I thought, perhaps it would be interesting to you
if I gave you just a little background
before he begins to read.
One of the things that is remarkable about Mr. Nims
is the many sidedness of his interests.
He is a critic.
Please, note them in the climactic order.
I put that first.
He has been an editor of Poetry Magazine.
He is a translator, they tell me, in six languages.
But I think we shall be concerned tonight, perhaps,
largely with three.
And he is primarily, of course, a poet.
His experience has been considerable.
From the university point of view,
he taught first as a professor at his alma mater, Notre Dame.
He has taught also at the University of Toronto,
the University of Illinois, and is now a visiting professor
at Harvard.
He has also taken considerable part in such writers
conferences as the one at Indiana, the one at Kansas,
and the one that perhaps you know more than the others--
The Bread Loaf Vermont Conference.
He has also-- in the 10-year period when he was writing
the poems for Knowledge of the Evening,
which will be the chief volume from which he will read
tonight--
spent about half of that time abroad.
Two years as a professor at the University of Madrid.
And I think his interest in Spanish,
which is to be brought out in several ways,
will be especially interesting perhaps to many of us tonight.
And two years as a Fulbright lecturer
at Milan and at Florence.
You probably would like to know a little something
about his poetry as it has been published
from time to time, if you don't already know the facts.
Mr. Nims began by publishing in anthologies, one of which
is decidedly interesting--
I suppose they all are.
This one, perhaps, most to us in the Southwest--
It's called the "Poem Itself".
And it is an anthology in which the poem
in the foreign language is presented first then
the poet who is concerned with the poem,
the translator, the explicator--
Mr. Nims, in this case--
gives a literal line by line translation.
And then there is an interpretation,
which concludes what he has to say about the poem.
Mr. Nims has four books of poetry, which
have been published since 1947.
The 1947 volume, The Iron Pastoral.
Three years later, the Fountain in Kentucky.
In 1959, a volume from which he will read tonight,
his translations from the Spanish
of the mystic of the 16th century St. John of the Cross.
I think, by the way, you may be very much interested
in the transposed translations.
And the last volume, Knowledge of the Evening, which
is his original work and which, I suppose,
will give us most of the poems this evening,
he has been writing on, he tells us,
for 10 years between 1950 and 1960
when the poems were published.
It was during this period that he spent his four years abroad
in Madrid, Spain generally, in Italy, and other places
on the continent.
His poems have also appeared in a number of magazines
that you probably have already noted--
Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry Magazine,
The Saturday Review of Literature.
And tonight you will notice that he
is going to read to us from a collection of three
poems in the current Atlantic Monthly.
These are translations of poems from the Spanish written
by Octavio Paz.
And I think that you have, probably in your hands,
that one poem "Nina", in which the Spanish original and Mr.
Nims' translation, up here side by side.
It seems almost presumptuous to mention this poet's prizes.
He has won them.
I will simply mention two or three
that I think speak for themselves.
The Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize
given by Poetry Magazine, The Guarantor's Prize
and the Fiske Prize awarded by the University of Chicago
for poetry.
All these things, of course, are concerned really,
as far as we are concerned, with only one thing--
the poetry itself.
Those of us who in the last two days
have had the privilege of listening to Mr. Nims
discuss poetry, read it, realize, I think,
that tonight we have in unusual pleasure in store for us
because this is poetry of a high order.
Mr. Nims.
[APPLAUSE]