Ralph Manheim was born in New York City in 1907 and took his Harvard degree in 1926. He then studied in Munich and Vienna before Hitler came to power. He lived in Paris from 1951 to 1986 and spent his last years in Cambridge, England, where he died in 1992.
He translated more than a hundred books, mostly from German and French. His first major commission, in 1943, was Mein Kampf. After that he worked on fiction, on letters by Proust and Freud, and on texts by Brecht, Jung and Paul Klee. He compared translation to acting, with the translator's task being to impersonate the author. That explains why Grass, Céline and Handke sound so unlike each other in his English.
The record of recognition is long. He won the PEN Translation Prize in 1964 and a National Book Award in the translation category in 1970. A MacArthur Fellowship followed in 1983, and PEN gave him its lifetime medal for translation in 1988. After his death that medal was renamed the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. His best-known renderings include Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, Céline's Castle to Castle and Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams.
If you came here from The Neverending Story, stay with it. Ende's novel appeared in German in 1979, and Manheim's translation was the first in English, published by Doubleday in 1983 with Roswitha Quadflieg's illustrations. When you want something heavier from the same hand, try The Tin Drum, which is the book most closely tied to his name.
