John Rodker

John Rodker

John Rodker (born December 18, 1894 in Manchester , † October 6, 1955 ) was an English writer and publisher.

Life before World War I.

John Rodker was born in Manchester, but grew up in London and is counted as part of the Whitechapel Boys group, where he met Isaac Rosenberg , Samuel Weinstein and Joseph Lefkowitz . Rodker's poems appeared before 1914 in, among others, The New Age magazine .

First World War

Rodker refused military service in the First World War for reasons of conscience . The poet RC Trevelyan therefore hid him from the authorities. In April 1917 Rodker was arrested and sent to Princetown Labor Camp in the former Dartmoor Prison .

Activity as a publisher

In 1919 John Rodker founded Ovid Press . The Ovid Press has published works by TS Eliot and Ezra Pound . Pound's first edition by Hugh Selwyn Mauberley was published by Ovid Press . Rodker also published collections of prints by Wyndham Lewis , Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Edward Wadsworth . The publishing house closed after a year.

John Rodker then lived in Paris, working on a second edition of James Joyce's Ulysses and translations of Joyce into French. He founded the Casanova Society to publish special editions of books. Under the publisher's name J. Rodker he published occult writings until he went bankrupt in the course of the economic crisis in 1932.

After this bankruptcy he translated French literature and worked for Preslit, the foreign literature magazine of the Soviet Union . In 1937, on the centenary of Alexander Pushkin's death , he founded Pushkin Press and published the English translation of Eugene Onegins by Oliver Elton.

With Anna Freud in 1938 he began to publish the works of Sigmund Freud in the Imago Publishing Company, which he founded . The edition was finished in 1952. Imago was dissolved in 1961.

Private life

In May 1918, John Rodker married the writer Mary Butts . The couple had a daughter Camilla in 1920. In his second marriage he was married to the painter Barbara McKenzie-Smith and they had a son, John Paul. In a third marriage, John Rodker was married to Marianne Rais.

Web links

• John Rodker: An Inventory of His Papers in the Manuscript Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center The University of Texas, Austin (with biographical introduction).