Vera Rich
Encyclopedia
Vera Rich was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 poet, journalist, historian, and translator from Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...

 and Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....

.

Born in London, she studied at St Hilda's College of University of Oxford and Bedford College, London. In 1959, her poetry attracted the attention of the editors of John O'London's Weekly
John O'London's Weekly
John O'London's Weekly was a weekly literary magazine that was published by George Newnes of London between 1919 and 1954. Regarded as the leading literary magazine in the British Empire, at its height it had a circulation of 80,000, and it was popular among young and older readers alike.Founded in...

 and the following year her first collection of verse, Outlines, was privately produced and received favourable reviews, selling out within six months.

Her translations of the works of Taras Shevchenko
Taras Shevchenko
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko -Life:Born into a serf family of Hryhoriy Ivanovych Shevchenko and Kateryna Yakymivna Shevchenko in the village of Moryntsi, of Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire Shevchenko was orphaned at the age of eleven...

, commissioned for the century of his death (1961) received excellent reviews, both in the West and in the Soviet Ukraine. For this work, Vera Rich was awarded an Honorary Diploma in Shevchenko Studies by the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences.

Later, influenced by Fr. Ceslaus Sipovich
Ceslaus Sipovich
Ceslaus Sipovich was a bishop of the Belarusian Greek Catholic Church.He was born in Homel, son of Heorhi Sipovich, a Belarusian carpenter, and Anna Kilipova, a teacher of Russian origin...

, she started also translating Belarusian poetry. Her first translation from Belarusian was the poem Na čužynie by Janka Kupala. Her Like Water, Like Fire published in 1971 became the world's first anthology of translations of Belarusian poetry into a western European language. Later she published The Images Swarm Free, a collection of translations of verses by prominent Belarusian authors, Aleś Harun, Maksim Bahdanovič
Maksim Bahdanovic
Maksim Bahdanovich was a famous Belarusian poet, journalist and literary critic.- Life :Bahdanovich was born in Minsk in the family of a scientist...

, and Źmitrok Biadula
Zmitrok Biadula
Shmuel Yefimovich Plavnik , better known by the pen name Źmitrok Biadula, , was a famous Jewish Belarusian poet, prose writer, cultural worker, and political activist in the Belarusian independence movement.Źmitrok Biadula was born Shmuel Yefimovich Plavnik on April 23, 1886 in the...

.

Vera Rich was the founder of Manifold, "the magazine of new poetry". It was started in 1962 and appeared regularly under Vera's editorship until May 1969, when it was suspended owing to Vera's taking a job as Soviet and East European Correspondent for the scientific weekly Nature. At the time of its suspension Manifold had close on 900 subscribers, almost half of them in the USA. This initially temporary job at Nature lasted for more than 20 years. It was only in 1998 that it proved possible to relaunch Manifold. All together, 49 issues were published under Vera's editorship. It published original high-quality poetry in traditional and innovative styles, in various variants of English, and - from time to time - in major European languages, as well as translations of poetry from less-known languages.

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