Elke Wehr — one of Germany’s best known Spanish translators — died last Friday in Berlin, at age 62, according to Suhrkamp Publishers of Frankfurt. Wehr gained notoriety with her translations of key works by Javier Marías of Spain, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Julio Cortázar of Argentina, and Octavio Paz of Mexico, among others. In 2006, she was awarded the Paul Celan Prize by the German Literary Fund in recognition of her works, particularly her translation of Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos’ masterpiece Yo, el Supremo which was considered the most difficult adaption.

She was not only an extraordinary translator, but also took it upon herself to discover new authors, according to Jürgen Dormagen of Suhrkamp. Wehr’s last translation was the novel Los días azules by Colombian author Fernando Vallejo, whose German edition will be published this August.

At the meeting on Saturday (Jan 5), during the announcements, I announced the passing of our colleague and friend, Leslie Willson. I quoted from Mike Conner’s earlier posting and to some extent from the obituary in the paper, which gave a few insights into Leslie’s life.

His story reminds us of the myriad ways in which translators find their languages and their destiny: World War II interrupted Leslie’s plans for a writing career and he left the University of Texas to join the army, where he discovered he had a gift for German, in which he soon became fluent. He was later assigned to a top secret operation known only by its mailing address “P. O. Box 1142” where he and others used their language skills to great effect in the war effort.

That sounds like a blurb for a great movie, one of those black-&-white ones with steely-jawed men in fedoras and women who always used a really long cigarette holder, dahling! In his photo, Leslie looks as though he starred in his own movie – which sounds like one definition of a happy life.

When I finished reading about him, I asked the old question: Where do old translators go? And it occurred to me that old translators never die because they live on in their works. Not just in literary translations of books and poems, but in the countless documents of all kinds that translators work on day to day. The manuals and labels and patents and contracts. The signs and forms and letters and birth certificates. The brochures and instructions and warnings and all the fine print that nobody ever reads.

All those words were one day invoked by a translator and thenceforth entered the canon of their time and space as the issue of their creators – as the fruit of their lives, the essence of their very own synthesis, an expression of their being. Translators make the world a little more understandable, which is an honorable occupation. Leslie Willson did, and we salute him for it.

Colleague and friend A. Leslie Willson Jr., highly respected educator and translator of contemporary German literature, died December 28, 2007, in Austin.

Among many accomplishments, he served for eight years as chairman of the German Department at UT-Austin, and for 20 years he edited Dimension, a groundbreaking bilingual literary magazine dedicated to the presentation of contemporary German-language authors. He was a co-founder and first president (1978–1979) of the American Literary Translators Association. He also served as president of the American Translators Association (1991–1993). He was recognized for his scholarly work with awards from the Goethe Institute and German government. An obituary appeared in the Austin American-Statesman.