Henno Rajandi

Henno Rajandi (until 1935 Henno-Joonatan Rosenstrauch, 19 October 1928 – 1 March 1998) was a linguist and translator.

Rajandi completed Tallinn Secondary School No. 7 in 1947 and graduated from Tartu State University in 1953, majoring in French philology. In 1969, he defended his Candidate of Philology degree with the thesis Eesti impersonaali ja passiivi süntaks (‘Syntax of the Estonian Impersonal and Passive’). His other research papers also concern Estonian grammar.

Rajandi worked as an editor in several publishing houses, in 1962–1970 and 1975–1988 as a researcher at the Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR, and from 1990 at the Estonian Institute.

Rajandi translated mainly from French (e.g., Anatole France, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, François Mauriac, Alexandre Dumas, Maurice Druon) but also from English (e.g., Winston S. Churchill, Robert Merle, Raymond Hull, Laurence J. Peter, John Fowles, Jim Hankinson, Henry Kissinger, John Milton, Angus Wilson, Bel Kaufman, C. Northcote Parkinson, William Golding, Jane Austen, John Fowles, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, David Herbert Lawrence, Thornton Wilder).

Rajandi’s stylish and informative prefaces and afterwords to the books translated over several decades are presented in the collection Tõlkija teekond (‘Translator’s Journey’, 2002), published in the Eesti mõttelugu (‘History of Estonian Thought’) series of the Ilmamaa publishing house.

In 1998, the Council of the Literature Endowment at the Cultural Endowment of Estonia established the Henno Rajandi translation scholarship.

L. P. (Translated by I. A.)

Books in Estonian

Articles and essays
Tõlkija teekond. Tartu: Ilmamaa, 2002. 220 lk. [Sari ‘Eesti mõttelugu’.]