Posted on August 22, 2010 - by Venik

Alan Myers obituary

Translator of Russian literature and poetry, teacher and ardent defender of his native north-east

Alan Myers, who has died aged 76, was one of the most acclaimed translators of Russian into English of his generation, but also a notable figure in two other fields: he was an inspirational comprehensive school teacher for nearly 25 years, and there were few journalists in the country – and beyond – who did not feel his wrath if they caricatured his native north-east. So strong was his passion for the real world beyond the Tees that he delayed much-demanded translation work to publish a satirical guide to it for London cliché-mongers, and an extraordinary A-Z of famous people from or connected with Northumberland and county Durham. Only four days before his death, after prolonged ill health, he was adding the pioneering journalist Emilie Peacocke – from Darlington – to his online A-Z, which runs from the Soviet masterspy Rudolf Abel to Yevgeny Zamyatin, who wrote novellas while designing an ice-breaker in Newcastle.

It was a coincidence that the first and last in the list had Russian connections, but an appropriate one for Myers, who became fascinated by the country during national service. Like many enforced recruits, he benefited from the military’s frantic laying-on of courses to occupy large numbers of temporary servicemen that it did not really want.

Myers studied Russian and became so absorbed that he abandoned the civil-service job with the Crown Agents which he had taken after going to school in his native South Shields. His parents, who worked respectively for the gas board and in a shoe shop, accepted his decision to study Russian at London University and then as an exchange student in Moscow. He fell in love with the culture and with a young Russian, Diana, who returned with him in 1961 and became his wife. With the cold war at its height, Myers’s obvious intelligence interested both sides and he later liked to describe being interviewed by the KGB and the CIA in the same week. He also had approaches from British intelligence, but was far more interested in Russian writers than Soviet policy.

Teaching took most of his energy between 1963 and 1986, notably at Fearnhill school, in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, where his hour-long weekly sessions on European history riveted the entire sixth form. An impassioned promoter of reading, he would ambush students in the town’s record shop, handing them a book – selected according to the pupil’s character and interests – before they went off to buy 45rpm discs.

Myers’ great translations followed his retirement in 1986 to work as a freelance writer; they included work by Pushkin and 19th-century poets, before culminating in a 1992 edition of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot which won him an international reputation. He was also an exceptional translator of the work of Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel laureate, who became a close friend. Brodsky’s poetry cycle In England is dedicated to Myers, who appears in the poem East Finchley, the London suburb where the devoted north-easterner was incongruously happy. He repeatedly resisted attempts by his sister to tempt him back to Tyneside, although he used the northern universities, and publishers such as Bloodaxe Books, to wage his war on the region’s behalf.

His flat was crammed in later life with shoeboxes full of cuttings, a data bank which not only fuelled his stream of postcards correcting error, but led to two major academic collections. The Myers collection of Russian speculative fiction, the biggest in the country, is held at Liverpool University, along with his history of the genre. Northumbria University has his seminal work on WH Auden’s connections with the north Pennines, which, with his usual mixture of energy and persuasiveness, he forced into mainstream studies of the poet.

Myers’s last translations were published by Penguin in 1999, but he learned before he died that his version of The Idiot was to win a huge new audience as the preferred text for schools and universities in China. He also maintained his habit of supervising the magazines at his doctors’ surgery, ensuring a much more interesting mixture than normal.

Diana survives him.

 • Alan Myers, translator and teacher, born 18 August 1933; died 8 August 2010

Popularity: unranked [?]

Related posts:

1. Pieta Monks obituary
2. Sally Laird obituary
3. REF Smith obituary
4. Elena Shvarts obituary
5. Andrei Voznesensky obituary