Friedhelm Rathjen

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Friedhelm Rathjen at the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich (eyed by James Joyce), May 2010

Friedhelm Rathjen (born October 30, 1958 in Westerholz bei Scheeßel ) is a German translator , literary scholar and writer as well as editor of the magazine Bargfelder Bote , which is dedicated to the life, work and impact of the German writer Arno Schmidt . Rathjen lives and works in Emmelsbüll-Horsbüll .

life and work

Friedhelm Rathjen studied journalism , German and English and began working full-time as a literary critic in 1983. Rathjen has also been a literary translator since 1989 . He has works by Jonathan Ames , Christopher Buckley , Anthony Burgess , Richard Jefferies , James Joyce , Herman Melville , Thomas Murphy , Charles Olson , Gertrude Stein , Robert Louis Stevenson , Edward Thomas , Mark Twain and the explorers Lewis and Clark into German transfer.

Rathjen's translation of Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick , which was initially due to be published by Hanser Verlag , sparked a controversy that attracted media attention when the publisher decided, after changing the publisher, to have the translation edited by Matthias Jendis . Its changes were so extensive that Rathjen did not want to see the adaptation published under his name and suggested that the publisher return the rights to his translation to him and publish the adaptation under Jendis' name. It was published by Hanser Verlag in 2001 and was awarded the Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt Prize for translations of Anglo-Saxon literature and the Nicolas Born Prize in the following year, while Rathjen's original Moby Dick translation was published in 2004 at Two Thousand One . A complete thirty-hour audio book was published there in 2006, spoken by Christian Brückner .

Rathjen, who as a literary scholar has dealt intensively with the life and work of Samuel Beckett , James Joyce and Arno Schmidt , is known to the general public primarily for his rororo monographs on James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. But Rathjen has also established himself as a Beatles specialist through his documentary From Get Back to Let It Be . The Beginning of the End of the Beatles (2009) made a name for itself.

Rathjens own literary production was pushed into the background by his literary work as a biographer , translator and editor . The volume Vom Glück , which gathers Rathjen's prose from 1983 to 1989, was only published in autumn 2007 . After reading one of these texts, Hans Wollschläger wrote: "I read your WART with extravagant imagination: a beautiful, subtle piece of prose."

At the beginning of 2009 Friedhelm Rathjen was commissioned by the publishing house Edition text + kritik to edit the literary scientific journal Bargfelder Bote , which was founded in 1972 and is dedicated to the life, work and impact of the German writer Arno Schmidt , at Jörg Drews ' request .

Rathjen's new translation of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in spring 2012, based on the 1993 Garland text-critical edition edited by Hans Walter Gabler , with an afterword by Marcel Beyer and Rathjen's translation of James Joyce's Stories of Shem and Shaun / Tales Told of Shem and Shaun , three stories from Finnegans Wake .

On October 10, 2013 Friedhelm Rathjen was awarded the Paul Celan Prize endowed with 15,000 euros by the German Literature Fund for his complete works, but especially for the new translation of the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the Frankfurt Book Fair . The reasoning states:

“After Georg Goyert and Klaus Reichert , Rathjen translated the book into German for the third time, based on a text-critical version created by Hans Walter Gabler , which for the first time takes into account all the peculiarities and inconsistencies ordered by the author. The jury is convinced that Rathjen has found convincing German solutions for these peculiarities, but above all for the different ways of speaking and levels of style in Joyce's novel. Rathjens new Joyce, according to the jury, has an impressive linguistic register, between childlike and adult speaking, between colloquial language and learned discourse. "

- German Literature Fund : press release. Paul Celan Prize 2013.

Awards

Works

Monographs

Translations (selection)

  • Howard Jacobson : In the zoo , novel. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-421-04564-5 .
  • Henry James : The Diary of a Man of Fifty , Narrative. Edition 5plus, Berlin 2013.
  • James Joyce: Tales of Shem and Shaun Tales Told of Shem and Shaun. English and German Edited, transcribed and with an afterword by Friedhelm Rathjen. Suhrkamp. Berlin 2012.
  • James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Based on the text-critical Garland edition of 1993 edited by Hans Walter Gabler, translated from Irish English by Friedhelm Rathjen; with an afterword by Marcel Beyer. Manesse Verlag, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-7175-2222-5 .
  • James Joyce: Finn's Hotel , edited by Danis Rose. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-518-42454-4 .
  • Mark Twain : Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . From the American and annotated by Friedhelm Rathjen. Suhrkamp.
  • Herman Melville : Moby-Dick . German by Friedhelm Rathjen. Edited by Norbert Wehr. With 269 pen drawings by Rockwell Kent. Two thousand and one.

Editor (selection)

documentation

  • Friedhelm Rathjen: From Get back to Let it be . Rogner & Bernhard Verlag (2009).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Dorothea Diekmann: True to the text or legible? Discussion of Moby-Dick translations , in: Deutschlandfunk , December 8, 2004. See also the section on translations in the Moby-Dick article .
  2. ↑ Friedhelm Rathjen: Vom Glück - Friedhelm Rathjens "Prose 1983-1989"
  3. ^ German Literature Fund : press release. Paul Celan Prize 2013.
personal data
SURNAME Rathjen, Friedhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German translator, literary scholar and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Westerholz near Scheeßel