John Ridland

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John Ridland was born in London in 1933. His British parents and he immigrated to California in 1935, where he has lived most of his life. He spent four years at Swarthmore College and two years in the Army in Puerto Rico. In 1956 he returned to Berkeley to study English, met and married Muriel Thomas from New Zealand, a fellow graduate student, and in 1964 completed a PhD from Claremont Graduate University. He taught English at the University of California, Santa Barbara for forty-three years, including nearly three in Melbourne, directing the UC Education Abroad Program in Australia.
       Ridland’s recent book publications include A Brahms Card Ballad (2007), originally published in Hungarian translation in 2004, Happy in an Ordinary Thing (2013), and book-length translations of Petöfi’s John the Valiant (1999) from Hungarian, and the Middle English masterpiece, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2013). With his essential collaborator, Dr. Peter Czipott, he has been translating modern Hungarian poets, including Sándor Márai’s The Withering World (Alma Classics, 2013) and Miklos Rádnoti’s, as All That Still Matters at All (New American Press, 2014). Forthcoming from Askew Publications is an epic, A. Lincolniad.