Peter Filkins

Who is Peter Filkins?

Peter Filkins is an American poet and literary translator. Filkins graduated from Williams College with a Bachelor of Arts and from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree. Filkins is best known for his translations of post-war German literature into English. Filkins was the first to translate H. G. Adler's novels into English. Adler, a Jewish Czech intellectual, survived several Nazi concentration camps and wrote both novels and non-fiction about the Holocaust. The Journey and Panorama, the two novels Filkins translated, were written soon after the war – The Journey in 1950–1951 and Panorama in 1948, but publishers disliked Adler's literary take on the Holocaust and they were not published until the 1960s, and then largely ignored during Adler's lifetime. Writing in The New Yorker, Ruth Franklin described Adler's books as "modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil". Before Filkins' project, only one of Adler's books, a work of history, had been translated into English, a situation that one scholar of German literature described as “one of the great intellectual scandals of our time.”