Elizabeth Wolff Mayer (1884 – 14 March 1970)[1] was a German-born American translator and editor, closely associated with W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and other writers and musicians.
[7][8][9] Britten described her as "one of those grand people who have been essential through the ages for the production of art; really sympathetic and enthusiastic, with instinctive good taste".
[13] In collaboration with Louise Bogan she translated Ernst Jünger's The Glass Bees (1961), Goethe's Elective Affinities (1963) and The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella (both in 1 vol., 1971).
One reviewer of Elective Affinities found the beginning "promising": by "tak[ing] liberties with the original text, .. [they] thereby win the modern reader's interest", but considered it "colorless, rather than timeless" overall.
With Peter Pears, Mayer also prepared translations for Benjamin Britten, for inclusion in programs or scores of songs in Italian, German and Russian which he had set to music.
Near the end of her life he wrote about her (without naming her) in his poem Old People's Home, and in Lines for Elizabeth Mayer, in About the House.