Mary de Rachewiltz, poet, translator, and daughter of the influential yet controversial modernist Ezra Pound, has died at the age of 101. Born Maria Rudge on July 9, 1925, she spent much of her life engaged in preserving and defending her father’s complex literary legacy, even as she contended with his notorious political beliefs and actions.
Ezra Pound, a seminal figure in early 20th-century poetry, was also a virulent antisemite whose outspoken support for fascism during World War II led to a highly contentious legacy. Following wartime broadcasts from Mussolini’s Italy denouncing the Allies and promoting antisemitic conspiracies, Pound was indicted for treason by a U.S. court in 1943. He was captured by Italian partisans near the war’s end and held briefly at a U.S. detention center before being declared mentally unfit to stand trial. Pound spent the next 12 years confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., resisting efforts to reopen his case. He was ultimately released in 1958 and returned to Italy, where he remained until his death in 1972.
Mary de Rachewiltz sought to separate her father the poet from Pound the fascist and antisemite, a task she pursued through her writings and personal stewardship of his work. In her 1971 memoir, *Discretions*, she portrayed her father’s political views as misguided efforts to prevent war and insisted that his antisemitism reflected broader cultural prejudices of his time. She also donated extensive archives, including transcripts of his wartime radio broadcasts, to Yale University’s Beinecke Library.
Born in the Italian South Tyrol amid a secretive family arrangement, Mary was raised by a local peasant couple and initially spoke a Tyrolese dialect of German. Her biological parents—Ezra Pound and his American violinist mistress Olga Rudge—maintained a complicated, often distant relationship, complicated further by Pound’s marriage to English artist Dorothy Shakespear. Mary eventually moved into a more cosmopolitan milieu, studying languages, attending school in Florence, and immersing herself in the artistic circles frequented by her parents.
During World War II, she avoided conscription by working in German military hospitals and later married Boris de Rachewiltz, a Russian-Italian Egyptologist and Vatican diplomat. Together, they restored Castle Brunnenburg, a 13th-century fortress near Merano in northern Italy, where she continued her literary work and curated Ezra Pound’s legacy through the Ezra Pound Centre for Literature.
Mary was vocal in rejecting contemporary far-right groups attempting to appropriate her father’s name, specifically condemning the Italian neo-fascist group CasaPound, whose founder identified with Pound’s fascist sympathies. She emphasized that such factions bore no relation to the poet she knew.
Beyond her work as a custodian of Pound’s oeuvre, Mary de Rachewiltz published her own poetry in Italian and translated her father’s work. She spent her later years at Brunnenburg, survived by her children Siegfried, an ethnologist, Patrizia, a poet and translator, and their adopted daughter Graziella.
Her death on July 24, 2026, closes a century-long chapter intertwined with one of modern literature’s most influential and polarizing figures.