Annemarie Boll; translator (Heinrich Boll's widow)
Hyfler/Rosner
one.)
Translator who brought Irish works to wide audience
Annemarie Boll: Annemarie Boll, widow of the Nobel
Prize-winning German writer, Heinrich Boll, and a translator
of more than 100 works of literature in her own right, has
died aged 94.
Ms Boll had a long and deep association with Ireland,
particularly with Achill Island in Co Mayo, where the Boll
family owned a cottage. As a translator, she first
specialised in Irish writers. She made the works of Behan,
Synge, Shaw and Flann O'Brien available to a large,
enthusiastic German public. She also translated the work of
Eilis Dillon and the American writers O. Henry and Bernard
Malamud into German.
Born in June 1910 in Pilsen, in what is now the Czech
Republic, Annemarie was the middle child of a Czech railway
worker, Eduard Cech, and his German wife, Stephanie. The
family was bilingual. Annemarie's mother died when she was
five, and her father three months later. She and one of her
two brothers went to live with their German grandfather in
Cologne, where she trained as a teacher.
She married Heinrich Boll, a soldier and native of Cologne,
in 1942 at the height of the second Word War. It was a time
of hardship and poverty for the couple. Their first son,
Christoph, died in infancy in October 1945 due to a lack of
proper medication. Raimund, Rene and Vincent were born in
1947, 1948 and 1950 "in the rubble of Cologne and grew up
there", Heinrich Boll later wrote. Raimund, an artist and
sculptor, died in 1981.
Although Heinrich Boll was to become an independent force in
a demoralised post-war Germany, president of the
international PEN writers' group and a Nobel laureate,
recognition was slow in coming when he started writing
full-time. "So much of Heinrich's work was written on my
kitchen table," Annemarie once remarked.
She assisted and supported her husband professionally, and
Boll acknowledged her contribution. While reworking a German
translation of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in the
early 1960s, Boll told his publisher that it was "an
excellent exercise in style for me but very hard labour -
although 90 per cent of the work is being done by my wife".
Annemarie received no printed acknowledgment when the
version appeared in 1963.
Heinrich Boll was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1972. In an autobiographical note for the Nobel Foundation
he stated: "In 1942 I married Annemarie Cech, who has been
irreplaceable, not only as my wife and companion, and not
only as fellow experiencer and fellow sufferer in the
fascist drama during the Nazi reign in Germany, but also for
her critical awareness of language."
Boll first visited Achill Island in 1954, and his wife and
three young sons followed the next year. In 1958 the Bolls
bought a cottage in the village of Dugort, which they lived
in periodically until Heinrich's death in 1985. He and
Annemarie loved Achill and found solace in its remoteness
and wild beauty.
In 1989 she made her last visit to the island, aged 79. She
took the boat from Achill to Clare Island with Rene.
The Boll Cottage, a white, horseshoe-shaped house surrounded
by fuchsia and flax, remains a place of pilgrimage for
German visitors to Achill, especially in summer. Some arrive
with a copy of Heinrich Boll's Irisches Tagebuch, Irish
Journal, in hand.
In 1991 Annemarie offered the use of the cottage as a
writers' and artists' retreat, and since then more than 100
poets, painters, playwrights, sculptors and novelists from
all over the world have benefited from her gesture.
In 2001 she sold the Boll Cottage to the Achill Heinrich
Boll Association, ensuring its legacy as an artists'
residence and a memorial to her husband. Recently renovated,
it will be opened officially by the Minister for the Arts
early next year.
Following her husband's death in 1985, Annemarie edited
Boll's wartime letters, most of which had been written to
her. Her last translation, a children's book published when
she was 80, was The Giant of Turramulli, an Aboriginal
fairytale.
Annemarie Boll is survived by her son Rene, a painter in
Cologne; her son Vincent, an architect in Ecuador; three
grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Annemarie Boll: born June 23rd, 1910; died November 15th,
2004