Word: manheim
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bland and utterly devoid of the weird, dark qualities that make it something of a masterpiece." With characteristic wit and technical wizardry, Sendak has restored those qualities. Marie, journeying from childhood to the altar, old Drosselmeier the taleteller and Nutcracker himself are no longer marzipan creations. In Ralph Manheim's vigorous new translation, mice and soldiers, clowns and children speak out as never before, and Sendak has found pictorial equivalents for their idiosyncrasies. The illustrations will be on deposit at the Rosenbach Museum and Library of Philadelphia, which owns Tenniel's original drawings for Alice in Wonderland...
...Manheim's decades of devoted labor - translating more than 100 books for often minuscule fees - were recognized last year by the MacArthur Foundation, which rewards "exceptionally talented individuals." It singled him out for the top award: $60,000 a year, tax free, for life. Says Manheim: "My main pride is that I know how to be simple. When inexperi enced people run into an everyday ex pression in a foreign work that seems weird to them, they change it into some thing equally weird. But when you know a language well, you can translate the natural into the natural...
Still, sometimes the natural is not enough. To render the coinages, puns, obscure allusions and technical vocabulary that abound in Grass's novels, Manheim consulted a series of specialists. Dentists were interviewed for Local Anaesthetic, stonecutters for The Tin Drum and conchologists for From the Diary of a Snail. On other esoteric points, Manheim prefers to query Grass by letter, rather than participate in seminars that the author periodically conducts in Frankfurt for his translators...
...Manheim is critical of much contem porary translation. Because he regards Goethe's Faust as untranslatable, he thinks English versions are "a waste of time," though he acknowledges that they "may be of help to students incapable of learning German or unwilling to take the time to do it." He agrees completely with Edmund Wilson's celebrated verdict that Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is unreadable. Lately, Manheim has been outraged by the praise lavished on the new English version of Remembrance of Things Past. Manheim, who has translated Proust's letters...
...addition to the pro fessional translators like Manheim, writers and po ets in every era have felt a duty to give foreign literature a new life in another tongue. Goethe, who called this work "one of the most important and valuable concerns in the whole of world affairs," found time to translate literature from ten different languages into German. André Gide argued that every writer "has an obligation to render at least one foreign work of art into his own language." He chose Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, then went on to Hamlet. In America most major modern...