Ewald Osers was a Czech translator born in Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary

Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...

. He was one of the most outstanding translators of Central European literature into English.

Career

Born in Prague to a secular German-speaking Jewish family, Osers studied chemistry in Prague and in London where he stayed after the Munich Agreement

Munich Agreement

The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without...

 in 1938. He worked for the BBC World Service

BBC World Service

The BBC World Service is the world's largest international broadcaster, broadcasting in 27 languages to many parts of the world via analogue and digital shortwave, internet streaming and podcasting, satellite, FM and MW relays...

 until his retirement in 1977.

He began translating Czech and German poetry in 1937 and went on to publish more than 150 books of literature in translation and several volumes of his own poetry and memoirs.

He translated several important Czech poetry works of the 20th century into English, including Czech poetry, including Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert

Jaroslav Seifert was a Nobel Prize winning Czech writer, poet and journalist.Born in Žižkov, a suburb of Prague in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, his first collection of poems was published in 1921...

, Vítězslav Nezval

Vítezslav Nezval

Vítězslav Nezval was one of the most prolific avant-garde Czech writers in the first half of the twentieth century and a co-founder of the Surrealist movement in Czechoslovakia....

, Miroslav Holub

Miroslav Holub

Miroslav Holub was a Czech poet and immunologist.Miroslav Holub's work was heavily influenced by his experiences as an Immunologist, writing many poems using his scientific knowledge to poetic effect. His work is almost always unrhymed, so lends itself easily to translation...

 and Jan Skácel

Jan Skácel

Jan Skácel was a Czech poet of Moravian origin, widely acclaimed as one of the best poets who had been writing in Czech....

. He also translated several German-language authors such as Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard

Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.- Life :Thomas Bernhard was...

, as well as Macedonian-language books (Mateja Matevski

Mateja Matevski

Mateja Matevski is a renowned Macedonian poet, literary and theatre critic, essayist, and translator.-Career:Mateja Matevski graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje...

), poetry of the Silesian poet Ondra Lysohorsky

Ondra Lysohorsky

Óndra Łysohorsky was the pseudonym of Ervín Goj , a Czech poet of Silesian origin and awareness. He is known for his works written in Lach language which was systematized and practically created as literary language by him...

, and two major Slovak poets, Miroslav Válek

Miroslav Válek

Miroslav Válek was a Slovak poet, publicist and politician. He was also the Minister of Culture in the government of Slovak Socialistic Republic within the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.- Biography :...

 and Milan Rúfus

Milan Rúfus

Milan Rúfus was a Slovak poet, essayist, translator, children's writer and academic.He was born in Závažná Poruba, in the Zilina region. As a student at the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava he studied Slovak language and literature, and history...

.

Awards

• European Poetry Translation Prize
• Order of Cyril and Methodius in Bulgaria
• Officer’s Cross of Germany
• Macedonian Literature
• Medal of Merit of the Czech Republic