Burton Pike co-translated – Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and translated Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and Gerhard Meier’s Island of the Dead, which won the 2012 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for best translation of a literary work from German published in 2011. He was awarded the 2016 Friedrich Ulfers Prize “for promoting German literature in the United States.”
Burton Pike
Articles by Burton Pike
Monday June 8
Shading and Retranslation: Translator Burton Pike’s Comments at BookExpo America
In recent years, literary translators have paid more attention to the shadings of the original work, whereas earlier translators were more focused on simply translating the story told rather than taking into account the many shadings in the original language in which the story was told.
Wednesday March 3
On Title and Talk
In translating Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Sophie Wilkins and I had great trouble finding equivalents for the infinitely subtle and nuanced gradations of title and talk in the old Austrian Empire with which Musil had such satirical fun. We could follow Musil when he riffed on the official rank “kaiserlich-königlich”: (imperial-royal) being a