In 1986, in her late 50s, Naomi Lazard, already the author of two volumes of poetry and two children’s books, earned a scholarship to study Urdu with Frances W. Pritchett in the Middle East language department at Columbia University. It wasn’t a lark.
The following year, Princeton University Press published “The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz,” Ms. Lazard’s translation of the poems of one of the most celebrated writers of the Urdu language in Pakistan. Until then Faiz’s work had been little known in the English-speaking world.
Not one to rest on her literary laurels, in 1992 Ms. Lazard helped launch the Hamptons International Film Festival, writing mission statements and successful grant proposals. She served as cultural coordinator during its first years, was a board member from 1992 to 1996, and in 1994 helped develop a film series for children.
Ms. Lazard, who was a full-time resident of East Hampton Village for more than 20 years, died of cardiac arrest on Dec. 22 at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93.
Her poems were published in 43 magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, The Paris Review, and The Hudson Review. Her work was also included in two Pushcart Prize anthologies, “The Norton Book of Light Verse,” and “The New Yorker Book of Poems.”
She was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1978 to 1980, was awarded two fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, and won the Robert Payne Translation Award from Columbia University for her translations of Faiz’s work. She also served on the board of Columbia’s Translation Center for seven years.
Her first book of poems, “Cry of the Peacocks,” was published in 1967 by Hiram Haydn in association with Harcourt Brace. “She is knowledgeable and touches upon many places and aspects of our times,” Kirkus Reviews wrote. “Her rooms and landscapes and mood-pieces are precisely arranged, and full of a delicate sense of alienation.”
“Ordinances” was first published in 1978 and reprinted several times, most recently in 2010, soon after which Dan Giancola reviewed the volume for The Star. “The persona of these poems appears to be an anonymous author on a government or institutional payroll,” he wrote. “The voice brims with certainty and confidence; it is the voice arising from the arrogance of power. . . .”
In an introduction to that reprint, the poet Edward Field called it “a perfect indictment of the grotesque predicament we live in, how we are treated by institutions — governmental, corporate, and commercial — how our lives are manipulated.”
Naomi Lazard was born in Philadelphia on March 17, 1928, to Morris Katz and Ruth Carlitz Katz. She grew up there and in Brooklyn and Brookline, Mass., before moving to Chicago in 1955. In 1958 she married Sidney Lazard; they were divorced three years later.
From 1958 to 1960 she attended the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design in Chicago, which was founded by Bauhaus architects and designers after they escaped Nazi Germany. While there, she studied graphic design with the artist June Leaf.
As a student in John Logan’s writing workshops at the University of Chicago in 1960, she began to write poetry. She received a scholarship to study with the writer J.R. Humphreys at Columbia in 1985.
Over the years Ms. Lazard was poet in residence at Kirkland College in Clinton, N.Y., the Provincetown Center for the Arts, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Montana.
She was a visiting lecturer in poetry at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and the State University at Purchase, and taught writing at the Victor D’Amico Institute of Art on Napeague and in the enrichment program at the Amagansett School. She did readings at the East Hampton Library, Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, and Guild Hall.
After moving to East Hampton in 1985, she lived in a modernist house designed and built with her brother-in-law, John Guest, an architect, and her sister, Myrna Guest.
Ms. Lazard is survived by a niece, Amanda Guest, a cousin, Bob Carlitz, two first cousins once removed, Ruth Carlitz and Natasha Carlitz, and Bella Danieli, a grand-niece. Her sister died before her.
A memorial service will be held via Zoom on March 20 at noon. The contact is [email protected]. Contributions have been suggested to the Retirement Home for Horses at millcreekfarm.org/our-mission, and Elsa’s Ark at elsasark.org.
