A Double Life

“As recounted in the memoir-essays and poignant late poems in A Double Life, the distinguished co-founding editor of Field and poet-translator, Stuart Friebert, has led the kind of globe-trotting “double life” that makes for the stuff of legend. There are fabled meetings with the likes of Günter Grass in Berlin and Paul Celan in Paris (not to mention the stray run-in with secret police in Bucharest before the fall of Ceausescu!). But Friebert also includes a sparkling homage to his late colleague, the co-founder of Umbra (with Langston Hughes and Alice Walker), Calvin Hernton. The volume richly concludes with an expert’s guide to teaching literary translation. Friebert sweeps us off to another time, a parallel universe where societies heed writers and their words, and in that, he has wrought something extraordinary. ‘Do you know where this is going?’ as one poem playfully asks. I urge you to read it and see!”

• Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance and In June the Labyrinth