April FitzLyon
| April FitzLyon | |
|---|---|
| Born | Cecily April Mead 22 April 1920 Langton Herring |
| Died | 17 September 1998 (aged 78) |
| Occupation | Translator, biographer, historian |
April FitzLyon (22 April 1920 – 17 September 1998) was an English translator, biographer, and historian.
Born Cecily April Mead, at Langton Herring, Dorset, in 1920, she was educated as a small child in France and later at St Mary's, Calne, in the west of England. She studied the flute at the Guildhall School of Music, but did not go on to become a professional musician.
In 1941, aged 20, she married Kyril Zinovieff, a Russian émigré who took the surname FitzLyon and who worked at the Ministry of Defence. The couple had two sons, Sebastian, who became a business man in France and later in Russia, and Julian, an information specialist. The family lived in Golders Green and later in Chiswick, moving in literary circles and having many Russian friends.
FitzLyon learned Russian from her husband's mother. In the 1950s, she approached a publisher with translations of stories by Anton Chekhov which were unknown in the UK, which she had produced jointly with her husband. They were published in 1953 as The Woman in the Case and Other Stories. This was a great success and was quickly followed later the same year by translations of three short novels by Leo Tolstoy (Three Novellas, 1953). Of these, she translated two herself. She continued to translate literature from Russian, French and Italian, but began to concentrate on historical biographies. She published the first life of Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist who had been a revolutionary in Venice, debunking Ponte's own unreliable memoirs (The Libertine Librettist, 1955). After that, she translated Émile Zola's Au bonheur des dames (Ladies Delight, 1957), the correspondence between Romain Rolland and Richard Strauss, and some recent French novels. She produced biographies of two Spanish singers, the daughters of Manuel del Pópulo Vicente García: firstly of Pauline García-Viardot, who was a star of nineteenth century France (The Price of Genius, 1964), and later a new life of Pauline Viardot's sister Maria Malibran, one of the most notable opera singers of the century (Maria Malibran: diva of the romantic age, 1987).
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