Barbara Bray, a champion of European literature has died at age 85. She was an important link between British and French literature in the 20th century. She was the principal translator and an early champion of Marguerite Duras, who was her close friend, and also translated the work of Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh. She was a personal friend and confidant to Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright for more than 30 years.
Barbara Bray was an identical twin, born into a lower middle class family in west London and raised in Harrow. She went to Girton College, Cambridge and took a first in English. She married Australian-born John Bray after they both graduated. She spent three years with him teaching English in Cairo before returning to London where she got a job as script editor in the drama department of the new BBC Third Programme.
She worked with Val Gielgud, Donald McWhinnie and John Morris where she was at the spearhead of a risky enterprise to introduce the postwar British public to avant-garde 20th-century drama.
Strikingly beautiful, opinionated and headstrong, Bray had run the course of her career at the BBC by 1961. At the age of 36, she moved to Paris with her daughters, partly to be closer to Beckett (who was 55) and partly to pursue a freelance career as a translator and critic.
Bray and Beckett met in 1956, during the production of his radio play All That Fall. She helped him then with Embers and they became more closely involved, however, Bray was in a relationship with McWhinnie after her estranged husband died and she was a single mother with two young daughters.
Later, she revealed it to 30 seconds to fall in love with Beckett, but she kept her distance and it was he who made the first moves in this important relationship which lasted until Beckett died.
He sent her his works in progress and worked with her and used her as a sounding board and translator. She was the only person with whom he shared his work in progress. His 713 letters to her are kept at Trinity College Dublin (he destroyed all personal correspondence he received).
Besides writing for the Observer and appearing regularly on the BBC programme The Critics, she translated almost all of Duras’s work; Anouilh’s Antigone; Pinget’s Clope; Genet’s Prisoner of Love; Michel Tournier’s The Ogre; works by Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Michel Quint, Frédéric Richaud and Amin Maalouf; Flaubert’s correspondence with George Sand; and Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography of Jacques Lacan. She won the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation four times.
A stroke in 2003 limited her activity, and left her using a wheelchair. She remained determinedly independent in a studio flat in the Rue Séguier, proudly reciting Shakespeare, Donne and the King James Bible from memory. After a continued decline in her health, she moved last December to Edinburgh to a nursing home near her daughter Francesca’s house.
Rational and atheist to the last, Bray eschewed a funeral and donated her body to science. She is survived by Francesca and her other daughter, Julia, and her sister, Olive. Barbara Bray, editor and translator, born 24 November 1924; died 25 February 2010
