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John E. Woods, an award-winning translator of the works of Thomas Mann, one in all Germany’s best novelists, and of the lesser-known Arno Schmidt, whose advanced fiction has been in comparison with James Joyce’s, died on Feb. 15 in Berlin, the place he had lived since 2005. He was 80.
Francesco Campitelli, his husband and solely instant survivor, mentioned that the trigger was a lung ailment and that Mr. Woods additionally had pores and skin most cancers.
“The nirvana of what I can do is to seize for an English-speaking reader, let’s hope, most of the aesthetic and mental appeal, delight and great thing about the unique,” Mr. Woods advised The New Yorker in 2016 about translating Mr. Schmidt’s “Zettel’s Traum” (1970), generally known as “Backside’s Dream” in English. An almost 1,500-page doorbuster, the novel is loosely a few couple looking for assist to translate Edgar Allan Poe into German. The duty took Mr. Woods a decade. “Extra,” he added, “I can’t do.”
Mr. Woods translated a few of the best-known novels written by Mr. Mann, a Nobel Prize winner: “Physician Faustus,” “Buddenbrooks,” “Joseph and His Brothers” and “The Magic Mountain.”
In his evaluate of Mr. Woods’s 1995 translation of “The Magic Mountain,” the story of a younger engineer’s go to to see a sick cousin at a tuberculosis sanitorium, Mark Harman, a translator of Kafka, wrote in The Washington Put up that Mr. Woods had rendered Mr. Mann in English much better than had Helen Lowe-Porter, who translated the books whereas Mr. Mann, who died in 1955, was nonetheless alive. The publishing home Knopf employed each translators, a long time aside.
“Mann would undoubtedly be far happier together with his new translator, John E. Woods, who succeeds in capturing the attractive cadence of his paradoxically elegant prose,” Mr. Harman wrote. “Woods’s English sentences are additionally splendidly lucid — an necessary criterion in assessing translations of Mann, who, for all his piling on of circumstantial particulars, writes luminously clear German.”
He added that “the aesthetic impact of Woods’s translation is similar to that created by the unique.”
Breon Mitchell, professor emeritus of Germanic research and comparative literature at Indiana College, mentioned in a cellphone interview that Mr. Woods was “one of the necessary German translators of his era.” The Lilly Library at Indiana College homes Mr. Woods’s archives and people of different translators.
Mr. Woods knew that it was inconceivable to translate a guide completely from one language to a different, and that information, he mentioned, allowed him to use his literary abilities, his humorousness and his ardour for etymology to the fiction of Mr. Mann and Mr. Schmidt. He did the identical to books by authors like Günter Grass, Ingo Schulze, Christoph Ransmayr and Patrick Süskind.
“He discovered the humorous facet of Thomas Mann and the humorous facet of Arno Schmidt,” Susan Bernofsky, the director of literary translation on the Columbia College Faculty of the Arts, mentioned in an interview. “He had unbelievable linguistic flexibility and made his translations shine.”
For Mr. Woods, translating was lonely work.
“You sit there with a textual content, with two languages preventing one another in your head,” he mentioned in 2008, when he accepted the Goethe Medal for his work in translation.
John Edwin Woods was born on Aug. 16, 1942, in Indianapolis and spent the primary seven years of his life with a foster household in Fort Wayne, Ind.; over the past two of these years, his start mom lived with him and his foster household. He later lived with each start dad and mom.
After graduating from Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, with a bachelor’s diploma within the mid-Sixties, Mr. Woods studied English literature at Cornell earlier than attending the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa. Within the Seventies, he continued his theological research in West Germany, the place he additionally discovered German in a language immersion class on the Goethe Institute. He married his instructor, Ulrike Dorda. (They might later divorce, and he would come out as homosexual.)
In 1976, when he accompanied his spouse to Amherst, Mass., the place she was in an trade program with the College of Massachusetts, they introduced alongside a duplicate of Mr. Schmidt’s “Night Edged in Gold.” Mr. Woods determined to desert his irritating try to jot down a novel and to attempt translating the Schmidt guide as an alternative.
“I hit author’s block and checked out a wall and mentioned, ‘I’ve obtained to do one thing,’” he advised The San Diego Reader in 1997.
The principle topic of Mr. Schmidt’s guide is the confrontation between a family and a band of hippies, though Kirkus Assessment mentioned taht this was “solely the barest framework for a free-associative, nonassociative barrage of wordplay.” Using language turns into a narrative, because it does in Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”
“And everybody mentioned it was untranslatable,” Mr. Woods mentioned. “Then, simply to have one thing to do to justify my existence as a author, I sat down and began to translate ‘Night Edged in Gold’ and located, a lot to my shock, that I may do that.”
He confirmed a few of his work in progress to Helen Wolff, whose imprint at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich printed translations of European authors. She was impressed and determined to publish it — even after Günter Grass had warned her that it couldn’t be performed.
Mr. Woods received translation prizes from each PEN America and the Nationwide Ebook Awards in 1981 for “Night Edged in Gold.” Six years later, he obtained a second PEN America prize for translating Mr. Süskind’s “Fragrance: The Story of a Assassin.”
In 2014, Mr. Woods mirrored on the problem of translating Mr. Schmidt’s books, telling the Dalkey Archive Press, which printed “Backside’s Dream,” that “the density of his prose is sui generis, even in German, which could be intimidatingly dense.”
“Then,” he added, “there’s the wordplay, the dance of literary references, the Rabelaisian humor, all packed into what I like to consider as ‘fairy tales for adults.’ So, what does a translator do? He places on his idiot’s cap and performs and dances and hopes he amuses.”
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