Walter W. Arndt
Scholar and translator of German and Russian (1916-2011)
Walter Werner Arndt (May 4, 1916–February 15, 2011) was a world-renowned scholar and translator of Russian, German and Polish. At the time of his death, he was the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth College. With degrees in business administration from Warsaw University, in political science and economics from Oxford University (Oriel College), a master's degree in engineering from Robert College (Istanbul), and a PhD in comparative literature from UNC, Chapel Hill, Arndt was well known for his metric translations, which included versions of Goethe's Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, a number of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as works by Busch, Morgenstern, and others. His translation of Eugene Onegin won the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962.
Life
Arndt was born to German parents in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire, in 1916. He had 12 years of classical schooling at Breslau, Silesia. In 1934 he moved to Oxford and studied Economics and Political science. After Oxford, Arndt moved to Warsaw, Poland for graduate study, where he learned Polish and, later, Russian. In 1939, after Hitler's invasion of Poland, he joined the anti-Nazi forces, was captured by the Germans and, after escaping from a German POW camp, spent a year in the Polish underground, eventually making his way back to Istanbul. From 1942 to 1945, Arndt was active in intelligence work on behalf of allied forces.
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