Biographical note

Franco-Anglo-American poet Nathaniel Tarn was born in 1928 and educated in France, Belgium and England, obtaining degrees from Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Chicago; he emigrated to the United States in 1970, where he taught at American universities until his retirement. He now lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although he is best-known these days as a poet and essayist, he is also an anthropologist, with a particular interest in Highland Maya studies and the sociology of Buddhist institutions, and is a translator of the highest order. His first collection of poetry was Old Savage/Young City (1964), which was followed the next year by his appearance in the seventh volume of the Penguin Modern Poets series. Three more collections followed in London, during which time he also became director of the Cape Goliard press, and editor of the remarkable Cape Editions series of seminal modern texts: poetry, prose, anthropology, drama, many of them in pioneering translations. Thereafter, with the exception of his Shearsman publications and one other volume, the majority of his work has appeared in the USA, most significantly: Lyrics for the Bride of God, The House of Leaves, Atitlan/Alashka (with Janet Rodney), Selected Poems 1950-2000, Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, Gondwana and the recent volume, The Hoelderliniae. There are also two significant volumes of essays in Views from the Weaving Mountain and The Embattled Lyric, as well as an "auto-anthropology", Atlantis (2022). Tarn's work is remarkable for its expansiveness, and its willingness to absorb material from very disparate sources - in this, it owes something to the examples of Pound and Olson, but also a lot to the author's own anthropological training, his knowledge of other languages and his interest in areas such as archaeology.