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 p ...

London London is the capital and 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 down to the North Sea, and has been a major s ...

; 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 status ...

, 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. ...

. 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 Harold Pinter (; 10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spann ...

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) ea ...

Amin Maalouf Amin Maalouf (; ar, أمين معلوف; born 25 February 1949) is a Lebanese-born French"Amin ...

Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva (; born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, bg, Юлия Стоянова Кръстева; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who h ...

, Michel Quint,

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 ad ...

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'' ...

Jean Genet Jean Genet (; – ) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. His major works include the novels ''The Thief's ...

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 p ...

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 Joseph Walton Losey III (; January 14, 1909 – June 22, 1984) was an American theatre and film director, producer, and screenwriter. Born in Wisconsin, he studied in Germany with Bertolt Brecht and then returned to the United States. Hollywood b ...

on the screenplay for ''

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...

'' (1975), which was an adaptation of the play by

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

. During the same decade, they collaborated on the script for a biographical film about

Ibn Sa'ud Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud ( ar, عبد العزيز بن عبد الرحمن آل سعود, ʿAbd al ʿAzīz bin ʿAbd ar Raḥman Āl Suʿūd; 15 January 1875Ibn Saud's birth year has been a source of debate. It is generally accepted ...

, the founder of Saudi Arabia and (with

), 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 Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and Tragicomedy, tr ...

, 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 ''Lettre International'' is the title of a number of cultural magazines published in various languages in Europe. The history of ''Lettre International'' dates back to 1984, the year that the original French edition (''Lettre Internationale'') fir ...

'' (''Es war wie ein Blitz…'' vol. 87, Winter 2009) and in French by the magazine '' Europe'' (''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 modern ...

'' (''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