Willis Barnstone

He has translated works by Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pedro Salinas, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (Ἡράκλειτος).

[1] In high school and college he volunteered with the Quaker American Friends Service Committee in Aztec villages south of Mexico City.

A newspaperman handed him a pile of baseball diplomas which the Babe would give out the next day at the 1939 World's Fair to raise money for poor school kids.

He started Film Studies and courses in International Popular Songs and Lyrics and Asian and Western Poetry at Indiana.

The Sub-Sahara spans oral creation myths to ends modern era writers Ben Okri, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, J.M.Coetzee, Mia Couto, Dambudzo Marechera.

The Americas section features Pre-Columbian era poems in Quiche-Maya and Quechuan languages through to the 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean authors, including Derek Walcott, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, V. S. Naipaul and Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams (poetry collection).

Among the scope Latin American women poets and intellectuals, the anthology spans religious and secular writings from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to 20th-century authors Gabriela Mistral, Clarice Lispector, Julia de Burgos, Giannina Braschi, Luisa Valenzuela, Isabel Allende, and Laura Esquivel.

In 1959 he was commissioned by Eric Bentley for the Tulane Drama Review to do a verse translation of La fianza satisfecha, an obscure, powerful play by the Golden Age Spanish playwright Lope de Vega; his translation, The Outrageous Saint, was later adapted by John Osborne for his A Bond Honoured (1966).

In 1964 the BBC Third Programme Radio commissioned him to translate for broadcast Pablo Neruda's only play, the surreal verse drama Fulgor y muerte de Joaquin Murieta (Radiance and Death of Joaquin Murieta), which was also published in Modern International Drama, 1976.

Barnstone's biblical work is The Restored New Testament, Including The Gnostic Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Judas.

In this annotated translation and commentary, he restores the Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew names to their original form.

The Library Journal in its 7/15/09 issue wrote, "In an achievement remarkable by almost any standard, and surely one of the events of the year in publishing, renowned poet and scholar Barnstone has created a new and lavish translation—almost transformation—of the canonical and noncanonical books associated with the New Testament.

In part a continuation of his work in The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament (2002) and The Other Bible (2005), and in many ways the completion of the pioneering efforts of other modern translators like Robert Alter, Reynolds Price, and Richmond Lattimore,...

After returning to the United States, they went together to the universities of Indiana, Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago to give talks (charlas) that appear in Borges at Eighty: Conversations (1982).

I took his bundle of papers, read one gloriously lucent page clearly from an unknown play, picked up the phone and wired Buenos Aires for my savings, cleaning out my miserly lifetime account.

In 1996 Barnstone published a sequence of 501 sonnets, including this poem on Adam and Eve who live the first morning of the globe:

Moonbook and Sunbook: Poems, North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2014 In 2003, the University of Evansville created the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize in his honor.