Where Babylon ends

by Nathaniel Tarn

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1968

About the author

Nathaniel Tarn is an American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator.

Tarn was educated at Clifton College, UK and graduated in history and English from King's College, Cambridge. He returned to Paris and, after some journalism and radio work, discovered anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and the Collège de France. A Fulbright a grant took him to Yale and the University of Chicago where Robert Redfield sent him to Guatemala for his doctoral fieldwork (1951-2) at the University of Chicago. He completed this work as a graduate student at the London School of Economics (1953-8).

Tarn was a professor at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

He emigrated to the United States in 1970 and taught at American universities.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those whose poetry was a way to master and to redeem the toxic masculine noosphere underlying the poem's cultural authority, two crucial themes will be the introduction of the wireless as well as the genocide carried out against the European Jews. I speak in particular of the poets of so-called Greatest Generation (born 1920-1930) for whom radio, and then war, are inextricable factors in their development. Nathaniel Tarn (b. 1928) was a late bloomer among these. Old Savage/Young City appeared in 1964; Tarn then translated Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu; and Where Babylon Ends (1967) is only his second book.

The eleven poems dedicated "to my West" are introduced, in the Cape Goliard edition in a frontispiece of a London tenement facade and bookended by a medallion blazoned eagle apotheosized by Tarn as a prayer to end autocracy and slavery. The manner arrives with some assumption, but the heralding of Tarn's mature style begins here. "Projections for an Eagle, Escaped in this City, March 1965" takes its form from the anthropology of coins and currency.

He'd quit his Anthropology position in England, and came through San Francisco in 1961 on his way to the Far East where he'd hit City Lights, therein to understand something of American West Coast small press publishing. Tarn took a job with Cape, having come more to see the States as his recruiting ground for the imprint he was setting up, Cape Editions. To keep him in this capacity, the folks at Cape Goliard brought this book out.