Patrick Creagh - Telegraph His first collection of poems, A Row of Pharaohs, was published by Heinemann in 1962, generating considerable acclaim which he built on with Dragon Jack-Knifed (1966) and To Abel and Others (1970). Perhaps his most enduring work was A Picture of Tristan: Imitations of Tristan Corbière - Creagh's own version of works by the Breton whose poems he had translated in 1965. A taste of Creagh's elegance of style is discernible in his introduction to this book: "Ailing in his teens, crippled and deformed in his twenties, dead at thirty, he [Corbière] accepted his destiny without resignation and twisted his metaphors to match his limbs. As sickness warped him to a caricature," Creagh wrote, "so the grotesque came to dominate his work and life. He kept a dried and flattened toad nailed above his mantelpiece: it saved him the trouble of looking in the mirror. Creagh returned to Italy in the late 1960s (a journey that he made with the con-man turned author Robin Cook, aka Derek Raymond, in a former Army lorry whose top speed was 35mph. "The contempt one feels," Cook noted, as they were repeatedly overtaken, "for these vehicles that one could print into the Tarmac with one touch of the wheel."). By that time Creagh had married Ursula Barr, whose mother was Barby, daughter of DH Lawrence's wife Frieda von Richtofen. When they met, Ursula was separated from her then husband, the poet and editor Al Alvarez. Shortly after she married Creagh, she inherited the rights to Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had only recently been cleared in the celebrated obscenity trial, and profits from the legacy enabled them to buy a dilapidated farmhouse at Radda-in-Chianti, north of Siena. The property had its own vineyard, and Creagh demonstrated an enthusiasm for the production and consumption of red wine. His only subsequent collection of poems would be The Lament of the Border Guard, published by Carcanet in 1980. As his own creative output diminished, however, he emerged as one of the great Italian translators of his generation. He approached translation much as he had poetry, with assiduous attention to every syllable; he would sometimes ponder a sentence for a day or longer, "biting," to use a phrase Creagh once applied to Leopardi, "his truant pen." The result was a deep-felt understanding of the works in question. In particular, critics praised his translation of the prose work of the 19th-century poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi. The perfect translation of Leopardi's poems would always remain elusive, however. In 1967, at the literary festival at Spoleto, Creagh acted as interpreter for the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had come at his suggestion. His Italian translation of the American's poem Who Be Kind To was so faithful to the spirit of the original that Ginsberg was questioned by police for three hours, then arrested for obscenity. In his late forties Creagh taught for more than a year at Princeton. While he was there he met the American composer John Eaton and wrote several libretti for him, including one for Eaton's best known opera, The Cry of Clytemnestra. On his return he worked with contemporary Italian authors. A gentle, gregarious and highly amusing melancholic, Creagh sometimes found that the professional association led to friendship: such was the case with the great Sicilian novelist Gesualdo Bufalino. Creagh's translation of Bufalino's Blind Argus, for his patient and most regular editor Christopher MacLehose, at Harvill, won the John Florio prize in 1992. Creagh and Ursula separated in the early 1980s, and his partner thereafter was Susan Rose (née James) who also proved an invaluable collaborator in his work as a translator. They lived at Panzano in Chianti, a small village on the old road from Florence to Siena. Unlike many expatriates, Creagh never remained aloof from his Italian neighbours, and for many years proudly played trombone with the uniformed brass band in the village . They were a hospitable couple and, at the height of the Balkan wars, took in a Kosovan refugee family of four, housing them for more than a year. Last year Creagh's translation of Antonio Tabucchi's Declares Pereira (1995) was republished under the title Pereira Maintains, to coincide with its choice as a Radio Four Book at Bedtime. He is survived by Susan Rose and his son and daughter. Patrick Creagh, born October 23 1930, died September 19 2012