User:Bmcpher/Kessler

Jascha Kessler
Occupation	Translator, Writer, Poet
Nationality	United States
Genre	Translation

Jascha Kessler (Brooklyn, 1929) is an American poet and short story writer, and a translator of poetry and prose from Eastern European languages. He is Professor Emeritus at UCLA. From 1990 to 1996, he served as Arts Commissioner for the City of Santa Monica, CA.

Kessler has received many honors, including the Hungary PEN Club's Memorial Medal, which he was the first American to receive, in 1979, and three Senior Fulbright awards.

Academic Career

Kessler was born in Brooklyn in 1929 and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1946. He graduated from NYU's Heights College of Arts and Science in 1950. He then continued his education at University of Michigan, where he received his MA and his Ph. D in English and Philosophy. Kessler was a professor of English and Modern Literature at UCLA from 1961 to his recent retirement. He also taught poetry, fiction, and playwrighting.

Awards and Honors

Kessler was awarded the Major Hopwood Award for Poetry from the University of Michigan in 1952. He was awarded the NEA Fellowship in Writing and three Senior Fulbright awards, two to Italy and one to Czechoslovakia. In 1979 he was a Rockefeller Fellow and worked at the Bellagio Study Center. He was given the California Arts Council Fellowship in Fiction Writing in 1993-94. He became the first American to receive the Hungarian PEN Club's Memorial Medal in 1979, awarded for his work on The Magician's Garden: 24 Stories by Geza Csáth with Charlotte Rogers. The book also won the Translation Prize from the Translation Center at Columbia University. In 1989 he received the Translation Center's George Soros Foundation Prize for Catullan Games, translated from the Hungarian by Sándor Rákos. He was awarded the Finnish Translation Center Translation Prize in 2001 for Traveling Light: Selected Poems of Kirsti Simonsuuri.

Critical Works

Kessler reviewed fiction, poetry, theater, and events on KUSC-FM, broadcasting from LA, for five years in the 1980's. He has published book reviews in magazines and papers. Several dozen of his radio and print reviews have been anthologized in Contemporary Literary Criticism. His literary essays have appeared widely. Kessler is a regular writer of letters to the editor of papers such as the L. A. Times and the Financial Times. In 2008 he stirred tempers when his letter to The Times Literary Supplement accused W. H. Auden of unethical practices in his choice of John Ashbery for the Yale Younger Poets award in 1956. Ashbery replied in turn with a letter disputing Kessler's story and defending Auden's choice and methods.

Bibliography

Poetry

• Whatever Love Declares (The Plantin Press: Los Angeles, CA: 1969)
• After the Armies Have Passed (NYU Press, NY: 1970)
• In Memory of the Future (Kayak Press, Santa Cruz, CA: 1976)
• Collected Poems (Xlibris: 2000)
• Táhirih: A Portrait in Poetry: Selected Poems of Qurratu'l-'Ayn Translated and Edited by Amin Banani, English poems by Jascha Kessler and Anthony A. Lee (Kalimát Press, Los Angeles, CA: 2004)

Prose

• An Egyptian Bondage and Other Stories (Harper & Row, NY: 1967)
  • second edition Xlibris: 2000
• Death Comes for the Behaviorist: Four Long Stories (Lexis Press, San Francisco, CA: 1983)
• Classical Illusions: 28 Stories (McPherson & Co,: Kingston, NY, 1985)
• Transmigrations: 18 Mythologems (Jazz Press: Capitola, CA: 1985)
• Siren Songs & Classical Illusions: Fifty Modern Fables (McPherson & Co.: Kingston, NY: 1992)
• Rapid Transit 1948: An Unsentimental Education (Xlibris: 2000)
• "Coat or Lining?: An Old Sephardic Tale" Midstream 46.5 (2000): 25.

Drama

• Christmas Carols & Other Plays (Xlibris: 2000)

Translations

• The Magician's Garden: 24 Stories by Geza Csáth (Columbia University Press, NY: 1980)
  • Republished as Opium ed. Philip Roth (Penguin Books, NY: 1983)
• Rose of Mother-Of Pearl by Grozdana Olujic, Ill. Kathy Jacobi (Hot Chocolate Books, Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN: 1983)
• Under Gemini: The Selected Poetry of Miklós Radnóti (Ohio University Press, Athens, OH: 1985)
• Medusa: The Selected Poetry of Nicolai Kantchev Trans. with Alexander Shurbanov (Quarterly Review of Literature Press, Princeton, NJ: 1986)
• The Face of Creation: 23 Contemporary Hungarian Poets (Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN: 1988)
• Catullan Games by Sándor Rákos, Introduction by the Translator, Ill. Richard Diebenkorn (The Marlboro Press, Marlboro, VT: 1989)
• King Oedipus by Sophocles, with Translator's Preface (The University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia: 1999)
• Tataga's Children: 23 Fairy Tales by Grozdana Olujic (Xlibris: 2000)
• Our Bearings at Sea: A Novel in Poems by Otto Orban (Xlibris: 2001)
• Traveling Light: Selected Poems of Kirsti Simonsuuri (Xlibris: 2001)
  • Finnish Translation Centre Translation Prize Winner, 2001