Paul Sohar, a Seretary of the American Branch of the International PEN Writers in Exile, passed away on August 20, 2023 at the age of 87. Born in 1936 in Hungary, he fled the country at the age of 20 after the 1956 revolution was crushed by the Soviets.In the US, Paul worked as a chemist at Merck for 36 years. Throughout his distinguished scientific career, he published 26 papers and secured 13 patents. In the evenings and during his free time, he dedicated himself to his literary interests, publishing numerous poems and short stories under his own name, as well as poetry he translated into English from Hungarian and other European languages. He was an active member of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Hungarian Educators Association (AHEA), and the American Branch of the International PEN Club Centre for Writers in Exile.His work was recognized through numerous prestigious awards, including the Wordrunner Press Chapbook Prize (2011), the Janus Pannonius Lifetime Achievement Award (2016), and the Balassi Literary Translation Grand Prize (2021). He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize on two occasions.Read this obituary on The Star-Ledger.

The world of literature has just lost the supreme Spanish translator of our time, Edith Grossman. And I have lost a dear friend of some fifty years. She was Edie to me and to others who had a personal or professional connection with her. The genius translator of so many works from Latin America and Spain—from the fiction of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Carlos Rojas, and Cervantes, to the poetry of Nicanor Parra, Ariel Dorfman, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Góngora—to name just a few of the authors that she translated. She published nearly fifty books of translations, in addition to her brilliant critical book Why Translation Matters.Yes, Dan Shapiro, what a handsome woman she was—her intelligence blazing through those intense dark eyes. Yes, García Márquez, she was your voice in English. Yes, Harold Bloom, she was the Glenn Gould of translators. Yes, New York Times, she elevated the art of translation.One of the things I loved about Edie is that she could recite poetry from memory. Yeats was a favorite. At mention of him, she might take a deep breath and chant the opening lines of his “Under Ben Bulben”: “Swear by what the Sages spoke / Round the Mareotic Lake / That the Witch of Atlas knew, / Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.” A few years ago, after a sip of wine at a dinner she and I had together, she smiled and recited Stevenson’s famous couplet: “The world is so full of a number of things, / I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” Funny how she changed “I’m sure” to “I think.” She once told me she was “born to tweak.” Listen to her:Edie’s favorite toast in recent years was the Scottish “To them that’s away.” Now she’s away. And so, “To Edie who’s away / An, canna be here today.” The good news is her many books are here with us. They survive her, and her genius will continue to shine in them.The tributes given to Edie at PEN America’s celebration of her in 2016, in honor of her 80th birthday, offer a wonderful picture of her and her work. Mine was followed by my slideshow of her life, starting in the beginning and also including images of her book covers over time: Celebrating Our Translator Supreme Edith Grossman

Back in 1973, when I first read, and was dazzled by, a trio of works by the German writer Arno Schmidt—Nobodaddys Kinder, Das steinerne Herz, and Die Gelehrtenrepublik—Schmidt was virtually unknown in the US, and the English-speaking world had yet to await their brilliant translations into English by John Edwin Woods. Later that decade, John decided to try his hand at translation with Schmidt’s Abend mit Goldrand. Published by Helen Wolff at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as Evening Edged in Gold, his translation garnered both the National Book Award and the PEN Translation Prize (then called the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize). Translations of other Arno Schmidt works soon followed (including the aforementioned trio, as, respectively, Nobodaddy’s Children, The Stony Heart, and The Egghead Republic). John broadened his translation oeuvre to encompass novels by Patrick Süskind (Perfume, which also won the PEN Translation Prize), Thomas Mann (Joseph and His Brothers, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and Buddenbrooks), Christoph Ransmayr, and Ingo Schulze, among others. John’s many awards also include the inaugural Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Prize, the Ungar German Translations Award, and the Goethe Medal. Every one of his translations sparkles with linguistic inventiveness that reflect John’s joy and brilliance in wordplay.In a 1997 interview, John summed up his philosophy of translation in words that resonate with me as I work my way through my own translation projects: “I’ve come to believe that translation itself is an impossibility. Because what happens, of course, is that ultimately I end up creating a new text for new readers in a new context. The original and its translation are not the same. I cannot, to use a good old word … , repristinate the original experience.”As John’s final and crowning achievement as a translator, he undertook what might well be considered the ultimate untranslatable novel, namely Arno Schmidt’s gargantuan Zettel’s Traum (1970), a book so weighty—literally and semantically—that surely only John could have brought it to completion, its 1495 pages emerging from his desk as Bottom’s Dream in 2016. This novel was inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, particularly in its use of what Schmidt called the SpaltenTechnik (“column technique”), and focuses thematically on translating the works of Edgar Allan Poe into German while actually centering on an astonishingly innovative use of language and typography that makes its extraordinary medium the book’s ultimate message. John’s translation showed his amazing wordsmithery to best advantage in this final masterpiece.I first met John Woods in person shortly after we co-translated a book, Hannelore Brenner’s The Girls of Room 28: Friendship, Hope, and Survival in Theresienstadt, published by Schocken in 2009. During my visit to Berlin about a year after that publication, we met at his apartment in Berlin-Mitte (in moving to Berlin from California, he had been adamant about selecting a home in the former East Germany of that once-divided city, as a political declaration), where I got to see for myself the mile-high piles of printouts of his evolving translation of Schmidt’s magnum opus. We then embarked on a tour of his favorite neighborhood spots. One highlight was the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery, the burial place of many famous writers, among them Hegel, Fichte, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Anna Seghers; the other was the Honigmond Hotel on Tieckstrasse, John’s favorite brunch spot. In 2012, we got together again, in Binghamton, New York, for a conference called “Doppelgängers and Fraternal Twins,” where we both spoke about translation. John sketched out a flow chart for his Bottom’s Dream translation-in-progress, and his merriment and excitement in recreating this work in English, neologisms and all, kept his audience spellbound.John and I arranged to meet again in Berlin, during a wintry January when the streets were covered in black ice. Unfortunately, John slipped and fractured his hip on the way to the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, where I was directing a translation workshop, and instead of celebrating with our translation gang, he had to recuperate at home. And recuperate he did, fully and in short order. Having survived other serious ailments as spry as ever, John seemed invincible, but his last encounter with illness this year proved otherwise. Those who know his work will miss him for the beauty he brought to the world of translation, and those who knew him will also miss his kindness and generosity. Thinking of John invariably lifts my spirits; his unflagging good humor, his inspirational writing, and his enduring friendship have enriched my life.