All of us at PennSound are saddened by the passing of
Pierre Joris. The Luxembourgish poet, translator, scholar, anthologist, and performer was 78 years old.
Back in 2021, we celebrated
Joris' selection for the PEN/Manheim Award for Translation, which recognizes the breadth of a translator's career.
The judges' citation begins offers a fine summation of that career, starting by acknowledging his resistance to the "landscape of literary translation that is still beholden to linguistic and national silos." "Pierre Joris's work has long been and remains essential in mapping currents and countercurrents of global modernity," they continue. "As literary translation struggles to confront imperial histories of violence and erasure, and to engage with and encourage voices of cultural and linguistic differences, Joris has blazed a path for generations of emerging translators to follow." The citation notes Joris' "stunning and unparalleled career as a translator, poet, essayist, editor, critic, performer, and academic," and spotlights his "personal trajectory has fueled his articulation of a 'nomad poetics' that cannot be contained by national or linguistic boundaries, one in which Anglo-European perspectives are enriched and complicated by those of the Global South, and where translation models the potentialities and necessary complexities of cross-cultural contact.PennSound listeners will probably be most familiar with Joris' work on Paul Celan or the groundbreaking series of Poems for the Millennium anthologies he co-edited with the late Jerry Rothenberg, but he translated a wide array of authors into both English (Adonis, Jean-Pierre Duprey, Safaa Fathy, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Pablo Picasso, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kurt Schwitters, Habib Tengour, and Tristan Tzara) and French (Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Sam Shepard, and Pete Townshend). Joris was also a good friend of PennSound and the Kelly Writers house, as evidenced by his PennSound author page, which is home to dozens of recordings spanning the nearly thirty years, including readings, talks, interviews, and podcast appearances., many at KWH.
We send our heartiest congratulations to Joris' widow, Nicole Peyrafitte, his family, friends, colleagues, and readers worldwide.
