https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/04/01/poet-translator-richard-howard-dead/

"A renowned translator of French literature, he introduced many English-language readers to works by Baudelaire and Stendhal, as well as the philosophers and essayists Roland Barthes and Emil Cioran."

By Harrison Smith

Richard Howard, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who helped revive the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, writing elegant, highly mannered verses from the point of view of Walt Whitman, Telemachus and John Milton’s daughters even as he maintained a parallel career as a renowned translator of French literature, died March 31 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was complications of dementia, said his husband, David Alexander.

Mr. Howard was a stylish, beguiling fixture of the American poetry world for more than half a century, based out of a cramped Greenwich Village apartment where he lived with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a French bulldog named Gide and a sprawling art collection, including drawings made by his friends Jean Cocteau and Dorothea Tanning. Every surface of his bathroom, from the ceiling to the inside of the shower, was covered with photographs of friends and artists, including Paul Valéry, Robert Frost, Harold Bloom and Susan Sontag.

Like Ezra Pound, he believed that “all poets are contemporaneous,” and spent much of his life promoting the work of classic writers as well as young upstarts. He nurtured student poets craving guidance and support in addition to introducing many English-language readers to works by Stendhal, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre and other French masters, winning a National Book Award (then known as the American Book Award) in 1983 for his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s 19th-century poetry collection “Les Fleurs du Mal.”

“He really is that European idea of a man of letters,” said one of his former students, the poet Mary Jo Bang, in a 2017 interview with the Paris Review. “It’s not just the expanse of his erudition, but the expanse of his work. … If you stick around once he welcomes you, and you continue to seek him out, you see an example of what it is to be a poet — to have an expansive intelligence, to be generous with others, and to form a community.”

Mr. Howard taught at schools including the University of Houston and Columbia University, was poetry editor of the Paris Review and the Western Humanities Review, and published more than 200 works in translation, including the war memoirs of French statesman Charles de Gaulle and numerous essays by his friends Emil Cioran and Roland Barthes. He also wrote more than a dozen books of poetry and literary criticism, including the 700-page essay collection “Alone With America” (1969), which examined the work of 41 contemporary American poets...

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