Walter Hasenclever (translator)

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Walter Hasenclever (born September 1, 1910 in Munich ; died December 4, 1992 ) was a German-American literary translator.

Life

Walter Hasenclever's father Alfred Hasenclever came from a wealthy Rhenish industrial family, the author Walter Hasenclever was a relative. The father died early and the mother married Josef Jaffé, a relative of her, who ran a prosperous dermatologist's practice in Berlin. Under difficult circumstances, the two managed to flee to the USA in 1939. His sister Charlotte Hasenclever-Jaffe married the American publicist Shepard Stone in 1933 .

As a teenager, Hasenclever belonged to the pacifist wing of the youth movement. After studying law with a doctorate in Berlin, he completed a legal clerkship . After the handover of power to the National Socialists , he emigrated from Germany with Stone's assistant in 1936 and worked as a teacher at the Andover Academy in the USA.

During the Second World War he became a soldier in the US Army in 1943 and came to Europe in the summer of 1944. The Nazi leaders and military leaders who had been taken prisoner by the Americans were held in the Camp Ashcan POW camp in Luxembourg . Hasenclever participated in the interrogations of Hermann Göring , Joachim von Ribbentrop , Robert Ley , Julius Streicher , Alfred Rosenberg , Hans Frank , Wilhelm Frick , Wilhelm Keitel , Karl Dönitz and Alfred Jodl , who were then transferred to the Nuremberg Trials . In his memoirs, published in 1975, You will not recognize Germany , these celebrities of the Nazi regime are characterized from their own perspective, albeit 30 years after the personal meeting, such as Robert Ley, Hermann Göring, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg and anecdotes about them tells.

He initially returned to the USA, but from 1952 he became co-editor of the German edition of the magazine Perspektives at S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main.He worked as a publisher's editor at Cotta and as a translator from English and in 1954 was one of the translators for the Das investigation sexual behavior of the wife of Alfred C. Kinsey .

In 1963, alongside Walter Höllerer, Hasenclever was the initiator of the Literary Colloquium in West Berlin and then worked there until 1969 as program director. He then lived in Friesland.

Hasenclever has translated individual works by the American writers Herbert Gold , Julian Halevy , James Leo Herlihy , Bernard Malamud , Richard P. Powell , Peter Tinniswood , Mark Twain and Eugene Walter as well as numerous works by the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow , including the novel Herzog . He also wrote a monograph on Bellow.

reviews

Most of the recent editions of Bellow's works contain Hasenclever's first translations. In 2009, two works by Bellow were newly translated, one revised by Bärbel Flad, and reissued. The revisions were deemed necessary, among other things, because the first translation was tied to the times: " Walter Hasenclever kept a low profile in the area of ​​sexuality, which is of great importance to Bellow, similar to his admirer Philip Roth , albeit less explicitly - that was probably not only due to the Federal Republican honesty in the early 1960s. "

Marcel Reich-Ranicki is quoted by Gerrit Bartels in the Tagesspiegel : “The translations of almost all of Saul Bellows' books are by Walter Hasenclever. And it must finally be said frankly: you are bad. And it doesn't make matters any better that the German literary public failed to protest against this continual distortion of the great American's prose in good time. "

On the other hand, Wieland Freund in der Welt wrote on the occasion of the revised translation in 2009: "The" Herzog "translation of Walter Hasenclever, who came from exile in America and co-founded the" Literary Colloquium Berlin ", turns out to be, even after several thousand small improvements, as amazingly fresh. "

Fonts (selection)

  • Young American Literature . Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein Taschenbücher-Verlag, 1959
  • (Ed.): Prose writing: A documentation . Berlin: Verl. Literary. Colloquium, 1964
  • You will not recognize Germany again. Memories . Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1975 ISBN 978-3-462-01074-9
  • Saul Bellow: Monograph . Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1978 ISBN 978-3-462-01269-9

literature

  • Konrad Feilchenfeldt (KF): Hasenclever, Walter , in: Konrad Feilchenfeldt (Hrsg.): Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon. The 20th century. Biographical and Bibliographical Handbook , Vol. XIV Halm – Hauptmann. Walter de Gruyter, p. 419

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Volker Rolf Berghahn: Transatlantic Culture Wars: Shepard Stone, the Ford Foundation and European anti-Americanism . Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004, ISBN 3-515-08422-3 , p. 22ff.
  2. ↑ a b Dieter E. Zimmer : The Literature Mafia of Berlin , Die Zeit, November 16, 1966
  3. ↑ You will ... p. 39
  4. ↑ Perspektives magazine not yet verified by ZDB
  5. ^ Stefan Koldehoff , Peter Rühmkorf : Training workshop for writers. 40 years of the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin , interview with Deutschlandfunk, May 19, 2003
  6. ↑ Ursula Krechel : 50 Years of the Literary Colloquium: This is where language stretches out its feelers. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 5, 2013, p. 2 , accessed December 18, 2019 .
  7. ↑ https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/saul-bellow-die-drei-grossen-romane.700.de.html?dram:article_id=84098 Ulrich Rüdenauer: Saul Bellow - The three great novels
  8. ↑ http://www.relue-online.de/2014/03/der-text-gehoert-dem-uebersetzer-und-ich-tue-weh/ Interview with Bärbel Flad: The text belongs to the translator and I hurt
  9. ↑ Gerrit Bartels: Saul Bellow. Power and compassion. In Der Tagesspiegel, August 21, 2009
  10. ↑ Wieland Freund: The great I-Theater. Die Welt April 4th 2009
personal data
SURNAME Hasenclever, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American author and literary translator
DATE OF BIRTH September 1, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1992