Philip Mosley

Philip Mosley is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University.  His recent book publications includea translation of Belgian author François Jacqmin’s The Book of the Snow (2010), shortlisted for the international Griffin Poetry Prize; The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers: Responsible Realism (2013); and Resuming Maurice and Other Essays on Writers and Celebrity (2019).  Additionally, he has translated a number of other Belgian authors including Guy Vaes (October Long Sunday, 1997); Georges Rodenbach (Bruges-la-Morte, 2007); and Maurice Maeterlinck (The Intelligence of Flowers, 2008).  He was awarded the 2008 Prix de la Traduction by the French Community of Belgium in recognition of his contribution to the dissemination of Belgian francophone literature.  In 2006, he published Anthracite!, an anthology of Pennsylvania coal region plays, and his latest book, Telling of the Anthracite: A Pennsylvania Posthistory, was published by Sunbury Press in 2023. 

A native of England who immigrated to the USA in 1988, he attended Norwich School from 1957 to 1965, holds a BA (Honors) in English from the University of Leeds (1968), an MA in European Literature (1970) and a PhD in Comparative Literature (1976), both from the University of East Anglia.  In 2000 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Toulouse, France; in 2003-04 was Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; and in 2013 was Visiting Professor at the University College of Sint-Lukas, Brussels, Belgium. 

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Werner Lambersy, a major French-language poet, confronts the disasters of personal and public history in a direct and dramatic but not sensational way. He mourns two disgraced father figures, his Nazi father Adolf, and the poet Ezra Pound, indicted for his pro-Fascism radio speeches during World War 2 and committed for over a decade to a U.S. hospital for the criminally insane. Lambersy imagines the two funerals, which he did not attend, one in Paris, the other in Venice, and chants accusations and atonement. To these two deeply flawed but also idealistic and generous “strugglers in the desert” (Pound’s term) he owes his physical and much of his creative life. Through poetry and language he finds the just means to suspend judgment and to say farewell to his mentors with wonder and pity.

Massimo Bacigalupo, Emeritus, Università di Genova, author of Ezra Pound, Italy and the Cantos (Clemson University Press).