(NEW YORK)— Poet, writer, and literary translator Norman MacAfee whose significant work includes the only modern English translation of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece Les Misérables, has died, according to his spouse, Dr. Miguel Cervantes-Cervantes.
MacAfee, who died on July 2 at age 81, was a longtime member of PEN America who served on the writers organization’s Translation Committee.
MacAfee was a prolific poet and translator, who also wrote plays, screenplays, and an opera libretto. He published three collections of poetry: One Class: Selected Poems, 1965-2008, A New Requiem, and The Coming of Fascism to America. His poems were published in more than 30 journals and he gave many readings in New York and abroad.
MacAfee translated (with Luciano Martinengo) the poetry of Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini (Farrar Straus Giroux 1996, Random House 1982), for which he won a PEN award for translation; and (with Lee Fahnestock) the letters of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which included love letters to his wife Simone de Beauvoir (Scribner, Penguin UK, 1993, 1994). He and Fahnestock also translated Les Misérables, the only complete modern English translation. Since its publication by Signet in 1987, it has sold over a million copies. In recent years, MacAfee and Martinengo collaborated on translations of works by the Italian poet Piera Oppezzo, published in August by the Massachusetts Review.
MacAfee wrote the libretto for The Death of the Forest, with music by Charles Ives, which tells the story of King Philip’s War, fought between Native peoples and settlers in New England in 1675-76. The opera premiered in Amsterdam in 2007 and toured Europe and the United States.
He also edited The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now (2004), which for the first time collected the best of Kennedy’s presidential campaign speeches along with new commentary. In 2005, he was invited by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights to speak at the U.S. Capitol to celebrate what would have been Kennedy’s 80th birthday. MacAfee joined then-Senators Edward Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Rep. John Lewis, Harry Belafonte and other notable speakers. A recording of his speech, which includes a poem he wrote for the occasion, is available on MacAfee’s website: http://www.normanmacafee.com/forest.html
Born in Philadelphia, MacAfee was raised in Brookline and Villanova, PA. He earned a BA in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA in English from the University of Iowa. He and Cervantes-Cervantes, a plant biochemist, resided in Manhattan.
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