Literary Arts

Rosmarie Waldrop is a poet and translator, born in Germany, in 1935. At age 10 she spent half a year acting with a traveling theater, but was happy when schools reopened and she could settle for the quieter pleasures of reading and writing. These she has pursued in universities (Ph.D. University of Michigan), but mostly in Providence, RI where she lives with Keith Waldrop, with whom she co-edited Burning Deck Press.

The linguistic displacement from German to English has not only made her into a translator, but gave her a sense of writing as exploration of what happens between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures.

Recent books include Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, Driven to Abstraction, and Curves to the Apple (New Directions). Her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested), is available from University of Alabama Press; her novel, The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter, from Dorothy a Publishing Project. She has translated from the French 14 volumes of Edmond Jabès’s work (see her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Wesleyan University Press) as well as volumes by Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Elfriede Czurda, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht, Peter Waterhouse and Peter Weiss.

Her honors include a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; a Harold Morton Landon and a PEN Translation Award; NEA, DAAD and Howard Foundation Fellowships; the rank of Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Government; and an honorary doctorate from Brown University.