David Ball

David Ball’s latest translation is Léon Werth, Deposition 1940–1944: A Secret Diary of Life in Vichy France, which Ball also edited (Oxford University Press, 2018). His translation of Jean Guéhenno, Diary of the Dark Years: 1940–1944 (OUP, 2014), won the French-American Foundation’s translation prize in nonfiction, and his Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology 1927–1984 (University of California Press, 1997) won the Modern Language Association’s prize for outstanding literary translation. Coma Crossing: The Collected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte is forthcoming, as is Marco Koskas’s novel Bande de Français, about a bunch of young French friends in Tel Aviv, from AmazonCrossing. Ball’s own poetry has appeared in half a dozen chapbooks. He is professor emeritus of French and comparative literature at Smith College. (updated 6/2019)