|
|
| Home | About this site | Author index | Awards and prizes | News | Events |
 |
|
|
|
||||||
|
 |
|
Richard BerengartenRichard BerengartenBack | Genres | Bibliography | Prizes and awards | Author statement | Further reading on this site | Contact details | Related links | Printer-friendly version
Biography
His mature work is inaugurated by Angels (1977), Tree (1980) and Black Light (1983), a tribute to George Seferis. The range is extended in the book-length poem The Manager (2001), and Book With No Back Cover (2003), which derives from Yi Qing (I Ching). Then comes his 'Balkan Trilogy': In A Time of Drought (2006); The Blue Butterfly (2006), whose departure-point is an encounter with a blue butterfly at the site of a Nazi massacre; and Under Balkan Light (2008). The first of these won the Morava International Poetry Prize and the second, the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Poetry and the Serbian Veliki školski čas award. Other books include Learning to Talk (1980), Some Poems, illuminated by Frances Richards (1977), Roots/Routes (1982), Croft Woods (1999), Against Perfection (1999), For the Living (2004) and Manual I - IV (2006-2010).
Richard Berengarten (as Burns) published his first story at the age of 16 in Transatlantic Review. As a student, he wrote for Granta and co-founded the Oxbridge magazine Carcanet. He worked in Padua and Venice, briefly apprenticing himself to the English poet Peter Russell. In Greece, he witnessed the military coup d’état and responded with The Easter Rising 1967. Returning to Cambridge, he met Octavio Paz and, with Anthony Rudolf, co-edited An Octave for Octavio Paz (1972). In the same year, his first collection, Double Flute won an Eric Gregory Award, and Avebury appeared. In 1975, he launched the international Cambridge Poetry Festival, which ran until 1985. His 1981 monograph, Keys to Transformation, explores Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas. Burns often collaborates with visual artists. He has translated poetry and prose from Italian, French, Greek, Serbian and Croatian.
His posts include: the British Council, Athens (1967); East London College (1968-9); Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology (1969-79); Arts Council resident writer, Victoria Centre for Adult Education (1979-81); Visiting Professor, Notre Dame University (1982); and British Council Lector, Belgrade (1987-91). He is an authority on creative writing for children and adults, and on writing skills for university students. He was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge (2003-2005), Project Fellow (2005-2006), and is currently Bye-Fellow at Downing College, Praeceptor at Corpus Christi College, and supervisor at Emmanuel, Pembroke and Wolfson Colleges and at Peterhouse.
Genres (in alphabetical order)Essays, Poetry, Translation
BibliographyTime of a Flower: poems by Aldo Vianello (translator) Anvil Press Poetry, 1968 The Easter Rising 1967 Restif Press, 1969 The Flaw/Antonis Samarakis (translator with Peter Mansfield) Hutchinson, 1969 The Return of Lazarus Bragora Press, 1971 An Octave for Octovio Paz (editor with Anthony Rudolf) sceptre Press/Menard, 1972 Avebury Anvil Press Poetry, 1972 Double Flute Enitharmon, 1972 The Graphic Works of Ceri Richards/Roberto Sanesi (translator) Enitharmon, 1972 Journey Towards the North/Ceri Richards (contributing translator) Cerastico, 1973 Mario Radice/Guido Ballo (translator with Joan Hall) ILTE (Italy), 1973 Untitled Sceptre Press, 1973 New Poetry (contributor) Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975 Roberto Sanesi/A Selection (contributor) Grosseteste, 1975 Inhabitable Space John Morann (Netherlands), 1976 Angels Los, 1977 On the Organic Language of Henry Moore/Roberto Sanesi (translator) La Nuova Foglio (Italy), 1977 Poems for Shakespeare (contributor) Globe Playhouse Publications, 1977 Some poems (illuminated by Frances Richards) Enitharmon, 1977 Writers of East Anglia (contributor) Secker & Warburg, 1977 Biography: poems by Nasos Vayenas (translator) Lobby Press, 1978 Earthquake Sceptre Press, 1978 For John Riley (contributor) Grosseteste Press, 1979 Learning to Talk Enitharmon, 1980 Rivers of Life: a Gravesham Anthology (editor) Victoria Press, 1980 Tree Menard, 1980 Voices With the Ark (contributor) Avon Books (US), 1980 Homage to Mandelstam (editor with George Gömöri) Los, 1981 Keys to Transformation/Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas Enitharmon, 1981 In Visible Ink: Selected Poems of Roberto Sanesi (editor) Aquila, 1982 Roots/Routes Cleveland State University Poetry Center (US), 1982 Black Light Los, 1983 The Full Note/Lorine Niedecker (contributor) Interim Press, 1983 Anthony Rudolf and the Menard Press Los, 1985 With a Poet's Eye (contributor) The Tate Gallery, 1986 New Angles (contributor) Oxford, 1987 P.E.N. New Poetry II (contributor) Quartet Books, 1988 A Grove of Trees and a Grove of Stones Octobar (Serbia), 1989 Anthony Dorrell, a Memoir St. Michael's Mount, Cambridge, 1989 An Anthology for Alan Clodd (contributor) Enitharmon, 1990 Färdväg/30 English Poets (contributor) FIB: S. Lyrikkllubb (Sweden), 1990 Lady in An Empty Dress: poems by Aleksandar Petrov (translator) Forest Books, 1990 The Virago Book of Love Poetry (contributing translator) Virago, 1990 I Wear My Shadow Inside Me: poems by Duška Vrhovac (co-translator) Forest, 1991 The Space Between (contributor) Notre Dame (Indiana), 1991 Klaonica (contributor) Bloodaxe, 1993 Out of Yugoslavia (co-editor) North Dakota Quarterly (US), 1994 The Road to Parnassus (contributor) Salzburg University, 1995 Summoning the Sea (contributor) Salzburg, 1996 The Colonnade of Teeth (contributing translator) Bloodaxe, 1996 Balkan Destiny/Ivan Gadjanski (translator) RAD (Serbia), 1997 Half of Nowhere (illustrated by Nick Maland) Cambridge University Press, 1998 The Spaces of Hope (contributing translator) Anvil Press Poetry, 1998 Against Perfection The King of Hearts, 1999 Croft Woods Los, 1999 Is NATO right to bomb Yugoslavia? Politika (Serbia), 1999 The Mind Has Mountains: a.alvarez@lxx (contributor) Los, 1999 The Twilight of the West (contributor) Novosti (Serbia), 1999 There ARE Kermodians (contributor) David Campbell, 1999 The Manager Elliott and Thompson, 2001 A Party Between Two Covers (contributor) Chapman, 2002 Earth Songs (contributor) Green Books, 2002 Passionate Renewal/Jewish Poetry in Britain since 1945 (contributor) Five Leaves, 2002 Book with No Back Cover David Paul, 2003 Looking Eastward (contributor) MPT, 2003 For the Living/Selected Longer Poems 1965-2000 Salt, 2004 Remnants of Light (contributor) Serbian Writers' Association, 2005 The Art of Unthinking International Haiku Association (Bulgaria & Japan), 2005 In A Time of Drought Shoestring Press, 2006 Manual/the first 20 Earl of Seacliffe Art Workshop (New Zealand), 2006 The Blue Butterfly Salt, 2006 A Room to Live In: a Kettle's Yard Anthology (contributor) Salt, 2007 Holding the Darkness: Manual/the second 20 Earl of Seacliffe (New Zealand), 2007 Into the Further Reaches (contributor) PS Avalon, 2007 Speaking English (contributor) Five Leaves, 2007 Hlding the Sea: Manual/the third 20 Earl of Seacliffe (New Zealand), 2008 Selected Poems/Aldo Vianello (co-translator) Anvil Press Poetry, 2008 Studia Mythologica Slavica 11 (contributor) Ljubljana and Trieste, 2008 Under Balkan Light Salt, 2008 ContourLines (contributor) Salt, 2009 For Angus (editor with Gideon Calder) Los, 2009 Manual/the fourth 20 Earl of Seacliffe (New Zealand), 2009 Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years (contributor) Notre Dame (Indiana), 2009 New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post 1989 Generation (contributing translator) Arc, 2010 The Perfect Order: Selected Poems 1965-2010/Nasos Vayenas (editor with Paschalis Nikolaou) Anvil Press Poetry, 2010
Prizes and awards1972 Eric Gregory Award 1972 Keats Memorial Prize for Poetry (shortlist) 1973 Arts Council Writers' Award 1974 Keats Memorial Prize for Poetry The Rose of Sharon 1982 Duncan Lawrie Prize, Arvon International Poetry Competition 1989 Yeats Club Prize for poem and translation (shortlist) 1990 Yeats Club Prize for translation (shortlist) 1992 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Poetry The Blue Butterfly (unpublished draft) 2005 Morava International Poetry Prize (Serbia) In a Time of Drought 2007 Veliki školski čas award (Serbia) The Blue Butterfly
Author statement
Six propositions
1. There are no temporal or spatial centres. Octavio Paz answered Yeats’ complaint that ‘the centre cannot hold’ (1919), with the assertion that ‘for the first time in our history, we are contemporaries of all humanity’ (1950). 2. There is no civilisation without poetry. A poet’s responsibilities are social as well as subjective, communal as well as individual. Poetry, if it is not to caricature or betray itself, needs to involve critical commitment to both the past and future history of ‘all humanity’, and all nature. 3. Reading Paz this way moves (re-turns) us to the vatic and shamanic origins of poetry and to the Orphic responsibilities that Blake and Shelley were the last English poets to advocate with wholehearted spirit and sustained devotion. 4. Languages have gaps and holes and render reality imperfectly. To make a poem, a poet needs to travel through them into silence and to return through them from silence back into language: to test (tear) the boundaries between language and silence. 5. Poetry is a challenge to mortality and a criticism of Death. Crossing deaths, poems are spacetime-travellers: they encapsulate a non-self-defeating irony, the only defeat Death might admit, if Death had words. 6. We might learn our theory and practice from a Southern African word: Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes: 'the word Ubuntu ... speaks about the essence of being human: that my humanity is caught up in your humanity because we say a person is a person through other persons.' (1998).
Further reading on this site
Contact information
Related links
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
 |
|
|||||||
|
The British Council is registered in England as a charity. Our privacy statement. Our Freedom of Information Publications Scheme. |
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
Developed and hosted by Artlogic Media Ltd London. | |
|||||||
|
|||||||||
