Jean Rounault

Jean Rounault (born March 14, 1910 Kronstadt ; † August 1, 1987 Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis / France ) was a Romanian-German-French writer and translator, whose name was actually Rainer Biemel .

Life

The eldest brother of the philosopher Walter Biemel first attended schools in Transylvania, before they recognized his talent for languages ​​and sent him to France, where he attended high school in Toulouse from 1926 and also passed his Abitur there. He then studied at the Sorbonne until 1933 (with an interruption from 1929 to 1931 when he was doing his military service in Romania).

From 1934 he was the Paris correspondent for Bucharest newspapers and, together with the later publisher Bernard Grasset, translated Rilke's letters to a young poet into French. He was friends with Henry de Montherlant and asked Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to write down his flight memories ( wind, sand and stars ). He translated numerous texts critical of Hitler into French, including the letter that Thomas Mann wrote to the rector of the University of Bonn after his honorary doctorate was withdrawn.

When the German troops marched into Paris in 1940, he fled to the unoccupied territories and was called up for military service in Romania in 1941. There he was employed as a translator in the Foreign Ministry. In January 1945 he was - like many other Romanian Germans - deported to the Soviet Union. A Russian doctor falsely certified that he only had one lung, after which he was able to return to Bucharest at the end of the year.

Here he worked for several years at the French institute. In 1948 the family settled in Paris and received French citizenship. His Memoirs of Russia was published in 1949 under the title Mon ami Vassia and caused a sensation among the left in France because of its criticism of Stalin. A communist newspaper sued him over the book.

He also translated Rilke's Duinese elegies into French and worked as a publisher and editor in Paris from 1953 to 1975.

Fonts

Books

• La maison d'ame , 1942 (poems)
• Mon ami Vassia , 1949 (Memoirs, new edition 2009)
• Le troisième ciel , 1952 (novel)

Translations into French

• Thomas Mann, Avertissement à l'Europe , with a foreword by André Gide , 1937
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Lettres à un jeune poète (with Bernard Grasset), 1937
• Thomas Mann, La victoire finale de la democratie , 1939
• Goethe, Le Second Faust (with Alexandre Arnoux ), 1942
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Élégies de Duino , 1949
• Hans Fallada, Le buveur (with Lucienne Foucrault), 1952.

Editions

• My friend Wassja , edited and with an afterword by Georg Weber and Oliver Sill; Translated from the French by Claudia Brink, 1995. ISBN 3-412-14294-8

literature

• The Russian was sorry , in: Der Spiegel, Heft 2, 1950, p. 18 f. [1]
• Siegbert Bruss: Brilliant personality in French and Transylvanian literature . Rainer Biemel wrote the first masterpiece about the deportation of the Transylvanian Saxons to the Soviet Union. In: Siebenbürgische Zeitung, June 30, 2010, p. 10.

Web links

• Literature by and about Jean Rounault in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Jean Rounault  in the German Digital Library