Accent Commands Interpreted as Internal Bibtex Commands

Question

I am having trouble with putting accent marks in my entries in my .bib references file. There are two problems:

1) The author of one of my works has a tilde (~) over one letter in his name; the code I have for the "name" field in this entry is:

NAME = "Praj\{~}n\={a}karamati",

to get "Prajñākaramati."

When I compile the document, a "runaway argument" error comes up; it says Paragraph ended before \name was complete. Looking at it now, I see that in the .bbl file the tilde is used to split first and last names within bibtex, here is the code from the .bbl file:

\entry{BCAPoussin}{book}{}
  \name{author}{1}{}{%
    {{}%
     {{n}\={a}karamati}{n.}%
     {Praj\}{P.}%
     {}{}%
     {}{}}%
  }
  \name{editor}{1}{}{%
    {{}%
     {Vall\'{e}e~Poussin}{V.~P.}%
     {Louis}{L.}%
     {de~la}{d.~l.}%
     {}{}}%
  }
  \list{publisher}{1}{%
    {Asiatic Society of Bengal}%
  }
  \strng{namehash}{nP1}
  \strng{fullhash}{nP1}
  \field{sortinit}{N}
  \field{subtitle}{{Praj\~{n}\={a}karamati's commentary to the
  Bodhicary\={a}vat\={a}ra of \c{C}\={a}ntideva}}
  \field{title}{{Bodhicary\={a}vat\={a}rapa\~{n}jik\={a}}}
  \field{volumes}{4}
  \list{location}{1}{%
    {Calcutta}%
  }
  \field{year}{1914}
\endentry

Somehow it interpreted the "~" character, which was intended to accent an "n", as some kind of name break command.

2) Whenever I put an umlaut, which is done using a double quotation mark, (e.g. f\"{u}r for für) in a bibliography entry, it interprets it as the end of the entry, which is indicated by a quotation mark.

Does anyone know how to get bibtex to interpret these commands as accents and not internal bibtex commands?

Thanks.