Lipkin, Semen Izrailevich

Born Sept. 6 (19), 1911, in Odessa. Soviet Russian poet and translator. People’s Poet of the Kalmyk ASSR (1968).

Lipkin graduated from the Moscow Economics Engineering Institute in 1937. He fought in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45). He translated into Russian the Kalmyk epic Dzhangar (1940), the Kirghiz epic Manas (1941), the Kabardinian epic Narty (1951), the Buriat epic Geser (1968), the epic of the peoples of India Mahabharata (1969), and the works of classical Tadzhik, Uzbek, Kirghiz, Balkar, and Kalmyk poets. His translations were published as Kabardinian Epic Poetry (1956), Voices of Six Centuries (1960), and The Golden Chain: Eastern Poems (1970). He also has written Eyewitness (1967), a book of verses. Lipkin received the Rudaki State Prize of the Tadzhik SSR (1967), four orders, and a number of medals.