Angela Mailander
ABOUT THE POET
Angela Mailander was born in 1940 in Berlin, Germany. She came to the U.S. as a refugee at the age of twelve, fluent in German and Russian. When she was barely fourteen and fluent in English, her mother sent her to a boarding school right outside Paris, France where she perfected her French. Then she moved back to the U.S. and, subsequently, embarked for another boarding school—in Germany this time—making each journey across the Atlantic an adventure via freight ship. She swam with wild dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, heard whales sing in the North Atlantic, and watched a ship (the Pamir) sink in Hurricane Carrie.
Angela’s college education has been entirely in the U.S. Her undergraduate work done was at Kent State University, and she lived in Kent during the time four students were shot there by the National Guard (her story of what happened there differs significantly from the official one).
At Cleveland State University, Angela did her M.A. Thesis on William Blake, specifically on the correspondences between his poetry and his “illuminations” of that poetry through the art of printmaking and watercolor. She concentrated on how Blake “makes vision visible” by consciously using the formal syntax that underlies vision as an organization of visual energies within any framed space.
She then went on to the University of Iowa, for a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies. Having finished the course work and the doctoral exams, she refused to submit a dissertation on the grounds of “philosophical differences” with her professors. They wanted her to say that there was no such thing as “a transcendental signified,” while she maintained that without some such thing, translation from one language to another would be impossible. Though she did not submit it, she did write a dissertation, which was subsequently accepted for publication by the most prestigious university press in her field at the time.
Having practiced the art of literary translation since age twelve, she designed and saw to the institution of an M.F.A. program in Translation Studies at the University of Iowa (with the help of subversive friends). Angela is unshakeable in her position that the translation of poetry is as deep (if not deeper) and as original (in the original sense of that word) as the art of writing poetry.
Unable to find a job that paid more than a doctoral fellowship, Angela earned a Ph.D. in English in 1982, again at Kent State University.
Since earning her Ph.D. at Kent, Angela has taught language and literature in the U.S., in Germany, in Greece, in India, and, most recently, in China. She has taught poetry writing at the University of Iowa, at the Chautauqua Institution, and at Mercyhurst College in Erie, PA.
When she is not busy writing poetry or translating it (primarily from the Chinese), she is a practicing artist whose work can be seen at the Teeple Hansen Gallery in Fairfield. She has also been represented by galleries in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
On the side—that is, entirely outside the context of academe — Angela has been developing a teaching methodology (theory and practice) for English as a Second Language. Experimental results (both quantitatively and qualitatively) so far outstripped expected norms that the standardized tests to measure them do not as yet exist. Her approach is related to her work on Blake, as she sees a formality underlying Language (the same in all languages) that also underlies vision. She is about to launch major initiatives in Latin America and in China.
PUBLISHED IN THIS ENDURING GIFT
Mushikarati: The Mouse’s Poem
Fishy Doggerel
The Love Song of J. Alfred Frog Prince
Seeking to Hide
Poem Written Dream-Side (Qin Guan, 1046-1100, tr. Angela Mailander)
