Basil Creighton

Basil Creighton was a British novelist and translator who died in 1989 at the age of 103. In the First World War he worked in military intelligence, taking aerial photographs of German trenches. He also wrote fiction under his own name, including Medner Hill Farm and The Leaden Cupid, but it is his translations that keep his name in circulation.

His work lay mostly in German prose between the two world wars. An Associated Press obituary counted 34 translations from that period. They cover very different ground: Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel, a novel of lives crossing in a Berlin hotel; Ernst Jünger's trench memoir Storm of Steel, whose first English edition, in 1929, was his; B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; and Alma Mahler's Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.

The best known is Steppenwolf. Creighton's version of Hesse's novel appeared in 1929 from Martin Secker in Britain and Henry Holt in the United States. In 1963 Joseph Mileck revised it for Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and later printings also credit Horst Frenz as a reviser. That revised text is the one many English-speaking readers first met. Later translators, Thomas Wayne among them, have offered more literal alternatives, which shows how long Creighton's wording stayed the default.

Start with Steppenwolf, since it is the book listed here and the clearest example of what he did: it follows Harry Haller, a solitary intellectual, through a crisis of identity that ends at the Magic Theatre. If you want to see his range, read Grand Hotel next. It is brisk, ensemble-driven and nothing like Hesse.