Background

Ralph Manheim was born on April 4, 1907 in New York, United States. Manheim lived for a year in Germany and Austria as an adolescent.

Education

Manheim graduated from Harvard at the age of nineteen, and studied at the universities in Munich and Vienna. He also undertook post-graduate study at Yale and Columbia universities.

Career

Manheim began his career in the United States and since 1950 had continued pursuing it in Paris. He began translating in the field of philosophy, often working on books by major figures such as Karl Jaspers and Ernst Cassirer, and the field of Jungian psychology. His first major translation of a novel was Gunter Grass’s "The Tin Drum", a first novel that drew the worldwide attention to its author and earned Manheim the 1964 PEN Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. The same year, Manheim translated Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical "Mein Kampf." That translation, too, was critically praised, as was Manheim’s translation, a few years later, of the transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial.

Manheim has continued to translate nonfiction in such disciplines as history, philosophy, and psychology, often by writers he has worked with repeatedly, such as Erich Neumann. However, since the mid-1960s his reputation has been increasingly associated With the translation of fiction and other imaginative literature. He has also translated Grimm’s fairy tales, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s "Nutcracker", and more.

In old age, Manheim continues to work hard, walking each day from his apartment to his small office in a former maid’s room near the Luxembourg Gardens. He turns out about a thousand pages, or three books, per year, working five hours a day.

Achievements

• Ralph was awarded a 1983 MacArthur Fellowship in Literary Studies. He won the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, a major lifetime achievement award in the field of translation, in 1988. Manheim's 1961 translation of Günter Grass's "Die Blechtrommel" was elected to fourth place among outstanding translations of the previous half century by the Translators Association of the Society of Authors on the occasion of their 50th anniversary in 2008.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mein Kampf 1998
  • The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (Works by Erich Neumann) 2015
  • The Neverending Story 1993
  • Childhood 2014
  • Saint Joan of the Stockyards (Modern Plays) 2010
  • Journey to the End of the Night 2006

Views

Quotations: "My main pride is that I know how to be simple. When inexperienced people run into an everyday expression in a foreign work that seems weird to them, they change it into something equally weird. But when you know a language well, you can translate the natural into the natural."

Connections

It is known that Ralph Manheim was married four times.

References

• The Ralph Manheim Story: Finding the Goodness of God in the Land of the Living
  2014