Departures of note

Mary de Rachewiltz (born Maria Rudge, 9 July 1925 – 24 July 2026) was an Italian‑American poet, essayist and translator. The daughter of the American poet Ezra Pound and the violinist Olga Rudge, she grew up on a farm in the Italian Tyrol and was educated in part by her father, who gave her early translation assignments. She later became the principal translator of Pound’s epic poem The Cantos into Italian, publishing the complete translation in 1985 and earning the Città di Monselice award for translation.

Beyond her work on Pound, de Rachewiltz translated major American poets such as Robinson Jeffers, E. E. Cummings, Ronald Duncan and Denise Levertov into Italian, and published several collections of her own poetry in Italy, the United States and elsewhere. Her memoir Discretions (1971) and the later collection Process in Verso (2024) document her literary life and the cultural milieu of mid‑20th‑century modernism.

She lived for many years at Brunnenburg Castle in South Tyrol, where she curated the Ezra Pound Archive and taught courses on his work. De Rachewiltz remained active in literary circles into her centenarian years, receiving renewed scholarly attention for her translations and memoirs. She died peacefully in Merano, South Tyrol, at the age of 101.