I sat down with AWP 2010 Conference panelist Judith Baumel and asked her questions to find out more about her panel, A Tribute to Robert Fitzgerald.

Who is Robert Fitzgerald?

In the 1970s, Robert Fitzgerald was Boyleston Professor of Rhetoric, (the poet position that grants ceremonial rights to allow one’s cow to graze on Cambridge Common) at Harvard Unviersity.

He taught forms writing, “Versification” undergraduate.

Fitzgerald was a man of letters. He started his career as a journalist for Time Inc. He traveled to Alabama and Louisiana with James Agee and Walker Evans to study the Great Depression. They wrote the book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

What did you learn from him about creative writing and translation?

Fitzgerald stressed daily writing regimens, and carefully and purposefully choosing what to read. To translate you should start from the target language. You should love the puzzle problem of the meaning of words, and the language, the sounds, the difference shapes of things—and you must concern yourself with making it as right as possible. You must consider the function of the line. Write the original language, then below it a line of notes, thoughts, and then the translation as the third line.

What makes translation important?

Today translators bring the ancient and medieval to modern audiences with contemporary references. So much of the world’s literature is inaccessible, unavailable. Translators share and the spread the unfairly unread.

A Tribute to Robert Fitzgerald will start Saturday at 9 A.M. in room 203 of the Colorado Convention Center, Street Level. Panelists will discuss Fitzgerald in different arenas: his poetry, his teaching of critique, of forms and his translation work.

Judith Baumel is a poet, critic and translator.  She is Associate

Professor of English and was Founding Director of the Creative Writing

Program at Adelphi University.  She blogs at

http://www.judithbaumel.com.  She also lectures on modern and

contemporary American poetry at Oxford University, UK.  A former

director of the Poetry Society of America, her poetry, translations

and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni

Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.  Her books of poetry

are The Weight of Numbers,  Now ,  and The Kangaroo Girl (forthcoming

from GenPop Books).