Manheim, Ralph F. (32977412): Difference between revisions

. Manheim was born in New York to American parents of Lithuanian and German descent, and graduated from Harvard in 1926. Born April 4, 1907; died September 26, 1992 at the age of 85. He was the outstanding literary translator from German into English since the second world war. Best known perhaps for his widely-read translations of Gunter Grass, starting with The Tin Drum for Kurt Wolff's New York firm Pantheon Books, he worked for several leading belles-lettres, academic and art book publishers on both sides of the Atlantic and also did some translating from the French (including Celine's novels and Proust's early letters). He won a number of literary awards, culminating in the MacArthur fellowship and the PEN medal for translation, and was an internationally loved and respected figure. He thereafter studied at Yale and Columbia before going overseas to Vienna and Munich. For a time he was a schoolmaster in Connecticut, and during the Roosevelt era began producing stories and articles of his own, helped by the Federal WPA writing project. His long bibliography of some 150 book translations begins ominously with Mein Kampf in 1943 and Konrad Heiden's biography of Hitler a year later, and when he was drafted into the army he was first sent to the intelligence training centre at Camp Ritchie to be made into a prisoner of war interrogator. By his own account he was spared this unwelcome role in favour of translating German documents, and the command of military terms and expressions which this gave him would become useful after 1945.