Barbara Bray (née Jacobs; 24 November 1924 – 25 February 2010) was an English translator and critic.

Early life

Bray was born in Maida Vale,

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

; her father had Belgian and Jewish origins. An identical twin (her sister Olive Classe was also a translator), she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, 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. In 1958, Bray's husband died in an accident in Cyprus.

Career

Bray became a script editor in 1953 for the BBC Third Programme, 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 List of Nobel laureates in Literature, Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramat ...

wrote some of his earliest work at Bray's insistence. From 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. Being more renowned than either Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balz ...

, 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, Julia Kristeva, Michel Quint,

Jean Anouilh Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh (; ; 23 June 1910 – 3 October 1987) was a French dramatist and screenwriter whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1944 play ...

, Michel Tournier, Jean Genet, Alain Bosquet, Réjean Ducharme, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Philippe Sollers. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1986. Bray collaborated with the film director

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

on the screenplay for ''

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), commonly referred to as Galileo Galilei ( , , ) or mononymously as Galileo, was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a poly ...

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

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

. During the same decade, they collaborated on the script for a biographical film about Ibn Sa'ud, the founder of Saudi Arabia and (with

), she wrote an adaptation of Proust's '' Remembrance of Things Past''. Bray also worked extensively with

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...

, 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. In spite of her serious disability she worked until shortly before her death on her memoir of Beckett, ''Let Mortals Rejoice...,'' which she was unable to complete. Her reflections on 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 continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

'' (''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'' (''Barbara Bray: In Her Own Words'', Volume 18, Number 4, November 2011). A biography by the French Beckett and translation scholar Pascale Sardin,
Barbara Bray, A Woman of Letters: Translator, Radio Producer, Scriptwriter, Critic, and Theatre Director
'(Routledge) came out in 2024.

Selected bibliography

Translations

* Céleste Albaret and Georges Belmont: ''Monsieur Proust'' *

: ''Antigone'' * Tahar Ben Jelloun: ''French Hospitality'' * Alain Bosquet: ''A Russian Mother'' * Maryse Condé: ''Segu'' * Réjean Ducharme: ''The Swallower Swallowed'' *

** ''The Lover'' ** ''The War'' ** ''The Malady of Death'' ** ''Blue Eyes Black Hair'' ** ''Practicalities'' ** ''Summer Rain'' ** ''India Song'' ** ''The Sailor from Gibraltar'' ** ''L'Amante Anglaise'' ** ''Yann Andrea Steiner'' ** ''The Man Sitting in the Corridor'' * '' Flaubert—

Sand Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided mineral particles. Sand has various compositions but is usually defined by its grain size. Sand grains are smaller than gravel and coarser than silt. Sand can also refer to a textural ...

: The Correspondence'' ranslated with Francis Steegmuller">Francis_Steegmuller.html" ;"title="ranslated with Francis Steegmuller">ranslated with Francis Steegmuller* Jean Genet: ''Prisoner of Love'' * Jean Giono: ''The Man Who Planted Trees'' * Amin Maalouf ** ''In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong'' ** ''Balthasar's Odyssey'' * Ismail Kadare ** ''The Palace of Dreams'' rom the French translation by Jusuf Vrioni">Jusuf_Vrioni.html" ;"title="rom the French translation by Jusuf Vrioni">rom the French translation by Jusuf Vrioni** ''The Concert'' [from the French translation by Jusuf Vrioni] * Julia Kristeva ** ''The Samurai'' ** ''The Old Man and the Wolves'' * J. M. G. Le Clézio: ''Terra Amata'' * Jean d'Ormesson: '' The Glory of the Empire: A Novel, a History'' * Robert Pinget ** ''Clope'' ** ''Dead Letter'' * Michel Quint: ''In Our Strange Gardens'' * Élisabeth Roudinesco: ''Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought'' * Simone Schwarz-Bart ** ''The Bridge of Beyond'' ** ''Between Two Worlds'' * Philippe Sollers: ''Women'' * Michel Tournier: ''The Ogre'' * Violet Trefusis: ''Broderie Anglaise''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bray, Barbara 1924 births 2010 deaths 20th-century English translators 20th-century English women writers Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge English identical twins English twins People from Maida Vale English critics French–English translators English women non-fiction writers Literary translators English people of Belgian descent People educated at Preston Manor County Grammar School