Arnold Julius Pomerans (27 April 1920 – 30 May 2005) was a German-born British translator. Arnold Pomerans was born in

Königsberg Königsberg (, ) was the historic Prussian city that is now Kaliningrad, Russia. Königsberg was founded in 1255 on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement ''Twangste'' by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and was named ...

, Germany on 27 April 1920 to a Jewish family. Because of growing antisemitism in Germany the family left for Yugoslavia and later South Africa. In 1948 Arnold Pomerans emigrated to England, where he became a full-time translator in the 1950s after first working as a teacher. He translated about two hundred works of fiction and non-fiction, selected from most European languages. Among the authors he translated are Louis de Broglie,

Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series ...

, Anne Frank,

Sigmund Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...

, Johan Huizinga, Jean Piaget,

Jacques Presser Jacob (Jacques) Presser (24 February 1899 in Amsterdam – 30 April 1970 in Amsterdam) was a Dutch historian, writer and poet who is known for his book ''Ashes in the Wind (The Destruction of the Dutch Jews)'' on the history of the persecutio ...

and Jan Romein. His translation of

George Grosz George Grosz (; born Georg Ehrenfried Groß; July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objec ...

's autobiography '' A Little Yes and a Big No'' earned him the 1983

Schlegel-Tieck Prize The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation is a literary translation award given by the Society of Authors in London. Translations from the German original into English are considered for the prize. The value of the prize is £3,000.

and in 1997 he was awarded the

PEN Translation Prize The PEN Translation Prize (formerly known as the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize through 2008) is an annual award given by PEN America (formerly PEN American Center) to outstanding translations into the English language. It has been pr ...

for ''The Selected Letters of Vincent Van Gogh''. In his obituary he was called "one of Britain's finest translators" by ''

The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...

''. In 1956 he married Erica White and they moved to Polstead in

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

the following year. They carried out much of the translation work together. He died in Polstead of cancer on 30 May 2005, aged 85.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pomerans, Arnold Julius 1920 births 2005 deaths 20th-century German translators German emigrants to the United Kingdom Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to South Africa Writers from Königsberg