Barbara Bray obituary
Translator, critic, script editor and partner to Samuel Beckett
Andrew Todd
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 4 March 2010 18.01 GMT

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.

An identical twin, she was born Barbara Jacobs into a lower-middle-
class family in Maida Hill, west London, and raised in Harrow. She
attended Preston Manor county grammar school, in Brent, and went to
Girton College, Cambridge, where she took a first in English. She
married John Bray, an Australian-born RAF pilot, after they both
graduated from Cambridge. She spent three years with him teaching
English in Cairo and Alexandria before returning to London and landing
a job, in 1953, as script editor in the drama department of the new
BBC Third Programme, one of a handful of women then in positions of
responsibility there.

Working under Val Gielgud, Donald McWhinnie and John Morris, she was
at the spearhead of a risky enterprise to introduce the postwar
British public to avant-garde 20th-century drama. She was involved in
recommending, commissioning and translating work by Duras, Robert
Pinget, Ugo Betti and Luigi Pirandello. Bray supported Pinter in
particular, assuring him a steady flow of commissions after the
failure of his London theatre debut, The Birthday Party. Pinter wrote
A Slight Ache, A Night Out and The Dwarfs initially as radio
commissions for her, and remained grateful to her throughout his life
for this crucial early support.

Bray met Beckett in 1956 during the production of his radio play All
That Fall, and they became more closely involved when she helped him
with Embers, his second BBC commission, in 1959. By then Bray was in a
relationship with McWhinnie, her estranged husband having died in an
accident in Cyprus, leaving her in sole charge of their two young
daughters.

She said later that it took 30 seconds to fall in love with Beckett.
Despite being drawn by his graceful, generous manner and his voice,
which she described as sounding like the sea, she nonetheless kept her
distance, and it was he who made the first moves in what was to become
a relationship of central importance for both of them.

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. 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.

In 1975 she collaborated with Joseph Losey on the later abandoned
screenplay of a film about the life of Ibn Sa'ud, the founder of Saudi
Arabia. The material she generated was refashioned into a biography,
co-written with Michael Darlow, which will be published later this
year. With Losey and Pinter, she undertook the immense task of
adapting Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu for the cinema
(Beckett also lent a guiding hand). The film was never made, but their
text was published (under Pinter's principal authorship) as The Proust
Screenplay in 1978.

Her relationship with Beckett lasted for the rest of his life. He sent
her work in progress by mail (sometimes twice a day, even if they were
meeting anyway) and worked with her, by her own account, as a sounding-
board, as a direct help with translation (he translated his own work
between French and English), and as a gadfly who would encourage him
to complete projects.

She was the only person with whom he regularly shared his work in
progress and one of very few with whom he discussed his work at all.
She never claimed credit for his work, stating that she had no
creative imagination at all. She "wasn't any influence on the nature
of the work", she later recalled, "because he was absolutely unique
and sure of himself and knew what he wanted to say". She described
their relationship as one of equals, an impression corroborated by
those who knew them at the time.

Beckett had just married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil when Bray moved to
Paris in 1961. Suzanne had helped him recover his health after he was
stabbed in 1938, and both had been hunted members of the Resistance
during the latter part of the second world war. Bray claimed that
Beckett remained faithful to both of them, a situation which was not
without consequences for Bray and her children, who were brought up as
the offspring of an occasionally anguished "other woman", devoted to
her often-absent companion.

Beckett and Suzanne's relationship had been forged in adversity and
before his fame. They had much less in common intellectually than he
and Bray. His double life was most likely the point of departure for
Play (1963), in which a man, wife and mistress confess their lives to
an intermittent spotlight, confined to the neck in earthen jars. The
similarly-confined but irrepressible Winnie in Happy Days (1960) has
sometimes been likened to Bray, who was possessed of an unstoppable,
effusive attitude bordering on the manic. She denied the link.

Bray spoke of writing a memoir of her life with Beckett, but never
completed it. She abhorred others' tell-all accounts of sometimes
superficial relations with him, and perhaps preferred in the end to
allow silence to descend on the mystery of their relationship. We can
nonetheless speculate whether the second part of his career would have
been as varied and adventurous without her, ranging across television
and film and inspired by sources including the Noh theatre, to which
she introduced him. Her last collaborative act with him was to type
his final work, What Is the Word (1989), which he composed when
confined to the Tiers Temps nursing home in Paris. He died that
December. His 713 letters to her are kept at Trinity College Dublin
(he destroyed all personal correspondence he received). She left a
brief account of her life with him in an interview with Marek
Kedzierski.

After Beckett's death, Bray continued to translate, and she put great
energy into the bilingual Paris-based theatre company Dear
Conjunction, which she co-founded and for which she directed lesser-
known Pinter and Beckett works.

A stroke in 2003 limited her activity, and left her using a
wheelchair. She remained doggedly independent in a studio flat in the
Rue Séguier, proudly reciting swathes of Shakespeare, Donne and the
King James Bible from memory. After a steady decline in her health,
she moved last December to Edinburgh to a nursing home near her
daughter Francesca's house.

Resolutely 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

• This article was amended on 5 March 2010. The original said that
[Samuel Beckett and his wife Suzanne] had been hunted by members of
the Resistance during the latter part of the second world war. This
has been corrected.

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