Burton Pike (June 12, 1930 - December 22, 2022) [1] was a translator of Robert Musil, [2] as well as a distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. [3] He did his undergraduate studies at Haverford College and received his PhD from Harvard University. He taught at the University of Hamburg, Cornell University, and Queens College and Hunter College of the City University of New York. [1] He was also a visiting professor at Yale University. [4]
Burton Pike was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, [5] a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a Fulbright fellowship. He was awarded the Medal of Merit by the City of Klagenfurt, Austria, for his work on Robert Musil. He was a finalist and received a special citation for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for editing and co-translating Musil's The Man Without Qualities . He was the winner of the 2012 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Gerhard Meier's Isle of the Dead, [4] and in 2016 was awarded the Friedrich Ulfers Prize for his work championing German-language literature in the United States. [6]
A festschrift titled Underlying Rhythm: On Translation, Communication, and Literary Languages. Essays in Honor of Burton Pike was published in 2023. [7]
Books
Translations
Robert Musil was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels.
The Sonnets to Orpheus are a cycle of 55 sonnets written in 1922 by the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926). It was first published the following year. Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," wrote the cycle in a period of three weeks experiencing what he described a "savage creative storm." Inspired by the news of the death of Wera Ouckama Knoop (1900–1919), a playmate of Rilke's daughter Ruth, he dedicated them as a memorial, or Grab-Mal, to her memory.
The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil.
Michael Hulse is an English poet, translator and critic, notable especially for his translations of German novels by W. G. Sebald, Herta Müller, and Elfriede Jelinek.
Michael Henry Heim was an American literary translator and scholar. He translated literature from eight languages, including works by Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, and Günter Grass. He received his doctorate in Slavic languages and literature from Harvard in 1971, and joined the faculty of UCLA the following year. In 2003, he and his wife used their life savings ($734,000) to establish the PEN Translation Fund.
Lawrence Venuti is an American translation theorist, translation historian, and a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan.
Joachim Neugroschel was a multilingual literary translator of French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish. He was also an art critic, editor, and publisher.
John Felstiner, Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, was an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests included poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic poems, literary translation, Vietnam era poetry and Holocaust studies. John Felstiner died in February 2017 at the age of 80. He had been suffering from the effects of progressive aphasia at his time of death, at a hospice near Stanford.
Ernst David Kaiser was an Austrian writer and translator.
Philip Boehm is an American playwright, theater director and literary translator. Born in Texas, he was educated at Wesleyan University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the State Academy of Theater in Warsaw, Poland.
Ross Benjamin is an American translator of German literature and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow. He has won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his translation of Michael Maar's Speak, Nabokov. He also received a commendation from the judges of the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his translation of Thomas Pletzinger's Funeral for a Dog. He is a graduate of Vassar College and a former Fulbright scholar.
Damion Searls is an American writer and translator. He grew up in New York and studied at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in translating literary works from Western European languages such as German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch. Among the authors he has translated are Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, Heike B. Görtemaker, and Nescio. He has received numerous grants and fellowships for his translations.
Susan Bernofsky is an American translator of German-language literature and author. She is best known for bringing the Swiss writer Robert Walser to the attention of the English-speaking world, translating many of his books and writing his biography. She has also translated several books by Jenny Erpenbeck and Yoko Tawada. Her prizes for translation include the 2006 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the 2012 Calw Hermann Hesse Prize, the 2015 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the 2015 Schlegel-Tieck Prize. She was also selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. In 2017 she won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her translation of Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada. In 2018 she was awarded the MLA's Lois Roth Award for her translation of Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck.
Uljana Wolf is a German poet and translator known for exploring multilingualism in her work. Wolf works in both Berlin and New York. She teaches German at New York University. Uljana Wolf was born in East Berlin in 1979. She studied German Studies, cultural studies and English Literature in Berlin and Krakow.
Esther Allen is a writer, professor, and translator of French-language and Spanish-language literature into English. She is on the faculties of Baruch College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Allen co-founded PEN World Voices: the New York Festival of International Literature (2004), and worked with PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants from their inception in 2003 to 2010. Allen heads the Development Committee of the American Literary Translators Association, and serves on the board of Writers Omi, part of Omi International Arts Center, on the Advisory Council to the Spanish-language program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and on the Selection Committee for the French Voices translation subvention program of the Services culturels français.
Joel Agee is an American writer and translator. He lives in New York.
Shelley Laura Frisch is an American literary translator from German to English. She is best known for her translations of biographies, most notably of Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Marlene Dietrich/Leni Riefenstahl.
Mati Sirkel is an Estonian translator and writer.
Eithne Wilkins was a Germanic Studies scholar, translator and poet from New Zealand.