William W. Hallo

William Wolfgang Hallo (March 9, 1928 – March 27, 2015 ) was professor of Assyriology and Babylonian Literature and curator of the Babylonian collection at Yale University. He was born in Kassel, Germany.

Hallo was a Master of Morse College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University, between 1982 and 1987.

Hallo and J. J. A. Van Dijk published the first translations and book-length discussion of the work of the Sumerian priestess and poet Enheduanna in 1968.

Early life and education Born in Kassel, Germany, in 1928, Hallo was the son of Rudolf Hallo, an art historian, and Gertrude Rubensohn Hallo, an economist. He fled Germany in 1939 for England on the Kindertransport, and immigrated to the United States with his mother and sisters in 1941. He received his B.A. from Harvard in 1950, and studied in the Netherlands in 1950-1951 through a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Leiden. Hallo received his Ph.D. in 1956 from the Oriental Institute with a fellowship from the University of Chicago under Professor I.J. Gelb.

In 1971, Hallo translated Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption, from German into English. Hallo's 1971 translation was considered the standard text until Barbara Galli's new translation was published in 2005.

Personal life Hallo met and married his first wife, Edith Pinto, a Dutch Holocaust survivor, in the Netherlands in 1951. Together they had two children.

Death Hallo died on March 27, 2015.

Works

Translations