Louise Varèse (1890–1989)

Louise Varèse, née McCutcheon, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to John Lindsay McCutcheon and his wife Mary Louise Taylor. She attended Smith College, but left before graduating in the fall of 1911 to marry Allen Norton, a poet and literary editor. Their son was born the following year. Together, the couple founded and edited the Dada-inspired modernist magazine Rogue (a play on Vogue) in 1915. Louise wrote articles for the magazine under the pseudonym "Dame Rogue," including a fashion column called Philosophic Fashions. During this time, she also contributed to the New York Dada magazine The Blind Man and met Marcel Duchamp, who became a close friend. In 1916, Louise and Norton separated, and they divorced four years later. In 1922, she married French composer Edgard Varèse. Louise became a well-known and influential translator of poetry and other works by Charles Baudelaire, Julien Gracq, Saint-John Perse, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Georges Simenon, and Stendhal. She also was a contributing writer for Lapham's Quarterly.
In 1948, she received the Denyse Clairouin Prize -- named for a heroine of the French Resistance -- for her translation of Baudelaire's collection of poems Paris Spleen. She was named a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1969. In 1972, she published a biography of her late second husband called Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary. Volume two of the work was in progress when she died in 1989.