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IN MEMORIAM
WILLIAM AYRES ARROWSMITH
William Ayres Arrowsmith, former
professor of classics and University Professor, was born in Orange,
New Jersey, on April 13, 1924. He died February 20, 1992, in
Boston.
Arrowsmith was brought to The University
of Texas at Austin by Harry H. Ransom in 1958. He stayed until
1971. He was chairman of the Department of Classics from 1962
to 1966.
Arrowsmith's work as a scholar,
critic, teacher, translator, lecturer, and editor earned him
a considerable reputation, both nationally and locally. Contentious
by nature, he functioned as a gadfly in several arenas, stirring
up national discussion of college teaching at the same time he
enlivened the controversy that marked academic discourse here
at the University in the 1960s. A founding editor of the literary-critical
journals, Chimera and Hudson Review, at UT Austin
he established Arion, a journal that set new standards
in the literary quality of translation and the criticism of classical
literature. His own translations, from Italian lyric poetry and
German prose as well as Greek drama and Latin fiction, established
a high literary standard not only for translators, but for poets,
creative prose writers, and playwrights. He became known as a
highly generous, if very strenuous, adviser to all those who
needed his aid. He was one of the first literary critics to treat
film as a serious literary subject, and his cinematic lectures
and essays, especially on Antonioni, won him an international
reputation and the Taormina Prize.
With Roger Shattuck and Donald
Carne-Ross, Arrowsmith was instrumental in the reanimation of
the Program in Comparative Literature at the University, and
the establishment here, in 1965, of the National Translation
Center. He attracted many distinguished colleagues to the Department
of Classics, and is well remembered for his wit, his eloquence,
and the dead seriousness of his puckishness. He left Austin for
Boston University, taking Arion with him. Later, he taught
at Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Emory Universities, returning to
Boston in the late 1980s. His impact and influence on The University
of Texas was great and deep, and can still be felt.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner,
President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting
of Professors Sidney Monas (chair) and Douglass Parker. Additional biographical
sources can be found in the UT Office of Public Affairs.
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