Dan Beachy-Quick’s translations from ancient Greek include the lyric collection Stone Garland and The Thinking Root, a collection of fragments of early philosophy (both from Milkweed Editions), as well as most recently Wind–Mountain–Oak: The Poems of Sappho (Tupelo Press, 2023). Of his approach to translation, Beachy-Quick writes, “There are depths within the denotative life of Greek words that English seldom allows readers in translation to access. At some basic level, I wanted to offer a translation that traced out some of those complexities into an apprehendable substance in the poems themselves–sometimes by allowing an image to unfold more fully than is the norm, at other times by giving some sense of a word’s complicated life, the compound nature of the Greek language, or by translating the same line in multiple ways. The hope, far-fetched as it might be, is to give a reader in English some semblance of how an ancient Greek listener might hear these songs. I’ve also veered away from the various traditions of ordering the poems. I’ve clustered them into groups that seem to loosely trace the entirety of life, from childhood to older age, from the birth of desire to the fear of no longer being desirable. In a quiet way, I mean the book to read as a kind novel, a bildungsroman, so that a larger sense of the life–the poem of the life–becomes palpable.”

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author of numerous books including of a collection of essays, fragments, and poems, Of Silence & Song. His books of poetry include gentlessness, Circle’s Apprentice, North True South Bright, Spell, Mulberry, and This Nest, Swift Passerine, and chapbooks including Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs, Apology for the Book of Creatures, Overtakelessness, Heroisms, Canto and Mobius Crowns (the latter two both written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy), a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick, A Whaler’s Dictionary, as well as a collection of essays, meditations and tales, Wonderful Investigations. His collaboration with Srikanth Reddy was released as a full-length collection, Conversities, and he has also collaborated with the essayist and performance artist Matthew Goulish on Work From Memory. In 2013, University of Iowa Press published his monograph on John Keats in their Muse Series (editor Robert D. Richardson) titled A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work, and Coffee House Press published his first novel, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky. He is a contributing editor for the journals A Public Space and West Branch.

An alumnus of the University of Denver and Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he has taught at Grinnell College, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is currently teaching in the MFA Writing Program at Colorado State University. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation residency, and taught as Visiting Faculty at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 2010. He was one of two Monfort Professors at CSU for 2013-2015, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Creative Fellow of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University.

This year’s events in the Ancient Exchanges speaker series are co-sponsored by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Translation Program, Magid Center for Writing, and Department of Classics.