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Idris the Ingénu

Galen Strawson, 21 January 1988

The Golden Droplet 
by Michel Tournier, translated by Barbara Wright.
Collins, 198 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 0 00 223139 5
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... signposted theme of La Goutte d’Or, first published in France in 1985 and now translated by Barbara Wright under the accurate but ill-judged title of The Golden Droplet (La Goutte d’Or is a place in the 18th Arrondissement of Paris, as well as a drop of gold). This is a gently juvenile book, a little sweet but not uncharming, hammy and didactic ...

Incompetents

Stephen Bann, 16 June 1983

Worstward Ho 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 48 pp., £5.50, April 1983, 0 7145 3979 1
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That Voice 
by Robert Pinget, translated by Barbara Wright.
Red Dust (New York), 114 pp., $10.95, May 1983, 0 87376 041 7
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King Solomon 
by Romain Gary, translated by Barbara Wright.
Harvill, 256 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 00 261416 2
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A Year in Hartlebury, or The Election 
by Benjamin Disraeli and Sarah Disraeli.
Murray, 222 pp., £8.50, May 1983, 0 7195 4020 8
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The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 180 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 224 02130 3
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... factor in this transatlantic shift has been the skill and commitment of his English translator, Barbara Wright, who has brought to Pinget’s work a well-deserved reputation for managing to translate the untranslatable – Albert-Birot and Queneau, to name only two. In her article on ‘The “Trials” of Translating Pinget’ in the current Review of ...

Spicy

Nicholas Spice, 15 March 1984

The Fetishist, and Other Stories 
by Michel Tournier, translated by Barbara Wright.
Collins, 220 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 00 221440 7
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My Aunt Christina, and Other Stories 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 207 pp., £8.95, May 1983, 0 575 03256 1
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Mr Bedford and the Muses 
by Gail Godwin.
Heinemann, 229 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 0 434 29751 8
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Alexandra Freed 
by Lisa Zeidner.
Cape, 288 pp., £8.95, January 1984, 0 224 02158 3
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The Coffin Tree 
by Wendy Law-Yone.
Cape, 195 pp., £8.50, January 1984, 0 224 02963 0
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... murs lépreux questionnés par la lumiére, émergeait la face blême et bouffie de l’ennui.’ Barbara Wright surmounts the biggest problems in translating Tournier with idiomatic ease and inventiveness, so it’s odd to find her lapsing now and again into un-English Latinisms like ‘inexistence’ for inexistence, ‘marmoreal’ for marmoréen, or ...

Reconstructions

Michael Irwin, 19 February 1981

Kepler 
by John Banville.
Secker, 192 pp., £5.95, January 1981, 0 436 03264 3
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The Daughter 
by Judith Chernaik.
London Magazine Editions, 216 pp., £5.50, January 1981, 9780060107574
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We always treat women too well 
by Raymond Queneau, translated by Barbara Wright.
Calder, 174 pp., £8.95, January 1981, 0 7145 3687 3
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... funny? There’s a good deal of larking around with stylistic levels, some of it agreeable enough. Barbara Wright’s translation reads racily and seems full of the appropriate inventiveness. One kind of joke is a species of do-it-yourself Pierce Egan slang: ‘He cheesed it presto, though, for John MacCormack had just split his skull with five bloodily ...

Baby-Sitter

Elaine Showalter, 14 June 1990

Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography 
by Deirdre Bair.
Cape, 718 pp., £19.95, June 1990, 9780224020480
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Lettres à Sartre. Vol I: 1930-1939 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 400 pp., frs 120, February 1990, 2 07 071829 8
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Lettres à Sartre. Vol II: 1940-1963 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 443 pp., frs 120, February 1990, 2 07 071864 6
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Journal de Guerre, Septembre 1939-Janvier 1941 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gallimard, 371 pp., February 1990, 2 07 071809 3
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In the Shadow of Sartre 
by Liliane Siegel, translated by Barbara Wright.
182 pp., £12.95, May 1990, 9780002153362
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... In an uncharacteristic moment of playfulness during her affair with Nelson Algren, Simone de Beauvoir called herself his ‘frog wife’. Although it echoed his tough-guy slang about their Paris-Chicago romance, the phrase has the ring of feminist fable. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid, whose story Beauvoir wept over as a child, the frog wife is a changeling, unlike other women; pebbly and awkward, she cannot wed the prince ...

‘I’m going to slash it!’

John Sturrock, 20 February 1997

Oeuvres complètes 
by Nathalie Sarraute, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié.
Gallimard, 2128 pp., £52.05, October 1996, 2 07 011434 1
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... poetry, so careful, compacted and rhythmical is it; the English of the later translations, done by Barbara Wright, is faithful in every respect, however, having had to pass the intimidating test of being read aloud to the author. Nathalie Sarraute has now become a Pléiade author in her own lifetime. That is exceptional; it’s high time the admiration ...

Just Like Cookham

Neal Ascherson: Stanley Spencer in China, 19 May 2011

Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 591 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 954193 5
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... Chinese regime and had played a leading part in securing the Geneva Accords. It was, as Patrick Wright puts it, ‘one of the last occasions, only two years before the Suez crisis, on which Britain exerted a decisive influence on international politics’. Zhou began to employ a ‘come and see’ strategy, inviting Western delegations to visit the ...

Il n’y a pas de Beckett

Christopher Prendergast, 14 November 1996

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett 
by James Knowlson.
Bloomsbury, 872 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 7475 2719 9
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Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist 
by Anthony Cronin.
HarperCollins, 645 pp., £25, October 1996, 9780246137692
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol I: Waiting for Godot 
edited by Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson.
Faber, 472 pp., £75, March 1994, 0 571 14543 4
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol II: Endgame 
edited by S.E. Gontarski.
Faber, 276 pp., £50, November 1992, 0 571 14544 2
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol III: Krapp’s Last Tape 
edited by James Knowlson.
Faber, 286 pp., £50, May 1992, 0 571 14563 9
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Eleutheria 
by Samuel Beckett, translated by Barbara Wright.
Faber, 170 pp., £6.99, September 1996, 9780571178261
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... is, inevitably, some talk of Beckett’s extra-marital amours, notably with Pamela Mitchell and Barbara Bray. It is admirably free of the gossipy and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the frankly sexist. Above ...

Short Cuts

Patrick Wright: The Moral of Brenley Corner, 6 December 2018

... de Gaulle was right after all, we are not ready for the Common Market, not on the A2 anyway.’ Barbara Castle, Labour’s minister for transport in the late 1960s, had refused to yield to Kentish requests that the M2 be extended all the way to Dover, but the bypasses were on the way by 28 June 1973, when the conservative MP for Canterbury, David ...

What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... James, the always reliable butler, deals with that, the illusion of a dedication to poetry. Adrian Wright, in this new biography, refers several times to Lehmann’s half-commitment (in spite of his energy) to the professional life he chose. Fieldhead was the magic enclosure to which, as an adult, he looked back, wishing that it might have been possible to sit ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
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... building is, as Adolf Loos once had it, a crime. (People often say Roark was based on Frank Lloyd Wright, but there are no significant similarities. Rand and Wright did meet, though: she visited Taliesin and commissioned designs for a house, never to be built.) The thesis is an extreme version of the Modernist ...
From Bauhaus to Our House 
by Tom Wolfe.
Cape, 143 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 224 02030 7
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... its way, albeit briefly, into the American best-seller lists, along with all those diets, cats and Barbara Cartland. What is more, this startling success has been accompanied by a sustained chorus of outraged disapproval from practically every US critic who is actually qualified to pass expert judgment on its contents. One may simple-mindedly attribute these ...

At Tate Modern (and elsewhere)

Peter Campbell: How architects think, 21 July 2005

... You get another angle on how architects think in the exhibition of architects’ drawings from the Barbara Pine collection, at Sir John Soane’s Museum until 27 August. The most interesting and liveliest are sketches which take you close to the moment of invention. These, like the material at Tate Modern, are early moves, unresolved and sometimes ...

Nature’s Chastity

Jose Harris, 15 September 1983

Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century 
by Barbara Taylor.
Virago, 402 pp., £9.95, March 1983, 0 86068 257 9
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Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080 to 1980 
by Rosalind Marshall.
Collins, 365 pp., £13.50, June 1983, 0 00 216039 0
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... was equally severe: ‘the Owenites were too abstract, too metaphysical and accomplish little.’ Barbara Taylor’s study, mainly concerned with the Owenites in spite of its misleadingly ambitious title, challenges these views in a number of different ways. She queries the Owenites’ reputation for utopianism, arguing that ‘what has counted as utopian ...

Resistance from Elsewhere

Kevin Okoth: Black Marxism, 7 April 2022

Black Marxism 
by Cedric Robinson.
Penguin, 436 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 0 241 51417 7
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Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition 
by Joshua Myers.
Polity, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 3792 1
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... is structured around discussions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright). All the same, it ‘opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical black intellectual past’, Robinson explained in an interview in 2013. ‘As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the terms that he did. But in ...

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