12 Facts About Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone was born on November 13,1927 and is an American poet, religious scholar, and translator.

Willis Barnstone was born in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Oakland, California.

Willis Barnstone has translated works by Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pedro Salinas, Pablo Neruda, and Wang Wei, as well as the New Testament and fragments by Sappho and pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

Willis Barnstone studied at the University of Mexico, the Sorbonne and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Willis Barnstone taught in Greece at the end of the Greek Civil War from 1949 to 1951 and in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War from 1975 to 1976.

Willis Barnstone was in China in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution.

Willis Barnstone went to the World Series with his father to see Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth play.

Willis Barnstone started Film Studies and courses in International Popular Songs and Lyrics and Asian and Western Poetry at Indiana.

The high bar Willis Barnstone has set for himself is the creation of an English-language Scripture that will move poets much as the 1611 King James Version moved Milton and Blake.

Only time will tell if Willis Barnstone has achieved his goal, but his work is fascinating, invigorating, and often beautiful.

Jorge Luis Borges had already lost his sight in 1968 when Willis Barnstone met him backstage at the 92nd Street Poetry Center in New York after a poetry reading he had arranged for the Argentine poet.

In 1996 Willis Barnstone published a sequence of 501 sonnets, including this poem on Adam and Eve who live the first morning of the globe:.