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

Königsberg Königsberg (; ; ; ; ; ; , ) is the historic Germany, German and Prussian name of the city now called Kaliningrad, Russia. The city was founded in 1255 on the site of the small Old Prussians, Old Prussian settlement ''Twangste'' by the Teuton ...

, 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 Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie (15 August 1892 – 19 March 1987) was a French theoretical physicist and aristocrat known for his contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave nature of elec ...

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, Jacques Presser and

Jan Romein Jan Marius Nicolas Romein (30 October 1893 – 16 July 1962) was a Dutch historian, journalist, literary scholar and professor of history at the University of Amsterdam. A Marxist and a student of Huizinga, Romein is remembered for his popul ...

. 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 Obj ...

's autobiography '' A Little Yes and a Big No'' earned him the 1983 Schlegel-Tieck Prize and in 1997 Pomerans was awarded the PEN Translation Prize 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, Pomerans married Erica White and they moved to Polstead in

Suffolk Suffolk ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It is bordered by Norfolk to the north, the North Sea to the east, Essex to the south, and Cambridgeshire to the west. Ipswich is the largest settlement and the county ...

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 Deaths from cancer in the United Kingdom German emigrants to the United Kingdom Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to South Africa Writers from Königsberg