After graduating from Brandeis University in 1959, David Ball won a Fulbright to Paris. He came back to the States ten years later with his wife Nicole and their baby son to teach at Smith College in Massachusetts, and received his Doctorat en Littérature Générale et Comparée from the Université de Paris-III (Sorbonne Nouvelle) a few years after that. He retired from Smith in 2002.

David Ball's Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology (1927-1984) was awarded the MLA's prize for outstanding literary translation in 1996. He has translated books by Pierre Loti and Pierre Louÿs, and his translations of modern French poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies. In Cities, the most recent chapbook of his own poetry, was published by Potato Clock Editions, Boulder, Colorado in 2001. His articles on literary history and politics have appeared in such publications as Les Temps Modernes, Scribner's Encyclopedia of Poets, Revue de Littérature Comparée, Études Anglaises, Modern Philology, Reference Guide to Holocaust Literature, and The Massachusetts Review; on translation theory and practice in Germanic Review, Metamorphoses, and Translation Review. What he swears is his “very last academic work” appeared in Raison Présente while he was in Paris last October, a twenty-page essay called “L'Intime et l'Histoire : Deux journaux personnels sous l'Occupation.” He is currently writing a historical novel about France under German occupation and collaborating on a book-length translation with Nicole Ball.

David often travels to France for research and pleasure, and to San Francisco and Chicago to visit two sons. When he is in Northampton, he plays tennis as much as he possibly can.

An active member of ALTA since 1989, he says “translation is the life-blood of literature—quite literally: without good translations, literature cannot circulate through the world. Universities should recognize this, and support ALTA. We need to expand what we do and provide more services to translators; we should reach out to younger translators, to less-translated literatures, and above all find more ways of supporting our vital but underpaid work.”