Barbara Bray (née Jacobs; 24 November 1924 – 25 February 2010)
was an English translator and critic.
Early life
Bray was born in
Maida Vale
Maida Vale ( ) is an affluent residential district consisting of the northern part of Paddington in West London, west of St John's Wood and south of Kilburn. It is also the name of its main road, on the continuous Edgware Road. Maida Vale is ...
,
London
London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...
; her parents had Belgian and Jewish origins. An identical twin (her sister Olive Classe was also a translator),
she was educated at
Girton College, Cambridge
Girton College is one of the 31 constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge. The college was established in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon as the first women's college in Cambridge. In 1948, it was granted full college statu ...
, where she read English, with papers in French and Italian and gained a First. She married John Bray, an Australian-born RAF pilot, after the couple graduated from Cambridge, and had two daughters, Francesca and
Julia
Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e.g ...
. In 1958, Bray's husband died in an accident in Cyprus.
Career
Bray became a script editor in 1953 for the
BBC Third Programme
The BBC Third Programme was a national radio station produced and broadcast from 1946 until 1967, when it was replaced by Radio 3. It first went on the air on 29 September 1946 and quickly became one of the leading cultural and intellectual f ...
, commissioning and translating European 20th-century avant-garde writing for the network.
Harold Pinter wrote some of his earliest work at Bray's insistence.
From about 1961, Bray lived in Paris and established a career as a translator and critic. She translated the correspondence of
George Sand
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (; 1 July 1804 – 8 June 1876), best known by her pen name George Sand (), was a French novelist, memoirist and journalist. One of the most popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, bein ...
, and work by leading French-speaking writers of her own time including
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu (, 4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996), known as Marguerite Duras (), was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film '' Hiroshima mon amour'' (1959) e ...
,
Amin Maalouf,
Julia Kristeva,
Michel Quint Michel Quint, 2013.
Michel Quint (born 1948) is a French writer from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais
Nord-Pas-de-Calais (); pcd, Nord-Pas-Calés); is a former administrative region of France. Since 1 January 2016, it has been part of the new region H ...
,
Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (; 23 June 1910 – 3 October 1987) was a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 play ''Antigone'', an a ...
,
Michel Tournier
Michel Tournier (; 19 December 1924 − 18 January 2016) was a French writer. He won awards such as the ''Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française'' in 1967 for '' Friday, or, The Other Island'' and the Prix Goncourt for '' The Erl-King'' i ...
,
Jean Genet,
Alain Bosquet
Alain Bosquet, born Anatoliy Bisk (russian: Анато́лий Биск) (28 March 1919 – 17 March 1998), was a French poet.
Life
In 1925, his family moved to Brussels and he studied at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, then at the Sorbonn ...
,
Réjean Ducharme
Réjean Ducharme (August 12, 1941 – August 21, 2017) was a Québécois novelist and playwright who resided in Montreal. He was known for his reclusive personality and did not appear at any public functions since his first successful book was ...
and
Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers (; born Philippe Joyaux; 28 November 1936) is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the ''avant garde'' literary journal '' Tel Quel'' (along with writer and art critic Marcelin Pleynet), which was published by Le S ...
. She received the
PEN Translation Prize
The PEN Translation Prize (formerly known as the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize through 2008) is an annual award given by PEN America (formerly PEN American Center) to outstanding translations into the English language. It has been p ...
in 1986.
Bray collaborated with the film director
Joseph Losey on the screenplay for ''
Galileo'' (1975), which was an adaptation of the play by
Bertolt Brecht.
During the same decade, they collaborated on the script for a biographical film about
Ibn Sa'ud, the founder of Saudi Arabia and (with
Harold Pinter), she wrote an adaptation of Proust's ''
Remembrance of Things Past
''In Search of Lost Time'' (french: À la recherche du temps perdu), first translated into English as ''Remembrance of Things Past'', and sometimes referred to in French as ''La Recherche'' (''The Search''), is a novel in seven volumes by French ...
''.
Bray also worked extensively with
Samuel Beckett, developing a professional as well as personal relationship that continued for the rest of his life. Bray was one of the few people with whom the playwright discussed his work.
Bray suffered a stroke at the end of 2003. In late 2009, she moved to a nursing home in Edinburgh near the residence of Francesca, one of her daughters.
In spite of her serious disability she worked until shortly before her death on her memoir of Samuel Beckett, ''Let Mortals Rejoice...,'' which she was unable to complete. Her reflections on Samuel Beckett, both as a writer and as a person, became part of a series of conversations with her Polish friend Marek Kedzierski, recorded from 2004 to 2009. Extensive excerpts from these conversations were published in German by Berlin's quarterly ''
Lettre international'' (''Es war wie ein Blitz…'' vol. 87, Winter 2009) and in French by the magazine ''
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...
'' (''C´était comme un éclair, un éclair aveuglant'', no. 974/975 Juin-Juillet 2010), as well as in Polish, Slovak and Swedish. The English original of these excerpts remains unpublished, but other fragments have appeared in ''
Modernism/modernity
''Modernism/modernity'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1994 by Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg.
History
It covers methodological, archival, and theoretical approaches to modernist studies in the long moder ...
'' (''Barbara Bray: In Her Own Words'', Volume 18, Number 4, November 2011).
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bray, Barbara
1924 births
2010 deaths
20th-century English translators
20th-century English women writers
20th-century English non-fiction writers
Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge
British identical twins
People from Maida Vale
English critics
English translators
French–English translators
English women non-fiction writers
Literary translators
English people of Belgian descent