Carmen Bernos de Gasztold

Carmen Bernos de Gasztold (9 October 1919 – 23 September 1995

Her most famous collection is titled Prayers from the Ark. The 1955 publication consists of short poems, each expressing a prayer from some animal on Noah's Ark.^[1][2] The book was translated into at least six languages, including an English version by Rumer Godden.^[3] Poet Marianne Moore praised the collection, but X. J. Kennedy criticized them as colorless and dull.^[3][2] Actor Marian Seldes recorded a spoken word album of the poems;^[3] composers Ivor R. Davies^[4] and Frieder Meschwitz^[5] set them to music.

A second volume of similar poems was published in 1965, entitled The Creatures Choir, also translated by Godden.^[3]

She spent her childhood in the province of

Her family were of Lithuanian descent (Gasztold being the Polish rendering of the Lithuanian name Goštautas).^[6]

Works

• Prières dans L'Arche, French & European Pubns, 1985,
  ISBN 978-0-685-11511-4
• Choral de Bêtes, French & European Pubns, 1985,
  ISBN 978-0-685-11121-5

• Prayers from the ark and the Creatures' choir, Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, Translator Rumer Godden, Penguin Books, 1976
  • Prayers from the ark: selected poems, Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, Translator Rumer Godden, Illustrator Barry Moser, Reprint Puffin Books, 1995,
    ISBN 9780140545852
• Bernos de Gasztold&f=false "The Prayer of the Dog", To absent friends: a collection of stories of the dogs we miss, Editor Jameson Parker, Willow Creek Press, 2004,
  ISBN 978-1-57223-706-3