Nathaniel Tarn

Nathaniel Tarn (born June 30, 1928) is a French-American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator.

He was born in Paris to a French-Romanian mother and a British-Lithuanian father.

He lived in Paris until the age of seven, then in Belgium until age 11; when World War II began, the family moved to England.

Among many recognitions, Tarn has received the Guinness prize for his first book, a Pennsylvania State literary prize for teaching poetry in the schools, was a finalist in the Phi Beta Kappa poetry awards for Selected Poems 1950–2000.

His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Philosophical Society, and a number of other Foundations.

Tarn's literary and anthropological papers are held by Stanford University Libraries.

Photo book by Serge Jacques with sparse texts by Michel Tavriger printed in both French and English, Paris, 1950

In 1958, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation administered by the Royal Institute of International Affairs sent him to Burma for 18 months, after which he became an instructor at London School of Economics and then lecturer in Southeast Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.

Even after moving primarily to literature, he continued to write and publish anthropological work on the Highland Maya and on the sociology of Buddhist institutions, as E. Michael Mendelson.

Tarn published his first volume of poetry Old Savage/Young City with Jonathan Cape in 1964 and a translation of Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu in 1966 (broadcast by the BBC Third Programme in 1966), and began building a new poetry program at Cape.

He left anthropology in 1967.

From 1967 to 1969, he joined Cape as General Editor of the international series Cape Editions and as a Founding Director of the Cape-Goliard Press, specializing in contemporary American Poetry with emphasis on Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky and their peers and successors.

He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at several American universities, primarily Rutgers, where he was a professor from 1972 until 1985.

He has lived outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, since his retirement from Rutgers.

Tarn was educated at Lycée d'Anvers and Clifton College and graduated with degrees in history and English from King's College, Cambridge.

He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l'Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France.

A Smith-Mundt-Fulbright grant took him to the University of Chicago; he did fieldwork for his doctorate in anthropology with the Highlands Maya of Guatemala.

In 1970, with a principal interest in the American literary scene, he immigrated to the United States as Visiting Professor of Romance Languages, Princeton University, and eventually became a citizen.

Later he moved to Rutgers.

Since then he has taught English and American Literature, Epic Poetry, Folklore and other subjects at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Colorado, and New Mexico.

In 1985, he took early retirement as Professor Emeritus of Poetry, Comparative Literature & Anthropology from Rutgers University and has since lived near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

His interests range from bird watching, gardening, classical music, opera and ballet, and much varied collecting, to aviation and world history.

As poet, literary and cultural critic (Views from the Weaving Mountain, University of New Mexico Press, 1991, and The Embattled Lyric, Stanford University Press, 2007), translator (he was the first to render Victor Segalen's "Stèles" into English, continued work on Neruda, Latin American and French poets) and editor (with many magazines), Tarn has published some thirty books and booklets in his various disciplines.

He has been translated into ten foreign languages.