BURTON PIKE

PIKE--Burton, translator and scholar of Comparative Literature and German, passed away in New York City at 92 on December 22, 2022. Burton was known for his co-translation of Austrian novelist Robert Musil's monumental novel "The Man Without Qualities," and for extensive scholarly work on Musil, for which he received the Medal of Merit from the City of Klagenfurt, Austria in 1993. He was also the author of "The City in Modern Literature" and translated Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther," Rilke's "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge," and Gerhard Meier's "Isle of the Dead," which was awarded the 2012 Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and in 2016 was awarded the Friedrich Ulfers Prize for championing German literature in the United States. Born in Boston in 1930, Burton graduated from Haverford College and received his M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard. He studied in Paris and Strasbourg and taught around the world, including for many years at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was department chair at Queens College, the Graduate Center, and Cornell University, where he met and became close friends with the literary critic Paul de Man. With his emphasis on producing precise and seamless reflections of original texts, Burton inspired and ushered in a new generation of translators.