Published: 30 October 2018
Last updated: 5 March 2024
THE WORKS OF AUSTRIAN pre-war novelist Stefan Zweig have never lost popularity in many of the 40 languages in which they were translated in the author’s lifetime but his reputation in Britain and America fell into abeyance until recently.
New translations by Anthea Bell of Zweig’s spare and haunting prose have reintroduced a giant of German-language literature, and an exemplar of the learning and ethical humanism of Central European Jewry, to readers in the English-speaking world.
Bell was not Jewish, and (though she admired the country’s pluralistic ethos) she never visited Israel. Yet she occupies a significant place in Jewish literature. The reason is simply that she was one of the great translators of the 20th and 21st centuries.
She died last week at the age of 82 after a long illness. A bit like George Eliot, an author she revered, my mother was a philo-Semite who contributed to public understanding of modern Jewish culture and history.
Newspaper obituaries have stressed Bell’s work in transforming the Asterix books into small masterworks of English comic fiction. Perhaps less well-known is that Rene Goscinny, the co-creator (with the artist Albert Uderzo) of the indomitable Gauls, was part of the Jewish diaspora.
FULL STORY Found in translation: My mother’s role in Jewish culture (Jewish Chronicle)
READ MORE Anthea Bell obituary (Guardian)
