Background
Middleton, Christopher was born on June 10, 1926 in Truro, Cornwall, England. Arrived in United States, 1966. Son of Hubert Stanley and Dorothy May (Miller) Middleton.
(Famed for his translations of Nietzsche, Goethe, and Hlde...)
Famed for his translations of Nietzsche, Goethe, and Hlderlin, variously mislabeled modernist, post-Surrealist, even an involuntary Marxist, Christopher Middleton has been hailed by John Lucas as "easily the most intelligent and serious of our English innovators, a poet with a disconcerting knack of making new in almost every poem.
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(These poems were written during the last three months of...)
These poems were written during the last three months of the 20th century, most of them in Cassis. The Mediterranean orbit, Phoenicians and fish, local dogs and children, drew close as I wrote. From poem to poem I knew what I was doing, but the ensemble, after much sifting, took me by surprise... a sub-textual motif recurred contrapuntally touch. The tropes summon a Doctor Dark”, who is fully there only once, and then in the past. That you may come to harm in purgatory without a guide is what the epigraph from Dante tells.’ Christopher Middleton
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(Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former director ...)
Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former director of the literary section of National Endowment for the Arts, has stated, "I believe Middleton is the finest living poet writing in English. If this were a just world, he would have the Nobel Prize." Others write: "Middleton is a poet for whom there is a profound connection between natural and imaginative creativity, nature and mind," and that "he apprehends seeing and imagining differently as an act which has political implications, and opposes all forms of tyranny . . . He is a poet who celebrates primal energy, but as a sea to navigate, not a savage or wild element to let loose imaginatively in deranged behavior or murderous exercises of power. He is also a playful and witty poet, who has fun at the expense of academic prose style and logic, and enjoys 'absurd' writing which upsets habits of categorizing and class-ifying or authoritarian ideas of order or literary decorum."
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(Christopher Middleton in his third book of criticism incl...)
Christopher Middleton in his third book of criticism includes sixteen essays and three reviews, drawing on two decades' writing. This is neither a monograph nor a patchwork miscellany: certain motifs develop from one piece to the next: there is (almost) common ground, outlined in the opening piece called `Imagination and Lyric Voice'. `Middleton is easily the most intelligent and serious of our innovators,' writes John Lucas in the New Statesman, `a poet with a disconcerting knack of making it new in almost every poem.' He brings to his prose the inventive wisdom of the verse practitioner, so that when he writes on translation, it's about the art of translating rather than theories of the craft. `It is the action, of the original, of the translator, that I was exploring.' The conclusions he reaches are always provisional: what matters is the process of imagination and analysis by which they are reached, the journey rather than the point of arrival. `The essays are neither strictly theoretical, nor empirical, nor scholarly -- nor even literary, come to that.' Middleton's most celebrated essays `The Viking Prow', 1 and 2, are reprinted here, along with `The Pursuit of the Kingfisher'. Among authors specifically considered are Shakespeare, Coleridge, Holderlin, Mallarme, Blake, Brecht, Eich and Celan.
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(Christopher Middleton uses translation as part of his own...)
Christopher Middleton uses translation as part of his own poetic project. Here he offers poems from German, French, Swedish, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish, ranging as far back in time as the medieval age. His approach to each poet is "appropriate": the general rule is to be true to those things that make a poem unique. This selection is divided thematically. Poems on memory by Goethe are next to Rimbaud's "Memoire", Otkay Rifat's "Foxholes" and Ibn Guzman's "The Crow". Other sections are "Loves" and "Art and Artifice"
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(Christopher Middleton, long a resident of the USA, is one...)
Christopher Middleton, long a resident of the USA, is one of Britain's finest poets. He was writing (not for publication) his 'Nocturnal Journal' during the two years prior to his retirement from the University of Texas at Austin, where he had taught German and Comparative Literature since 1966. The journal appears here in conjunction with conversations tape-recorded by Marius Kociejowski in London during October 2002 and June 2003. In both areas Middleton attends eloquently to his concerns as poet, translator, and essayist: values intrinsic and peculiar to poetry, the fundamental human aptitude (and craving) for aesthetic expression, and the reading of sign-systems usually deemed haphazard (e.g., a Turkish sea-mew, a soccer match, the aprons of waiters, rubbish in the Paris Metro, and a fresco in Cappadocia). Also included here, by way of introduction to the volume, is a brief but entertaining reminiscence of his first encounters with Christopher Middleton by Marius Kociejowski.
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( In the tradition of Henri Michaux’s Plume and Julio Cor...)
In the tradition of Henri Michaux’s Plume and Julio Cortázar’s Lucas, British author Christopher Middleton presents hilarious anecdotes of the great economist Blaff, a bold, bluffing, blunderbuss character.
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( Caroline Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former direct...)
Caroline Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former director of the literary section of the National Endowment for the Arts, has stated: "I believe Middleton is the finest living poet writing in English. If this were a just world, he would have the Nobel Prize." Guy Davenport writes that his "rare genius for exact observation and metaphysical wit as given us for over half a century now poems of such brilliant craftsmanship and exacting sensibility that a few critics only have dared to assess their magic. He is an incomparable stylist, a wry ironist, a philosopher of words." These new poems continue Middleton’s exploration of geography, imagination, and "trouble about history."
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(In the first part of this work, against a background of d...)
In the first part of this work, against a background of destruction in history and of history, glowing figures move. The second section contains poems about various art works as durable epiphanies. Poems in the third section work around figures that signify resistance, in large ways and small, to destruction, and endurance through it. Various historical periods are sighted or glimpsed through a lens and in a shifting perspective, those of a person now captive, now free. Each section centres on transformation and metamorphosis, Middleton's perennial theme.
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Middleton, Christopher was born on June 10, 1926 in Truro, Cornwall, England. Arrived in United States, 1966. Son of Hubert Stanley and Dorothy May (Miller) Middleton.
Bachelor, University Oxford, England, 1951. Doctor of Philosophy, University Oxford, England, 1954.
Assistant Lecturer in German, King's College University of London 1955-1957, lecturer 1957-1966. Professor, of Germanic Languages and Literature University of Texas at Austin since 1966. Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial.
(Famed for his translations of Nietzsche, Goethe, and Hlde...)
( In the tradition of Henri Michaux’s Plume and Julio Cor...)
( Caroline Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former direct...)
(Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner and former director ...)
(Christopher Middleton in his third book of criticism incl...)
(In the first part of this work, against a background of d...)
(These poems were written during the last three months of...)
(Christopher Middleton, long a resident of the USA, is one...)
(Christopher Middleton uses translation as part of his own...)
( A collection of essays by the British poet and translat...)
(Book by Middleton, Christopher)
Author: Selected Writings, 1989, Andalusian Poems, 1993, The Balcony Tree, 1992, Intimate Chronicles, 1996, Twenty Tropes for Doctor Dark, 2000, The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems, 2001, Of the Mortal Fire, 2003, Jackdaw Jiving: Essays on Poetry and Translation, 1998, In the Mirror of the Eighth King, 1999, Faint Harps and Silver Voices-Selected Translations, 2000, Crypto-Topographia: Stories of Secret Places, 2002, Palavers and A Nocturnal Journal, 2004, The Anti-Basilisk, 2005, The Tenor on Horseback, 2007, Collected Poems, 2008, Depictions of Blaff, 2010, Poems, 2006-2010.
Member Akademie der Künste Berlin.