Translations

David Wevill was born a Canadian in Japan in 1935, and was educated in both Canada and England. He has lived in Burma and in Spain but has made his home in Austin, Texas for the past fifty years. While resident in England in the 1950s and ’60s, he established a substantial reputation as a poet, publishing four volumes between 1964 and 1973. He won prizes, was represented in major anthologies such as The New Poetry and A Group Anthology, and was included in the renowned Penguin Modern Poets series before his first full collection appeared. All of his poetry has now been gathered in two volumes of Collected Poems that are published simultaneously with this book.

In the late ’60s he moved across the Atlantic to take up a position in Austin, Texas, and then joined the University of Texas there in 1970, where he remained until retirement as Professor Emeritus in 2008. He still lives in Austin today. His work slowly fell from view in Britain after the publication of 1974’s Where the Arrow Falls, although a number of poetry collections continued to appear in his native Canada.

David Wevill’s translations have only been gathered on one previous occasion, in the USA. In this volume we present all of his versions of Pessoa, Lacerda, Baudelaire, San Juan de la Cruz and Pindar and in due course will issue a matching volume devoted entirely to his translations of Ferenc Juhász, the great Hungarian poet, which were originally published in the seminal Penguin Modern European Poets series.