Robert Mezey is an American poet, critic and academic. He is also a noted translator, in particular from Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, having translated with Richard Barnes the collected poems of Borges.

He was born in Philadelphia, and attended Kenyon College

Kenyon College

Kenyon College is a private liberal arts college in Gambier, Ohio, founded in 1824 by Bishop Philander Chase of The Episcopal Church, in parallel with the Bexley Hall seminary. It is the oldest private college in Ohio...

 as a contemporary of E. L. Doctorow

E. L. Doctorow

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow is an American author.- Biography :Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of second-generation Americans of Russian Jewish descent...

 and James Wright

James Wright (poet)

James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...

; after a time and serving in the army he finished in 1959 an undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa

University of Iowa

The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...

.
Having worked for a while, he became a graduate student at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.
Then he began teaching at Case Western Reserve University

Case Western Reserve University

Case Western Reserve University is a private research university located in Cleveland, Ohio, USA...

, in 1963.
During a year at Franklin and Marshall College he was for a time suspended after an accusation of inciting students to burn draft cards. After holding other positions, he settled at 1976 at Pomona College

Pomona College

Pomona College is a private, residential, liberal arts college in Claremont, California. Founded in 1887 in Pomona, California by a group of Congregationalists, the college moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a hotel, retaining its name. The school enrolls 1,548 students.The founding member...

, until retiring in 1999.

He has received numerous awards including the 2002 Poets' Prize

Poets' Prize

The Poets' Prize is awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year. The $3000 annual prize is donated by a committee of about 20 American poets, who each nominate two books and who also serve as judges...

 for Collected Poems: 1952-1999.

Works

• "Fishing Around", The New Yorker, January 21, 2008

• The Lovemaker (1960), poems, received the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1961.
• White Blossoms (1965), poems
• A Book of Dying, poems
• The Mercy of Sorrow, poems
• Naked Poetry (1969), anthology, editor with Stephen Berg
• The Door Standing Open: Selected Poems (1970)
• Poems from the Hebrew (1973), translator
• Small Song (1979), poems
• Tungsteno, novel by Caesar Vallejo (1982), translator
• Evening Wind (1987), poems
• Couplets
• Selected Translations
• The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette
  Henri Coulette
  Henri Coulette was an American poet and educator. His first book, The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems , was greeted with acclaim and won the Lamont Poetry Prize...
  
  (1990), editor with Donald Justice
  Donald Justice
  Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr has written, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his...
  
  
• Natural Selection (1995), poems
• Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems (1998), editor
• The Poetry of E. A. Robinson (1999), editor
• Collected Poems 1952-1999 (2000)
• Poems of the American West (2002), editor
• Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, translator with Richard Barnes

External links

• "Review: The Poetry of Robert Mezey", Chicago Review, Peter Michelson, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1963), pp. 123–128
• New Poem, ‘Please?’ New Poetry at The Flea
  The Flea
  The Flea may refer to:*"The Flea" , a 1956 episode of The Goon Show*The Flea , a form of solitaire*The Flea , a character from the TV show ¡Mucha Lucha!*A poem by the metaphysical poet John Donne...
  
  , Broadsheet 14, March 2011.