Richard Howard Extended Bio
 Richard Howard is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Untitled Subjects, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, and most recently, Inner Voices. He reviews regularly for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many literary magazines, directed the Braziller Poetry Series for several years (fifteen volumes), and now serves as director of the James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series at the University of South Carolina (fourteen volumes to date).
He has served as the poetry editor of several periodicals (New American Writing, Shenandoah, and the New Republic), a position he now occupies at The Paris Review and Western Humanities Review.
He is the translator of more than 150 works from the French, including books by Cocteau, Gide, Breton, Stendhal, Barthes, Sartre, and Beauvoir. In 1983, he received the American Book Award for his translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. He also has been awarded the PEN Translation Medal and the first French-American Translation Prize, and was designated a Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Merite by the French government in 1982. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1983, he served as Poet Laureate of New York State and as President of PEN American Center. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. Mr. Howard lives in New York City.
Richard Howard talks about
"The Definitive Translation:"
There's no such thing as a definitive translation. All translations date, the original works never do. Therefore, the translations must be redone, maybe every generation. And that's really what's happened here with The Little Prince. The new translation is not performed in the sense of repudiating the old one. It's an indication of the continuing life of the work. That it needs to be translated according to the movement and development of English, even in 50 years. And so I have not prepared the definitive or last translation of The Little Prince; maybe in 50 years people will want a different one again."
On translating The Little Prince:
Partly the joy of it was translating a work that is familiar to all of us, which had a charm and a quality all its own, and one wanted to try to get that right. The challenge was that there was, after all, a perfectly good translation or what seemed to be and one had to do better. One had to come closer to the original, one had to be more accurate, one had to be less British. This is an Amercian translation and I hope it's transatlantic. But mainly, it was a quest of being as natural as possible."
Book text and illustrations copyright © 1943 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
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