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).
Elaine Feinstein, reviewing Phaedra in PN Review in 2013, observed that Angela’s version “not only extends our understanding of a great Russian poet, but also illuminates the spirit of her translator, who is as little interested in the commonplace values of the everyday world as the poet she translates”.
Angela and I got to know each other in 1999 when, as features editor at the BBC Russian Service, I made a programme on her translation of The Ratcatcher.
It was Tsvetaeva’s breathtaking sound patterns and rhythms, and Pasternak’s stream of striking images that gave Angela, in seeking to translate them, “a pleasure which is not like any other”, she said. Like her favourite poets, Angela possessed a childlike ability to experience everything, however familiar, as if for the first time. She also loved Andrei Platonov for his peculiar use of language and described his great novel Chevengur of 1928 as “a prose of concealed poetry”, transposing 50 passages from it into English verse, published as Poems from Chevengur in 2004.
Angela was born in Hayes, Middlesex (now the London Borough of Hillingdon), to Albert Hobbs, a further education lecturer in mechanical engineering, and his wife, Edith (nee Parker), a primary school teacher. Her love for literature and languages was kindled at Greenford county grammar school, and at Cambridge University, where she gained a first-class degree in German and Russian.
At university she met Rodney Livingstone, a fellow student, who later became professor of German at Southampton University, and they married in 1959. Angela worked in the department of literature at Essex University for more than 30 years, becoming professor and its head in 1992 before retiring in 1996.
Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1971. In 2014 she married Alan Palmer. He died in 2019. She is survived by Sonia and Benjamin, the children from her first marriage, four grandchildren and her sister, Pamela.
