Janet Lembke

Janet Lembke (2 March 1933 – 3 September 2013), née Janet Nutt, was an American author, essayist, naturalist, translator and scholar.

Life and work Lembke was born in Cleveland, Ohio during the Great Depression, graduated in 1953 from Middlebury College, Vermont, with a degree in Classics, she lived in Virginia and North Carolina, drawing inspiration from both locales. She was recognized for her creative view of natural cycles, agriculture and of animals, both domestic and wild, with whom we share the natural environment. Referred to as an "acclaimed Southern naturalist," she was equally (as the Chicago Tribune described her) a "classicist, a noted Oxford University Press translator of the works of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus". She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to translate Virgil's Georgics, in her translation of Georgics, readers were often charmed and seduced by her way of weaving scientific fact, history and culture, with personal anecdote, mythological allusion and poetic feeling. "The author's ability to pull together disparate elements in her writing is impressive, and her passionate connection with the natural world is displayed in line after line," wrote The New York Times. Novelist Annie Proulx expressed a similar perception, observing that "Lembke's writing tacks between three points: the stuff of her late-twentieth-century life; the tangle of creature and plant in every dimension of tide and river flow; and the haunting, connecting wires of mythos that still knot us to the ancient beginnings."

Among Lembke's noted titles were Because the Cat Purrs: How We Relate to Other Species and Why It Matters (2008); Skinny Dipping: And Other Immersions in Water, Myth, and Being Human (2004); Dangerous Birds (1996); River Time (1997); Despicable Species: On Cowbirds, Kudzu, Hornworms, and Other Scourges (1999); and The Quality of Life: Living Well, Dying Well (2004)-- a sober and unflinching account of the death of the author's mother. At the time of her own death at age 80 in Staunton, Virginia, Lembke was working on a memoir, I Married an Arsonist. She had married twice, and had four children and six grandchildren.

There is a repository of archived materials ("The Janet Lembke Papers, 1966 - 2008"), including notes and correspondence by the author, at the Jackson Library of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, NC.

Books Translations Suppliants by Aeschylus, Lembke (Translator), Oxford University Press, 1975 - Hecuba by Euripides, Lembke (Translator), Oxford University Press, 1991 - Persians by Aeschylus - Lembke (Translator), C. John Herington (Translator), Oxford University Press, 1991 - Georgics by Virgil, Lembke (Translator), Yale University Press 2006 -

Non-fiction Bronze and iron: Old Latin poetry from its beginnings to 100 B.C., University of California Press, 1973 - River Time, The Lyons Press, 1989 - Looking for Eagles, The Lyons Press 1990 - Dangerous Birds, The Lyons Press, 1992 - Skinny Dipping: And Other Immersions in Water, Myth, and Being Human, University of Virginia Press, 1994 - Shake Them 'Simmons Down, Lyons Press 1996 - Despicable Species: On Cowbirds, Kudzu, Hornworms, and Other Scourges, Lyons Press, 1999 - Soup's On!: Sixty Hearty Soups You Can Stand Your Spoon In, The Lyons Press, 2001 - Touching Earth: Reflections on the Restorative Power of Gardening, Burford Books, 2001 - The Quality of Life: Living Well, Dying Well, The Lyons Press, 2004 - From Grass to Gardens: How to Reap Bounty from a Small Yard, The Lyons Press, 2006 - Because the Cat Purrs: How We Relate to Other Species and Why it Matters, Skyhorse Publishing, 2008 - Chickens: Their Natural and Unnatural Histories, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012 -

As co-author Southern Harvest, by Claire Leighton; foreword by Lembke, University of Georgia Press, 1997 - Tuscan Trees, photographs by Mark Steinmetz, text by Lembke, The Jargon Society, 2002 -