Ralph Manheim

Ralph Manheim

Ralph Frederick Manheim (1907–1992) was an American translator of German and French literature. After graduating from Harvard, Yale and Columbia, Manheim spent time in Munich and Vienna. His first major work was translating Hitler’s Mein Kampf into English with all of its grammatical errors and awkward phrasing intact. Manheim won many awards in his lifetime, including a MacArthur Foundation (1983) “genius” grant. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a National Book Award and honors from PEN. The PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation is awarded to mark major lifetime achievement in the field of translation.

cover image of the book The Life Before Us

The Life Before Us

by Romain Gary

Translated by Ralph Manheim

Momo has been one of the ever-changing ragbag of whores’ children at Madame Rosa’s boarding house in Paris ever since he can remember. But when the check that pays for his keep no longer arrives and as Madame Rosa becomes too ill to climb the stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. This sensitive, slightly macabre love story between Momo and Madame Rosa has a supporting cast of transvestites, pimps, and witch doctors from Paris’s immigrant slum, Belleville. Profoundly moving, The Life Before Us won France’s premier literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

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cover image of the book Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Translated by Ralph Manheim

With a contribution by William Vollmann

Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society’s idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim’s pitch-perfect translation captures Céline’s savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

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cover image of the book Efraim’s Book

Efraim’s Book

by Alfred Andersch

Translated by Ralph Manheim

Efraim’s Book is the sophisticated, offbeat novel about the peculiar society of post-World-II Berlin. Its hero George Efraim is a Jewish reporter who has fought for the British on the Italian front and lost both parents to Auschwitz. He returns home to Berlin in 1962 for the first time since the war to investigate the wartime disappearance of his editor’s daughter, only to begin writing a novel, which helps him “to embark on a certain arrangement of signs with the help of which I hope to chart my position.” Like the great German novels of Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, Alfred Andersch’s Efraim’s Book grapples with the legacy of World War II and the Holocaust in all its horror and sad humanity. A troubling yet often humorous book, it offers a poignant account of the traumatized German state.

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cover image of the book Death On The Installment Plan

Death On The Installment Plan

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s earlier novel, Journey to the End of the Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called “creative confessions,” they told of the author’s childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of service in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated despair with Gargantuan comedy, they also created a new style, in which invective and obscenity were laced with phrases of unforgettable poetry. Céline’s influence revolutionized the contemporary approach to fiction. Under a cloud for a period, his work is now acknowledged as the forerunner of today’s “black humor.”

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