poet who took the self's structures as the scrap lumber of language, and so takes himself apart in every poem, word choice, its voicings and intonings, are almost the only tracery of personality. High intelligence, humor, crudity, spiritual depth, these come from a place of great activity and search, one that is constantly centering and decentering itself.” - Michael Heller