Charles Guenther, 88
Although this really is off the focus of this blog (which I don’t post to often), I wanted to acknowledge the passing of Charles Guenther, poet and translator. Few people outside St. Louis will even know his name–those who do probably recognize it (as much as anyone pays attention to the names of translators) for his translations of Italian poets, for which the Italian government gave him their Order of Merit. Guenther also carried on long-time correspondence with great poets, including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound. Mostly, he was just one of the most gentle souls I’ve ever known; I sat in on a few of his classes in the extension programs he taught for, and attended some poetry workshops he gave and he had the capacity to make even the most banal poet feel as if he or she had done something right in their work, no matter how trite. He always found something positive to say along with his careful and positive criticism about how a writer might address a revision. (If you know anything about continuing ed writers’ workshops, you know they are classes that anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the English language can join and often the writing is abysmal.) The writing that Guenther’s students submitted was often terrible–even though I was just a guest in the workshops, I would cringe, having no idea what to say a person besides, “Go and write no more, my child.” One of the ways that Guenther had of talking to these often bad poets was to find one line in their work and say to them: “You know, this line reminds me of” and then he would name a great poet: Eliot or Bishop or Frost. The writer, who would never, most likely, write a good poem, went away happy–and I am guessing that some of them went to look up the work of writers they never would have read otherwise.
Charles Guenther died Thursday, July 24, at 88. He left his wife, whom he married two-thirds of a century ago, three children, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
