Richard Stokes
For the operatic stage he has translated Wozzeck and La voix humaine (Opera North), and Parsifal, Lulu, L’Amour de loin and Jakob Lenz (ENO). His books include The Spanish Song Companion (with Jacqueline Cockburn), J.S. Bach – The Complete Cantatas (Scarecrow Press), A French Song Companion (with Graham Johnson) (OUP), The Book of Lieder (Faber), a translation of Jules Renard’s complete Histoires Naturelles in a dual-language edition (Alma Classics) and The Penguin Book of English Song – Seven Centuries of Poetry from Chaucer to Auden, now available in paperback.
He collaborated with Alfred Brendel on Collected Poems: Playing the Human Game (Phaidon). His translations of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Trial have been published by Hesperus Press, and Alma Books published his translation (with Hannah Stokes) of Kafka’s Letter to his Father. His translation of Helmut Deutsch’s Memoirs of an Accompanist appeared in the autumn of 2020 (Kahn & Averill) and Faber recently published The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf. Life, Letters, Lieder.
Richard was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2012 and the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art in 2022.
BOOKS BY THIS TRANSLATOR
Mouche: The Last Days of Heinrich Heine
By Camille Selden and Heinrich Heine
Offering a personal, poignant, more intimate look at the final seven months of Heine’s life in Paris, Mouche which will surprise and enchant in equal measure all the admirers of the great German lyric poet and all music lovers. This edition contains short biographies of the characters mentioned in t…
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The Marquise of O—
Part of Alma’s 101 Pages series, The Marquise of O is a masterpiece of psychological literature by German writer, Heinrich von Kleist. It is accompanied here by two other celebrated stories, ‘The Earthquake in Chile’ and ‘The Foundling’, showcasing the range of their author’s narrative abilities and…
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The Trial
By Franz Kafka
Published the year after the author’s death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka’s three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian exces…
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Dearest Father
By Franz Kafka
In this open letter to his father – a letter which was never sent – Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of auth…
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Histoires Naturelles
By Jules Renard
A delightful variation on the long tradition of bestiary writing, Jules Renard’s Histoires Naturelles have captured the imagination of readers and artists since they were first published in 1896, with Ravel famously setting five of the poems to music. Presented in a new version by acclaimed translat…
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