David Bellos, a renowned translator of French literature who was best known for wrestling the writer Georges Perec’s intricate wordplay into English, died on Oct. 26 at his vacation home in Doussard, France. He was 80.
His son, Alex, said the cause of death had not been determined, but that it was likely linked to a pacemaker implanted several years ago.
Mr. Bellos was impressively prolific, especially considering that he did his translation work in addition to holding a day job as a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University.
Since publishing his first translation in 1987 — of Mr. Perec’s novel “Life: A User’s Manual,” originally issued in French in 1978 — Mr. Bellos translated 27 additional books, a little more than one every 18 months, including a forthcoming English version of Victor Hugo’s last novel, “Quatrevingt-Treize” (“Ninety-Three”), about the French Revolution.
Mr. Bellos did not know Albanian, but nevertheless translated seven novels by the acclaimed Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. The books had already been translated into French, and Mr. Bellos worked from those, consulting with Mr. Kadare to make sure his twice-removed versions were true to the originals. When Mr. Kadare won the first Man Booker International Prize, in 2005, he was able to select a translator to receive a companion award, and chose Mr. Bellos.
But Mr. Bellos also loved crime novels; he translated two thrillers by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, as well as a pair by Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, the archaeologist and historian who wrote as Fred Vargas.
Mr. Bellos “had specific tastes in what mattered and what people should be paying attention to,” Goran Blix, a professor of French at Princeton, said in an interview. “And it was eclectic.”
It was his work on Mr. Perec’s oeuvre that occupied Mr. Bellos the longest and brought him the most joy — and attention. He translated eight Perec books, and in 1993 wrote a biography, “Georges Perec: A Life in Words,” which won the Prix Goncourt, one of France’s highest literary honors.
Mr. Perec was part of Oulipo, a group of postwar French writers known for imposing linguistic constraints on their work; his inventive use of word games, hidden allusions and language puzzles makes translating him a monumental task. (Among his works that Mr. Bellos did not translate are “La Disparition,” a novel without a single use of the letter “e,” and “Les Revenentes,” in which “e” is the only vowel.)
At one point in “Life: A User’s Manual,” Mr. Perec included three columns listing items in a room of the Paris apartment building that gives the novel its structure. Mr. Bellos found a code hidden in the columns: The last letter in the first entry of the first column was “a,” which was the second-to-last letter in the column’s next entry, and so on.
Across the three columns, the code spelled out “A-M-E,” or “soul” in French. Mr. Bellos chose “ego” as the English equivalent, and then pushed and pulled his translation to make the effect work in his version.
“Georges Perec taught me to write,” he wrote in a 2011 essay in The Wall Street Journal. “He set a puzzle that forced me to acquire a fuller grasp of the units of the writer’s craft — words, and the letters from which they are made.”
Mr. Bellos wrote two other biographies, “Jacques Tati: His Life and Art” (1999), about the French actor and director, and “Romain Gary: A Tall Story” (2010), about the French diplomat and novelist. He also wrote a book about Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, “The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’” (2017).
He wrote extensively about the art of translation, and wordsmithery in general, most notably in two books, “Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything” (2011), and “Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs” (2024), with Alexandre Montagu.
He emphasized that he never tried to exactly replicate a sentence in translation, but to find something similar that expressed the same meaning.
“Likeness is what translation seeks to provide,” he told NPR in 2011. “A good match is what you’re after, but sameness — I mean, identity — well, that you just can’t have, because even in the same language, no two utterances, even of the same sentence, are actually the same.”
David Michael Bellos was born on June 25, 1945, in Rochford, east of London, and grew up in nearby Southend-on-Sea, a resort city on the English Channel. His father, Nathaniel, owned a lingerie store, and his mother, Kitty (Shapiro) Bellos, managed the home.
He received a degree in medieval and modern languages from Oxford University in 1967, and then stayed to earn a doctorate in French, which he received in 1971.
Before going to Princeton, in 1997, Mr. Bellos taught at the universities of Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester.
His first two marriages, to Hélène Roth-Laszlo and Susan Lendrum, ended in divorce. Along with a son from his first marriage, Mr. Bellos is survived by his wife, Pascale Voilley Bellos; two daughters from his first marriage, Amanda Bellos and Olivia Coghlan; seven grandchildren; and two sisters, Miriam Jacob and Vivienne Bellos.
In recent years, Mr. Bellos was often asked whether artificial intelligence might make human translation obsolete. He wasn’t worried, he said: Machines may produce an accurate translation of words, but they could never make the subtle choices among hundreds of possibilities that go into rendering an accurate, nuanced meaning.
“Even where these hundred versions do all say the same thing, are all acceptable translations of the source?” he said on the podcast “The Hedgehog & the Fox” in 2018.
“Who is the guardian?” he added. “Who is the judge? Who says this is right and that is wrong?”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post David Bellos, 80, Dies; Wrestled French Wordplay Into English appeared first on New York Times.
