Denis Jackson obituary
My friend and colleague Denis Jackson, who has died aged 84, achieved distinction in two wholly different areas – as an electrical engineer and as a literary translator.
He was born and brought up on Tyneside, the youngest of six children of Sidney Jackson, a signwriter, and Kathleen le Bart Carey. Leaving school in Whitley Bay at 14 without any qualifications, he took a course at Leicester College of Technology and Science before specialising during national service as a radar technician in the RAF.
He then went to Germany to work for a television manufacturer in Hamburg, knowing only the words for yes, no and thank you. After picking up some German, he took a job as a houseparent for an institution for displaced young people. Returning to the UK after hitchhiking through northern Germany, Austria, Italy and France with his future wife Janet Woolfrey, a geography teacher whom he married in 1960, he worked as a test engineer with Decca Radar at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. The company eventually became part of the German engineering giant Siemens.
On retirement from Siemens, Denis’s second career began. He became interested in the 19th-century writer Theodor Storm, who occupies a position in German literature comparable to that of Thomas Hardy in the English canon. Finding English versions inadequate, he began his own translations of Storm’s tales, which are rooted in the way of life of the north German coastal region dominated by the ever-threatening North Sea. Denis became acquainted with Storm country on visits and holidays to the region, and was convinced that only by experiencing the vastness of the terrain, its tidal flats and hushed polders, was it possible for a translator to do justice to the intentions of the author.
Typical of his approach was his first translation, in 1996, of Der Schimmelreiter, to which he boldly gave the title of The Dykemaster, instead of the limply literal The Rider on the White Horse used previously. His translations were published over 20 years by Angel Classics in six volumes, including one, Paul the Puppeteer (2004), which won the 2005 Oxford-Weidenfeld translation prize.
He is survived by Janet, their children, Ali and Hilary, six grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
