Mary de Rachewiltz, an American poet and translator who was the daughter of Ezra Pound and the violinist Olga Rudge, died July 24. She was 101. Though raised in Italy by foster parents, she frequently visited her father as a child. Rachewiltz married the Egyptologist Boris de Rachewiltz in 1946--the same year her father was deported to the U.S. to stand trial for treason.
Her autobiography Discretions was published in 1971; reissued as a paperback by New Directions (1975); and again in 2005 as Ezra Pound, Father and Teacher: Discretions, with a new afterword by the author.
She also published several books of poems in Italian and English. Rachewiltz translated several of her father's works, including The Cantos. She served for years as curator of the Ezra Pound Archives at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and lived for much of her life in the Schloss Brunnenburg castle, which she and her husband worked to restore.
In a tribute, New Directions said it "mourns the passing of Mary de Rachewiltz--beloved poet, translator, memoirist, and devoted steward of the work of her father, Ezra Pound. We celebrate her vision as well as her legacy of steadfast care and share the sorrow of her family and friends."
"She herself minimized the anti-Allied and virulently antisemitic propaganda Pound broadcast on Italian radio during World War II, which led to his indictment for treason in the United States and his confinement for over a decade in a Washington mental hospital after he was found unfit to stand trial," the New York Times noted in her obituary.
"The charge was fascism and antisemitism," de Rachewiltz told the newspaper La Stampa in 1986. "For an American citizen, this shouldn't be a crime. As Pound said, free speech without free speech on the radio is worthless."
For years, she worked on a complete translation of Pound's The Cantos, which was published in 1985. She continued to write her own poetry and helped edit Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895-1929 (2011). She also established the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg.
From her poem "Roses":
Because I do not know
because I do not know how
to plant roses by the spring
now dry, let my tears fill the fountain
where waters no longer flow,
and sing to the poet who broke
the mold (and ate red tulips
when sitting among stiff bores).