Utopian Stock: David Constantine Interviewed by Aaron Deveson

Utopian Stock: David Constantine Interviewed by Aaron Deveson

David Constantine, who was born in Salford, Lancashire, in the United Kingdom in 1944, is one of the most consistently brilliant poets and short-story authors writing in English today. In a review of Constantine’s Collected Poems (2004), the critic Stephen (now Stephanie) Burt called him “the most lyrical of good poets” (3), adding that his poetry was “Romantic, in almost all the loaded, unfashionable and daring senses that once-omnipresent word can bear” (3). Constantine’s most recent book of short stories, Tea at the Midland, won the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and he has published two novels. He is also one of our most important translators and translation editors. With his wife Helen he edited Modern Poetry in Translation between 2003 and 2012. His translation of Selected Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin was the winner of the European Translation Prize and another of his translations, Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter than Air, won the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Translation. He has also produced critically lauded translations of Goethe’s Faust, Kleist, Henri Michaux, and Philippe Jaccottet, among others.