The Tortoise of History

Poet and translator Anselm Hollo was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1934. He lived in England for many years, working for the BBC European Service. In 1967, he moved to the United States and taught at various institutions, including SUNY Buffalo and the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Hollo, who was influenced by the Beat poets, was the author of more than forty books of poetry, including Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: New and Selected Poems 1965–2000 (2001), which won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; Corvus (1995); Finite Continued (1980); and Sojourner Microcosms: New and Selected Poems 1959–1977 (1977). He also published a book of essays, Caws and Causeries: Around Poetry and Poets (1999). His many translations include works by Paavo Haavikko and Pentti Saarikoski, for whose Trilogy (2003) Hollo received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Hollo’s many honors and awards included a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, grants from the Fund for Poetry, the Finnish State Award for Foreign Translators, and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry. Hollo lived in Boulder with his wife, the artist Jane Dalrymple-Hollo, until his death in 2013.