Anthea Bell
(1936 - 2018) Translator
Anthea Bell OBE (1936 – 2018) was an English translator of literary works widely hailed as practising “the art of translator at its best”.
Anthea Bell was born in Suffolk on 10 May 1936. She later attributed the lateral-thinking abilities essential to her work as a translator to her father Adrian Bell, the first Times cryptic crossword setter. After boarding school in Bournemouth, Bell read English at Somerville College, Oxford (matric. 1954). She was married to the publisher and writer Antony Kamm from 1957 to 1973, and the couple had two sons, Richard and Oliver.
Anthea Bell’s career as a translator began at the end of the 1950s when the German publisher Klaus Flugge asked 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.
Bell specialised in translating children’s literature, and is particularly famous for her translations of the Asterix books, which The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation praised for displaying “the art of the translator at its best”. Bell first began translating Asterix in 1969, coming up with some of the series’ best jokes and puns. In her version, Obelix’s small dog Idéfix became Dogmatix, and the druid Panoramix became Getafix.
In addition to her translations of children’s literature, Bell also translated into English many adult novels, including W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Kafka’s The Castle and Władysław Szpilman’s memoir The Pianist. Her translations of Zweig and Sebald are said to have transformed both those writers’ reputation among anglophone readers. Of Sebald, Will Self commented that, “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.”
Self went on to say that he had read Bell’s translations all his life, and that when he convened a translators’ symposium to discuss the “vexed problem” of translating Kafka, Bell shone. “Particularly inspiring was her analysis of his humour as a writer – incomprehensible to English readers until mediated by this very fine and very great mind,” he said. “In an era when Britain seems once more to be winding itself yet tighter into its immemorial and monoglot garb, we’d do well to remember the huge importance of literary translation as a vector for our understanding of – and empathy with – other peoples.”
The winner of a host of literary awards, Bell was also awarded Germany’s Verdienstkreuz (Cross of Merit) in 2015, and was appointed OBE in 2010. She believed that translations should “read as if they were not only written but also thought in English”, telling a conference in 2004: “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.”
Did you know? Bell’s translation of ETA Hoffmann 1819 book The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr…, the supposed autobiography of a poetically pretentious tomcat which gets swapped with the biography of a composer, helped rebuild Hoffmann’s reputation?