John Woods, Masterly Translator of Thomas Mann, Dies at 80

John E. Woods, an award-winning translator of the works of Thomas Mann, considered one of Germany’s best novelists, and of the lesser-known Arno Schmidt, whose complicated fiction has been in comparison with James Joyce’s, died on Feb. 15 in Berlin, the place he had lived since 2005. He was 80.

Francesco Campitelli, his husband and solely speedy survivor, stated that the trigger was a lung ailment and that Mr. Woods additionally had pores and skin most cancers.

“The nirvana of what I can do is to seize for an English-speaking reader, let’s hope, most of the aesthetic and mental attraction, delight and great thing about the unique,” Mr. Woods informed The New Yorker in 2016 about translating Mr. Schmidt’s “Zettel’s Traum” (1970), generally known as “Backside’s Dream” in English. A virtually 1,500-page doorbuster, the novel is loosely a few couple looking for assist to translate Edgar Allan Poe into German. The duty took Mr. Woods a decade. “Extra,” he added, “I can’t do.”

Mr. Woods translated among the best-known novels written by Mr. Mann, a Nobel Prize winner: “Physician Faustus,” “Buddenbrooks,” “Joseph and His Brothers” and “The Magic Mountain.”

In his assessment of Mr. Woods’s 1995 translation of “The Magic Mountain,” the story of a younger engineer’s go to to see a sick cousin at a tuberculosis sanitorium, Mark Harman, a translator of Kafka, wrote in The Washington Put up that Mr. Woods had rendered Mr. Mann in English much better than had Helen Lowe-Porter, who translated the books whereas Mr. Mann, who died in 1955, was nonetheless alive. The publishing home Knopf employed each translators, many years aside.

“Mann would undoubtedly be far happier along with his new translator, John E. Woods, who succeeds in capturing the gorgeous cadence of his sarcastically elegant prose,” Mr. Harman wrote. “Woods’s English sentences are additionally splendidly lucid — an necessary criterion in assessing translations of Mann, who, for all his piling on of circumstantial particulars, writes luminously clear German.”

He added that “the aesthetic impact of Woods’s translation is similar to that created by the unique.”

Breon Mitchell, professor emeritus of Germanic research and comparative literature at Indiana College, stated in a telephone interview that Mr. Woods was “one of the vital necessary German translators of his technology.” The Lilly Library at Indiana College homes Mr. Woods’s archives and people of different translators.

Mr. Woods knew that it was inconceivable to translate a ebook completely from one language to a different, and that data, he stated, allowed him to use his literary abilities, his humorousness and his ardour for etymology to the fiction of Mr. Mann and Mr. Schmidt. He did the identical to books by authors like Günter Grass, Ingo Schulze,  Christoph Ransmayr and Patrick Süskind.

“He discovered the humorous facet of Thomas Mann and the humorous facet of Arno Schmidt,” Susan Bernofsky, the director of literary translation on the Columbia College Faculty of the Arts, stated in an interview. “He had unbelievable linguistic flexibility and made his translations shine.”

For Mr. Woods, translating was lonely work.

“You sit there with a textual content, with two languages combating one another in your head,” he stated in 2008, when he accepted the Goethe Medal for his work in translation.

John Edwin Woods was born on Aug. 16, 1942, in Indianapolis and spent the primary seven years of his life with a foster household in Fort Wayne, Ind.; over the last two of these years, his beginning mom lived with him and his foster household. He later lived with each beginning mother and father.

After graduating from Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, with a bachelor’s diploma within the mid-Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Woods studied English literature at Cornell earlier than attending the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pa. Within the Seventies, he continued his theological research in West Germany, the place he additionally discovered German in a language immersion class on the Goethe Institute. He married his instructor, Ulrike Dorda. (They’d later divorce, and he would come out as homosexual.)

In 1976, when he accompanied his spouse to Amherst, Mass., the place she was in an trade program with the College of Massachusetts, they introduced alongside a duplicate of Mr. Schmidt’s “Night Edged in Gold.” Mr. Woods determined to desert his irritating try to jot down a novel and to attempt translating the Schmidt ebook as a substitute.

“I hit author’s block and checked out a wall and stated, ‘I’ve received to do one thing,’” he informed The San Diego Reader in 1997.

The primary topic of Mr. Schmidt’s ebook is the confrontation between a family and a band of hippies, though Kirkus Evaluate stated taht this was “solely the barest framework for a free-associative, nonassociative barrage of wordplay.” Using language turns into a narrative, because it does in Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”

“And everybody stated it was untranslatable,” Mr. Woods stated. “Then, simply to have one thing to do to justify my existence as a author, I sat down and began to translate ‘Night Edged in Gold’ and located, a lot to my shock, that I might do that.”

He confirmed a few of his work in progress to Helen Wolff, whose imprint at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich printed translations of European authors. She was impressed and determined to publish it — even after Günter Grass had warned her that it couldn’t be completed.

Mr. Woods gained translation prizes from each PEN America and the Nationwide Guide Awards in 1981 for “Night Edged in Gold.” Six years later, he obtained a second PEN America prize for translating Mr. Süskind’s “Fragrance: The Story of a Assassin.”

In 2014, Mr. Woods mirrored on the issue of translating Mr. Schmidt’s books, telling the Dalkey Archive Press, which printed “Backside’s Dream,” that “the density of his prose is sui generis, even in German, which might be intimidatingly dense.”

“Then,” he added, “there’s the wordplay, the dance of literary references, the Rabelaisian humor, all packed into what I like to think about as ‘fairy tales for adults.’ So, what does a translator do? He places on his idiot’s cap and performs and dances and hopes he amuses.”