Anthea Bell, Translator of Sebald, Kafka, and Asterix, Has Died at 82
She Was One of our Greatest English Translators
Anthea Bell, beloved English translator of W. G. Sebald, Stefan Zweig, Cornelia Funke, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the Asterix comics, among others, died this morning at the age of 82. She translated primarily French and German, but also taught herself Danish to re-translate Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales.
As Will Self told The Guardian, “it’s doubtful that the eminence of WG Sebald would be quite so great in the English reading world were it not for Anthea Bell’s magnificent translations of his works. Indeed, given quite how important a translator is—often effectively rewriting the original—it might be better to speak of a hybrid creature: ‘Bellbald,’ perhaps.”
“It was a great privilege,” Bell said of her turn as Bellbald, “and fascinating because his own English was so good that he could have written in it himself. It was very, very dense work. He wouldn’t use email and said he’d never unwrapped the computer in his office. I would draft out a passage and send it to him and he’d send it back while I did the next one, so we were working together on it all the way through.”
“All my professional life, I have felt that translators are in the business of spinning an illusion: the illusion is that the reader is reading not a translation but the real thing,” Bell said in a 2013 interview. Almost no one pulled off that trick as well as she did. She will be missed.
