In 1991, I arrived in New York after a year spent in Prague. Because I missed Czechoslovakia and wished that I could maintain contact with it somehow, I made the experiment of sitting in on an advanced Czech-language class at Columbia University. It was there that I met Peter Kussi.

Kussi was a tall, slender man, then in his sixties, with an aquiline nose and a Chaplinesque moustache, and he stooped as if apologetic about his height. He taught Czech the same way that my classics professors had taught Greek at Harvard: each student was asked to read a few lines aloud and then translate them extemporaneously. If anything, Kussi was even more old-fashioned than my classics professors had been. I don’t believe I ever saw him without a coat and tie, and he always addressed a student by honorific and last name. I was “Mr. Crain”; my classmates were “Mr. Smith” or “Miss Jones.” This made for an initial bump of awkwardness in social interactions between classmates outside of school, because none of us ever knew one another’s first names. We always called him “Professor Kussi.” I must have suspected that he had a story, because anyone who taught a Warsaw Pact language before 1989 was likely to have one, but it never occurred to me to try to breach his formality of manner to find it out.

In the first class I attended, I found him leading a discussion of Václav Havel’s play “Audience,” in which a dissident intellectual has a duel of wits with a foulmouthed brewer. I struggled to understand the intellectual; the brewer, on the other hand, I had little trouble with. “Now, what’s the correct form of this verb?” Kussi asked, of a word the brewer used.

“Is there something wrong with this one?” I muttered to myself.

Thus did I learn that I was ignorant of the rudiments of proper Czech grammar. Kussi let me study with him anyway. I’m not sure his indulgence was good for me, as a matter of language pedagogy. Fluency wasn’t something that his methods were ever likely to give me, but what he offered, in its place, was an opportunity to hear a master translator think aloud.

After two or three lines of improvised translation by a student, Kussi would nod and gently break in. Sometimes he praised the student for having jumped over a syntactic mud puddle that the student was, generally speaking, unaware of. At other times, he amiably, coaxingly suggested that if the student were to delay a limiting phrase until later in the sentence, or replace a literal rendering with an analogous colloquialism in English, or transpose a prepositional phrase into an appositive noun phrase, then English might be able to reproduce the meaning of the Czech original with a little more elegance. His chief interest lay in questions of nuance and tone. Was “mailman” the best translation? Might “courier” bear the metaphoric and semantic weight a little more easily? Tact is the best word I can think of for what he was teaching. It was hard to know how to take notes, and it almost didn’t make sense to do so, because the modesty of his manner implied that any given comment was only pertinent to the case of the particular sentence under discussion. He had a way of waggling a hand at the wrist as he made a suggestion, the gesture seeming to signal that he himself dismissed any prospective attachment of larger significance to his words.

Modesty was part of his personal style, too. Over the years he was tremendously generous to me, but he was quite reserved. He once shyly admitted that he had recently been made an adjunct associate professor, pronouncing his new title with invisible scare quotes, and I learned from a mailing address he gave me that he lived in Queens. But that was the limit of what I knew about him personally, and I responded in kind.

After a while, Kussi began to recommend me to editors in search of Czech-to-English translators, explaining away his generosity by saying that he was offered more commissions than he had time to accept. I translated a campaign biography of Václav Havel, as well as a number of short stories, only some of which made it into print. Kussi even invited me to collaborate with him and another translator on a collection of Josef Škvorecký’s tales. The work required much labor and paid little—a drawback that Kussi warned me about straightforwardly—and in my case effort had to compensate for a lack of facility. Meanwhile, I wanted to write fiction of my own, and a sideline as a scholar of American literature began to seem a more plausible way to support myself. That misapprehension is a story for another time; all that needs to be said here is that I drifted away from Czech and away from Kussi.

I came back to him briefly, in 1999, as a journalist, which is what I became upon leaving graduate school. The novelist Milan Kundera was then revisiting English-language translations of his works, in pursuit of greater control and a radical linguistic fidelity. In some cases, Kundera went so far as to ask a surrogate to retranslate a novel into English from a French version, which Kundera, who had become fluent in French, now considered to have an “authenticity value” that matched the Czech original. He had renounced two American translators whom he had previously extolled, Kussi and Michael Henry Heim, each of whom had translated three of his novels, to much acclaim. Within the small world of literary translation, the story was fiercely controversial. Kussi agreed to be interviewed. He was gentlemanly but firm, calling the attacks on Heim and himself “questionable or outright wrongheaded.” I remember feeling impressed by his candor and a little frightened by it on his behalf. Would it boomerang on him? But he was to retire a couple of years later, and he let me know that he had, in any case, begun to turn his attention to writing fiction himself.

Last October, he died after a heart attack, and I drove to Kew Gardens, Queens, for his funeral. I hadn’t seen him in years. It was a mild, sunny day, and I joined a small group of his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and former students. A longtime friend and neighbor of Kussi’s had found a rabbi to administer the service. I hadn’t been aware that Kussi was Jewish. The rabbi seemed rather tradition-minded. When he remarked that few of us seemed to know Hebrew, his tone sounded regretful. It sounded even more so when, toward the end of the ceremony, he informed us that there was no obligation to say kaddish because none of Kussi’s immediate family had survived him. He invited us to shovel dirt into the grave, and after we made a preliminary attempt he admonished us, rather sternly, that we had to keep shovelling until the coffin was completely covered. The exercise proved bracing.

From testimonials at the graveside and from conversations over dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant afterward, I began, for the first time, to gather information about Kussi’s life. A couple of mourners told me about a half-hour interview that Tereza Brdečková, of Czech Television, had conducted with Kussi in 2000, and Alex Zucker, a former student of Kussi’s who is now an acclaimed translator himself, later shared with me his translation of a transcript. Zucker also told me that in 2011 Kussi had donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum a letter that an uncle had sent from Nazi-occupied Prague. I began to find out a little of my late teacher’s story.