Ralph Manheim

Translator Class of February 1983
location icon Location
Paris, France
age iconAge
76 at time of award
age iconDate Deceased
September 26, 1992
area of focus iconArea of Focus

About Ralph's Work

Ralph Manheim was one of the world’s foremost literary translators.

He translated German and French fiction and belles-lettres into English. Since the publication of his first major translation, Mein Kampf (1943), Manheim translated novels by Hermann Hesse, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, and Erich Maria Remarque, among many others. He also translated the letters of Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung as well as texts by Bertholt Brecht, Karl Jaspers, and Paul Klee. His work also includes various plays, short stories, and poems.

Biography

Manheim’s awards included the 1961 PEN Prize (for Grass’s The Tin Drum), the 1965 Schlegel-Tieck Prize (for Grass’s Dog Years), the 1970 National Book Award (for Celine’s Castle to Castle), the 1975 Goethe House PEN Prize (for Handke’s Sorrow Beyond Death), and the 1979 Schlegel-Tieck Prize (for Grass’s The Flounder). He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1971). He also received the Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation from the PEN American Center (1988) for his body of work.

Manheim received an A.B. (1926) from Harvard University, and did graduate work at Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Vienna, and the University of Munich.

Last updated January 1, 2005.

Published on February 1, 1983

Select News Coverage of Ralph Manheim