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Anthea Bell, “Asterix” Translator, Dead at 82

By | October 18th, 2018
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Deutsche Welle reports Anthea Bell, one of the translators who worked to bring the French “Asterix” comics to the English market, died this morning, aged 82.

Bell was born in Suffolk, England, on May 10, 1936. She attended boarding school in Bournemouth, and then studied English at Somerville College in Oxford. She specialized in translating children’s literature, re-translating Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish fairy tales for publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons, as well as German authors Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy, and Kerstin Gier’s Ruby Red Trilogy. She also translated adult novels, and books on art history, and musicology, including Władysław Szpilman’s memoir The Pianist.

She translated the “Asterix” series into English with Derek Hockridge until his death in 2013. Bell and Hockridge were widely praised for ensuring the comic’s sense of humor was not lost in translation, for example, they changed the name of the druid who brews the potion that gives Asterix and Obelix their powers from Panoramix to Getafix. Bell continued to translate the series until she became too ill and retired in 2016, and was succeeded by Adriana Hunter on the 37th installment, 2017’s “Asterix and the Chariot Race.”

For her work, Bell was honored as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2010, and with an Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2015. Award-winning translator Daniel Hahn told The Guardian, she “was an elegant stylist, but more than that, a startlingly versatile one. I first learned her name, as so many people did, because she wrote all those impossible Asterix jokes I loved so much; but to other people she was Sebald, or perhaps Kafka – or sometimes Freud. She was Cornelia Funke or Erich Kästner for children, Saša Stanišić and Stefan Zweig for adults, and so many others besides. Literature struggles to thrive without translation. Today I can’t help wondering how we readers and writers ever could have managed without Anthea Bell.”

Bell was married to publisher and author Antony Kamm from 1957 to 1973. She is survived by their two sons, Richard and Oliver Kamm, and by her brother, UNICEF UK ambassador Martin Bell.


//TAGS | obit

Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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