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Richard McKane obituary

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My brother, Richard McKane, who has died aged 68 of pneumonia, was a poet, interpreter and translator. While he was a second-year undergraduate at Oxford University, his translations from Russian of the poetry of Anna Akhmatova were published by Penguin and Oxford University Press. The book was instrumental in popularising her in Europe and was the standard English translation for many years.

In spite of spates of ill health, he continued to translate Russian and Turkish poetry, publishing Osip Mandelstam, Olga Sedakova, and many Turkish writers, including Oktay Rifat and Nazim Hikmet. This was combined with writing his own poetry and interpreting at counselling sessions at the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, work that made great demands on his own equilibrium. The charity’s founder, Helen Bamber, became a close personal friend, and on Desert Island Discs she chose a book of his own poetry, Out of the Cold Blue, for her desert island.

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