Joachim Neugroschel

Joachim Neugroschel (13 January 1938—23 May 2011) was a multilingual literary translator of French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish. He was also an art critic, editor, and publisher.

Early life and education Joachim Neugroschel was born in Vienna. His father was the Yiddish Galician poet Mendel Naygreshl (Max Neugröschel) (1903–1965). The family emigrated to Rio de Janeiro in 1939, and eventually arrived in New York City in 1941. He grew up in New York City and graduated from Bronx Science (1954) and Columbia University (1958) with a degree in English and Comparative Literature.

In an interview that touched on his translation process, Neugroschel said, "I never read a book before translating it. No reason to. I do not translate the words literally. Only a bad translator would translate literally." He followed up with, "You don't have to have a sense of the author's work to translate. I read a page and get the style. It is a question of music and rhythm." In 1996 he was also made a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Joachim Neugröschel became also known in Germany through an interview that the writer Hubert Fichte conducted with him in New York in September 1978. However, it was only published in 2006 as part of , a nineteen-volume cycle of narrations by Hubert Fichte as the third volume entitled The Second Guilt.

Death Neugroschel died in Brooklyn at the age of 73. He is survived by his legal guardian and former partner, Aaron Mack Schloff. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Scribner, 1993) Tahar Ben Jelloun, With Downcast Eyes (Little, Brown and Company, 1993) Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March (Overlook Press, 1995) Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales (Viking, 1998) Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (Penguin, 1999) The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A Haunted Reader [ed. and trans.] (Syracuse University Press, 2000) Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (Penguin, 2000) Marcel Proust, The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (Cooper Square Press, 2001) Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace and Other Tales (Modern Library, 2003) Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask (Penguin, 2003) No Star Too Beautiful: Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present [ed. and trans.] (W.W. Norton, 2002) Dovid Bergelson, The Shadows of Berlin: The Berlin Stories of Dovid Bergelson (City Lights Books, 2005) Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir; or, The Immoral Mentors (Penguin, 2006) The Golem: A New Translation of the Classic Play and Selected Short Stories [ed. and trans.] (W.W. Norton, 2006) E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King / Alexandre Dumas, The Tale of the Nutcracker (Penguin, 2007)