Serge Gavronsky

Serge Gavronsky (born 1932) is an American poet and translator.

Life

Gavronsky was born in Paris. He fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940. Gavronsky received his A.B. in European History and French in 1954 from Columbia College and an M.A. in European History in 1955 and a Ph.D in European Intellectual History in 1965 from Columbia University,^[1] and is now professor emeritus in the French department at Barnard College.^[2] He lives in New York City.^[3]

Gavronsky is currently working on his sixth novel and in the process of co-translating, with François Dominique, writer, the majestic poem "A" by Louis Zukofsky.

Awards

• 1979 Guggenheim Fellowship^[4]
• 1980 Camargo Foundation Fellowship^[5]

• 1990 Sole judge appointed by the Academy of American Poets for the Harold Morton Landon Prize in Translation ^[6]
• 1991 French Government, Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
• 1997 French Government, Officier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

Works

Novels

• The German Friend, a novel (New York, SUN, 1984.)
• The Name of the Father, a novel (Spiralli, 1993) Translated into Italian with a preface by Harold Bloom.
• L'Identita, a novel, a novel (Spiralli, 2006.) Translated into Italian.
• The Sudden Death of…, a novel (NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2009.)
• Silence of Memory, a novel (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014.)

Poetry

Books of Poetry:

• AndOrThe: Poems Within a Poem (Talisman House, 2007)

Gavronsky has appeared in over thirty French and American poetry magazines including:

• Lectures et compte-rendu, poèmes. Coll. "Textes," Flammarion, 1973.
• Je le suis, poème, illustrations by Michel Kanter, artists’s edition, 1995.
• L’interminable discussion, poem with six original woodcuts by JM. Scanreigh. Editions Philippe Millereau, 1996.
• Reduction du tryptique, poem with 4 original woodcuts by JM. Scanreigh, Philippe Millereau, 1996.
• Il était un dire, poem for artist's book by Patricia Erbelding (Mémoires Collections, 2007)

Translation

A selection of books in translation:

• Poems & texts; an anthology of French poems: translations, and interviews with Ponge, Follain, Guillevic, Frénaud, Bonnefoy, DuBouchet, Roche, and Pleynet. October House. 1969. 
• Patricia Terry, Serge Gavronsky, ed. (1975). Modern French Poetry : a Bilingual Anthology. Columbia University Press. 
• Serge Gavronsky, Francis Ponge: The Power of Language. (1979). University of California Press.
• Le mecanisme du sens (Paris: Maeght, 1979).
• Joyce Mansour, Cris/Screams, trans. with an Introduction by Serge Gavronsky (Sausolito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 1995.)
• Serge Gavronsky, eds. (1997). Six contemporary French women poets: theory, practice, and pleasures. Southern Illinois University Press. 
• Toward a new poetics: contemporary writing in France : interviews, with an introduction and translated texts. University of California Press. 1994. ISBN 978-0-520-08793-4. KrGO4IrgcgsC&dq=Serge+Gavronsky&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=BThASpvSN8bKlAeliZjKAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5. 
• Translator and author of introduction, Joyce Mansour Essential Poetry and Prose (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2008.)
• Co-Translator with François Dominique, writer, "Louis Zukofsky’s “A” – 13 - 18 (Dijon: Virgile, 2012).
• Co-Translator with François Dominique, "Louis Zukofsky’s “A” – 19 - 23 (Dijon: Virgile, 2014).

A selection of anthologized poems in translation:

• Jean Follain, Modern European Poetry, Bantam Classics, 1967.
• René Depestre, The World, Special Translation Issue, 1973.
• Aragon, For Neruda/For Chile, Beacon, 1975.
• Francis Ponge, Contemporary World Poetry, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979.
• Marcelin Pleynet, André Frénaud, Francis Ponge, Random House Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, 1982.
• Monique Buri, The Defiant Muse, French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present, The Feminist Press, 1986.
• Jean Frémon, Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleynet in Violence of the White Page: Contempo-rary French Poetry, Tyuonyi, 1992.
• Francis Ponge, Against Forgetting, Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, Norton, 1993.
• Francis Ponge, "The Sun...," Poems for the Millenium, The University of California Press, I, 1995.
• Francis Ponge, "Rhetoric," World Poetry, Norton, 1998.
• Francis Ponge, “The Object is Poetics,” in Mary Ann Caws, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Nebraska University Press, 2001.

Criticism

• The French Liberal Opposition and the American Civil War. (New York, The Humanities Press, 1968.)
• Francis Ponge and the Power of Language. (Berkeley, California, The University of California Press, 1979.)
• Culture/Ecriture, essais critiques. (Rome, Bulzoni, 1983.)
• "BLACK THEMES IN SUREAL GUISE". The New York Times. February 19, 1984. 
• Gavronsky, Serge (November 5, 1989). "'DON'T ASK. ACT'". The New York Times. Retrieved May 23, 2010. 
• Towards a New Poetics (Berkeley, California, The University of California Press, 1994.)

References