David Luke: 1921-2005

David Luke was an internationally renowned academic and translator, known for his fluent and sensitive English translations of German literature. Educated at Sedbergh School and Christ Church, Oxford, he became known as a provocative and eccentric lecturer at Manchester University, where he was famed for his love of playing Wagner at maximum volume. He returned to Oxford in 1959 as Lecturer in German, becoming an Official Student in June 1960, and remained there as Student and Tutor in German (Emeritus) until his retirement in 1988.

Throughout an extensive academic career, he published a great many journal articles on German literature, covering authors as divers as Goethe, Kleist, Thomas Mann and the Brothers Grimm, and including an article which is heralded as one of the cornerstones of 20th-century Kafka criticism. It was however as a translator of both prose and verse that he was best known, notably of Goethe’s works, including Faust (1987); Part I of which won the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1989. Other translations of note include Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O and Other Stories (1978), Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories (1970) and Death in Venice (1990), Novellen by Adalbert Stifter, and what is considered to be the definitive English versions of the Grimms’ fairy tales. Most recently, Luke’s 1997 translation of Mozart's Journey to Prague by Eduard Mörike was reissued by Penguin Classics in 2006. The introductions to his translations are themselves masterpieces of criticism, and alongside his journal articles they constitute a fine academic legacy. In 2000 the German-British Forum presented David Luke with the GBF Award in honour of his contribution to cultural understanding between the two nations.

A wickedly funny raconteur, he was close friends with Iris Murdoch and W.H. Auden, and had a store of extremely amusing stories about the literary scene. He had got to know Auden during his time as Professor of Poetry, and was instrumental in persuading the Christ Church Governing Body to give Auden accommodation when he returned from America in 1972. There was much more to their friendship than the fact that they were both gay: Luke’s professional focus, German literature, was one of Auden’s abiding loves, and Luke was a connoisseur of Auden’s poetry, especially appreciative of the poet’s huge technical facility with language and the forms of verse. Indeed, the last piece of sustained writing he undertook, a few weeks before his final illness, was an extremely moving account of the poet’s relationship with Christ Church.

Recent books:

Mozart's Journey to Prague (translator) (Penguin Classics: 2006)