It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden passing of Anthony Mortimer on Wednesday, 19 March. He was professor of English literature at the University of Fribourg from 1978 until his retirement in 2006, serving as Director of the English Department and as Dean of the Faculty of Letters. His funeral will take place on Friday, 28 March, at 10.30 a.m., at (the Anglican) Holy Trinity Church, Rue du Mont-Blanc 14bis, 1201 Geneva.

Born in Birmingham in 1936, he studied English literature, French, and History at the University of Leeds, where he co-edited the university magazine Poetry and Audience, which published works by some of the foremost English poets of the twentieth century, such as Geoffrey Hill, Philip Larkin, and Tony Harrison. He subsequently taught English literature at the University of Zagreb (from 1960) and the Bocconi University of Milan (from 1963), before he obtained a Fulbright grant for his doctoral studies on English Petrarchism at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1968. After a year at the Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany (1971-72), he was appointed assistant professor of English literature at the University of Geneva. In 1978, he was appointed full professor of English literature at the University of Fribourg, where he remained until his retirement in 2006, with the exception of a visiting research fellowship at Merton College, Oxford (1994-95).

During his time in Fribourg, he served as Dean of the Faculty of Letters (1984-85) and had an unparalleled impact on the development of English studies at the University of Fribourg, as he oversaw the transformation of the English Department from one professorship on his arrival into a modern department with four professorships at the time of his retirement.

Over his long and distinguished research and teaching career, he published widely on English literature, from Elizabethan drama and Petrarchism to modernist poetry, with a particular focus on the Renaissance. His second monograph, Petrarch’s ‘Canzoniere’ in the English Renaissance (1975, revised and enlarged edition 2006), set the tone for his lifelong interest in Renaissance poetry and its pan-European and polyglot dimension. This interest resulted, among other publications, in his first volume of translation, Petrarch: Selected Poems (1977, revised and enlarged edition in 2002), and a book-length study of Shakespeare’s hitherto often neglected narrative poetry, Variable Passions: A Reading of Shakespeare’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ (2000). (A comprehensive list of his publications is available here.)

After his retirement in 2006, he embarked on a highly productive second career as a translator and published fourteen volumes of translation in less than twenty years. His masterful English translations from Italian, French, and German range from medieval epic over Renaissance poetry, prose, and drama to nineteenth-century poetry, covering a daunting number of canonical writers such as Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Angelus Silesius, François Villon, Charles Baudelaire, and others. Never shying away from a new challenge, he devoted his last book to translations of selected poems by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, one of Switzerland’s foremost nineteenth-century poets and novelists, which will appear later this year. An hommage to his career as translator by John E. Jackson, professor emeritus of French Literature at the University of Bern, was published in Le Temps on 25 March and can be read here.

Both in his work and his life, Professor Mortimer embodied the spirit of Renaissance cosmopolitanism and multilingualism in the best sense. Long after his retirement, he remained an active contributor to Swiss early modern studies and a warm-hearted colleague, who took a vivid interest in the work of his younger colleagues and generously shared his advice, knowledge, and experience with them.

Tony will be dearly missed as a scholar, teacher, colleague, and friend.