Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924

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3/7/2010
Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

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Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award to D. A. Powell

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Robert McChesney and John Nichols the history and necessity of government subsides for US journalism

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12/19/2009
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Robert Jensen: Of Turkeys and Holocausts

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10/21/2009
Four Canadians tortured in the name of fighting Terror, Kerry Pither wins Ottawa Book Award for Dark Days

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The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009

3/7/2010 Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

Barbara Bray, who has died aged 85, was one of the most significant links 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 and Alain Robbe-Grillet. As a young and influential script editor at the BBC in the 1950s, she fostered the work of many writers including Harold Pinter and, perhaps most importantly, Samuel Beckett, who became her personal and intellectual partner for more than 30 years. - from the obituary for Barbara Bray published in theGuardian by Andrew Todd.

Barbara Bray, apart from introducing Harold Pinter to Samuel Beckett, was also the BBC radio script editor who found and commissioned both men when they began their careers in radio drama, Beckett with All That Fall in January 1957 and Pinter with A Slight Ache in 1959. Barbara Bray recalls: "the (BBC) Third Programme asked Sam to write them a radio play and though he never worked to commissions he said he would if he could. All That Fall aroused such interest among the general public and among writers that we thought it would be a good idea to introduce the public to Beckett's prose works. While we waited for him to write Embers we selected things from his works and there happened to be an invasion of Irish actors in the London theatre then. So we got people like Pat Magee and Jack McGowran to read bits from the so-called trilogy." What then was the original reaction of the general public to the works of these two men both destined to become Nobel Prize winners? Barbara Bray explains: "Pinter's first radio plays were met with remarks concerning the ravings of a lunatic, and similar things were said concerning Samuel Beckett readings, but after the second or third readings people began to get intrigued and began to get an ear for it as you do with music. New music is at first strange to you, then you listen to it a few times and you begin to get the hang of it. We did all Harold's radio plays on the Third Programme. Harold would write many of his plays first for radio, then they would become television plays and then stage plays. The tide was turning when authors realized that if they were going to distinguish themselves, it was going to be as much with their words as with their action." Barbara Bray was one of the first producers to realize that such a change was taking place as, in the wake of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger (1956), the nature of the relationship between author and public was dramatically being transformed. She remembers: "the focus of drama switched back to the classical Shakespeare period when the word was more important than the action or at least as important as the action and where the stress was largely on the function of words in drama." - from When Harry Met Sam by Declan McCavana.

Barbara Bray, editor and translator and four time winner of the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, was born November 24, 1924 and died February 25, 2010.

The Sailor From Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras
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A Russian Mother
Alain Bosquet
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The Ogre
Michel Tournier
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