In 1970 Anthea Bell found herself with the tricky task of translating Asterix in Britain. The eighth adventure in the comic book series about everyone’s favourite Gaul rested on a French view of the English that was not directly translatable, involving warm beer, rugby louts and tea. A whole strand of humour rested on the English inability to tell tu from vous, while the bowler hat did not lend itself to fruity puns in quite the same way as the chapeau melon.
So Bell transported the story to a Wodehousian England “with much: ‘I say, jolly good, old fellow, what!’” And though she herself was never very satisfied with the result, René Goscinny, co-creator of Asterix, was overheard muttering to himself, “Ah, vieux fruit. I wish I’d thought of that one!”
It was not the first time that Bell, who has died aged 82, had upstaged the creators of one of the world’s most famous comics. It was she, working with the academic Derek Hockridge, who changed the name of Obelix’s small, evil-tempered dog from Idéfix to Dogmatix and who named the local druid Getafix, giving rise to decades of debate as to the precise nature of his herbs.
But her 35 Asterix translations – culminating in Asterix and the Picts in 2013 – were only a fraction of an oeuvre that ran into several hundreds of titles, and she was appointed OBE for services to literature and literary translation in 2010. Though she was one of the rare translators to have become something of a celebrity in her own right, she was a firm subscriber to the old school belief that her profession should be read and not seen.
Bell was the oldest of three children, born in Redisham, Suffolk, into a journalistic dynasty. Her grandfather Robert Bell, whose collection of Loeb classics she credited with sparking her interest in world literature, was a deputy editor of the Observer; her father, Adrian Bell, combined farming with writing and compiling the Times crossword, inspiring her love of wordplay. Her brother is the BBC journalist and former MP Martin Bell, and one of her two sons is the Times columnist Oliver Kamm.
After being sent as a boarder to Talbot Heath school, Bournemouth, where she developed an interest in French and German, she studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, and, in 1957, married Antony Kamm, a fellow student, who became a publisher.
Eager to please her in-laws and her own mother, Marjorie (nee Gibson), Anthea gave up her academic ambitions and enrolled on a secretarial course, only falling into translation after the birth of her first baby, when the children’s publisher Klaus Flugge asked Kamm if he could recommend someone to translate The Little Water Sprite, by the German writer Otfried Preussler.
She went on to translate the whole Preussler oeuvre, and by the time of her divorce, in 1973, was well enough established to support herself and her sons through her translation work.
One reason for Bell’s prolific output was her ability to move fluidly between children’s and adult publishing. On the children’s side, she reunited with Goscinny on his Le Petit Nicolas series, as well as translating books by Erich Kästner and the fairytales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. An early adopter of new technology, who regarded age as no barrier, she hit the bestseller charts again in the noughties with Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart trilogy.
She won the Mildred L Batchelder award, which recognises the year’s “most outstanding” children’s book translated into English and published in the US, seven times – more than anyone else – for her translations from German, French and Danish, the last of which languages she taught herself over a single Christmas.
On the adult side she collaborated closely with WG Sebald to translate his 2001 Kindertransport novel Austerlitz, and went on after his death that year to tackle his essay collection On the Natural History of Destruction, working from notes he left to add two essays that were not in the original German edition.
She was responsible for restoring the reputation of the early 20th-century Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, responding to a ferocious attack in the London Review of Books by the critic Michael Hofmann, who dismissed Zweig as “the Pepsi of literature”, by mildly remarking: “I don’t think that readability is a point to hold against a writer.”
Bell also translated Freud, Kafka and a polemic against world armament by the German statesman Willy Brandt. Her longstanding love affair with German culture was rewarded, in 2015, with the Cross of Merit for her “invaluable contribution to furthering understanding between Germany and the UK”.
As a sideline, after her sons left home, Bell took to breeding and showing Birman cats, generations of which continued to rule her Cambridge home with a ferocious sense of entitlement long after their glory days were over. Her two enthusiasms coincided in translations of German works such as Astrology for Cats and Cat Sense: Inside the Feline Mind.
She also had a keen interest in musicology, translating entries to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians “for peanuts”. All three interests collided to operatic effect in 1999 in one of her personal favourites: ETA Hoffmann’s exuberant early 19th-century novel The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, in which a printer’s error scrambles the biography of a composer with the autobiography of a lushly pretentious tomcat.
She is survived by her sons, Richard and Oliver, her twin siblings, Martin and Sylvia, and her twin granddaughters, Eleanor and Alexandra.
• Anthea Bell, translator, born 10 May 1936; died 18 October 2018
