Our translation filled almost every evening that semester, and when we were finished we did what most would-be writers did at college-founded a literary magazine and published the passages we loved best, along with translations by any other German students foolhardy enough to lift their eyes above their abilities. We were second-year German college students, just back from a summer in Germany in 1961, alive with enthusiasm for Hofmannsthal’s glowing language and with his message to live life to the full before it simply passed us by.
Could you share how you arrived at a career in literary translation, and what drew you to these (and other) writers?īreon Mitchell: My life as a literary translator began at the Jayhawk Café in Lawrence, Kansas, eating peach pie and drinking Pepsi, translating Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Death and the Fool into blank verse with a friend. Patrick Thomas Henry: You’ve translated the work of many writers-including such figures as Siegfried Lenz, Franz Kafka, and Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass-into English. Recently, Story Prize intern Patrick Thomas Henry spoke with Professor Mitchell on the topics of literary translation, world literature, and the emotional effect of the short story. His distinguished and prolific career as a literary translator has led to widely lauded English language editions of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel, and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, among others. His critical interests span the fields of literary translation, Anglo-German literary relations, visual and literary arts, and the works of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka. Professor Mitchell also serves as the Director of Indiana University’s Lilly Library, a repository for rare books, manuscripts, and other special collections. Breon Mitchell, one of this year’s three judges for The Story Prize (along with Sherman Alexie and Louise Steinman), is Professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington.
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