Norman MacAfee was a New York poet, translator and editor who died on July 2, 2024, at the age of 81. He belonged to PEN America for many years and served on its Translation Committee. Alongside literary work he was also a visual artist and freelance book editor.
His own writing moved between poems, plays, screenplays and an opera libretto, The Death of the Forest, written to music by Charles Ives. He published three poetry collections: One Class: Selected Poems 1965-2008, A New Requiem and The Coming of Fascism to America. Politics runs through the work. One Class closes with a poem written for a November 2005 celebration at the U.S. Capitol of what would have been Robert F. Kennedy's 80th birthday. He later gathered Kennedy's 1968 campaign speeches, with his own commentary, in The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now.
Most of his reputation rests on translation, usually in partnership. With Luciano Martinengo he rendered the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, work that PEN America says won him a PEN translation award. With Lee Fahnestock he translated Jean-Paul Sartre's letters, including those to Simone de Beauvoir, and the pair received an NEA translation fellowship and the American Literary Translators Association award. Their Les Misérables appeared from Signet in 1987, and PEN America reports sales of more than a million copies since.
Start with Les Misérables. It is the book that found the largest audience, and the Signet edition keeps Hugo's digressions on convents, sewers and Waterloo instead of trimming them. If you would rather hear MacAfee in his own voice, try One Class.
