Education
An identical twin (her sister Olive Classe is also a translator), she was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read English, with papers in French and Italian.
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Barbara Bray
Edit ProfileCareer
Bray became a script editor in 1953 for the British Broadcasting Corporation Third Programme, commissioning and translating European twentieth-century avant-garde writing for the network. Harold Pinter wrote some of his earliest work at Bray"s insistence, but her connection with Samuel Beckett became personal as well as professional. From about 1961, Bray lived in Paris and established a career as a translator and critic.
She translated the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert, and work by leading French speaking writers of her own time including Marguerite Duras, Amin Maalouf, Julia Kristeva, Michel Quint, Jean Anouilh, Michel Tournier, Jean Genet, Alain Bosquet, Réjean Ducharme and Philippe Sollers.
Bray collaborated with the film director Joseph Losey on the screenplay for Galileo (1975), which was an adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht. Her relationship with the married Beckett continued for the rest of his life, and Bray was one of the few people with whom the Irishman discussed his work.
She suffered a stroke at the end of 2003. In spite of her serious disability she worked until shortly before her death on her memoir of Samuel Beckett, Let Mortals Rejoice.., which she was unable to complete.
Extensive excerpts from these conversations were published in German by Berlin´s quarterly Lettre international (Es war wie ein Blitz… volume 87, Winter 2009) and in French by the magazine Europe (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The English original of these excerpts remains unpublished, but other fragments have appeared in Modernism/modernity (Barbara Bray: In Her Own Words, Volume 18, Number 4, November 2011).
Achievements
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She received the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Translation Prize in 1986. During the same decade, they collaborated on the script for a biographical film about Ibn Sa"ud, the founder of Saudi Arabia and (with Harold Pinter), she wrote an adaptation of Proust"s Remembrance of Things past
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Born
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Died
February 25, 2010 (aged 85) -
Nationality
English
Awards
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Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Translation Prize
The Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Translation Prize (formerly known as the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize through 2008) is an annual award given by the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association American Center to outstanding translations into the English language.The Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association Translation Prize (formerly known as the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize through 2008) is an annual award given by the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association American Center to outstanding translations into the English language.