Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Words count, family matters
Professor John DuVal engages others with curiosity, sincerity.
John Tabb DuVal, says his Wikipedia entry, “is an award-winning translator of Old French, Modern French and Italian and has been a professor of English and creative writing and translation at the University of Arkansas since 1982.” His accomplishments in his field are quite impressive, says his wife, retired University of Arkansas English professor Kay DuVal. “His ‘Song of Roland’ was a finalist for the PEN/USA Award in Translation,” she says. “Other biggies are the Harold Morton Landon Award in Translation and the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, both awarded by the Academy of American Poets. He also was granted a National Endowment Award for one Old French play translation.”
He’s either fluent in, or has studied, the French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Romanesco (an Italian dialect), Catalan, German and Arabic languages.
But do not think for one moment that John DuVal can be summed up by simply listing his credentials, no matter how impressive they are.
A recent two-hour conversation with DuVal in his charmingly disheveled university office ranges far and wide, fascinating and often hilarious. He has to be repeatedly directed back to the subject of himself; he just finds so much else in the world more interesting.
Among the subjects covered: TheatreSquared, and how remarkable it is to find a theater of that quality in a town as relatively small as Fayetteville; who in the family does the taxes (Kay does them for the DuVals); and the Academy Award-winning movie Hidden Figures, and how moving and particularly interesting it was to DuVal, given the fact that his older sister worked in computing at the Pentagon at a time when it was an unusual profession for a woman.
Very quickly, a pattern of geniality and generosity and upbeat
“[John] once told me that when he teaches graduate students, he always keeps in mind that one of these students might one day be a much better writer than he is. There’s an enormous amount of respect in that statement.” — Former student and literary translator Elizabeth Harris
sunniness emerges. Much of DuVal’s conversation includes stories and anecdotes that reveal how proud he is of his family. Kay, he says, is a better teacher than he is. His son, Niell — whose excellent Woodland Junior High spring report card still hangs on DuVal’s bulletin board — is now a properties artisan at the Arena Stage theater in Washington, D.C., where he created a goat so lifelike for Edward Albee’s play “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” that Albee said it was better than the one made on Broadway. He points out a yellowed newspaper clipping on the wall of his office that features a story about how his daughter, Kathleen, with whom he collaborated on the reader “Interpreting a Continent: Voices from Colonial America,” was awarded both an Arkansas Governor’s Scholarship and a National Merit Scholarship her senior year of high school. He eagerly shows off the brilliant penand-ink drawings of his brother, Frank, and says, “If you look at his drawings, you can really see his sense of humor.”
In fact, he seems sincerely thunderstruck by the wonder of those around him.
“There’s a simplicity and a complexity at the same time about his faith [in God],” says Kay. “I think it accounts in large part for his happiness and his basic goodness and his freedom and confidence to be himself in any surroundings.”
“John genuinely cares for people,” says the Rev. Lowell Grisham, rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville. “He is among the most compassionate people I know. He engages others with a curiosity and sincerity that energizes conversation. He delights in the insights of others, and he contributes generously from the treasure of his lifetime of scholarly thought. John does all of this with the playfulness of a 5-yearold in a sandbox with friends.”
A ‘terrible student’
DuVal was born in 1940 in Germantown, Pa., to parents who were fluent in French. His mother’s parents were born in France, and she grew up bilingual. DuVal’s father spent a year studying in France after World War I and continued his studies once he came back to the United States. Ultimately, both became French teachers.
“My older sister spoke French before she spoke English,” he says. “But when she refused to speak French [any longer], my father didn’t want to continue teaching [his children French], and my mother also gave up. So I learned French in school. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as enthusiastic about learning French if they had tried to teach me as a child.
“I was a terrible student. But I was good at French.”
When asked why he thinks he was a “terrible student,” there is a long pause.
“I think I wasn’t very smart,” he says.
“I talked about that with my mother not too long before she died. She said, ‘Well, you were so unhealthy.’ I had asthma. She said, ‘You were so tired, you couldn’t listen for long in class.’” DuVal’s asthma was diagnosed in his early teen years, and he says the use of a prescribed inhaler would eventually improve his respiratory health. He also discovered the effect his cardiovascular health had on his ability to breathe easily when he played soccer as a teenager.
“That’s why I ride a bicycle all the time,” he says. DuVal rides to campus every day from his home on Mount Sequoyah, in addition to joy rides that he takes with his wife and his colleague, Geoff Brock. “I feel like I’m riding, trying to get away from the asthma,” says DuVal.
It’s clear that his selfassessment that he wasn’t “very smart” was not the reason for his poor high school performance. (See the first paragraph of this story for evidence.) Likely, it had more to do with something he mentions a bit later in the conversation:
“My mind just wandered. I was always reading.”
“One of the surprising things to me about John is that he had such unhappy public school experiences,” says Kay. “He was disorganized, couldn’t find his homework even when he’d done it, and was always late, all things that make school difficult for the child, the parents and the gradeschool teacher. But he was a great reader, and he read and read, mostly classics, often when he was supposed to be studying.”
Post-secondary studies turned out to be easier for
DuVal. He discovered that he was talented at standardized testing, which bolstered his confidence in his intelligence. He was one of five students in his high school who qualified for the
National Merit Scholarship, and he ended up at Franklin and Marshall College, a private, all-men’s college in
Lancaster, Pa.
He quickly discovered that his skills in French were advanced for those of a freshman university student when he exceeded expectations on a dictation assignment given the first week of his level three
French class.
“Then the next day,
[the instructor] gave us this assignment that was a hundred pages of prose,” remembers DuVal. “I started reading it, and it was dull prose. It wasn’t a novel or anything. And I just thought, ‘I can’t do this.’
And so he came in the next day, and he said, ‘DuVal, if you would like to, you can get out of this class and take
17th century French with so-and-so,’ and I thought,
‘Oh, good!’ And I talked to this other [student], and he said, ‘Don’t do it! Don’t go!
You’ll have to study in that other class!’ And I said, ‘Did you not see that assignment we had? Oh, no, I’m getting out of here.’
“It was a good class, but it was the highest I could go in French. So then I signed up for Russian and, oh, I just loved Russian. It was a very intensive course: Five days a week and three hours of lab. And the teacher was a Soviet countess who had been run out of the country.”
War and peace
Following his college graduation, DuVal went to Penn State for a year, working on a master’s degree, before enlisting in the Army, sure that he was soon to be drafted anyway. A recruiting officer convinced him to apply for officer’s candidate school. He realized in boot camp, he says, that he “was not officer material.”
“One of my sergeants said to me, ‘You’re very “upsy-downsy,” aren’t you?’” recalls DuVal. “‘You do things either really well or really badly,’ and I said, ‘Yes, Sergeant!’”
DuVal ended up teaching English at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. His sunny account of his time in the Army is a testament to his ability to make the best out of any potentially bad situation. It was 1963, and Vietnam was beginning to boil over. But the easygoing DuVal found satisfaction in his role as an English teacher, and he made good friends.
“I could tell you stories about getting lost and losing things in that camp,” he says. “You have to go to the different places and get certain equipment, you get certain clothes here and your rifle and your knapsack and things, and as I went from place to place, it was just like Hansel and Gretel — anyone could have followed me by the stuff I was losing along the way. But fortunately, I had good friends that would help me go back and look for the stuff. To tell you the truth, I loved basic training because of the friends I made there.”
By 1965, DuVal had finished his stint in the Army, and he turned his attention toward finding civilian employment. While checking out the job placement office on the campus of Southwest Missouri College, he serendipitously ran into someone on campus who told him the school was looking for English teachers. It was here that he met his wife, Kay. The two will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this fall.
“We didn’t even like each other at first,” he says. “This snotty Southern woman. My parents were from the South, and, even so, I thought she was snotty! She wasn’t at all, but she was pretty and had good posture.
“I was so stupid.”
Kay says they started going out in a group, until the group dwindled to just her and John. Even then, she says, they weren’t exclusively dating each other.
“There’s a photo I have of John sitting in my living room with a bouquet of red roses beside him,” she says. “But the flowers were from another English instructor, not John. That particular incident led to what some in the English department referred to as ‘The War of the Roses.’ But John wasn’t one for doing anything in the expected manner. One night, I came in from a date with some now long-forgotten person to find daisies draped across the mailbox beside my apartment door. No note, but I knew that John knew I was crazy about the daisies that grow along Missouri highways.”
The two had signed a three-year teaching contract, and DuVal was already looking toward what would come afterward. He was determined to live in Ireland for a year, and he told Kay of his plans two years into their contract.
“I had grown up with National Geographic dreams of Ireland,” she says. “So when he asked if I’d like to go with him, I said, ‘Yes,’ but ‘under what conditions?’ He said, ‘Whatever you require.’ I said, ‘We’d have to be married,’ and he said, ‘Fine,’ and that was that. So we got married and taught another year to save money and then caught a freighter and moved to Dublin. It was a wonderful year.”
Once back in the States, DuVal taught a year at Arkansas State University and then took advantage of the newly enacted G.I. Bill to go back to school for his master’s degree in creative writing at the UA. As it turned out, he didn’t care much for creative writing, but he took a class in medieval literature with Ben Kimpel and a class in medieval French with Raymond Eichmann (with whom he would ultimately translate five books) and a germ of an idea started to form. When he had a poetry assignment in Miller Williams’ workshop, instead of turning in an original poem, he turned in a poetry translation.
“He sent it back to me and said, ‘We’ll think about this later,’” DuVal says. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll never hear about this again.’ Well, I didn’t know Miller.
“When I dropped out of the creative writing program, I got on my bike and went over to Miller’s house, and I said, ‘I have to tell you, I’m going to drop out of creative writing and go into comparative literature and study medieval French.’ He was so nice about it. He was so agreeable. And as soon as he decided he wanted to start a translation program, he sent me a letter and invited me to take a workshop — I think this may have been around 1973.
“Everything came together with translations: The interest in poems, the interest in creative writing, but creative writing that maybe was not as self-invested. My own ego wasn’t at stake as much as with the other creative writing.”
Still going strong
Former student, literary translator and University of North Dakota professor Elizabeth Harris says DuVal’s humility is one of his qualities that makes him a successful translator.
“This is one of his great gifts, I think. A translator must work as an artist, yet also disappear. I don’t think everyone is cut out for that sort of art.”
So DuVal had found his calling, and, by this time, he and Kay had started a family: Daughter Kathleen was born in 1970; Neill, four years later. Life was moving right along for the DuVals.
“When the children were little, he did make demands on their school habits, while always offering mind-expanders beyond what they got in the classroom,” remembers Kay. “He always read to them, long after most parents leave the reading up to the children themselves. … We always said about him that if you asked him what time it was, he’d teach you how to build a clock, but, in the long run, the kids got a lot out of his sessions.
“And as adults, they are just about our best friends.”
“It is wonderful having adult children who like you,” agrees DuVal. “Be nice to your children now so that they will like you when they’re adults.”
Indeed, it’s not every father-daughter relationship that could withstand writing a book together.
“I always say that I’ll never have a better coauthor,” says daughter Kathleen of their collaboration. “He was consistently supportive and easy to work with, and he brought to the project … his own tremendous translation skills for French and Spanish.”
In 1982, DuVal was teaching in Albany, Ga., when Williams called him back to Fayetteville to be part of the faculty of a creative writing program that was, by this time, internationally known as one of the strongest in the country. It was full of larger-than-life personalities, says DuVal, who remembers his friends and colleagues from the era fondly, though he does not miss the tumultuous
faculty meetings. He says that another thing that has changed in the intervening years is that the current leadership of his department encourages faculty to try teaching new classes — it keeps him on his toes as a teacher, he thinks.
And DuVal’s strength as a teacher is as impressive as his credentials. During a recent poetry translation workshop, his praise for his students is genuine and enthusiastic. He doesn’t hold back on his criticism, but it is gentle and cut with wit. His interest in and thrill of teasing out the mystery of a poem written in a foreign language with a group of graduate students is so fresh, it’s difficult to believe he’s been doing it for 35 years.
“His classes were always fun; there was a lot of laughter in our little seminar room,” says Harris. “But John also expects a lot from his students. In one class in particular, Dante in Translation, John had us write drafts of papers that he’d respond to. The comment of his that I remember the best was, ‘For a fiction writer, your sentences aren’t very good.’ It had never occurred to me to put as much effort into writing my academic papers as I did my fiction and translations. That’s a lesson I never forgot. I try, in everything I write, to make sure my sentences are good, so John won’t be disappointed.”
With his evergreen enthusiasm for his work and his youthful appearance — perhaps it’s the bicycling, but DuVal looks 20 years younger than his actual age — it’s difficult to imagine him retiring. It’s certainly difficult for DuVal to imagine it. He adores his job.
“When I get tired or anxious, I guess I think about retiring,” he says. “But when somebody asks me, ‘When are you going to retire?’ I always think, ‘Well, probably when I can’t get up the steepest hill in Fayetteville.’”
Lucky students. He might be teaching forever.