James Stern

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James Stern (born December 26, 1904 in County Meath ; died November 22, 1993 in Tisbury , Wiltshire ) was an Irish-British writer, translator and literary critic.

Life

James Stern was the eldest son of a British officer of Jewish origin and a Protestant Anglo-Irish woman from the English upper class. After Irish independence, the family left the country in 1922. James Stern received the strict and impersonal upbringing of an upper-class child and suffered from severe mental disorders until his marriage. He attended Wixenford School in Berkshire , schoolmates were Harold Acton and Kenneth Clark , and from 1918 to 1923 Eton College , where he was introduced to the upper class lifestyle. After a year at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst , his father was also convinced that James was not suitable for a military career.

After a stay in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia , his parents placed him in London with relatives in a private bank. The bank sent him to Frankfurt and the Berlin of the twenties , where Stern devoted himself more to nightlife than to work. After a while, Stern left the job that he did not like. Alan Pryce-Jones got him a job in London as assistant to the editor John Collings Squire of the influential literary magazine London Mercury .

He went to Paris in 1931 and tried his hand at writing , secluded in a room in the Hotel d'Alsace . In 1932 he published his first book, The Heartless Land, with short stories about his time in Africa with bitter criticism of British colonialism and racism. In Paris in 1934 he met Constanze Kurella , who had fled Germany , and they married the following year in his parents' house in London. They didn't have any children.

In Paris they met WH Auden in 1937 , with whom they were very close friends from their time in New York. In 1944 Auden dedicated the long poem The Sea and the Mirror "for James and Tania Stern". Aude's partner, Chester Kallman , was less valued by them. In 1972 Auden stayed with Sonja Orwell for a long time in Stern's house in Tisbury and gave them the poem Thank You, Fog , which was printed posthumously in 1974 in the poetry book of the same name. The Sterns were founding members of the Auden Society. Stern was also friends with Christopher Isherwood , Djuna Barnes , Samuel Beckett and Arthur Miller , who dedicated his play A View from the Bridge to him.

Both fled Europe to the USA in 1939. In addition to his faltering literary work, he wrote reviews for the New York Times , Partisan Review, and New Republic . After the end of the war, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and Auden summoned him to Germany for three months. In 1947, he published the report The Hidden Damage . In 1951 he wrote a satirical review of JD Salinger's novel Catcher in the Rye .

In 1955 they returned to England, lived in the Salisbury area and in 1961 they moved into Hatch Manor in Tisbury. Together with Tania Stern, he translated individual works from German into English by writers such as Thomas Mann , Franz Kafka , Erich Maria Remarque , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Bertolt Brecht , and letters from Sigmund Freud .

Works

  • The Heartless Land . Short stories. (1932)
  • Something Wrong . Short stories. (1938)
  • The hidden damage . (1947).
    • The invisible rubble: a journey through occupied Germany in 1945 . Translation Joachim Utz. Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2004 ISBN 978-3-8218-0749-2
  • The man who was loved . Short stories. (1952)
  • The Stories of James Stern . Selection tape. (1969).
  • A silver spoon . Autobiographical, unpublished manuscript.
Translations (selection)
  • Stefan Zweig : Brazil, land of the future . Translation of James Stern. New York: Viking, 1941
  • Stefan Zweig : Amerigo: a comedy of errors in history . Translation of James Stern. New York: Viking, 1942
  • Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm : Grimm's fairy tales . Revision of translation by Margaret Hunt. Illustrations by Josef Scharl . New York: Pantheon Books, 1944
  • Erich Maria Remarque : Spark of Life . Translation of James Stern. New York: Appleton 1952
  • Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Selected prose . Translation Mary Hottinger , Tania Stern , James Stern. Introduction Hermann Broch . New York: Pantheon Books 1952
  • Franz Kafka: Letters to Milena . Editor Willy Haas . Translation: Tania Stern, James Stern. New York: Shock 1953
  • anonymous (i.e. Marta Hillers ): A Woman in Berlin . Introduction CW Ceram . Translation of James Stern. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954
  • Leo Lania : The foreign minister . Translation of James Stern. London: Davies, 1957
  • Sigmund Freund: Letters: 1873-1939 . Editor Ernst Ludwig Freud . Translation: Tania Stern, James Stern. London: Hogarth Press 1961
  • Bertolt Brecht: The Caucasian Chalk Circle . Translation: Tania Stern, James Stern, WH Auden. London: Methuen 1961
  • Hermann Kesten : Casanova . Translation James Stern, Robert Pick. New York: Collier Books 1962
  • Franz Kafka: Letters to Felice . Editors Erich Heller , Jürgen Born. Translation James Stern, Elisabeth Duckworth. New York: Schocken 1988

Web links

literature

  • Nicholas Jenkins: Some Letters from Auden to James Stern and Tania Stern , in: Katherine Bucknell, Nicholas Jenkins (Ed.): WH Auden. "In Solitude, For Company": WH Auden after 1940: unpublished prose and recent criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995, ISBN 0-19-818294-5 , pp. 31-65
  • Walter Allen: The Short Story in English . Oxford: Clarendon, 1981, pp. 236-240

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nicholas Jenkins: Some Letters from Auden to James Stern and Tania Stern , 1995
  2. ↑ Jenkins rumors that the hotel room in Alsace was the room where Oscar Wilde died .
  3. ↑ James Stern: Aw, the World's a Crumby Place , in: The New York Times, July 15, 1951
personal data
SURNAME Stern, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Star, Jimmy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish-British writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH December 26, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH County Meath
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1993
Place of death Tisbury, Wiltshire