Keith Anthony Bosley (16 September 1937 – 24 June 2018) was a British poet and translator. Bosley was born in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, and grew up in

Maidenhead Maidenhead is a market town in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in the county of Berkshire, England, on the southwestern bank of the River Thames. It had an estimated population of 70,374 and forms part of the border with southern Bu ...

Berkshire Berkshire ( ; in the 17th century sometimes spelt phonetically as Barkeshire; abbreviated Berks.) is a historic county in South East England. One of the home counties, Berkshire was recognised by Queen Elizabeth II as the Royal County of Be ...

. He was educated at Sir William Borlase's Grammar School in Marlow (1949 – 1956) and the Universities of

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. ...

Caen Caen (, ; nrf, Kaem) is a commune in northwestern France. It is the prefecture of the department of Calvados. The city proper has 105,512 inhabitants (), while its functional urban area has 470,000,Reading Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of Letter (alphabet), letters, symbols, etc., especially by Visual perception, sight or Somatosensory system, touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process invo ...

(1956 – 1960), where he read French. In 1961 he began working for the BBC, mainly as an announcer and newsreader on the

World Service The BBC World Service is an international broadcasting, international broadcaster owned and operated by the BBC, with funding from the Government of the United Kingdom, British Government through the Foreign Secretary, Foreign Secretary's o ...

, but the work for which he perhaps best known is as a poet and translator. In 1978 he was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Translators. In 1980 he became a Corresponding Member of the Finnish Literature Society, and a year later he undertook a Middle East lecture tour for the BBC and the

British Council The British Council is a British organisation specialising in international cultural and educational opportunities. It works in over 100 countries: promoting a wider knowledge of the United Kingdom and the English language (and the Welsh la ...

. Other accolades include first prizes in the British Comparative Literature Association's translation competition in 1982 and, in the same year, in the English Goethe Society's translation competition. In 1991 he was made a Knight, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bo ...

. Bosley retired from the BBC in 1993 and lived in

. In 2001 he was awarded a pension from the

Royal Literary Fund The Royal Literary Fund (RLF) is a benevolent fund that gives assistance to published British writers in financial difficulties. Founded in 1790, and granted a royal charter in 1818, the Fund has helped an extensive roll of authors through its long ...

, and continued in his role as organist at St Laurence's Church,

Upton-cum-Chalvey Upton is a suburb of Slough, in the Slough district, in the ceremonial county of Berkshire, England. Until the local government reforms of 1974 it was in Buckinghamshire. It was one of the villages that developed into the town. History The Dom ...

until 2015. He was married to harpist Satu Salo and had three sons – Ben (from an earlier marriage), Sebastian and Gabriel. He died in a nursing home in Slough, Berkshire, after a short illness.

Publications

;Poetry * ''The Possibility of Angels'' (1969) * ''And I Dance: for children'' (1972) * ''Dark Summer'' (1976) * ''Stations'' (1979) * ''A Chiltern Hundred'' (1987) * ''An Upton Hymnal'' (1999) * ''The Wedding-Guest: selected poems'' (ed. Owen Lowery and Anthony Rudolf) (2018) ;Translations * ''Russia's Other Poets'' (1968) * ''An Idiom of Night: Pierre Jean Jouve'' (1968) * ''The War Wife: Vietnamese poetry'' (1972) * ''The Song of Songs'' (1976) * ''Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic'' (1977) * ''

Mallarmé Mallarmé is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * André Mallarmé (1877–1956), French politician * Stéphane Mallarmé Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a Fre ...

: The Poems'' (1977) * ''A Round O: André Frénaud'' (1977) * ''The Last Temptations: opera by

Joonas Kokkonen Joonas Kokkonen (; 13 November 1921 – 2 October 1996) was a Finnish composer. He was one of the most internationally famous Finnish composers of the 20th century after Sibelius; his opera '' The Last Temptations'' has received over 500 performa ...

'' (1977) * '' Whitsongs:

Eino Leino Eino Leino (born Armas Einar Leopold Lönnbohm; 6 July 1878 – 10 January 1926) was a Finnish poet and journalist who is considered one of the pioneers of Finnish poetry and a national poet of Finland. His poems combine modern and Finnish fo ...

'' (1978) * ''The Elek Book of Oriental Verse'' (1979) * ''A Reading of Ashes:

Jerzy Ficowski Jerzy Tadeusz Ficowski (; October 4, 1924 in Warsaw – May 9, 2006 in Warsaw) was a Polish poet, writer and translator (from Yiddish, Russian, Romani and Hungarian). Biography and works During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, ...

'' (1981) * ''From the Theorems of Master Jean de La Ceppède'' (1983) * ''The

Kalevala The ''Kalevala'' ( fi, Kalevala, ) is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology, telling an epic story about the Creation of the Earth, describing the controversies an ...

'' (1989) * ''

Luís de Camões Luís Vaz de Camões (; sometimes rendered in English as Camoens or Camoëns, ; c. 1524 or 1525 – 10 June 1580) is considered Portugal's and the Portuguese language's greatest poet. His mastery of verse has been compared to that of Shakespe ...

: Epic and Lyric'' (1990) * ''The Kanteletar: selection'' (1992) * ''The Great Bear: Finno-Ugrian oral poetry'' (1993) * ''Odes:

Aleksis Kivi Aleksis Kivi (; born Alexis Stenvall; 10 October 1834 – 31 December 1872) was a Finnish author who wrote the first significant novel in the Finnish language, '' Seitsemän veljestä'' ("Seven Brothers") in 1870. He is also known for his 1864 ...

'' (1994) * ''A Centenary Pessoa'' (1995) * ''Rome the Sorceress: André Frénaud'' (1995) * ''Eve Blossom Has Wheels: German love poetry'' (1997) * ''Skating on the Sea: poetry from Finland'' (1997) ;Audiobooks * ''The

'' (2013) – an audio recording of the 1989 translation Bosley's other works include contributions to numerous journals in the UK, France, Finland and the US, and authorship of hundreds of radio scripts including ''The Poetry of Europe'' (nine 30-minute programmes, 1981) and ''The Kalevala'' (fifteen 15-minute programmes, 1992).

References

External links

Reviews of the ''Kalevala'', as translated by Keith Bosley
– (published by

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print book ...

)
A blog piece by Keith Bosley about his translation of the ''Kalevala''

* ttp://finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=160079&contentlan=2&culture=en-US "The Kanteletar" thisisFINLAND.fi– Finland's treasury of folk lyrics and ballads
Rome the Sorceress
– – by André Frénaud, as translated by Keith Bosley *
Web page for ''The Wedding-Guest'' (2018)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bosley, Keith 1937 births 2018 deaths People from Wycombe District People from Maidenhead University of Paris alumni University of Caen Normandy alumni Alumni of the University of Reading Radio and television announcers English translators English male poets English male non-fiction writers 20th-century British translators British expatriates in France