Janet Lembke, 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, and her knowledge of the classical Greek and Latin worldview, from Homer to Virgil, informed her life and work. A Certified , 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 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, having already translated Euripides' Electra and Hecuba, and Aeschylus's Persians and Suppliants. Lembke's first book was Bronze and Iron: Old Latin Poetry from Its Beginnings to 100 B.C., but beyond translations and essays about classics, there were more than a dozen books on nature, works for which the author acquired a base of admirers. Her articles were printed in The New York Times, Sierra Magazine, Oxford American, Audubon, Raleigh News and Observer, Southern Review and other publications. The writing style was eclectic and personal, meditative and detailed, and though she was at least once accused of "taking poetic license too far" 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 ; Skinny Dipping: And Other Immersions in Water, Myth, and Being Human ; Dangerous Birds ; River Time ; Despicable Species: On Cowbirds, Kudzu, Hornworms, and Other Scourges ; and The Quality of Life: Living Well, Dying Well -- 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, including notes and correspondence by the author, at the Jackson Library of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, NC.
