Lowenfeld was born in
Washington, D.C. to Andreas Lowenfeld, a German-Jewish Professor of International Law (
NYU), and Elena Lowenfeld, a Cuban guitar player and art critic. His great-grandfather Raphael Löwenfeld, a correspondent for the newspaper
Berliner Tagesblatt in
St. Petersburg, was the first translator of
Leo Tolstoy into German, and Tolstoy's play
The Power of Darkness had its world premiere in the
Schiller Theater, Berlin, which Löwenfeld founded. After the
Russian Revolution, the
Nabokov family lived in the Löwenfeld home in
Berlin. Lowenfeld studied Russian literature at
Harvard, did postgraduate work at
St. Petersburg University and then obtained his
J.D. degree at
New York University. As a trial lawyer, Lowenfeld won several multimillion-dollar judgments on behalf of major Russian film studios Mosfilm, Lenfilm, and Soyuzmultfilm Studios and their licensees against copyright pirates in the USA. Lowenfeld translates from 8 languages, including Russian, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Latin. He has translated verses of
Lermontov,
Blok,
Mandelshtam,
Tsvetaeva,
Akhmatova,
Yesenin,
Mayakovsky,
Rilke,
Goethe,
Heine,
Pessoa,
Lorca,
Machado,
Martí,
Neruda,
Leopardi,
Petrarch,
Dante,
Catullus,
Ovid,
Martial, and
Horace. His translations of
Alexander Pushkin are considered to be "the most brilliant and fullest translation" of Pushkin's works:Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может, I loved you once, and still, perhaps, love’s yearningВ душе моей угасла не совсем; Within my soul has not quite burned away.Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит; Yet may that nevermore you be concerning;Я не хочу печалить вас ничем. I would not wish you sad in any way.Original: Alexander Pushkin Translation: Julian Henry Lowenfeld. Pushkin's
Little Tragedies, translated into verse by Lowenfeld, were staged at the
Baryshnikov Arts Center in
New York in 2009. ==Performances==