Anthea Bell
Anthea Bell (10 May 1936 – 18 October 2018) was an English translator of literary works, including children's literature, from French, German and Danish. These include "The Castle" by Franz Kafka "Austerlitz" by W. G. Sebald, the "Inkworld" trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the French "Asterix" comics along with co-translator Derek Hockridge. Biography. Bell was born in Suffolk on 10 May 1936. According to her own accounts, she picked up lateral thinking abilities essential in a translator from her father Adrian Bell, Suffolk author and the first "Times" cryptic crossword setter. Her mother, Marjorie Bell (née Gibson ), was a home maker. The couple's son, Bell's brother, Martin, is a former BBC correspondent who was an independent Member of Parliament for one parliamentary term. After attending a boarding school in Bournemouth, she read English at Somerville College, Oxford. She was married to the publisher and writer Antony Kamm from 1957 to 1973; the couple had two sons, Richard and Oliver. Oliver Kamm is a leader writer for "The Times". After her sons left home, she lived and worked in Cambridge. She died on 18 October 2018, aged 82. Works. Anthea Bell's career as a translator  began at the end of the 1950s when the German publisher Klaus Flugge asked Antony Kamm if he knew anyone able to translate "Der kleine Wassermann", a book for children by Otfried Preussler. Kamm recommended his wife; Bell's English version entitled "The Little Water Sprite" was published in 1960. Eventually, she translated Preussler's entire works. Over the decades, she translated numerous Franco-Belgian comics of the "bande dessinée" genre into English, including "Asterix" – for which her new puns were praised for keeping the original French spirit intact. Peter Hunt, now Professor Emeritus in Children's Literature at Cardiff  University, has written of her "ingenious translations" of the French originals which "in a way display the art of the translator at its best". Other comic books she has translated include "Le Petit Nicolas", "Lieutenant Blueberry", and "Iznogoud". She specialised in translating children's literature, and re-translated Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales from Danish for the publishing house of G. P. Putnam's Sons. She also translated the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the Ruby Red Trilogy by Kerstin Gier. Other work includes "The Princess and the Captain" (2006), translated from "La Princetta et le Capitaine" by Anne -Laure Bondoux. Bell also translated into English many adult novels, as well as some books on art history, and musicology. She has translated W. G. Sebald's "Austerlitz" (plus other works by Sebald), and Władysław Szpilman's memoir "The Pianist" (translated, at the author's request, from the German version). Her translations of works by Stefan Zweig have been said to have helped restore his reputation among anglophone readers, and that of E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr" (originally "Lebensansichten des Katers Murr") has had a positive effect on Hoffman's profile as  well. In addition, Penguin Classics published Bell's new translation of Sigmund Freud's "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" in 2003. She contributed an essay titled "Translation: Walking the Tightrope of Illusion" to a 2006 book, "The Translator as Writer", in which she explained her preference for 'invisible' translation whereby she creates the illusion that readers are not reading a translation "but the real thing". Bell was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 New Year Honours for services to literature and literary translations. Bell received the German Federal Republic's Cross of Merit  in 2015. Illness and death. In a December 2017 newspaper column, Bell's son Oliver Kamm revealed his mother had entered a nursing home due to illness a year earlier, and "her great mind has now departed". As a result of her forced retirement, the 37th book in the Asterix series, "Asterix and the Chariot Race" (published in October 2017), was translated by Adriana Hunter. The end of the book has a message of thanks from the publishers to Bell for "her wonderful translation work on Asterix over the years". Bell died on 18 October 2018 at the age of  82. Notable awards. Mildred L. Batchelder Award. The Mildred L. Batchelder Award is unusual in that it is given to a "publisher" yet it explicitly references a given work, its translator and its author. Its intent is to encourage the translation of children's works into English in order ""to eliminate barriers to understanding between people of different cultures, races, nations, and languages"." Anthea Bell, translating from German, French and Danish, has been mentioned for more works than any other individual or organisation (including publishers) in the history of the award: