David Bellos (born 1945) is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University in the United States.[1] He was director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication from its inception in 2007 until July 1, 2019.

Biography

Bellos' research topics have included Honoré de Balzac and Georges Perec. Bellos published a translation of Perec's most famous novel, Life A User's Manual, in 1987.

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.[2]

Bellos has written three literary biographies and an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything (2011).[3] His most recent book, The Novel of the Century, tells the story of how Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables.

Who Owns This Sentence. A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (with Alexandre Montagu) will appear in January 2024 in the UK with Mountain Leopard Press and the USA with W. W. Norton.

He appears in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about the filmmaker Jacques Tati.[4]

He is the father of writer and broadcaster Alex Bellos.[5]

Awards and honours

Publications

Translations

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.
  • Jacques Tati. His Life and Art, 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 Le poisson & le bananier, Flammarion, 2012, republished in 2017 as La Traduction dans tous ses états. Spanish translation by Vicente Campos, as Un Pez en la higuera. Ariel, 2012. German translation by Silvia Morawetz as Was macht der Fisch in meinem Ohr?, Eichborn, 2013. Russian translation by Natalia Shahova, Azbuka, 2019. Traditional Chinese translation, Rye Field, Taipei, 2019. Also translated into Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Farsi.
  • 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

References

  1. David Bellos at Princeton University
  2. 1 2 "The Englishing of Ismail Kadare" by David Bellos, complete review Quarterly, vol. VI, issue 2 – May 2005
  3. Is That A Fish In Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything at Janklow & Nesbit
  4. The Magnificent Tati at IMDb
  5. Anon (2017). "Bellos, Alexander". Who's Who (online Oxford University Press ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.289184. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. "The 2017 American Library in Paris Book Award goes to The Novel of the Century" (Press release). American Library in Paris. Google Drive. 3 November 2017. Retrieved 3 January 2018.
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