A British translator who introduced French literature to the English-speaking world and had a lengthy affair with Samuel Beckett has died at the age of 85.
Barbara Bray translated works by many of the great French writers of the twentieth century, including Marguerite Duras and Jean-Paul Sartre. As a script editor at the BBC, she championed the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, at a time when many audiences and critics found their work absurd.
It was Beckett who was to become her lifelong lover, from their introduction in 1958 until the Irish writer's death in 1989.
Barbara Bray was born Barbara Jacobs on November 24th, 1924. Her twin sister, Olive Classe, who survives her, is also a translator, and author of the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English.
Bray began her linguistic career at Girton College in Cambridge, worked at the BBC throughout the 1950s, and moved to Paris in the 1960s to be near Beckett. She also worked alongside him, helping him with translation. It was during those years that she produced her most celebrated translations, such as The Greatness of Flaubert, by Maurice Nadeau, and Antigone, by Jean Anouilh.
Following Beckett's death, she remained in Paris, working chiefly with Dear Conjunction, a bilingual theatre company that she co-founded.
In 2003, she was working on a memoir of her relationship with Beckett when she suffered a stroke. In 2009, she was forced to move to an Edinburgh nursing home, near her family.
She died on February 10th.
18 April 2010
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