Snows of Yesteryear: A Translator's Story Book

I have no intention of stopping working. I enjoy literary translation, I enjoy the intellectual, artistic and linguistic challenge. No other activity, and certainly not leisure, would give me the same satisfaction. It would be nice to bring the total of my translated books up to the round figure of 160; but time will tell.Ewald Osers will be ninety year's old in the early summer of 2007. Allowed to enter England in 1938, he was not to see his home town, Prague, for another twenty-seven years. In the intervening years Ewald Osers would become one of the best known translators of European literature in the twentieth century. He is also a highly regarded poet, writing in English, and his homeland has recognised his considerable achievement by awarding him their Medal of Merit, presented to him by Vaclav Havel. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has accrued a plethora of awards including the prestigious Schlegel-Tieck Prize and remains the only translator to ever have won the International Federation of Translators (FIT) Aurora Borealis Prize for outstanding translations in both fiction and non fiction categories, in the same year (2002).This charming memoir is more, however, than an impressive account of the many works he has translated. His long career at the BBC World Service is remembered as is his long and happy marriage. From family holidays in America, skiing expeditions, memories of Alan Ross, T.S. Eliot, encounters with Lord Weidenfeld and working with the Arts Council, Ewald Osers weaves a magical account. His has been, truly, a literary life lived to the full, and in a Europe which changed beyond recognition, before his very eyes.Read More