Richard Winston (1917 – December 22, 1979) and Clara Brussel Winston (1921 – November 7, 1983), were prominent American translators of German works into English.Fraser, C. Gerald (5 January 1980)
Richard Winston, 62, Translator of Books from German Is Dead
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' Richard and Clara were both born in New York and went to

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

.News and Notes
''The German Quarterly'' Vol. 22, No. 3 (May, 1949), pp. 170-173 Richard and Clara began translating together in the late 1930s, working with the many German exiles in New York.Winston, Krishna, ''"Second-Class Refugees": Literary Exiles from Hitler's Germany and Their Translators'', i
The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile
Rose, Peter Isaac (ed.) (2005), pp. 310-11(10 November 1983)

''

'' The Winstons translated over 150 books as well as many other works, and they received a number of awards for their translations. In 1978, they won the American Book Award for

Uwe George Uwe George (born April 1, 1940, in Kiel, Germany) is a prize-winning German documentary film maker, science editor and writer. In the 1960s, he studied birds in the Sahara Desert and wrote several ornithology articles on the nesting behavior and ...

's ''In the Deserts of This Earth''. In 1972 then won 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 their translation of ''Letters of

Thomas Mann Paul Thomas Mann ( , ; ; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novella ...

''.(11 April 1972)
Neruda Opens Visit Here With a Plea for Chile's Revolution
''

'' Their best known translations included the works of

Franz Kafka Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It ...

, Hannah Arendt,

Albert Speer Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer (; ; 19 March 1905 – 1 September 1981) was a German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he ...

Hermann Hesse Hermann Karl Hesse (; 2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a German-Swiss poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include ''Demian'', ''Steppenwolf (novel), Steppenwolf'', ''Siddhartha (novel), Siddhartha'', and ''The Glass Bead Game'', ...

, and

Rolf Hochhuth Rolf Hochhuth (; 1 April 1931 – 13 May 2020) was a German author and playwright, best known for his 1963 drama '' The Deputy'', which insinuates Pope Pius XII's indifference to Hitler's extermination of the Jews, and he remained a controversial ...

, among others. In Richard's 1980 obituary in ''

'', Clara described translation an interpretative art which relies on intuition. They could be "devoutly faithful" to some writers, but "helped ..along" writers whom they considered less skilled, using their own discretion. The Winstons moved to a farm in Vermont in 1943, where they did their translation work.The Translator's Voice: Richard and Clara Winston
Translation Review, Volume 4, 1979 - Issue 1 The couple's archival papers are housed at Brooklyn College.The Papers of Richard & Clara Winston
worldcat.org, Retrieved 7 September 2017 Their daughter

Krishna Winston Krishna Winston is an American academic and translator of German literature. She is the daughter of translators Richard and Clara Winston.Fraser, C. Gerald (5 January 1980)Richard Winston, 62, Translator of Books from German Is Dead ''The New Yor ...

is also a translator.Weschler, Robert
Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation
p. 16 (1998) Both also wrote works of their own. Richard authored ''Charlemagne: From the Hammer to the Cross'' (1954) and ''Thomas Becket'' (1967), and Clara wrote the novels ''The Closest Kin There Is'' (1952), ''The Hours Together'' (1962), and ''Painting for the Show'' (1969). Together, they also wrote ''Notre-Dame De Paris'' (1971).A Note About the Editors
in ''Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955'' (1975 abridged edition)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Winston, Richard and Clara German–English translators Brooklyn College alumni People from Halifax, Vermont 20th-century American translators