Cid Corman

Cid Corman , actually Sidney Corman (born June 29, 1924 in Boston , Massachusetts , † March 12, 2004 in Kyōto , Japan ) was an American writer with Ukrainian roots.

Life

Corman came from a humble background. His parents and grandparents had immigrated from Ukraine at the turn of the century and settled first in New York and later in Boston.

After graduating from the Boston Latin School , Corman moved to Tufts University in 1941 , where he was able to present some of his poems for the first time at events organized by Phi Beta Kappa , one of the Honor Societies .

After the war, Corman enrolled at the University of Michigan , but soon moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . Here, too, he broke off his stay after a short time and embarked on a long journey that led him all over the United States. In the summer of 1948 he returned to his hometown.

There Corman was able to publish some of his poems in the feature sections of regional newspapers. When a local radio station launched the weekly program “This is Poetry” in 1952, Corman was hired, who now works every Saturday evening for 15 minutes with modern poets such as B. Introduced Robert Creeley and Theodore Roethke . But he also brought short readings, such as Moby-Dick by Herman Melville or Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman . During this time on the radio, he shortened his first name from Sidney to Cid .

In 1954 Corman was accepted into the Fulbright program and was able to go to Paris on a generous scholarship to study at the university there. He later went to Italy to teach English at a school in Matera . At the same time, he began to translate Paul Celan's poems into English during this time .

Four years later Corman was sent to a school in Kyoto for two years, again through the Fulbright program, with a teaching position for English. In 1960 Corman returned to Boston, but was unable to gain a foothold either as a lecturer or in other professions. He returned to Japan in 1962 and soon married the news anchor Konishi Shizumi. In addition to his own poetry, he now also began to translate and rewrite Japanese poetry, e.g. B. by Matsuo Bashō and Kusano Shinpei .

In 1980 Corman and his wife settled in Boston in order to realize some business ideas there. Since there was no success after two years, the two went back to Japan in 1982. He stayed there until the end of his life, only interrupted by a 2003 visit to Wisconsin . There, in Milwaukee and Fort Atkinson, in honor of his colleague, the poet Lorine Niedecker , her 100th birthday was celebrated.

From January 2004 Corman was treated in a hospital in Kyoto for a cardiovascular disease and on March 12, 2004 he died there of heart failure. His body was cremated and the ashes handed over to his widow.

literature

• Gary M. Lepper: Cid Corman . In: The same: A Bibliographical Introduction to 75 Modern American Authors . Serendipity Books, Berkeley, Calif. 1976. pp. 123-130.
• William Walsh: Cid Corman . In: Joseph Conte (Ed.): American Poets since World War II, Series 6 . Gale Research Publ., Detroit, Mich. 1998, ISBN 0-7876-1848-9 . Pp. 65-74.

Individual representations

1. ↑ a Ondit related to extensive with Konishi Yukinaga