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> The doyen of professional translators, Ralph Manheim, 77, has lived in Paris for 34 years, secure in his grip on the English language, working with equal fluency from the French and the German. In the tiny maid's room that serves as his office, near the Luxembourg Gardens, Manheim has produced inventive English versions of some of Europe's most difficult writers, including Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Günter Grass. Manheim's most recent endeavor: a canny rendering of The Weight of the World, an elliptical memoir by Austrian Playwright Peter Handke.
Manheim's decades of devoted labor — translating more than 100 books for often minuscule fees — were recognized last year by the MacArthur Foundation, which rewards "exceptionally talented individuals." It singled him out for the top award: $60,000 a year, tax free, for life. Says Manheim: "My main pride is that I know how to be simple. When inexperi enced people run into an everyday ex pression in a foreign work that seems weird to them, they change it into some thing equally weird. But when you know a language well, you can translate the natural into the natural."
Still, sometimes the natural is not enough. To render the coinages, puns, obscure allusions and technical vocabulary that abound in Grass's novels, Manheim consulted a series of specialists. Dentists were interviewed for Local Anaesthetic, stonecutters for The Tin Drum and conchologists for From the Diary of a Snail. On other esoteric points, Manheim prefers to query Grass by letter, rather than participate in seminars that the author periodically conducts in Frankfurt for his translators.
Manheim is critical of much contem porary translation. Because he regards Goethe's Faust as untranslatable, he thinks English versions are "a waste of time," though he acknowledges that they "may be of help to students incapable of learning German or unwilling to take the time to do it." He agrees completely with Edmund Wilson's celebrated verdict that Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is unreadable. Lately, Manheim has been outraged by the praise lavished on the new English version of Remembrance of Things Past. Manheim, who has translated Proust's letters, says, "The first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, was a little awkward and a little mistaken, but he did a "marvelous job. Now Terence Kilmartin has altered Moncrieff, and not well." Manheim is most derisive about one Kilmartin method of cor rection: "The way he fixed up a passage was to leave it in French. Problem solved."