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At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 6, 2025, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Walter Jacob Kaiser was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Walter Jacob Kaiser, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, led a life of vibrant culture, knowledge, and accomplishment.
In 1963 Kaiser published “Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare,” a study of Renaissance humanism, philosophy, witty fools, and cosmopolitanism based on his dissertation. The next year saw his edition of the essays of Michel de Montaigne in John Florio’s English. Kaiser soon produced translations, first of three longer poems from the modern Greek by the Nobel laureate George Seferis 1969 and later of three volumes of prose from the French by Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman elected to the Académie Française: “Alexis” (“Alexis ou le traité du vain combat”) in 1984; “Two Lives and a Dream” (“Comme l’eau qui coule”) in 1987; and, in 1992, “That Mighty Sculptor, Time,” a collection of Yourcenar’s essays on which he collaborated. His skill as a translator drew praise, including from the reviewer Philip Thody in the Times Literary Supplement in 1992. Kaiser’s 1983 essay, “The Achievement of Marguerite Yourcenar,” is an important contribution to English criticism of that writer.
Kaiser devoted much of his career at Harvard to revitalizing Villa I Tatti, the University’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, housed in Bernard Berenson’s villa and grounds in the valley of the Mensola in the hills northeast of the city. The choice of Kaiser to lead this institution had a certain logic. As an undergraduate in 1953, he had met Berenson — “I was terrified,” he later recounted — but the two became acquainted on walks. Thirty-five years later, Walter became I Tatti’s director. During his tenure, serving from 1988 to 2002, he consolidated its scholarly programs and gave new life and vitality to its garden, properties, people, and programs.
According to one member of the Memorial Minute Committee, a visiting professor at I Tatti in 1991, when Kaiser was director, “he was absolutely perfect for the position. Presiding at daily lunches with grace and humor, he always managed to steer the conversation to the varied and interesting research projects of the Fellows. . . . Walter loved the gardens and saw to it that they were kept in the best possible condition of each season. His Italian and French were perfect. He could talk about anything with anyone. He was loved and admired by staff and fellows. He presided like a happy Renaissance Prince of the Church, lavishing his blessings on his guests. He knew how to raise money and keep order so that a very complicated organization seemed to flow effortlessly. Walter was smart, sharp; he loved to laugh and make people laugh with him!”
The present director, Alina Payne, remarks how much she benefited from Kaiser, “both as a scholar and personally from what he managed to build . . . at I Tatti — the community, the place, the grounds, and its sound financial basis.” He oversaw the expansion of the library and photo collection. His efforts were marked by the establishment of a fund named in his honor to support the Biblioteca Berenson at Villa I Tatti and, in 2018, by the reopening of its newly renovated main space as the Walter J. Kaiser Reading Room.
Kaiser also inaugurated a library of a different sort: the I Tatti Renaissance Library. This highly regarded series of Latin literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific texts with facing English translations, distributed by Harvard University Press, now runs to more than one hundred volumes. He also contributed to the Press’s Villa I Tatti Series, which publishes studies on topics related to Bernard Berenson, his colleagues, interests, and collections, editing, with Michael Mallon, a selection of book reviews by the eminent art historian John Pope-Hennessy.
Above all, Kaiser valued interdisciplinarity. Under his direction, I Tatti focused on the Italian Renaissance, a purview since expanded to encompass the broader Mediterranean. For more than seven decades, I Tatti has supported scholarly work in many fields, including literature, history, art history, philosophy, and musicology. Kaiser called the resulting conversation among the disciplines “the greatness of I Tatti.”
Before his directorship of I Tatti, Kaiser taught courses featuring Shakespeare, Spenser, Ariosto, and Montaigne. He enlivened his lectures on Shakespeare with analysis, criticism, and a marvelous ability to play characters in different voices. Memory of his renderings of Falstaff, Justice Shallow, and Justice Silent in “Henry IV, Part 2,” never fades. When one student asked what, aside from verbal ability, permitted Shakespeare to become a great poet, Kaiser replied, “He was open to every kind of experience.”
From 2009 through 2015, Kaiser wrote essays and reviews for The New York Review of Books. His subjects reflected his wide interests: Renaissance and American art, connoisseurship, the task of translation, Paul and Julia Child in the Office of Strategic Services, Arezzo, Florence, Shakespeare, modern European painting, Caravaggio, Piero della Francesca, Janet Ross, and Bernard Berenson. In these essays, as in all his undertakings, he connected learning to living as much as to the academy.
Born May 31, 1931, in Bellevue, Ohio, the son of a grocer, Kaiser earned the position of page in the U.S. Senate in 1944, followed by scholarships to Phillips Academy and Harvard, which conferred his A.B. magna cum laude with highest honors in 1954 and his Ph.D. in 1960. He published poems in The Harvard Advocate and The New Yorker. Appointed assistant professor of English and comparative literature in 1962, promoted to associate professor in 1965, and tenured in 1969, he was, in 1999, granted a named professorship. From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, he chaired the Department of Comparative Literature three times, totaling eight years.
Before divorcing in 1981, Kaiser and Neva Goodwin Rockefeller had two children. Kaiser is survived by his daughter, Miranda Kaiser; her two daughters; and two daughters by his son, David Kaiser, a courageous climate advocate who died in 2020. Walter Kaiser died peacefully in New York City on Jan. 5, 2016.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert Kiely
Katharine Park
Jan Ziolkowski
James Engell, Chair
