Shimon Markish (Russian: Симон/Шимон Перецович Маркиш, Hungarian: Markis Simon; March 6, 1931, in Baku – December 5, 2003, in Geneva) was a classical scholar, literary and cultural historian, translator.
Markish enrolled in the English department at Moscow State University, but in 1949, after his father's arrest, he decided to change to the small and "hidden" field of classical philology.
[1] After receiving his diploma, Markish began working as a translator at the State Publishing House of Fiction (Gosudarstvennoie Izdatelstvo Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1956–1962).
He translated primarily from ancient Greek and Latin,[2] but also from English, German, sometimes under an assumed name, sometimes in collaboration with colleagues who found it difficult to work.
In addition to translating Apuleius, Plutarch, Plato, Lucian,[3] Thomas Mann, Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Feuchtwanger, Markish wrote about ancient Greece, publishing Gomer i ego poemy (Homer and His Poems; 1962), Slava daliokikh vekov (Glorious faraway centuries, 1964), Mif o Prometee (The Myth of Prometheus, 1967) and Sumerki v polden’: Ocherk grecheskoi kul’tury v epokhu peloponnesskoi voiny (Dusk at Noon: A Study of Greek Culture at the Time of the Peloponnesian War; 1988).
Markish did not find a job, so he could not acquire a passport and could not leave the country to see his mother, who, in the meantime, had left the Soviet Union for Israel.
Finally, with the help of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, having got a job "without salary", he could obtain a passport and travel to see his mother in Paris.
With difficulty and a whole semester late, having received permission to leave only for half a year, he arrived in Geneva in February 1974.
Markish also compiled several anthologies of works by Russian-Jewish writers (on Ossip Rabinovich, Lev Levanda, Grigory Bogrov, Vassily Grossman,[6] Ilya Ehrenburg, and Isaac Babel,[7] as well as the book Rodnoi golos [Native Voice: Pages from Russian Jewish Literature; 2001]).
In 2002 he was invited to the jubilee meeting for an opening lecture by the International Erasmus Society of Rotterdam in Holland.