Career
In 1958, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation administered by the Royal Institute of International Affairs sent him to Burma for 18 months after which he became Lecturer in South East Asian Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London (1960–1967).
Tarn published his first volume of poetry "Old Savage/Young City" with Jonathan Cape, London in 1964; a translation of Pablo Neruda’s “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” in 1968 and began building a new poetry program at Cape. He left anthropology in 1967. From 1967-9, he joined Cape as General Editor of the international series Cape Editions and as a Founding Director of the Cape-Goliard Press, specializing in contemporary American Poetry with emphasis on Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky and their peers and successors. He brought a great many French, other European and Latin American titles to Cape and made many visits to the U.S. as a Cape Editor. He taught English at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo in the summer of 1969.
In 1970, with a principal interest in the American literary scene, he immigrated to the U.S. as Visiting Professor of Romance Languages, Princeton University, and eventually became a citizen. Later he moved to Rutgers. Since then he has taught English and American Literature, Epic Poetry, Folklore etc. etc. at inter alia the Universities of Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, Manchuria (PRC), reading and lecturing all over the world: Paris, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Berlin, Rome, Messina, Prague, Budapest, Sydney, Melbourne, etc. etc. He has set foot in every state of the U.S., with especially long study in Alaska. Extensive travels over the years in all seven continents has informed his poetry from the start.
As poet, literary & cultural critic (two volumes: “Views from the Weaving Mountain”, University of New Mexico Press, 1991, and “The Embattled Lyric”, Stanford University Press, 2007), translator (he was the first to render Victor Segalen’s “Stèles” into English, continued work on Neruda, Latin American and French poets) and editor (with many magazines), Tarn has published some thirty books and booklets in his various disciplines. He has been translated into ten foreign languages.
In 1985, he took early retirement as Professor Emeritus of Poetry, Comparative Literature & Anthropology from Rutgers University and has since lived near Santa Fe, New Mexico. His interests range from bird watching, gardening, classical music, opera & ballet, and much varied collecting, to aviation and world history.
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