Joachim Neugroschel


Joachim Neugroschel was a multilingual literary translator of French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish. He was also an art critic, editor, and publisher.

Early life and education

Joachim Neugroschel was born in Vienna. His father was the Yiddish Galician poet Mendel Naygreshl . The family emigrated to Rio de Janeiro in 1939, and eventually arrived in New York City in 1941. He grew up in New York City and graduated from Bronx Science and Columbia University with a degree in English and Comparative Literature. After graduating from Columbia, he lived in Paris and then in Berlin. Neugroschel returned to New York six years later and became a literary translator.
Although his father was a native Yiddish speaker, Neugroschel did not grow up speaking the language and learned it as an autodidact in the 1970s.

Work

Neugroschel translated more than 200 books by numerous authors, including Sholem Aleichem, Dovid Bergelson, Chekhov, Alexandre Dumas, Hermann Hesse, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Moliere, Maupassant, Proust, Joseph Roth, Albert Schweitzer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and modern writers such as Ernst Jünger, Elfriede Jelinek and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His Yiddish translations of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky and God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch were produced and reached wide audience.
In an interview that touched on his translation process, Neugroschel said, "I never read a book before translating it. No reason to. I do not translate the words literally. Only a bad translator would translate literally." He followed up with, "You don't have to have a sense of the author's work to translate. I read a page and get the style. It is a question of music and rhythm."

Recognition

Neugroschel was the winner of three PEN Translation Awards, the 1994 French-American Translation Prize, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in German Literature. In 1996 he was also made a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Joachim Neugröschel became also known in Germany through an interview that the writer Hubert Fichte conducted with him in New York in September 1978. However, it was only published in 2006 as part of, a nineteen-volume cycle of narrations by Hubert Fichte as the third volume entitled The Second Guilt.

Death

Neugroschel died in Brooklyn at the age of 73. He is survived by his legal guardian and former partner, Aaron Mack Schloff.

Selected translations