All Scholars

Douglass Parker was among the most creative and beloved members of our profession. In his 40 years of teaching at the University of Texas, he taught courses in the theory of translation, classical civilization, and a specialty of his own devising, parageography, the geography of fantastical realms. He had met William Arrowsmith as a graduate student and they became lifelong friends. Parker had written poetry, but in 1952 Arrowsmith suggested that he translate ancient drama. Arrowsmith was also a founder of The Hudson Review, in which had published a translation of the Bacchae. As a result, there can hardly be a reader interested at any level in Greek comedy who has not used Parker’s translations of Aristophanes. After Arrowsmith moved to the University of California, Riverside, in 1954, Parker joined him in 1955 and began his translations. (At this time, he also wrote one of the earliest scholarly articles on The Lord of the Rings.) An early version of Aeschylus’ Persians convinced Parker that he was made for comedy. When he and Arrowsmith were subsequently at the University of Texas, they and others in the Texas Classics Department began Arion magazine. Parker and Arrowsmith also began a journal, Delos, that was totally devoted to translation, with an editorial board that included W.H. Auden. Parker’s translation of the Ecclesiazusae was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translation in 1968. He also translated some Roman comedies and many Greek and Roman works from the familiar (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1) to the rarefied (Nonnos). He had the gifts of wide reading, deep knowledge of the languages, a ready wit and a sense of theatre that made his translations come almost as alive on the page as they were on the stage. Parker greatly loved jazz and played the trombone in jazz groups all of his life, specializing in improvisation. He linked the two in an interview: “About translation there are two quotes I like by Thelonious Monk. The first is, ‘The cats I like are the cats who take chances,’ and the other is, ‘Sometimes I play a tune I’ve never heard before’.” He was a fatherly mentor to professional classicists interested in ancient theatre and modern presentation and was himself last seen on stage as the elder Housman in the reading of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love at the 2002 APA meeting. Along with Garry Wills, Michael Putnam, Kenneth Reckford and others, he was an inaugural fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, where he worked on his Wasps and Lysistrata. He requested that his epitaph read, "but I digress…"