Emile Capouya

Emile Capouya, who died recently, was literary editor of The Nation from 1970 to 1976. His successor, Elizabeth Pochoda, recalls, "I always thought he was brilliant and unusually fearless about his opinions. My desk was filled with the most elaborately courteous rejection letters to contributors that managed, despite their politesse, to express ferociously firm opinions about the shortcomings of the work submitted."&&&--The Editors

Emile (a&k&a Mike) Capouya was before and after his tenure as Nation literary editor one of the hard core of young intellectual editors and executives who brought trade book publishing up to European standards during the paperback revolution and lived on to oppose and be ground down by the invasion of the conglomerates.

His two names seemed to stand for the two sides of Capouya's powerful integrity. Mike signified the immigrant American kid in the teenage stevedore and Merchant Marine who carried in his spirit the honed hardihood of the seafarer. Emile signified the European culture that was his birthright and that he cultivated at Columbia and Oxford and ever after: captain of the fencing team; translator of French, Italian, German, Dutch; editor of Ivo Andric, Primo Levi, Ismail Kadare and many other international writers; and the essayist whose prose style descended from that of the philosophes in its dignity, élan and thrust.

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