Tony Barnstone & Willis Barnstone
Tony Barnstone: Pierre Grange is the pseudonym that I sometimes use when I want to try my hand at doing a translation from cribs from a language I don’t speak, or as a mask behind which to hide my role in creating literary jokes. Interestingly enough, it is also the pseudonym that my father, Willis Barnstone, uses. “Pierre Grange” means “Stone Barn” in French, and it is the name that my grandfather, Robert Barnstone, gave to the brand of Swiss watches that he sold as a jewelry dealer in Lewiston, Maine.
Willis and I decided to see if there were any French writers who were named Pierre Grange, and we found a few. One had written a medical history of syphilus, and another a “Brief History of Frogs.” We decided to create a biography for our invented Pierre Grange and to begin to “translate” his poems into English. “Mother Toad” is our first “translation” from the remarkable works of this French writer, and it is the first poem of his to appear in English.
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Mother Toad
Your short and neckless body, brown and often
spotted, is hideous. The webbed feet behind
cast you like a croaking stone into kind
waters and countless eggs. You sing in the coffin
of your green skin. The fat eardrums protrude
behind the brow. No outer ears to hear
sublunary nightingales under the queer
blue membrane. But you sing, pulsating crude
and beautiful as world-eggs burst and spill
your gilled aquatic larvae in prime-
val jelly! Tadpoles wiggle like the sea
in a child’s drawing. In a week they trill
with brand new lungs and kill from poison glands.
Then grasp the water in their human hands.
Pierre Grange (1878-1957)
tr. Tony Barnstone & Willis Barnstone
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Willis Barnstone Βorn in Lewiston, Maine, Willis Barnstone was educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, Yale and the Sorbonne, and now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University He taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), was in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and in China during the Cultural Revolution. A Guggenheim fellow, he has been the recipient of the NEA, NEH, the Emily Dickinson from the Poetry Society of America, W. H. Auden Award of the New York State Council on the Arts, and four Book-of-the-Month selections. His work has appeared in APR, Poetry, Harper’s, NYRV, Nation, New Republic, Paris Review, New Yorker and TLS.
Some of his books are The Gnostic Bible, Life Watch, Algebra of Night: Selected Poems, The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets, and With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Airesz: A Memoir.
Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College and has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. His books of poetry include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry (BKMK Press),The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008), which won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry, Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005) and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone (University Press of Florida, 1998), in addition to a chapbook of poems titled Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman, 2007); The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005); Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Wesleyan, 1993); Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (University Press of New England, 1991); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala, 1996); and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East (all from Prentice Hall Publishers). Among his awards are the Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival and a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Barnstone has lived in Greece, Spain, Kenya and China.