Yuri Elperin

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Juri Elperin (also: Jurij Elperin , pseudonym : Peter Trenck , born June 24, 1917 in Davos ; † September 23, 2015 in Berlin ) was a Russian - German translator .

Life

Yuri Elperin came from a Jewish family. His father was a lawyer and had been with his family in Switzerland for a long time when Juri Elperin was born because of a lung disease . Juri Elperin grew up with German as his mother tongue . In 1922 the family moved to Berlin , where the father ran a book printing company . Elperin attended elementary school and high school in Berlin . After the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, the Elperin family was expelled from the German Reich . She first stayed in Paris for two years , where he attended the Lycée Janson de Sailly . In 1935 the residence permit in France expired and the family was forced to go to the Soviet Union .

Elperin attended the German-language Karl Liebknecht School in Moscow ; after this was closed in 1937, he switched to a Russian-language school, where he took the final exam . Then studied it Germanistik ; he graduated from this course in 1941 with a diploma. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union , he volunteered for the Red Army . As a native German speaker, his duties included interrogating German officers who had been taken prisoners of war in a camp in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk . Towards the end of the Stalin era , Yuri Elperin was dismissed from the Red Army as a result of increasing anti-Semitism . The family has now built a dacha in the artist village of Peredelkino near Moscow. Elperin initially earned his living as a lecturer at the Moscow University of Foreign Languages and with private German lessons; from the mid-1950s he translated Russian authors into German.

In the following years numerous translations Elperins appeared in Soviet and East Germany - publishers . Without joining the CPSU , he became a member of the Soviet Writers' Union . Since the 1970s, Elperin also worked for Swiss and West German publishers. Apart from the years 1979 to 1985, when he was banned from leaving the country by the Soviet authorities, he was also able to travel to the West. Contacts with Germany increased in the course of the 1990s. After his dacha burned down in the 1990s, nothing kept him in Russia. Elperin moved to Germany with his wife in 2000. He received German citizenship and an honorary pension from the Federal President . Elperin last lived in Berlin again and wrote his autobiography.

In addition to his translation work, Elperin was also the author of journalistic and essayistic works. Elperin was of the opinion that a literary translator must also produce his own works; some of his poems and stories were published under the pseudonym Peter Trenck.

Memberships

Honors

Translations

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary , Der Tagesspiegel , accessed on October 2, 2015; “I did three things right in life” Obituary for Juri Elperin, Die Welt , September 23, 2015. Retrieved September 23, 2015.
  2. ↑ a b c d Joseph Wächtholz: "I have lost all fear" , in: Literarisches Welt , September 5, 2015, p. 7
personal data
SURNAME Elperin, Yuri
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Elperin, Jurij; Trenck, Peter (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-German translator
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Davos
DATE OF DEATH 23rd September 2015
Place of death Berlin