Eric Mosbacher

Eric Mosbacher (22 December 1903 – 2 July 1998) was an English journalist and translator from Italian, French, German and Spanish. He translated work by Ignazio Silone and Sigmund Freud.[1]

Life

Eric Mosbacher was born in London. He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, graduating in 1924 in French and Italian. After working on local newspapers, he worked for the Daily Express and then the Evening Standard. He also worked as assistant editor of the weekly Everyman and editor of Anglo-American News, the London journal of the American Chamber of Commerce.[1]

Mosbacher's wife, Gwenda David, introduced him to the work of Ignazio Silone, and the pair translated Silone's anti-Fascist novel Fontamara in 1934. Often working in collaboration with his wife, Mosbacher continued translating in parallel with his other jobs.[1]

During World War II he worked as an interpreter interrogating Italian prisoners of war before joining the Political Warfare Executive in 1943, working alongside Sefton Delmer to produce a German-language newspaper to be dropped on Germany each night. In June 1945 he was sent to the Rhineland, now occupied by the British, to encourage a free press by starting two German-language newspapers there, Kolnischer Kurier and Ruhr-Zeitung.[1]

Demobilized in 1946 at the rank of lieutenant-colonel, Mosbacher was a public relations officer for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning before joining The Times as a sub-editor in 1948. Resigning from the Times in 1960, he continued to work at translation.[1]

Translations

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 'Eric Mosbacher', The Times, 10 July 1998, p.25