July 16, 1890 [Des Moines, Iowa]–June 30, 1967 [Stuttgart, Germany]
Carlyle Ferren MacIntyre was born in Des Moines, Iowa and graduated from the University of Southern California, receiving his doctorate in Marburg, Germany. He taught at various places around Los Angeles, including Los Angeles Polytechnic High School, Occidental College and UCLA. He received a Guggenheim in 1938 to work on this translation of Goethe’s Faust (New Directions, 1941). The experience provided material for his first book of poems, Cafés and Cathedrals, published in 1939. One poem in the collection, “Detail on a Street Corner in Herculaneum,” proved to be controversial, leading to his transfer from UCLA to Berkeley. Though he published several more books of original poems, his reputation largely rests on his translations of early Modernist European poetry by the Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. He died in Stuttgart, Germany.
