Anya Berger

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Anya Berger , also Anna Bostock (born Anna Zisserman in 1923 in Harbin , China; died February 23, 2018 in Geneva ), was a Russian-British translator , intellectual and feminist.

Life

Anna Zisserman was a daughter of Wladimir Zisserman and Matilda Glogau. Her father had been a landowner in Russia and fled abroad after the Russian Revolution . From 1936 she lived with her mother's Jewish family in Vienna and attended school there. After the “ Anschluss of Austria ” she went to Great Britain alone in 1938 at the invitation of an Englishwoman. Zisserman attended St Paul's Girls' School in London, which gave some free places to refugee children. During the war she began to study languages ​​at Oxford, but gave up her studies to work for Reuters as a war-essential translator for Russian.

In 1942 she married Intelligence Officer Stephen Bostock; they had two children, Nina and Dima. After the war ended, the marriage was divorced. Bostock went to New York to work as a translator for the United Nations. The father kidnapped the children from New York to England, the custody battle went to court and in the press.

Anna Bostock returned to London, where she became part of a left-wing intellectual circle around Eric Hobsbawm , Doris Lessing and Mordecai Richler . She found employment as a literary critic at the Manchester Guardian and as an editor at the publishers Methuen and Hutchinson and began translating books from Russian and German into English. Under her name Anna Bostock she translated works by Trotsky , Lenin , Karl Marx , Ernst Fischer , György Lukács , Ilja Ehrenburg , Wilhelm Reich and also a book of cats by Paul Eipper . She had a relationship with the artist Peter de Francia , and together they translated Le Modulor by Le Corbusier into English. Anna Bostock and Peter de Francia were in the dedication of John Berger's debut novel A Painter of Our Time in 1958 ; she had known the writer since 1951. From then on she lived with Berger; they had two children, daughter Katya and son Jacob . Together they translated texts by Helene Weigel and poems by Bertolt Brecht .

In 1958 she changed her name to Anya Berger by means of a deed poll . With John Berger she traveled through Europe on a motorcycle and came to the Soviet Union for the first time. They then lived in Geneva, where she was able to work again as a translator for the UN. Anya Berger got involved in the emerging new women's movement. John Berger dedicated the novel G. to her and her “sisters from the women's movement” in 1972. The partnership with John Berger ended in the 1970s. Your last translation was in 1993 Gesture and Speech by André Leroi-Gourhan .

Translations (selection)

  • Ilja Ehrenburg: Julio Jurenito . Translation by Anna Bostock and Yvonne Kapp . London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958
  • Bertolt Brecht : Poems on the theater . Translation John Berger, Anna Bostock. Northwood: Scorpion Press, 1961
  • Ernst Fischer: Art against ideology . London: Allen, 1969
  • Walter Benjamin : Understanding Brecht . Introduction Stanley Mitchell. London: NLB, 1973
  • Georg Lukács: Soul and form . London: Merlin Press 1974
  • Ernst Fischer: The necessity of art: a Marxist approach . Harmondsworth, Eng. : Penguin Books, 1981

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tom Overton: Anya Berger (1923-2018) , frieze.com, February 27, 2018, accessed August 7, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Berger, Anya
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bostock, Anna; Zisserman, Anna (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian-British translator, intellectual and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Harbin , China
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 2018
Place of death Geneva