Richard Sieburth is a translator, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. A graduate of the University of Chicago and of Harvard University, he retired from university life in early 2019, after 45 years of teaching. Over the course of his career, he directed many doctoral dissertations that resulted in successful books and academic careers, and advised dozens of other students who went on to careers in translation, publishing, and other corridors of the Arts. Sieburth is considered an authority on French renaissance poetry, on European romanticism and on literary modernism in general, particularly the life and work of Ezra Pound. In addition to his numerous editions of the works of Pound for New Directions and the Library of America, Sieburth has published translations of Nostradamus, Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Büchner, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, Michel Leiris, Eugène Guillevic, and Jacques Darras. He has also published translations into French of American poets like Michael Palmer. As a historian and theorist of translation, Sieburth played a crucial role in introducing and disseminating the work of Antoine Berman into English. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, his essays, articles and translations have also appeared in Studies in Romanticism, Romantisme, L’Esprit Créateur, Parnassus, Poetry, Poesie, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, Critical Inquiry, October, Raritan, Yale Review, Sulphur, Conjunctions, the Paris Review, Bookforum and Harper’s. He was made a Chevalier dans l’ordre des palmes académiques in 1985, elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and received an Annual Award in Letters from the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 2017, while his forthcoming Late Baudelaire has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship for Translation. Among many honors, he received the PEN/Book-of the Month Translation Prize in 2000 for his Selected Writings of Gérard de Nerval and his translation of Maurice Scève’s Emblems of Desire was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Prize and the PEN Poetry Translation Prize in 2003. He was twice shortlisted for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, in 2007 for Stroke by Stroke and then in 2010 for The Salt Smugglers, while his translations of Eugène Guillevic's Geometries was shortlisted for the Three Percent Poetry Translation Prize in 2012. Most recently, his A Certain Plume received the 2019 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation and his Songs from a Single Eye was longlisted for the 2020 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation.
Life and work
Today he is recognized as a leading translator from both German and French, including the following:
Georg Büchner's Lenz
Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hymns and Fragments,
Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary
Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings and "Salt Smugglers"
Henri Michaux’s Emergences/Resurgences & Stroke by Stroke
Michel Leiris’s Nights as Day, Days as Night
Gershom Scholem's The Fullness of Time: Poems
Maurice Scève's Emblems of Desire: Selections from the Délie
