My friend Angela Livingstone, who has died aged 90, was a translator and university teacher of literature known for playing a key role in making the most innovative works of 20th-century Russian literature accessible to the English-speaking world.
Her publications include edited selections of writings by Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva and masterful translations of their prose and poetry, among them Tsvetaeva’s “lyrical satire” The Ratcatcher and verse-drama Phaedra, both previously unknown in English. She also published Pasternak: Modern Judgements (1969), a groundbreaking book of critical essays (in collaboration with the poet and critic Donald Davie), a monograph on Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1989) and, late in her life, a collection of her own poems, Certain Roses (2017).
