Antoaneta Ralian, who has died aged 91, achieved in her native Romania something difficult to imagine in almost any other country: celebrity status solely for her work as a translator of foreign fiction and drama.
Her list of more than 120 classic and popular American and English novels and plays translated into Romanian is astonishing in its length and variety. Beginning with Dickens and Nathaniel Hawthorne, it goes on to include Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, DH Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. It takes in much of Lawrence Durrell and most of Henry Miller, published after the communist period, and then gives generous attention to Saul Bellow and Iris Murdoch, with both of whom she formed important friendships, before arriving at EL Doctorow, Salman Rushdie and the Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston. In her last month she was working on a translation of Priya Parmar’s Bloomsbury novel Vanessa and Her Sister.
Continue reading...