Die deutsche Sprache ist die Orgel unter den Sprachen.
~Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul)
Eric Trump is a journalist, writer, editor, and translator of German literature and academic scholarship into English.
His first immersive experience in German came with a broken femur (bicycle, gravity) in Schleswig-Holstein when he was five. This adventure was as excellent as it sounds, and one that enhanced his orthopedics vocabulary. Over the weeks it took to recover, he had rowdy conversations in the hospital with his injured companions, mostly about cinema. They wanted precise translations of scenes from the movie Jaws. Evenings, his German mother sat bedside, singing songs and telling him stories in her native tongue.
Undeterred by any possible correlation between German and the body in pain, he later studied the language and its literature at the University of Tübingen, New York University, and the Free University in Berlin, where he was a 1998-1999 Fulbright Scholar—and where he was again confined to a hospital, this time expanding his nephrology and immunology vocabularies.
Eric has taught translation studies and German language and literature at New York University, Purchase College, and Vassar College, where he also taught courses on bioethics, biopolitics, and the transplanted body.
Eric attended the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and has worked in journalism in the United States and Germany. He studied English literature at the University of Toronto in Canada and German language and literature at New York University.
Eric has translated two books and numerous academic articles. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Health Affairs, and Reader’s Digest, Listener and North & South among others. He has reviewed American fiction for Publishers Weekly and German fiction for the New Press and Penguin Random House. He has also worked as an editor at the bioethics journal Hastings Center Report. Eric divides his time between New Zealand and New York.
Although he has the exact same name as the son of Donald J. Trump, Eric Frederick Trump the translator and writer remains his own man.
And that’s the der, die, and das of it.
“Wie wollte ich an den Brüsten des Lichts saugen!”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche