At the time of his death, he was the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, of Russian Language and Literature at Dartmouth College.
[3] With degrees in business administration from Warsaw University, in political science and economics from Oxford University (Oriel College), a master's degree in engineering from Robert College (Istanbul), and a PhD in comparative literature from UNC, Chapel Hill, Arndt was well known for his metric translations, which included versions of Goethe's Faust, Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, a number of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as works by Busch, Morgenstern, and others.
After Oxford, Arndt moved to Warsaw, Poland for graduate study, where he learned Polish and, later, Russian.
He taught classics and modern languages at Guilford College and then the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Arndt was an accomplished polyglot, possessing near-native fluency in Russian, English and Polish in addition to his native German.