CONSTANTINE, David (John) 1944-

PERSONAL: Born March 4, 1944, in Salford, Lancashire, England; son of Bernard Constantine (a civil servant) and Bertha (Gleave) Constantine; married Helen Frances Best (a teacher), July 9, 1966; children: Mary-Ann, Simon. Education: Wadham College, B.A. (modern languages), 1966, D.Phil, 1971. Politics: Left.

ADDRESSES: Home—1 Hill Top Rd., Oxford OX4 1PB, England. Office—Queen's College, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 4AW, England.

CAREER: Writer, cultural historian, translator, and literary critic. University of Durham, Durham, England, 1969-81, began as lecturer, became senior lecturer in German; Queen's College, Oxford, tutorial fellow in German and university lecturer, 1981-2000.

AWARDS, HONORS: Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, Poetry Society (London, England), 1984, for Watching for Dolphins; received Anglo-Hellenic League's Runciman Prize from Book Trust (England) for Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal; Southern Arts Literature Prize from Southern Arts Association for Davies; Robertson Prize and European Poetry Translation Prize for Hoelderlin; Something for the Ghosts was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) German Short Stories 2, Penguin (New York, NY), 1976.

The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hoelderlin, Modern Humanities Research Association (London, England), 1979.

Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1984.

Davies (novel), Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1985.

Back at the Spike (short stories), Ryburn Publishing (Keele, Staffordshire), 1994.

(Editor, with Hermione Lee and Bernard O'Donoghue) Oxford Poets 2000: An Anthology, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 2000.

POETRY

A Brightness to Cast Shadows (includes "In Memoriam 8571 Private J. W. Gleave"), Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne , England), 1980.

Watching for Dolphins (includes title poem, "Hymns," and "Islands"), Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1983.

(With Noel Connor, Barry Hirst, and Rodney Pybus) Talitha Cumi, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1983.

Mappa Mundi, Five Seasons Press (Hereford), 1984.

Madder, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1987.

Selected Poems, Bloodaxe (Newscastle upon Tyne, England), 1991.

Caspar Hauser: A Poem in Nine Cantos, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1994.

The Pelt of Wasps, Bloodaxe (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1998.

Something for the Ghosts, Bloodaxe Books (Tarset, Northumberland), 2002.

Also contributor to Ten North-East Poets, edited by Neil Astley, Bloodaxe Books, 1980.

BIOGRAPHY

Hoelderlin, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Friedrich Hoelderlin, Beck Publishing (Munich, Germany), 1992.

Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 2001.

TRANSLATOR

(With wife, Helen Frances Constantine, from French) Henry Michaux, Spaced, Displaced: Deplacements Degagements, Bloodaxe (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1992.

(With Mark Treharne, from French) Philippe Jaccottet, Under Clouded Skies, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1994.

(From German) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1994.

(From German) Selected Writings: Heinrich von Kleist, Everyman Classic Library, 1999.

Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin, Bloodaxe (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1996.

(From German) Holderlin's Sophocles: Oedipus & Antigone, Bloodaxe (Tarset, Northumberland), 2001.

Also translator of Hans Magnus Enzenberger's Lighter than Air, 2002.

Former coeditor of Argo (literary magazine); literary editor of Oxford. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Stand, Critical Quarterly, Iron and London.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Working on a translation of Goethe's Faust, for Penguin Classics.

SIDELIGHTS: David Constantine is an acclaimed British poet and author, whose collections of verse include A Brightness to Cast Shadows and the award-winning Watching for Dolphins. He is a scholar of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Greece, as reflected by his Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal. Constantine has also been recognized as an authority on the early nineteenth-century German poet Friedrich Hoelderlin.

The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hoelderlin was Constantine's graduate thesis and his first published work. It garnered the young scholar praise from critic Ronald Grey in the Times Literary Supplement, who found that, despite the restrictions imposed by the nature of the thesis, "David Constantine's modest study . . . reveals a latent talent for criticism and appreciation."

In his next critical work, Constantine shifts his emphasis from German literature to a more classical subject. Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal was published in 1984 and examined what William St. Clair referred to in the Times Literary Supplement as "the course of Europe's discovery of Greece in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." Prior to that time, European travelers desirous of exploring classical antiquities confined their explorations to Rome and the other major cities of Italy. As the title implies, the book discusses accounts of early European tourists in Greece, including those who felt they had discovered customs among the Greek people that dated back to ancient times, many of whom were so steeped in classical tradition that they found the reality of Greece a disappointment. St. Clair concluded that in Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal, Constantine penned an "excellent study."

Aside from Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal, Constantine concentrated on his poetry during the early 1980s. His poems often combine the use of classical subjects and models with more modern topics. Mary Kinzie explained in the American Poetry Review that "what is remarkable about the poetry of David Constantine is that he seems to have the words for any situation, although he has as yet used very few of them. His poems keep enough in reserve that they need not always incline at the same angle, nor come down with the same flourish at the same speed in the same spot every time."

A Brightness to Cast Shadows is Constantine's first book-length collection of poems. "In Memoriam 8571 Private J. W. Gleave," one of the more noted works in the collection, is a sequence of nine poems concerned with Constantine's maternal grandfather who perished without a trace during World War I. It centers on how his grandmother over the years came to terms with the loss of her husband. Commenting on this sequence of poems in the Times Literary Supplement, Roger Garfitt found the work to be "not so much a raid on the inarticulate as a persistent stalking of the incomprehensible." While less impressed with the book's last group of poems, calling them "a series of portraits of the socially deprived," Garfitt lauded Constantine's first two love poems and his overall sense of classicism, finding that the poet "adheres to that severe canon of style which teaches that poetry, to be of enduring excellence, must be unostentatious in its effects."

Constantine's second volume of poetry, Watching for Dolphins, earned him the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize. With the work, Constantine continued to gain attention for his classicality. As Michael Hofmann stated in a Times Literary Supplement review, "the 'classical mastery' achieved by Constantine . . . entails not only a classical manner and choice of subjects, but also an original creative impulse whose nature is genuinely un-modern, if not anti-modern." In addition to the segment "Hymns" (a translation from Ancient Greek), which is made up of individual poems on figures from classical mythology such as Aphrodite and Demeter, Watching for Dolphins includes the title poem—another Ancient Greek translation—which juxtaposes the classical conceit of waiting for dolphins to accompany one's ship, but where, as Kinzie relayed, "the dolphins alas never do come and the sacred charm of their images fades against a horizon of tankers and pollution and guilt—the skyline of unworthiness." The volume also contains a segment titled "Islands," which tells of a couple at sea in search of their daughter, who sight her on a small island as she is about to be drawn into the water by the tide. Commenting on Watching for Dolphins, Kinzie concluded that "Constantine's poems continue to repay close scrutiny, becoming richer with each reading, more effortlessly layered."

Madder, Constantine's 1987 collection of poems, takes its name from the root of the Eurasian madder, used to produce a moderate to deep red dye. Times Literary Supplement contributor Mark Ford declared that "the poems in Madder are written with an intensity his earlier, remoter work only obliquely aspires to." While Constantine in Madder draws upon classical subjects and motifs, Ford noted that "poems here evoke the Nazi death-camps, Russian political imprisonments, Vietnam, [the events surrounding the atomic bombing of] Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the El Salvador death squads."

In 1988, Constantine returned to the subject of Friedrich Hoelderlin, publishing a biography and critical introduction to the work of the German poet. As with Constantine's poems, his academic work continues to be well received. Theodore Ziolkowski of the Times Literary Supplement, praised Constantine's even-handed treatment of Hoelderlin, when considering that extreme left- and right-wing political camps, and existentialist and deconstructionist philosophical schools, have each co-opted his writings to suit their respective ideologies. Hoelderlin's work was, for example, adapted by the Nazi government in Germany in which, as Ziolkowski observed, "theorists of National Socialism co-opted him as a forerunner of the voelkisch [nationalistic] mentality." But, Ziolkowski continued, "Constantine picks his way through the ideological extremes with knowledge and good sense, equally wary of silly theories regarding Hoelderlin's madness or politics and of the 'acquisitive reading' that characterizes the various partisan schools of interpretation." The critic completed his assessment by declaring that "Constantine . . . has now given us a readable and reliable 'critical introduction' to the works [of Hoelderlin] based on an understanding of the life." Four years after producing 1988's Hoelderlin, Constantine published another volume under the same title. This publication, written in German, introduces Hoelderlin's life and works.

An award-winning translator, Constantine has produced several acclaimed books. His translation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Wahlverwandtschaften, which Constantine translated as Elective Affinities (1994), is considered to be one of Goethe's most unapproachable novels. Reviewer Nicholas Boyle of the Journal of European Studies explained that the story is filled with "such Romantic baggage as animal magnetism, landscape symbolism . . . medieval revivalism, Fate, coincidence, and miracle-stories." The characters speak through stilted conversation, and Boyle described the narrator as "knowing" but "aloof." Constantine warns readers in his introductory comments that Goethe's voice here is racked with "oppressive rigidity and unnaturalness," Still, Boyle commended Constantine for making the reader's effort to get through the novel well worth the time. Boyle referred to Constantine's translation as an "outstandingly accurate and beautiful version."

Constantine is also a noted biographer. Prior to Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, Hamilton had, unfortunately, been best remembered for the indiscretions of his wife, Emma. She was a beautiful but poverty-stricken young woman, who became a mistress of the great British naval hero Vice Admiral Lord Nelson. Due to the scandalous nature of the affair, Hamilton's own scholarly achievements went largely ignored. Constantine's biography is an attempt to rectify this. During the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum, Hamilton collected a number of ancient vases and compiled an illustrated book of engravings depicting them. As a result, British manufacturers began producing replicas of the beautiful vases, and the British Museum ultimately purchased Hamilton's entire collection.

Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, according to Aileen Reid of the London Sunday Telegraph, is an excellent book that demonstrates that the more popular view of Sir William (as a "dumb cuckold") has been a misrepresentation. Another reviewer, Miranda Seymour for the London Sunday Times, called the book an "excellent and sometimes scintillating biography."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 40: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

PERIODICALS

American Poetry Review, September, 1984, pp. 45-47.

Economist (UK), March 24, 2001, Kate Grimond, review of Field of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, pp. 122-23.

Journal of European Studies, December 1994, Volume 24, number 4, Nicholas Boyle, review of Elective Affinities: A Novel, pp. 411-13.

Library Journal, March 1, 2000, Volume 125, number 4, Ali Houissa, review of Selected Writings: Heinrich von Kleist, p. 90.

Sunday Telegraph (London, England), March 25, 2001, Aileen Reid, "The Other Man: Aileen Reid Enjoys a Life of William Hamilton, the Husband of Nelson's Mistress," p. NA.

Sunday Times (London, England), March 11, 2001, Miranda Seymour, "The Man Who Was Cuckolded by Nelson," p. 34.

Times Literary Supplement, January 11, 1980, p. 45; March 13, 1981, p. 286; November 18, 1983, p. 1272; October 12, 1984, p. 1148; May 27, 1988, p. 596; October 7, 1988, pp. 1106-07; January 27, 1995, Malcolm Bowie, review of Spaced, Displaced: Deplacements, Degagements, pp. 11-12, Malcolm Bowie, review of Under Clouded Skies, pp. 11-12; March 3, 1995, No. 4796, Lachlan MacKinnon, review of Caspar Hauser: A Poem in Nine Cantos, p. 24; April 6, 2001, No. 5114, L. G. Mitchell, review of Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton, p. 27.