One of my former fellow students from CUNY Graduate Center had the brilliant idea about a year and a half ago to make a Festschrift for our Doktorvater and Professor, Burton Pike. We gathered some likely contributors and a team of editors (Peter Constantine, Robert Cowan, and Henry Gifford) and some wonderful contributions of translations with commentaries; essays on translation, on literature, on the city in literature, on communication; and some laudations by people who had known and been touched by Burt. Add two interviews with Burton and two pieces of his own writing, and voila. We did it!
It is really a marvelous book, if I do say so myself, filled with thoughtful and intriguing writing in honor of a man who was one of the kindest, wisest, most charming persons I ever had the pleasure to know. Burton died before the book could come out, but he knew of its progress toward publication and was, despite his usual modesty, glad of it.
And now we are glad we did it, with the help of Peter Lang publishers. And you can get a copy for yourselves!
The excerpt on Peter Lang's site provides a table of contents of the rich bouquet of flowers we cast at Burton's feet. For all he has done for translation, for the field of literature study, to make the world a more gracious, more intelligent, more bearable place to live.
With love and thanks,
Genese
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