Burton Pike was selected by a five-member jury as the winner of this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Gerhard Meier’s Isle of the Dead (Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), originally published as Toteninsel.
Burton Pike is professor emeritus of comparative literature and German at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has also taught at the University of Hamburg, Cornell, Queens and Hunter Colleges of CUNY, and was a visiting professor at Yale. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Medaille für Verdienste um Robert Musil from the City of Klagenfurt. He is a member of the PEN Translation Committee. He edited and co-translated Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and a book of Musil’s essays, Precision and Soul, and a collection of Musil’s stories. He has also translated and written the introductions to Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and most recently Gerhard Meier’s novel Isle of the Dead. He translated a story by Proust for Conjunctions, a story by Ingeborg Bachmann for Grand Street, and stories by Alissa Walser for Chicago Review and Painting in a Man’s World. Other translations of his prose and poetry from German and French have appeared in Fiction, Grand Street, Conjunctions, and other magazines.
Mr. Onno Hückmann, consul general of Germany in Chicago, presents the award to Burton Pike. This year’s jurors were David Dollenmayer, Krishna Winston, Karen Noelle, Michael Ritterson, and Annie Wedekind.
Recorded Monday, June 11, 2012 at the Chicago Cultural Center.
