Discipline: Literature

Walter Arndt

Discipline: Literature
Region: Hanover, NH
MacDowell Fellowships: 1985
Walter Werner Arndt (1916-2011) 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 masters in engineering from Robert College (Istanbul), and a Ph.D. 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. Arndt was born to German parents in Istanbul, Turkey, and had 12 years of classical schooling at Breslau, Silesia. In 1934 he moved to Oxford and then to Warsaw 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. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services (now the CIA), and the Office of War Information where he forged Nazi documents and passes until the end of the war.

Studios

Irving Fine

Walter Arndt worked in the Irving Fine studio.

Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…

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