Roditi, Edouard (1910-1992)

In his unpublished autobiography, Edouard Roditi describes his life in terms of a triple curse of being Jewish, epileptic, and homosexual. Perhaps a fourth quality ought to be added here: that of being a polyglot, both through his complex heritage and personal inclination. Roditi lived a long life that would have been enough to fill in several biographies: Roditi the prodigy Surrealist and modernist poet writing in English and French, Roditi the art critic and historian, Roditi the Sephardic scholar, Roditi one of the pioneering generation of simultaneous interpreters at some of the most momentous conventions of the twentieth century, and Roditi the translator and ‘ literary mediator ’ (to use Sidney Rosenfeld’s apt term) between several generations, and nations, of artists and poets.