Field: Modern poetry; Jewish literature; literary translation; poetry and environment

Special Interests: Literature, art, and music of the Holocaust; Pablo Neruda; Paul Celan

Profile: John Felstiner's first book, The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature (1972), has to do with parody, but his teaching and writing now concern modern poetry in various forms. A year of teaching North American poetry in Chile led to Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980) which won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal, and to an interest in literary translation. His Pablo Neruda and Paul Celan translations won 1st and 2nd prizes from the British Comparative Literature Association. During the 1970s he developed critical approaches to poetry by civilians and soldiers from the Vietnam era. After a year of teaching at the Hebrew University in Israel, he began to study and teach the literature that emerged from the European Jewish catastrophe. Felstiner's commitment is to Jewish Studies and to the practical, interpretive, and theoretical implications of literary translation. He is currently writing a book on poetry and environmental awareness. He has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and NEA fellowships. Felstiner's book on the German-speaking Jewish poet, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), was named a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, the MLA's James Russell Lowell prize, and it won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. He has edited a Norton anthology of American Jewish literature (2000) and Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Norton, 2001). This anthology won the Modern Language Association's biennial Lois Roth Award for Translation of a Literary Work, the American Translators Association's biennial award for German translation, PEN West's prize for literary translation, and was runner-up for American PEN's translation award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, and the British Society of Authors’ Schlegel-Tieck prize.