Clayton Eshleman

Vocation

American poet, translator, and editor. Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He and José Rubia Barcia won the U.S. National Book Award in category Translation. He has also translated books by Aimé Césaire (with Annette Smith), Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy and Bernard Bador. His 2006 translation of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo won the 2008 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was shortlisted for the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Eshleman founded and edited two of the most seminal and highly regarded literary magazines of the period. Twenty issues of Caterpillar appeared between 1967 and 1973. In 1981, he founded Sulfur magazine (forty-six issues appeared between 1981 and 2000). Sometimes he is mentioned in the company of the "ethno-poeticists" associated with Jerome Rothenberg. Eshleman's work have been published in over 500 literary magazines and newspapers, and he has given readings at more than 200 universities. He is now Professor Emeritus at Eastern Michigan University. In the fall of 2005, Clayton and his wife Caryl were in residence at the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio on Lake Como, Italy, where he studied Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" and wrote a 67-page work on the triptych in poetry and prose, "The Paradise of Alchemical Foreplay". For over thirty years, Eshleman has studied Ice Age cave art of southwestern France. The Eshlemans have led several cave tours to the painted/engraved Ice Age caves for the Ringling College of Art and Design. Link to Wikipedia biography