Katharine Washburn, who died in New York on March 22nd, was a central person in the American literary world.
She was a special figure in various ways: a respected esssayist, anthologist, editor, translator, reviewer and promoter of other writers' works. Apart from her love of literature, she was one of the rare few who lived and breathed poetry. Born in Rochester, New York in 1943, she was an undergraduate at Pembroke-Brown University and a graduate of Columbia University where she completed an MA in classics.
Katharine Washburn worked as an editor for Book-of-the-Month-Club for many years. She played an active role in PEN and was on the adjudicating board of the PEN Translator's Award, and also adjudicated the National Endowment for Humanities Grants, the American equivalent of the Irish Arts Council bursaries.
With John S. Major, she edited World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time. At 1,338 pages, the volume includes 1,600 poems ranging over 4,000 years, from ancient Sumer and the Near East, to international poetry of this century. Many poems were translated into English especially for the anthology. Katharine Washburn, herself, translated from five languages and included some of her translations in this monumental anthology, which she humorously called "the doorstopper".
She also translated Euripides's The Madness of Heracles with David Curzon for the Penn Greek Drama Series. With John Thornton, Katharine Washburn edited Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip Mining of American Culture. This book presented critical overviews from many vantage points on the current state of life, art, and thought in the United States. They also co-edited Tongues of Angels, Tongues of Men: A Book of Sermons. It ranged from the Sermon on the Mount to Savonarola, and the anti-Nazi defiance of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Under the pseudonym, Felicity Bast, she edited The Poetical Cat - an anthology of poems about cats from various cultures.
She wrote articles and reviews for many papers and journals and most recently she began reviewing for the literary pages of The Irish Times. She had made a number of visits to Ireland and loved the country, especially its grey weather.
She deeply respected the achievement of its literary tradition and was friendly with many Irish poets.
Her company at any time had the quality of fortifying those around her and it was never without humour. She was a vastly learned person and had the humility of true learning, and the humour of humility.
In The Irish Times she wrote of how Irish writers had restored and expanded the world's "word hoard". She achieved this herself in her work and was the antithesis of the phrase that she helped to make popular, "dumbing down".
Katharine Washburn is survived by her husband, Tuck; their three children, Andrew, Michael and Will; by her parents, Calman and Margaret Winegarden; and by her sister, Mary Hoyle.
Katharine Washburn: born 1943; died March, 2000.