Anthea won the 2009 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Saša Stanišic’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Anthea Bell, one of the UK’s most important and prolific translators from German, was on the New Year’s Honours list this year, awarded the distinction of OBE for services to literature and literary translation. This award is a reflection both of Anthea’s great skill as a translator and of her significant contribution to furthering cultural links between the English-and German-speaking worlds; but it is also a very positive sign of the growing acceptance of translation in literary culture in this country.

 

Anthea has translated from German and French for many years, with tremendous scope and range. Her first translation was for young readers, Otfried Preussler’s The Little Water-Sprite, and she recalls working on this, Preussler’s first book, with her first baby sleeping in a basket beside her – a whole string of firsts and the beginning of a prolific partnership between Anthea and modern European literature. She has continued to translate youth fiction; from French most notably Asterix, from the very beginning of its publication in English, and from German Cornelia Funke’s very popular Inkworld trilogy; but the majority of her work remains in adult fiction, translating some of the best German-language books of recent years.

 

Anthea translated W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), working with the author on that version shortly before he died, and received a string of honours for that exceptional rendering: the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (USA) and the Schlegel-Tieck award. Anthea numbers Austerlitz amongst the most enjoyable of her translations, and was also delighted to have the opportunity to translate E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (Penguin Classics, 2001), which had long been her ambition in part because of the challenges it posed for translation. Alongside youth and adult fiction comes non-fiction, too, and she has contributed a volume to the New Penguin Freud series, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and translated Stefan Aust’s weighty volume on the Baader-Meinhof gang in 1970s Germany, on which the recent film The Baader-Meinhof Complex was based.

 

Still as active as ever, Anthea’s version of Fear by Austrian author Stefan Zweig (Pushkin, 2010) is one of her most recent translations, and she won the 2009 Schlegel- Tieck Prize for the translation of another of Zweig’s novellas, Burning Secret. Her knowledge of German-language literature and its reception in the English-speaking world is encyclopaedic. Anthea is an extremely valued member of the NBG Editorial Committee, and we congratulate her on her exceptional work, and in particular on the OBE. We look forward to enjoying all her future translations.