Walter Werner Arndt was a world-renowned scholar and translator of German and Russian.
Education
With degrees in Business Administration from Warsaw University, in Political Science and Economics from Oxford University (Oriel College), a Masters in Engineering from Robert College (Istanbul), and a Doctor of Philosophy. In 1934 he moved to Oxford and studied Economics and Political science.
Career
At the time of his death, he was the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth College. in Comparative Literature from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Arndt was well known for his metric translations, which included versions of Goethe"s Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin"s Eugene Onegin, a number of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as works by Busch, Morgenstern, and others Arndt was born of German parents in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1916. He had 12 years of classical schooling at Breslau, Silesia.
After Oxford, Arndt moved to Warsaw, Poland for graduate study, where he learned Polish and, later, Russian.
In 1939, after Hitler"s invasion of Poland, he renounced his German citizenship, joined the Polish army, was captured by the Germans and, after escaping from a German Prisoner Of War camp, spent a year in the Polish underground, eventually making his way back to Istanbul. From 1942 to 1945, Arndt was active in intelligence work on behalf of allied forces.
He worked for the Office of Strategic Services (now the Central Intelligence Agency), and the Office of War Information where he forged Nazi documents and passes until the end of the war. He worked in United Nations refugee resettlement between 1944 and 1949 until he was able to arrange emigration to the United States with his family.
In 1956 he received his doctorate in comparative linguistics and classics from University of North Carolina. He taught classics and modern languages at Guilford College and then the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
In 1966 he accepted the chairmanship of the Russian department at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Semi-retired since 1986, he continued to write well into his 93rd year. His final published work, an elaboration of his earlier version of his memoirs published as "A Picaro in Hitler"s Europe," was completed in 2003.
Arndt, 94, died on February 15, 2011.
He was also known to have a command of Latin, Greek, French and Czechoslovakian.