Christopher Middleton (poet)

This article is about the contemporary British poet. For men with similar names, see Christopher Middleton (disambiguation).

John Christopher Middleton (10 June 1926 – 29 November 2015) was a British poet and translator, especially of German literature.

Life

Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, United Kingdom in 1926. Following four years' service in the Royal Air Force, he studied at Merton College, Oxford, matriculating in 1948. He then held academic positions at the University of Zürich and King's College London. In 1966 he took up a position as Professor of Germanic Languages & Literature at the University of Texas, Austin, retiring in 1998. Middleton has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe, Gert Hofmann and many others. He has received various awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation.

Middleton married Mary Freer in 1953; they had two daughters and a son. They divorced in 1969. Middleton died on 29 November 2015.

Works

• The Pigeons and the Girls (unknown)
• Poems (1944)
• Nocturne in Eden (1945)
• The Vision of a Drowned Man (1949)
• Torse 3 (1962)
• Nonsequences (1965)
• Our Flowers & Nice Bones (1969)
• The Fossil Fish (1970)
• Briefcase History (1972)
• The Lonely Suppers of W. V. Balloon (1975)
• Pataxanadu and Other Prose (1977)
• Céleste, Orange Export Ltd., collection Chutes (1977)
• Bolshevism in Art and Other Expository Writings (1978) essays
• Anasphere: le torse antique (Burning Deck, 1978)
• Carminalenia (1980)
• The Pursuit of the Kingfisher (Carcanet Press, 1983) essays
• 111 Poems (Carcanet Press, 1983)
• Serpentine (1984)
• Two Horse Wagon going by (Carcanet Press, 1986)
• Selected Writings (Carcanet Press, 1989)
• The Balcony Tree (Carcanet Press, 1992)
• On a Photograph of Chekhov (1995)
• Intimate Chronicles (Carcanet Press, 1996)
• The Swallow Diver (1997)
• Jackdaw Jiving (Carcanet Press, 1998)
• The Redbird Hexagon (1999)
• Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations (Carcanet Press, 2000)
• Twenty Tropes for Doctor Dark (2000)
• The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2001)
• The Anti-Basilisk (Carcanet Press, 2005)
• Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2008)
• Collected Later Poems (Carcanet Press, 2014)

Translations

• Kafka's Other Trial, by Elias Canetti (Schocken Books, 1974)
• Selected Stories, by Robert Walser (Carcanet Press, 1988)
• The Spectacle at the Tower, by Gert Hofmann (Carcanet Press, 1988)
• Our Conquest, by Gert Hofmann (Carcanet Press, 1988)
• The Parable of the Blind, by Gert Hofmann (Fromm International, 1989)

External links

• Profile at Carcanet Press
• Profile at Poetry Archive