James Laughlin
My Ambition
is to become a footnote
in a learned work of the
22nd century not just a
"cf" or a "see" but a sol-
id note such as Raby gives
Walafrid Strabo in Christ-
ian Latin Poetry or Ernst
Robert Curtius (the most
erudite German who ever
lived) devotes to Alber-
tino Mussato in his Euro-
päische Literatur und La-
teinisches Mittelalter I
hope the scholar of the
22nd will lick his schol-
arly lips when he finds me
in some forgotten source
(perhaps the Obloquies of
Dreadful Edward Dahlberg)
and think here is an odd-
ball I would have liked
immortalizing me in six
turgid lines of footnote.
James Laughlin
James Laughlin was born in Pittsburgh in 1914 and as a twenty-two-year-old sophomore at Harvard University he founded New Directions, which published some of this century's greatest writers: Ezra Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and many others. As a champion of literature in translation, New Directions published Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, among others. Laughlin was awarded honorary degrees from Colgate University, Hamilton College, Duquesne University, Cornell (Iowa), Yale University, and Brown University. He received the American Academy and Institute Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, the Annual PEN Publishers Citation, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He died in 1997.
