The translator who transformed Idéfix into Dogmatix and Panoramix into Getafix tells Claire Armitstead that the secret to successful translation is invisibility.
Publication of the first new Asterix album in eight years has brought the world's media to a small house in Cambridge. The Guardian is in the living room and BBC Northern Ireland is on the phone. It's the 35th adventure that translator Anthea Bell has undertaken with the world's most famous Gaul, and it has transported them to Scotland on a mission to save the Picts from imperialists and usurpers.
The political potential of the latest storyline was quickly grasped by the Scottish press, which breached a fortress of secrecy in the summer to announce that Asterix and the Picts would be about the independence referendum. They were wrong, says Bell, not least because Asterix is on a royalist mission, to return a prince to his rightful throne. Though she managed to slip in a reference to "Pict Nats", she suspects the resonance was lost on the new writer/illustrator team of Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad. The days when Asterix could be mined for sly political in-jokes, and a thinly disguised Jacques Chirac flitted between Obelix's menhirs, are past. "I fear Alex Salmond would be mortified to think that the French, traditional allies of the Scots, know nothing about his wonderful party and its referendum."
Bell began translating Asterix with the university lecturer Derek Hockridge in 1969, eight years after the books first appeared in French. She is responsible for some of its finest puns and was hailed by Conrad as "a star" at the Paris launch of the new album. It was she who changed the name of Obelix's small, evil-tempered dog from Idéfix to Dogmatix, and transformed Panoramix into Getafix, provoking decades of scholarly musing as to whether the druid was a dopehead. Bell has always protested her innocence. In her translation notes for the new book, she seized on one frame as belated evidence in her defence, writing: "Aha! At last we have a place in the text, and in the mouth of the druid himself, to justify his English name over all these years! Nothing to do with drugs … I mean, would I dream of such a thing? Never – I am as innocent as the driven snow. No, he was getting a fix on the stars …"
The Asterix mandate has made Bell into that rarity in translating circles, a celebrity in her own right, but she never sought fame, and the albums are only a fraction of a workload that shows little sign of lightening up in her late 70s. Three months before the brouhaha over Asterix and the Picts, she slipped quietly into the shops as translator of Eugen Ruge's In Times of Fading Light – the story of three generations of an East German family. That this was a debut novel by an unknown author makes it no less interesting to her than any other challenge of a career that has included collaborating with WG Sebald, rehabilitating the Austrian novelist and memoirist Stefan Zweig, and translating Kafka and Freud.
It all began with a passion for world literature and an aptitude for wordplay. She traces the wordplay back to her father, Adrian Bell, a farmer turned local newspaper columnist, and the first compiler of the Times cryptic crossword. Her sense of an international literary heritage was nurtured by a collection of Loeb classics that had been liberated by her grandfather Robert Bell from the offices of the Observer, where he worked as deputy editor. The faded red and green volumes of the famous "library" of Greek and Latin translations still dominate her bookshelves.
She grew up in Suffolk, the oldest of three children (her brother is the BBC journalist turned MP Martin Bell), and was sent to boarding school in Bournemouth, where she learned French and German, racing through the language to get to the literature. She went on to Somerville College, Oxford, to read English rather than modern languages, because the course was strongly historical and "I was very interested in history: I liked the beginnings of things".
She would have gone on to a second degree had she not married "far too young" and opted instead for a secretarial course. The pressure to do so came both from her own mother, "whose ideal was domestic – I loved her dearly but we didn't understand each other", and her inlaws. Her publisher husband, Antony Kamm, was from a Jewish family. "It must have been a shock to them that he married out, and they were so nice to me that I went off like a good girl and did my Pitmans."
It was "by complete accident" that she made her translating debut, after Antony was asked by publisher Klaus Flugge if he knew anyone who could translate a children's book The Little Water-Sprite, by the German writer Otfried Preussler. "It was my first translation and I did it with my first baby in a carrycot at my side," she says.
She went on to translate the whole Preussler oeuvre for Flugge, who now runs the children's imprint Andersen Press. Yet it wasn't until she got divorced in her mid-30s that she realised she didn't have to go back to secretarial work: she could earn enough from translating to support herself and her two children.
When her sons – Oliver, now a Times leader writer, and Richard, an academic – left school, she moved to Cambridge to be closer to her parents and to a good university library. She was an early adopter of the internet, which she discovered when she was hunting down an obscure reference to a 19th-century German poem singing the praises of the joys of hiking in Westphalia. "All I had was the poet's name and a few lines of the poem. I typed it in and the whole poem came up." It was a eureka moment. While many of her peers were sceptical, she became an early convert, embracing a technology that she realised would transform the translator's work.
Along with the technological change has come a new politics, with heated debate among translators as to how prominent the fact of translation should be. Though Bell is the doyenne of them all – with a raft of international awards alongside her homegrown OBE – she describes herself as "an unrepentant, unreconstructed adherent of the school of invisible translation".
Flugge points out a paradox: her limpid translation style has meant that her work travels, and her visibility in terms of international awards has been part of her service to literature. She has won the US's prestigious Mildred L Batchelder award for children's books in translation four times, and has been cited more often than anyone else, which has helped to establish a trans-Atlantic market for European children's books. She was, for instance, the translator of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart series, a German young adult fantasy trilogy which reached number two in the New York Times bestseller list.
"Anthea has a talent that not every translator has for catching the mood of a book. Some are a bit more wooden and some try to take too many liberties. She has a knack of hitting the right style and atmosphere," says Flugge.
Bell herself laid out her position at a translation conference in 2004: "All my professional life, I have felt that translators are in the business of spinning an illusion: the illusion is that the reader is reading not a translation but the real thing." Nine years on, she still insists that "a translation is successful if it's invisible" – though that is not to detract from the creativity of a relationship that emerges clearly from her Asterix notes.
MacAroon, the wronged Pictish prince, has a large tattoo on his chest that causes some curiosity among the Gauls. In the French version, Obelix speculates that it may be a decalcomanian (from decalcomania, a method of using transfers to impose artwork on various basic materials). Bell was having none of it: "This term is all but unknown in English, so a substitute is necessary. 'Maybe a footballer … they do it with transfers.'"
It is one of a series of cultural negotiations that are most intense over a running gag involving famous song lyrics, which MacAroon spouts when he is lost for words. At one point she insists that Gene Vincent's Be-Bop-a‑Lula should be replaced by a line from Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. "In the distinctly wet circumstances, I suspect the Ancient Mariner is more apt." In the end, she says, copyright law came to her aid, ruling out many of the lyrics, "although I was sorry we couldn't have 'rock around the loch'".
While it's preferable to be able to consult directly with an author, it's not always possible. Her collaboration with Sebald is a case in point. She worked closely with him on two books, including his final novel Austerlitz. "It was a great privilege, and fascinating because his own English was so good that he could have written in it himself. It was very, very dense work. He wouldn't use email and said he'd never unwrapped the computer in his office. I would draft out a passage and send it to him and he'd send it back while I did the next one, so we were working together on it all the way through."
However, after his untimely death in a car crash, a series of essays was discovered on his desk which were collected into a posthumous book,On the Natural History of Destruction. The title appalled one academic who wrote that Sebald would never have agreed to such a loose translation of the German, Luftkrieg und Literatur. Bell argued that it was his own choice. "It was the title that Solly Zuckerman [British bombing unit survey director] wanted to give to a report he had been asked to write on immediate postwar Germany, but after what he had seen in the ruins of Cologne, he couldn't bring himself to do it."
As an article of faith to her authors, Bell will not work from a language she doesn't know – though she taught herself enough Danish over one Christmas to be able to add it to her core repertoire of French and German. She has only once translated from an intermediary language, taking Władysław Szpilman's memoir The Pianist from German rather than the original Polish at the request of Szpilman himself.
Though she has come to the conclusion that she likes working on fiction best – "It's all about finding the tone of voice in the original. You have to be quite free" – she covers a swath of what she calls literary translation (as opposed to the technical manuals that constitute the majority of translation work), toiling away "for peanuts" on the New Grove Dictionary and dabbling in art history. "You don't have to be an expert as long as you can understand a text in your own language."
The only two genres she wouldn't attempt are science and poetry – she says she doesn't count Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and A Case of Hysteria (Dora) as science. Translating Freud was like a literary detective story "because he pokes behind slips of the tongue". In this context, the gap between comic album and psycho-analytic tract isn't so huge: "If you're trying to work out wordplay, you're trying to do on purpose what the Freudian slip does by accident: fishing up words from the unconscious."
And poetry? "I wouldn't trust myself with anything except for comic verse or bad-on-purpose verse: now you've met my cats you'll understand why I was very keen to do The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr …". This exuberant early 19th-century novel by ETA Hoffmann is framed as a poetically pretentious tomcat's autobiography, which gets mixed up, due to a printer's error, with the biography of a composer.
"It's the ancestor of all books written by cats," she says – which brings us to her own feline family. When her sons left home and she found herself alone, Bell took up breeding cats "in a small way", but discovered that the kittens landed her in a predicament. She couldn't give them away because it would be undercutting other breeders, but she didn't feel comfortable about selling them for her own profit, so she gave the money to a Bosnian orphanage supported by her brother Martin. In pride of place on her sitting-room wall is a glamorous show photograph of Grand Champion Arcady Dorcas – one of six pedigree Birmans that continue to rule her household with an evident sense of entitlement in their old age.
The cat show circuit provided a very different outlet for a self-confessed workaholic, who spends most of her time at home alone, juggling texts and languages, but it had its own linguistic delights for the inexhaustible translator. "People get quite bitchy in the cat world," she says, "though the equivalent of bitch in catspeak is queen, which is a much nicer term."