David Bellos Explained
David Bellos (born 1945) is a British academic, translator and biographer. He is the Meredith Howland Pyne professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States,[1] and was director of its translation and intercultural communication programme from 2007 to 2019.
Biography
Bellos has written literary biographies of Romain Gary and Georges Perec, and has published work on Honoré de Balzac; his The Novel of the Century relates the writing of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. He has also written a biography of the filmmaker Jacques Tati, , and appeared in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about him.
Other works include an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything (2011)[2] and Who Owns This Sentence. A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, written with Alexandre Montagu and published in 2024.
He has translated much of the work of Perec into English, including the novel .
He won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005 for his translations of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, despite not speaking Albanian. His translations were done from previous French translations.[3]
He is the father of writer and broadcaster Alex Bellos.
Awards and honours
Publications
Translations
Life A User's Manual, 1987 (French-American Foundation's translation prize); new edition, 2008
The Pyramid, 1995
A Universal History of Numbers, 2000
Have Mercy On Us All, 2003
Journal, 2008
Hocus Bogus, 2010
- Georges Perec: The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, 2011
- Georges Simenon
Pietr the Latvian, 2013
Twilight of the Eastern Gods, 2014
Portrait of a Man, 2014 (UK), 2015 (USA)
I Remember, 2014 (USA) (with Philip Terry)
Biographies
- Georges Perec. A Life in Words, 1993. (Prix Goncourt de la biographie). French edition, 1994. Japanese edition, 2014. Hebrew edition, 2016. New edition in French, 2022; German translation, 2023; Turkish and Chinese translations in progress.
- , 1999. French edition, 2002; Italian edition, 2022. German edition forthcoming in 2024
- Romain Gary. A Tall Story, Harvill Secker, November 2010
Other books
- Balzac Criticism in France, 1850–1900. The Making of a Reputation. Oxford, 1976
- La Cousine Bette. A Critical Guide. London, 1981
- Old Goriot (Landmarks of World Literature). Cambridge, 1987. Hebrew translation, Tek Aviv, 1990.
- Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. London and New York, 2011. Paperback edition, 2012.
French translation by Daniel Loayza as , Flammarion, 2012, republished in 2017 as La Traduction dans tous ses états. Spanish translation by Vicente Campos, as Spanish; Castilian: Un Pez en la higuera. Ariel, 2012. German translation by Silvia Morawetz as , Eichborn, 2013. Russian translation by Natalia Shahova, Azbuka, 2019. Traditional Chinese translation, Rye Field, Taipei, 2019. Also translated into Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Persian.
- The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables. London and New York, 2017. Korean edition, 2018. Japanese edition, 2018. Chinese edition, 2019
External links
Notes and References
- https://www.princeton.edu/fit/people/display_person.xml?netid=dbellos David Bellos
- http://www.janklowandnesbit.co.uk/david-bellos/fish-your-ear-translation-and-meaning-everything Is That A Fish In Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything
- http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol6/issue2/bellos.htm "The Englishing of Ismail Kadare"
- . The 2017 American Library in Paris Book Award goes to The Novel of the Century . American Library in Paris . . 2017-11-03 . 2018-01-03.
