STANLEY H. BARKAN was born in 1936. Following service in the U.S. Army and graduation from college, Barkan taught in the New
York City public schools. Stanley H. Barkan, born in Brooklyn in 1936, is
the editor/publisher of the Cross-Cultural Review Series of World Literature and
Art in Sound, Print, and Motion, which includes some 50 different ethnic,
language, national, and cultural groups. In 1976 and 1978, he represented the
United States at the “Struga Poetry Evenings” in Macedonia. Also, in 1978, he
was a Fellow of the Stichting/Amsterdam and was awarded a medal for his
contribution to the arts in Sicily. In 1987, he was one of ten American editors
invited by Teddy Kollek to represent the United States at the Jerusalem
International Book Fair. In the summer of 1990, he was the American Director of
the World Odyssey Conference in Trapani, Sicily. For the past 38 years, he has
directed the International Literary Arts Festival, which, from 1990-91, included
(with David Curzon) the Reading Series at the United Nations in New York City,
where he featured such literary luminaries as Isaac Asimov and Allen Ginsberg.
In 1991, Poets House and the NYC Board of Education presented him with the
Poetry Teacher of the Year Award, and, in 1996, he received the Poor Richard’s
Award, a bust of Benjamin Franklin, “for a quarter century of high quality
publishing” from the Small Press Center in New York.
From 1992-95, he
directed the Multicultural Poetry Series at Barnes & Noble and borders
superstores and the International Poets & Writers Literary Arts Weeks in New
York, featuring Italian, Israeli, Latin American, and Cajun Writers. . He is the editor of Sicilian Antigruppo (1976), To Struga with Love (1978), and ABC Bestiary (with endless-line drawings by Alfred Van Loen, 1990), the co-editor (with Joost De Wit) of 50 Dutch & Flemish Novelists (1979), and (with Laura Boss)
Lips 17: International Women Poets. To date, he has published some 350 titles in 50 different languages, including bilingual editions by Joan Alcover, Isaac Goldemberg, Stanley Kunitz, Harry Mulisch, Vinícius de Moraes, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Preil, Louis Simpson, Edith Södergran, Henry Taylor, and Leo Vroman. In 1978, he was a Fellow of the Stichting/Amsterdam (The Foundation for the Promotion of Dutch & Flemish Translation) and was awarded a medal for his contribution to the arts from the City of Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, and, in 1998, he received the Brandeis National Women’s Association award for Poetry.
Stanley Barkan is the author of 14 poetry books, including The Blacklines Scrawl (1976, 2004), O Jerusalem (with photographs by Ron Agam, 1996), presented by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani at the Tweed Gallery at City Hall, “in celebration of the 3000th anniversary of Jerusalem,” and Mishpocheh (with paintings by Bebe Barkan, 2004), and his poems have been translated into 24 languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Sicilian, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Turkish, and Yiddish. His bilingual collections, include Under the Apple Tree / Pod jablonia (translated into Polish by Adam Szyper, 1998), Bubbemeises & Babbaluci (translated into Italian by Nina & Nat Scammacca, 2001), Naming the Birds (translated into Bulgarian by Vladimir Levchev, 2002), Pàssuli cu mènnuli / Raisins with Almonds (translated into Sicilian by Marco Scalabrino, 2003), and Crossing (translated into Russian by Aleksey Dayen). His latest book (with complementary photographics by Mark Polyakov) is Strange Seasons (Sofia, Bulgaria: AngoBoy, 2007). Daniel Weissbort, editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, praised Barkan’s poetry as being “subtle and convincing . . . about real things, not just themselves, as so many poems are.”
Gregory Rabassa, foremost translator of Spanish and Portuguese literature, whose translations have resulted in both Asturias and García-Márquez receiving the Nobel Prize, says, “Barkan has a way about him that gets the best out of people and out of words.”
Alfred Kazin, foremost socio-literary critic of our time, selected a poem by Barkan, “As yet Unborn,” from Modern Poems on the Bible (edited by David Curzon), to cite in his review and to read at New York City’s main public library and on the radio. In May 2006, Barkan was invited, under the aegis of The Seventh Quarry, edited by Peter Thabit Jones, to be the first solo featured poet at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, Wales. Two years later, he became co-publisher of the new Quarry chapbook series. His latest project was organizing the Spring 2008 Dylan Thomas Tribute Tour of America, featuring Aeronwy Thomas and Peter Thabit Jones. Barkan lives with his artist-wife, Bebe, in Merrick, Long Island.
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Barkan explains
his passion for cross-cultural communication: “Something
extraordinary happens at the point of contact between peoples of different
cultures, particularly on the artistic level, and the greater the difference in
world view, the more extraordinary the meeting.”
“When
CCC was in its formative stages, we had the naive hope that our efforts
might result in some improvement of the human condition. Somehow, we
thought, if peoples of different languages, enthnicities, and cultures would
meet on an essential artistic level, they could not help but be more
mutually understanding and appreciative. Somehow this might prevent them
from killing each other. Well, especially in view of recent history, we have
long since abandoned that version of the dream. But, as Donald Lev has
written, We keep on, we keep on.”
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