Ralph Manheim was a highly acclaimed, prize-winning translator of major German and French works, including books by Hitler, Proust, Brecht, and Grass.
Manheim was born in New York City. He lived for a year in Germany and Austria as an adolescent, graduated from Harvard at the age of nineteen,[3] and spent time in Munich and Vienna (studying at the universities)[2] before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. He also undertook post-graduate study at Yale and Columbia universities.
His career as a translator began[2] with Hitler's Mein Kampf, commissioned by Houghton Mifflin and published in 1943. Manheim endeavored to give an exact English equivalent of Hitler's highly individual, often awkward style, including his grammatical errors.[3]
Manheim translated the works of Bertolt Brecht (in collaboration with John Willett), Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, philosopher Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, Novalis, and many others. His translation of Henry Corbin's work Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi could be considered a major contribution towards the understanding of Ibn Arabi's and Sufi philosophy in the English-speaking world.
In 1961, he rendered transcripts of the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann into English, and Grimm's Tales For Young and Old - The Complete Stories, published in 1977. Modern readers are familiar with his 1986 translation of E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King". It was published with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, in conjunction with the release of the 1986 film Nutcracker: The Motion Picture. Lovers of children's books also admire his agile translation of Michael Ende's The Neverending Story.
He moved to Paris in 1950 and lived there until 1985, when he moved with his fourth wife to Cambridge, England,[3] where he died in 1992, at age 85, from complications associated with prostate cancer.[2]
National Book Award for Translation (1979-Castle to Castle)
Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada (1971)
Schlegel-Tieck Prize (1966, 1977, 1979)
MacArthur Fellowship for Literary Studies (1983)
PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation (1988)
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. . . with you when a word is altered, when the order is dis arranged by a hair's breadth, the whole spirit of the thing seems to vanish. And yet the unhappy translator must alter words and disarrange order. Dorothy Bussy in a letter to Andre Gide (1937) ... philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (tr. G. E. M. Anscombe)
The practice of translation is fraught with many problematic issues which the translator may confront in completing the task at hand, but which—because translation is foremost a practical activity—are likely to go unexamined, even unarticulated. Among these issues one demands particular attention because it seems to define the translator's situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture (and no doubt elewhere as well): this is what I shall call the invisibility of the translator. This somewhat melodramatic term refers to two related phenomena, one having to do with reader response to translations, the other with the criterion by which they are produced and evaluated. On the one hand, readers usually respond to the translation of a foreign text, whether prose or poetry, as if the text had been originally written in their language, as if it were not in fact a translation; on the other hand, a translation is judged acceptable (by editors, reviewers and readers) when it reads fluently, when the absence of any awkward phrasings, unidiomatic constructions or confused meanings gives the appearance that the translation reflects the foreign author's personality or intention or the essential meaning of the original text. What is so remarkable here is that both attitudes completely efface the translator's crucial intervention in the text: the more "successful" the translation, the more invisible the translator, and the more visible the author or meaning of the original text. The corollary drawn from these attitudes, and often asserted by translators them selves, is that the work of translation should be effaced, that the discovery of this work during the reading process is undesirable because it means that the translated text fails to meet the criterion of fluency.
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VENUTI, LAWRENCE. “The Translator's Invisibility.” Criticism, vol. 28, no. 2, 1986, pp. 179–212. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23110425. Accessed 5 Aug. 2020.