Walter W. Arndt

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Walter Arndt is the Professor Emeritus of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth. He has produced a number of notable translations including Goethe's Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and a number of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. His translation of Eugene Onegin won the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962.

Born in Constantinople in 1916, Arndt had nine years of classical schooling at Breslau, Silesia. In 1934 he moved to Oxford and studied Economics and Political science. After Oxford, Arndt moved to Warsaw, Poland for graduate study, where he learned Polish and, later, Russian. In 1939 he joined the Polish army and, after escaping from a German POW camp, spent a year in the Polish underground forging Nazi documents, and eventually made his way to Istanbul where he took a degree in mechanical engineering at Robert college.

From 1942 to 1945, Arndt was active in intelligence work on behalf of allied forces. He worked in U.N. refugee resettlement between 1944 and 1949 when he emigrated to the United States, where he taught classics and modern languages at Guilford college until 1956 when he received his doctorate in comparative Linguistics and classics at the University of North Carolina. Since then he has held several appointments at various American universities.

Arndt is an accomplished polyglot, possessing near-native fluency in Russian, English and Polish in addition to his native German. He is also known to have a command of Latin, Greek, French and Czech.

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