Ants Oras

Ants Oras in the 1930s

Ants Oras (formerly Hans Gottfried Oras , born November 25 ^{. Jul} / 8. December  1900 ^greg. In Tallinn , † 21st December 1982 in Gainesville (Florida) ) was an Estonian literary scholar, critic and translator.

life and work

Ants Oras graduated from high school in Tallinn in 1919 and studied philology at the University of Tartu from 1919 to 1923 . After completing his master's degree, he continued his studies at the Universities of Leipzig (1923–1924) and Oxford (1925–1928). He completed it with a dissertation on John Milton and was then a lecturer in Tartu and Helsinki . From 1934 he was a professor of English at the University of Tartu.

Oras, however, by no means limited himself to English-language literature, but also took an active part in the literary life of Estonia as a critic and editor. In 1938 he put together a volume of modern contemporary poetry, the title of which was Arbujad , which gave its name to a new direction in Estonian poetry. In 1943 he left Estonia and came to Sweden via Finland, where he worked at the British embassy in Stockholm until 1945 . From 1945 to 1949 he lectured at Oxford and Cambridge before receiving a call to the University of Florida in Gainesville. Here he was professor of English literature until 1972.

As a translator, he has published works by Mark Twain , Edgar Allan Poe , Heinrich Heine , Alexander Sergejewitsch Pushkin and many other authors in Estonian. He was particularly interested in Shakespeare and Goethe , of whose Faust he made the first complete Estonian translation (1955, 1962). He translated a large part of Shakespeare's work.

Since 2015, the Ants Oras Prize for Literary Criticism has been awarded annually on December 8th in Estonia for the best review or literary work of the year. The prize is donated by the Kultuurileht publishing house, which publishes most of the Estonian cultural magazines.

bibliography

Literary studies

• The critical ideas of TS Eliot . Tartu: Universitas Tartuensis 1932. 118 pp.
• Estonian literature in exile . Lund: Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv 1967. 88 pp.
• Laiemasse ringi . Uppsala: Vaba Eesti 1961. 391 pp.
• Marie Under . Lund: Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv 1963. 64 pp.
• Blank verse and chronology in Milton . Gainesville: University of Florida Press 1966. 81 pp.
• Friedebert Tuglase ilukirjanduslik looming: kriitiline etüüd. Tartu: EÜS Veljesto Kirjastus 1997. 85 pp.

Translations into German

• Eight Estonian poets . Selected and transmitted by Ants Oras. Stockholm: Verlag Vaba Eesti 1964. 221 pp.
• Aleksis Rannit : Verses to Wiiralt and the clarified parable . Translated from Estonian by Ants Oras (as well as Erich Müller-Kamp and Konrad Veem). Baden-Baden: Woldemar Klein Verlag 1960. 33 pp.

memoirs

• Baltic Eclipse . London: Victor Gollancz 1948. 307 pp. (Of these translations into Swedish (1949), Norwegian (1949) and Icelandic (1955) as well as an expanded edition in Finnish (1958))

Awards

• 1962 Visnapuu Prize
• 1965 Visnapuu Prize

Literature on Ants Oras

• Ivar Ivask : Ants Oras Goethe tõlkijana ja tõlgitsejana, in: Mana 3/1964, pp. 188–199.
• Estonian Poetry and Language. Studies in Honor of Ants Oras. Stockholm: Vaba Eesti 1965. 301 pp. (Contains a list of scriptures on pages 13–24.)
• Jaak Rähesoo: Ants Oras ja TS Eliot, in: Keel ja Kirjandus 1/1997, pp. 6-18; 2/1997, pp. 83-94.
• Anne Lange: Ants Oras. Tartu: Ilmamaa 2005. 493 pp.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cornelius Hasselblatt : History of Estonian Literature. From the beginning to the present. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter 2006, p. 508.
2. ↑ Eesti kirjanike leksikon. Koostanud Oskar Kruus yes Heino Puhvel. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat 2000, pp. 387-388.
3. ↑ Cf. Cornelius Hasselblatt: Estonian literature in German translation. A reception story from the 19th to the 21st century. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2011, pp. 249-251.