Robert Mezey (February 28, 1935 – April 25, 2020) was an American poet, critic and academic. He was also a noted translator, in particular from Spanish, having translated with Richard Barnes the collected poems of Borges.[1]

He was born in Philadelphia, and attended Kenyon College as a contemporary of E. L. Doctorow and James Wright; after a time and serving in the army he finished in 1959 an undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa. Having worked for a while, he became a graduate student at Stanford University. Then he began teaching at Case Western Reserve University, in 1963. During a year at Franklin and Marshall College he was for a time suspended after an accusation of inciting students to burn draft cards. After holding other positions, he settled in 1976 at Pomona College, until retiring in 2000.[2][3][4]

He received numerous awards including the 2002 Poets' Prize for Collected Poems: 1952-1999.

Works

• "Fishing Around", The New Yorker, January 21, 2008
• The Lovemaker (1960), poems, received the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1961.
• White Blossoms (1965), poems
• A Book of Dying, poems
• The Mercy of Sorrow, poems
• Naked Poetry (1969), anthology, editor with Stephen Berg
• The Door Standing Open: Selected Poems (1970)
• Poems from the Hebrew (1973), translator
• Small Song (1979), poems
• Tungsteno, novel by Caesar Vallejo (1982), translator
• Evening Wind (1987), poems
• Couplets
• Selected Translations
• The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette (1990), editor with Donald Justice
• Natural Selection (1995), poems
• Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (1998), editor
• The Poetry of E. A. Robinson (1999), editor
• Collected Poems 1952-1999 (2000)
• Poems of the American West (2002), editor
• Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, translator with Richard Barnes

References

External links

• "Review: The Poetry of Robert Mezey", Chicago Review, Peter Michelson, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1963), pp. 123–128
• New Poem, ‘Please?’ New Poetry at The Flea, Broadsheet 14, March 2011.