Image of Babette Deutesh

Timeline

Lifetime: 1895 - 1982 Passed: ≈ 41 years ago

Title

Poet, Critic, Translator, Novelist

Country/Nationality

United States
Wikipedia

Babette Deutesh

Babette Deutsch was an American poet, critic, translator, and novelist. 

  
Born in New York City, the daughter of Michael and Melanie (Fisher) Deutsch, she matriculated from the Ethical Culture School and Barnard College, graduating in 1917 with a B.A. She published poems in magazines such as the North American Review and the New Republic while she was still a student at Barnard. 

 

On April 29, 1921, Deutsch married Avrahm Yarmolinsky, chief of the Slavonic Division of The New York Public Library (1918–1955), also a writer and translator. They had two sons, Adam and Michael. 

 

During the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, Deutsch was teaching at Columbia University, where her students included poet/publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In 1946, she received an honorary D. Litt. from Columbia University. 

 

She translated Pushkin's Eugene Onegin into English and also made some of the best English versions of Boris Pasternak's poems. Deutsch's own poems displayed what poet Marianne Moore called "her commanding stature as a poet." 

Books by Babette Deutesh

Modern Russian Poetry: An Anthology Cover image

Modern Russian Poetry: An Anthology

Poetry Non-Fiction
Anthologies

This volume...aims to present the lyrical poetry of Russian for the last hundred years by a selection of poems translated by the editors...The principle of selection was, so far as might be, aesthetic. Poems were chosen less for their representative...