Paul Roche (hurler)

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Paul Roche

(born September, 1916 in Mussoorie, India) is a British poet,scholar, 
 critically acclaimed translator of Greek and Latin classics

Besides being a poet, novelist and professor of English, Paul Roche translated from the Greek and Latin of Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho and Plautus. His poetry and translations have been critically acclaimed worldwide.
Editions of his works have sold in their hundreds of thousands and are still used as standard texts in
many schools and colleges in America and Europe.

The early years

He is also known for his thirty-two year relationship with the Bloomsbury painter, '''Duncan Grant''', whom he met in the summer of 1946.

Donald Robert Paul Roche was born on September 25th 1916 in the foothills of the Himalayas in the hill station, Mussoorie,
India, where his father, Robert Roche de la Baume was a captain in the Royal Engineers in the days of the Raj.
But after his mother died of smallpox when he was nine, Paul was sent with his brother, George, to school in
the north of England and did not see India again for 69 years. The stricken family moved to Hanwell, west London and
his father later remarried.

All three children, including his sister Valery, were sent away to school, the boys to Ushaw College, Durham,
where their uncles had been educated; it was one of the Catholic schools established in England after
the French Revolution, since when it had continued seemingly unchanged. Inkwells would freeze in their
desks and Roche later said that at least a couple of boys would die of pneumonia or of malnutrition every winter;
a stark contrast to their idyllic life in India.

He learnt Latin and Greek and practised stringent self-discipline, rising at five every morning,
a habit that would last his whole career. He also became enchanted with the rituals of Catholicism,
daily mass being de rigueur, which fostered ambitions in him to be a saint and later a calling to the priesthood.

After Ushaw and stints at the Ealing Priory School as a day boy and St Edmunds College, Ware, it was decided,
after a meeting with Cardinal Hinsley, the archbishop of Westminster, that he should continue his studies in Rome.

The "holy" years

In 1936
He left for Italy and spent four years at the English College. When the war broke out and Italy joined forces
with Germany in 1940, the students returned to England.

He attended St Mary's Hall at Stonyhurst, where young Jesuits were trained. Although he had misgivings about
joining the priesthood, he was persuaded by his peers and ordained as a priest in 1943.

Having served in the OTC while at Ealing Priory, and knowing that his brother was a fighting officer in the Army,
Roche longed to join the Navy but was rejected.

Instead he spent a year as chaplain to three different convents at Isleworth before he was considered ripe for
the job of assistant personal secretary to Cardinal Griffin, the new Archbishop of Westminster, being picked out
because he "looked ornamental and was apparently endowed with intelligence, conscientiousness and charm".

Little did the Church know that he was on the point of cutting loose; his nemesis came one Saturday morning,
when the Cardinal announced that Roche was to accompany him to a certain convent.

Roche excused himself with a dentist's appointment and thought he would be dismissed because of his cheek;
instead he was promoted. However, his father had him officially secularised when it was obvious that
he was unhappy with his vocation and was looking for any way to escape.

One summer's day in Piccadilly, in 1946 Roche met the Bloomsbury post-impressionist painter Duncan Grant
and struck up a friendship that was to last until Grant's death in 1978. Roche began to model for him
on a regular basis and sometimes for Vanessa Bell.

Dressed up in a sailor suit as Roche was, Grant did not find out until years later about Roche's priestly secret.
Making up for lost time, Roche enjoyed relationships with a variety of women, believing himself to be a satyr,
and for the next few years he took to writing and traveling even on a rowboat along the Costa Brava.

His career as a writer was beginning to take shape. A book of fables, The Rat and the Convent Dove (1952),
was followed by short stories for several magazines (and an interview with Salvador Dalí,
whom he met on his Costa Brava travels, and which he sold to Town and Country).

His first novel, O Pale Galilean (1954), was praised by John Betjeman and led to an offer from Smith College
in Massachusetts to join its English department.

Roche also began his first Greek translation of Antigone for New American Library; he would continue to
translate Greek tragedy for decades to come.

Between 1956 and 1958

he taught at Smith College, where he became great friends with Ted Hughes and
 

Sylvia Plath, who was also a member of the faculty. In 1958 he was awarded the Bollingen Foundation
Fellowship and published The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles.

Numerous publications of poetry followed, together with translations of The Orestes Plays of Aeschylus,
which the great classicist and writer on mythology Edith Hamilton declared "the best I have ever read".

In 1958

Duncan Grant decorated the Russell Chantry at Lincoln Cathedral, using Roche as the model for Christ.

Keen to find a cheap place to live and in search of the sun, Roche and his American wife Clarissa,
whom he had married in 1954, left with their two children to live on the West Indian island of Nevis,
followed by two years in Taxco, Mexico, where a third child was born in 1958.

In 1961

Vanessa Bell, the mother of Grant's daughter, Angelica, died, and a distressed Grant urged Roche to visit him.
After contracting severe hepatitis, Roche returned to England to settle with his family at Aldermaston, Berkshire,
in an old stable which they restored.

His second novel, Vessel of Dishonour, a love story based on his experiences as a priest, was published in 1964 but
was slated by certain members of the Catholic Church who thought it immoral.

In 1967

He wrote the screenplay for the Universal Pictures production of Oedipus the King, which was filmed on location in
Greece and starred Orson Welles, Christopher Plummer, Lili Palmer and an up-and-coming Donald Sutherland.

Roche continued with numerous publications and readings of his poetry, working with actresses such as Flora Robson,
Sybil Thorndike, Diana Rigg and Vivien Merchant. His record Death at Fun City, a cry for ecology,
attracted the attention of Gloria Swanson, who interviewed him for CBS in 1972.

In the same year Roche took a job as poet in residence at California Institute of the Arts and discovered he had a great talent and
love for teaching. Other stints and lectures at several American universities such as Notre dame, followed in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, with Duncan Grant now in his eighties, Roche was able to dedicate more of his time to the artist.

In 1973
they travelled together to Turkey, resulting in the journal With Duncan Grant in Southern Turkey (1982).
In 1975
They took a house and spent six months in Tangier, where Paul nursed Grant through pneumonia.


He was devastated when, in 1978, at the Roche household where he had come to live, Duncan Grant died of bronchial pneumonia at the age of 93.
In 1985
After a divorce from Clarissa in 1983, in 1985 Roche bought a house in Sóller, on the Spanish island of Mallorca.
Working from his office with a view of the sun-drenched mountains he continued with several Greek translations, fables and,
translating from the ancient Greek, produced The Bible's Greatest Stories, published by Penguin in 1990.

In 1994
At the age of 79, he returned to India for the first time since his childhood, embarking on a six-month backpacking trip with his daughter Mitey.
The resulting book, A Visit to India, was published by the Calcutta-based Writer's Workshop, also publishers of his Cooking With a Poet series.

Roche's other passion was gardening. He was renowned in Sóller for being the only nonagenarian to zip about on a bicycle until his penultimate year.

Roche had a son and three daughters by his wife Clarissa, and a son with Mary Blundell.

New York Times obituary
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/arts/25roche.html


Who is Paul Roche
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_is_paul_roche


Duncan Grant
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