Brown University Library News

Thursday, May 15, 2008
7:00 p.m.
List Art Center Auditorium
Brown University
Following Ms. Cardona’s talk, a reception and book signing will be held in the John Hay Library.
Guests will have an opportunity to visit the Yoken Archives located on the 3rd floor of the John Hay Library.
Ms. Cardona’s visit to Brown is part of the Mel and Cindy Yoken Cultural Series.
A citizen of the United States, France and Spain, Hélène Cardona is fluent in English, French, Spanish, German, Greek and Italian. Born in Paris of a Greek mother and Spanish father and raised all over Europe, she studied English Philology and Literature in Cambridge, England; Spanish at the International Universities of Santander and Baeza, Spain; and German at the Goethe Institute in Bremen, Germany. She attended Hamilton College, New York, where she also taught French and Spanish, and the Sorbonne, Paris, where she wrote her thesis on Henry James for her Master’s in American Literature. She worked as a translator/interpreter for the Canadian Embassy and the French Chamber of Commerce. She is also a teacher and dream analyst and has appeared in many films.

A graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she studied with Ellen Burstyn at the Actors’ Studio, played Fuffi Drou in Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat and Candy in Lawrence Kasdan’s Mumford. Voice credits include The Painted Veil, The Interpreter, The Bourne Supremacy, The Terminal, The Pink Panther and others. For Serendipity, she co-wrote with Peter Chelsom the song Lucienne, which she also sang.

She has lived in Geneva, Cambridge, London, Llandudno, Monte-Carlo, Bremen, Tarragona, Paris, New York City and Santa Monica, and travels extensively. She has translated What We Carry by Dorianne Laux into French, her father’s poetry from Spanish into English, the Lawrence Bridges film Muse of Fire for the NEA and has received grants from the Durfee Foundation and the French Cultural Services of Los Angeles.

Her first book, The Astonished Universe, an uplifting and luminous collection of poetry about consciousness, is the first bilingual edition in English and French from Red Hen Press. Richard Wilbur writes that “each poem fully exists in two tongues at once, and this adds to the book’s great charm and visionary quality.”