Charles Boer’s groundbreaking translation of Marsilio Ficino’s immensely popular Renaissance treatise on mental and physical health, Liber de vita. Ficino wrote about the secrets of food, the pleasures in life, the antidotes to depression, and a lot of other wisdoms that had been lost for centuries. A founding text of archetypal psychology, it has long been an important source for image-oriented thought.
Charles Boer taught mythology, poetry, and individual 20th-century writers in the English department at University of Connecticut from 1966 to 1992. He was a gifted translator of ancient Greek and Latin. His translation from ancient Greek of the Homeric hymns was nominated for the National Book Award in 1972, and his translations from Latin of Marsilio Ficino’s Book of Life (1980) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1989) were highly praised. His most popular and successful book (translated into 28 different languages), however, was Freud’s Own Cookbook, written with James Hillman. His other books include works of poetry and biography along with numerous literary and critical articles and lectures, and poems mostly published in small publications. After retiring from UConn, Boer became the editor of Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and taught mythology and classics at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara (1994–97). In addition, he was a regular participant and lecturer at the Eranos Conferences (1972–2001) in Ascona, Switzerland and a founder of the international Myth & Theatre Conference in 1986, in which he participated until 1999.