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Barbara Bray – A Woman of Letters: An Interview with Pascale Sardin

Maija Makela

Barbara Bray (1924-2010) was a British radio producer, script writer, critic, theatre director, and, most prominently, a translator, who became one of the most significant links between the French Nouveau Roman writers and the Anglophone world. She was the preferred translator of Marguerite Duras, and was instrumental in bringing an array of works by writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julia Kristeva, Nathalie Sarraute, Amin Maalouf and many others to an English readership for the first time. In cinema, she collaborated with Franco Zeffirelli and Joseph Losey; and later in her life she established the experimental bilingual theatre company, Dear Conjunction, in Paris. Through her work as a producer and script editor for the BBC’s Third Programme, she fought to bring avant-garde theatre to a wider audience in the British public for the first time. She was an early champion of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, both of whom she regularly commissioned for the programme.

She met Samuel Beckett in 1957 when she commissioned and edited his first radio play All That Fall for the BBC. They soon became romantically involved and their affair lasted thirty years, until the end of Beckett’s life. Over this period they exchanged countless letters in which Bray, who was eighteen years his junior, became a constant sounding board for Beckett’s ideas, making countless suggestions and edits to his works in progress. Bray, who was also a widowed mother of two daughters, relocated to Paris in 1961 to be closer to Beckett, and around this time he married his long-term partner, the pianist, political activist and writer Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil.

Bray’s influence on Beckett’s life and work had been all but entirely forgotten until the publication of the third volume of his letters in 2014, in which his early letters to Bray make up a sizeable portion of the content. I first encountered Bray as an undergraduate student when, during a class on Beckett, I was shown some of Beckett’s unpublished letters, held in the archives at Trinity College Dublin. I became fascinated with their intellectual relationship, finding her handwriting on his manuscripts, reading his unpublished letters, and realising with a kind of sadness just how influential this invisible woman had been on the development of his work.

Now, in the first comprehensive biography of Bray’s life and work, writer and academic Pascale Sardin has taken Barbara Bray out of Beckett’s shadow for the first time, and exposed the full extent of her formidable career. In her book, titled Barbara Bray, A Woman of Letters: Translator, Radio Producer, Scriptwriter, Critic, and Theatre Director, Sardin explores Bray’s life and work, demonstrating just how significant she was in the cultural exchange between experimental writing, theatre and cinema in France and England, and how much of an impact she had in introducing avant-garde work to a much wider audience.

I spoke with Pascale over zoom in November 2024 to discuss the life and work of this fascinating woman, as well as the role of literary translation more generally and the importance of archiving the work by women like Bray who might otherwise remain under the radar forever.

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MAIJA MAKELA
Could you start by telling me how you first came to discover Barbara Bray, and how you initially became interested in her work?

PASCALE SARDIN
Sure. Well, I’m a Beckett scholar. I did my PhD 30 years ago on Beckett and his self-translating process. I’m in English Studies in France and I was really interested in Beckett, in theatre, and the Nouveau Roman; anything that happened from the 1950s onwards in France in the theatre scene, and so Beckett was a big name, of course. I’ve been working in Beckett Studies on a regular basis ever since, and I also specialise in translation studies as well as having an interest in feminist and gender studies that goes back 20 years.

I read a lot of books that were published in the late 90s, by Luise von Flotow, for instance, and Sherry Simon’s Gender in Translation, and they all discussed the fact that we need to put forward female translators. It’s something that’s very important in the history of translation, putting forward these women that, up to very recently, were rather invisible. Even the work that translators do in general, be they male or female, is little known to the general public.

I knew Barbara Bray by name because I’d read Marguerite Duras — a very important writer for feminist studies in France — and I knew she’d translated The Lover, her big success bestseller that was published in France in 1984.

I talk about this in the book, but what happened is that in the late 2010s, Cambridge University Press published a selection of Beckett’s letters. I read all four volumes, but in the third volume and the fourth volumes, which I read in 2014 and 2016, Barbara Bray becomes really present; she is really the revelation.

I’d heard about Barbara Bray’s relationship with Beckett through James Knowlson’s biography and other biographies that have been written, but in the Knowlson biography she just gets three pages, and anyway, when I was writing my PhD, I wasn’t interested in Beckett’s personal life, really. What was of interest to me was that he was living in France, and wanted to get published in French, which explains part of his decision to self-translate in the first place. Barbara Bray’s name never appears next to his in his published work, so I had no real reason to ever investigate. When the letters were published, I re-read my dissertation on his self-translating process through the lens of the newly published letters, which I hadn’t had access to when I was doing my PhD. It made me realise just how important Barbara Bray was in Beckett’s self-translating process, his writing process, and his intellectual life in general, from the late 1950s to his death.

I presented on this in Dublin, in 2016 for a Beckett Studies conference called DRAFF, which was in English and French, and one of the rare conferences where you can actually meet French scholars and Anglophone scholars, when there’s often not much exchange. I remember saying, ‘well, there’s really something to be done on Barbara Bray, not just in relation to Beckett, but her own work is worth looking into.’ I mean, she’s the one who translated Margaret Duras’s Lover. In a way she’s world famous for that, even though no one knows her.

I remember saying that and thinking, ‘oh, someone’s going to do that.’ And then two years later, I decided to start on the research.

MM
Could you speak a little about Bray’s translations, and their impact more broadly on anglophone literature? I also first came to her through the Beckett letters, so I was initially interested, from a feminist perspective, in how her co-translations with him destabilised this kind of ‘lone male genius’ image we often have. But I’m also interested in just how influential her work has been on experimental writing more generally that was happening from the 60s onwards?

PS
Well, yes, she really introduced a lot of important writers from the experimental scene, especially in theatre. She translated [Robert] Pinget especially for British radio. With Donald McWhinnie [director and producer for the BBC], she was instrumental. She was really proactive in actually getting the radio to even broadcast the likes of Pinget, Beckett and [Eugène] Ionesco, and other important playwrights that really changed the way we do theatre, even today.

I think it really started at the BBC when she was script editor for the drama department, and then when she came to Paris in 1961, she was very close to Beckett, but she was also close to Ionesco and Robert Pinget, to all these people, and she knew Marguerite Duras, Jean Vilar, Alain Robbe-Grillet, etc. She interviewed them for the Observer, writing pieces on them and on French culture and education more generally. So she was really important in the transfer of French thought into Britain at the time.

She was also commissioned to translate books for the American market in the 70s and 80s, a lot. She worked for Knopf, and for André Schiffrin – she did a lot for Pantheon Books. I’m also thinking of all the historians like Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie that she translated in the 70s and 80s, as well as a lot of Jean d’Ormesson, who was a very important historian and thinker. So she really contributed to the exchange of French and Francophone thought into Anglophone culture.

Including theatre, historians and novelists, I listed 80 books that were published in her translation, and that’s not counting all the plays that she translated that were performed but never published, plus all the texts that she translated for British radio throughout the years. Her translations made these texts available to all these important English and American playwrights later on, for instance, who would go on to be inspired by Duras and inspired by Pinget and so on.

MM
Absolutely, I’m also thinking about how unimaginable it seems today that a huge state institution like the BBC would have such an active commitment to the experimental—that a big mainstream cultural institution would even be broadcasting these kinds of writers. It seems vaguely utopian to me. I’m wondering, if you could speak to Bray’s influence here, and on her attitudes towards making writing that often gets dismissed as ‘difficult’ or ‘elitist’ more accessible and popular to wider audiences?

PS
It’s an excellent question, I think Bray didn’t believe that Duras was difficult, and that her work shouldn’t be considered elitist. She really wanted to make Duras and Pinget and all these playwrights who are ‘difficult’ to an extent, accessible. You can see this in her translations in the way sometimes, for instance, in L’Amant [The Lover], she will insert some little indications to explain an obscure cultural reference.

There are no translator’s notes in her translation, but she made it easier for the Anglophone reader to understand the context, which is, as you know, Indochina, so the country that was colonised by France at the time—it’s something that is probably very distant still for us today, I mean, for French speakers, but even more so for foreign speakers.

You know, Duras has this very difficult kind of writing, and so sometimes Bray would simplify and make it more fluid, to make it easier to read, but sometimes she would also resist the modifications or revisions that the editors would ask for. So she wanted to keep it ‘difficult’ but also easier to read. It really was an exercise in trying to find the right balance.

In the book, I quote an article that she wrote, I think for the Observer, in the 1960s, where she says that she doesn’t see a difference between high art and low art. For her, there’s no difference, and she actually read a lot of pulp fiction too, she read thrillers, and was often lending Beckett the thrillers that she loved. She was the one who introduced Léo Malet, the inventor of Nestor Burma, to an English-language readership for the first time, and he’s a hugely popular figure.

So it’s dark, a roman noir. And she’s the one who did that. In a way, she treated both Duras and Léo Malet the same, they were as important to her, they were on the same level.

MM
That’s so interesting, I didn’t know that. Because until now, Bray has almost always been remembered as a footnote to Beckett, if at all, I’m resistant to making Beckett the focus of conversation! But I wanted to ask you a little bit more about her their work together. I came across one of your papers on the idea of them as ‘translaborators’, which I found really interesting, because I often think of translation itself as already a form of collaboration, but then the extra collaborative back and forth between her and Beckett adds a new dimension. What was her influence on Beckett’s self-translation process? I’m also interested in less quantifiable forms of influence, as can be seen in the letters, when he would constantly solicit her edits and suggestions on works in progress, but the letters also reveal the way in which she was a constant, and yet invisible, source of emotional support, which undoubtedly has an impact on the way works are produced too, but is much less easy to define.

PS
The book isn’t really about that, but I do touch on Beckett, of course, because she was working with him. What you say is actually reflected in the interviews that she gave to Marek Kedzierski towards the end of her life. She died in 2010 and just a few years before that, they really became very close friends. Marek was very good to her, and he interviewed her before she died. In their interview, she says that her intellectual relationship [with Beckett] was constant, that she would read everything he was doing, that she would suggest translations, and this is echoed in the letters, as you said, the published and unpublished ones.

From what you can see in the letters, there are many examples; like when he was writing Ghost Trio, they were writing nearly every day, and he was writing about the progress—or the non-progress—of the little piece, and you can see that writing to her about this is enabling, it’s helping him in the creative process.

So she was instrumental in that way. We don’t have her answers because he didn’t keep his letters, which is really sad, but we know that there was this exchange and a constant dialogism going on between them—so that’s the ‘lab’ I’m talking about.

Of course, it’s the same thing with translation. Like with Company, for instance, we know that she translated it. Same thing for The Lost Ones, because at one point he says, ‘oh, I translated this sentence pretty much as you did.’ He was saying that to Bray, meaning that she had done her version and that now he was maybe, you know, plundering her version, but we can’t know exactly for sure because he didn’t keep her letters.

What we do know, from some of the manuscripts that we have in Trinity [College, Dublin], you can see Barbara Bray’s handwriting on the manuscripts. What I did was really just try and reveal what was in the unpublished letters. Again, there’s not so much of that in the book because there’s the problem of permission to quote from the unpublished Beckett letters that I didn’t want to ask for the rights for, so I paraphrase them when I need to. But again, I wanted to focus really on what was not known at all, such as her work with cinema, her work with the newspapers.

MM
Yes, I did want to ask you about her work in the cinema, I never realised that she worked closely with Franco Zeffirelli for instance.

PS
Yes, she was very, very active in cinema in the 70s and 80s, and I think it was very important for her because it made much more money come in than what she was making through translation or through other writing. She helped Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey write scripts, and in television or cinema, the amounts of money that are made are just huge compared to what you can make in publishing. If you’re not a bestseller, of course.

And so she was introduced to Losey through Harold Pinter. She’d helped Pinter at the BBC, and she was a really good letter writer, she would write a lot and keep contact with people like that. She was also living in Paris, which meant that people from England who went through Paris would visit her—there are lots of letters where she says, ‘oh, I’m staying in Paris for the summer, but there are all these people coming over,’ so she was always seeing people from the literary scene. Really she was sort of an intellectual hub.

So when Pinter introduced her to Losey, they didn’t fall in love, but I think they liked each other a lot. There’s a letter by Pinter to Losey saying that when they first met in the early 1970s, around the postscript, that Bray was really fascinated by Losey and that she really liked him. Of course, there were very difficult moments between the two because, as I found in Joseph Losey’s biography, he was, at the end of his life, a bit of a drunk, really. He would often be drunk on shoots. He adapted Galileo by Brecht and Bray wrote the script, and she was invited for two weeks to the London shoot and he was just abominable, he was terrible. And again when they were in Cannes for the festival, because he was drinking, it was similar. So they had a difficult relationship, but also a very productive one, I think.

That lasted until the early 1980s, but then you know, in cinema, there are lots of projects and few films that are actually made, which was the problem with many of the films that she did. She worked on a lot of scripts for years and sometimes they wouldn’t come through.

MM
Yes, I think she wrote a script for À la recherche du temps perdu that never got made?

PS
Well, Pinter wrote that and she collaborated with him on it. That’s how she met Joseph Losey. I talk about that in the book, and there are some pieces out there about it, because Joseph Losey was so famous, a lot of people have worked on his archive, but no one had worked on Barbara Bray really. You know, she is mentioned in his biography. She is mentioned in Harold Pinter’s biography, when they discuss the writing of the film, but they only say, ‘well, they were using an expert, blah, blah, blah.’ But then I really looked into the archive and saw what she did – and she did a lot.

Eventually, she became very unhappy with Pinter because when he published the text with Grove Press in 1977, he first said that he would share royalties evenly with Losey and her, but in the end, instead of getting a third of the royalties, she only got a sixth of them. She was really disappointed as she was in dire need of money. She was a difficult person sometimes, but she was very robust.

MM
I wanted to ask you about the process of researching the book. Because no one has worked on her in any real depth before, when I was looking into her as a student I felt like I was on a treasure hunt, trying to find information. How did you go about finding things? Did you come up against many problems?

PS
It was fascinating. I completely agree with you, I felt like a detective for a long time. I first got the idea in 2016 and decided to start on it in 2018. First I was actually looking for what had been written on her, I did a bibliography of her translations through online catalogues; it is rather easy to do, even though you miss things because sometimes they’re not at the library or they’re not on the Library of Congress website for whatever reason. I decided to go to the BBC Written Archives, there are no oral archives for people who aren’t working for the media, but you do have access to the written archives, but then they closed for refurbishment. So when I could, I went in 2019 but then during COVID going to archives was impossible.

When I started off with the book, I contacted her daughters, Francesca and Julia Bray. I wanted to tell them that I was working on this because even though I wanted to look at the professional life, I was going to have to talk about the personal life. Even though James Knowlson and other biographers had mentioned the affair [with Beckett], I knew that Bray wanted to remain private during her lifetime, so there was an ethical issue I wanted to clear before starting. Francesca answered very quickly and said, ‘Great. I’ve been waiting for ages for someone like you to write to me about this—and yes, please do.’ I sent her the book proposal so that she could see what I was planning to do, and wanted to meet with her, but then Covid hit, so I finally went to visit her only in September 2021 when borders reopened. I met Francesca and her husband, and I stayed for two days in Edinburgh where they live and where Barbara died. She gave me access to Barbara’s personal archive, which had been salvaged from her very small Paris apartment. So I had access to that, as well as to what I found in the BBC. I also visited the British Film Institute, and of course there was a lot of material in publishers’ archives, such as the John Calder archives. I went to a lot of places, each time I had to find funding, which is why it took a long time.

What’s really interesting about archives is that sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to find. In February 2023 I went to Columbia, New York because the papers of Barney Rosset [who was head of Grove Press] are there, and while looking into the catalogue, I saw that they also had Georges Borchardt, the literary agent’s archive, as well as the archive of André Schiffrin, the head of Pantheon Books and the one who published The Lover, and I found a lot of material in his archive that went into a chapter on The Lover in the book.

MM
That’s so exciting, I love when unexpected things appear like that

PS
You know, there are basically no translator’s archives, hardly any. There’s just one in England and one in Indiana, but there’s no material relating to Bray in there. You have to look elsewhere. Working on this book made me think we should start translators’ archives, so now I’m working on a big project dealing with that. I have a colleague who translated Italian to French, and she’s really interested in archives and female translators as well, and so I’m bringing the first three boxes of materials next week to the library in Bordeaux. Hopefully we’ll get some money to make this project more visible, and it will become an archive of female translators that people can donate their archives to.

MM
In recent years I’ve been seeing more efforts to bring greater recognition to work that translators do, especially with Kate Briggs’ book This Little Art, and the work that publishers like Fitzcarraldo are doing generally, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on, as well as making the archive, how to give more exposure to translators or how to bring translation more prominently into the wider literary conversation?

PS
Yes, one way is through the internet, obviously. One of the ideas of the translation archive project is to not only build these archives in libraries, but also to make the documents in the archives accessible to the public—so scanning them, and making them digitally accessible for free.

Another thing is working with contemporary translators and interviewing them and then putting the interviews online etc. I mean, this already exists to an extent, but maybe like creating a sort of network between different languages because, you know, I do French and English, but, of course there are so many people out there who translate so many other languages and I think it would be interesting to have this sort of corpus of interviews. Translators are often agents in the literary field that are very proactive; they work as scouts, they present new authors to publishers, and because they can read multiple languages, they have access to other cultures, and become really important cultural mediators.

Another thing would be to have presentations of translator’s work in bookshops, alongside the original writers, really showing their collaboration and how a translation exists and how it’s made, making it accessible and visible to the public as well.

MM
Absolutely. And is there anything else you’d like to discuss about Bray or the book itself?

PS
I think what’s really important to me is that this is not just a book about a translator, that’s why it’s called ‘A Woman of Letters’, it’s about someone who really was so important in the creation of a mediation between cultures, and she’s completely invisible. She was a brilliant, proactive translator, but she was much more as well, and I think that’s also why I insisted that the title of the book had the list of all her activities in the literary and media fields. It really was great to research Bray for so many years, but I think still there’s still a lot to do. There are things I haven’t found, there’s lots more to investigate.

Working in the archives, I also found that there are lots of other women out there who need to be researched, which is one of the reasons why I want to do this project on female translators’ archives. With Bray, you can see how she mingles the professional and the personal all the time, you know, how she addresses her friends who are colleagues at the same time, so navigating this kind of thin line between private and public was sometimes a bit difficult, but also quite fascinating.

MM
I think that’s a really important point, which I thought about a lot when reading Beckett’s letters to her. Within academia we’re encouraged to stay completely impersonal, but that becomes difficult when so much work by women is being done in the shadows. Obviously feminist scholars have done a lot to rethink this, but often it’s not possible to recognise that work without delving into the private. I’m wondering how to objectively treat the mingling between personal and intellectual when so often personal relationships are inextricable from the work they create?

PS
It’s really good that you should underline this because it’s really one of the great difficulties. For instance, for me as a scholar and also a mother with children myself, I think, how do I react to this woman who loved her children, but who was so dedicated to this man that everything else in her life was secondary? And she really devoted her life to him—she said that he was her work or piece of art, that she was completely devoted to him and that everything else was in the background. I mean, how do you, as a feminist scholar, deal with that? It has to have an impact on how you write.

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