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Period(s): Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Languages: French, with ancillary interests in German, Russian and Balkan literatures
Teaching Interests: Modern and contemporary European fiction; Translation Studies; experimental writing since the 1960s (especially Queneau, Perec and Roubaud); nineteenth-century studies. He also teaches French-English translation classes.
David Bellos gained his doctorate in French literature from Oxford University (UK) and taught subsequently at Edinburgh, Southampton and Manchester before coming to Princeton in 1997. He worked first in nineteenth century studies, particularly on the novel and the history of literary ideas and then developed interests in post-war French writing and film. He is the translator and biographer of Georges Perec and has also written major studies of Jacques Tati and Romain Gary. A well-known translator, he is also the author of an irreverent introduction to translation studies, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (2011). In 2017, The Novel of the Century. The Amazing Adventure of Les Misérables, marked a return to nineteenth-century studies in a trans-national perspective. His latest book, Who owns this sentence? A history of copyrights and wrongs, co-authored with Alexandre Montagu, appeared with Mountain Lion Press in London and W.W. Norton in New York in January 2024.. He has won the French-American Foundation’s translation prize (1988), the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994), the Man Booker International translator’s award (2005) and the Book Award of the American Library in Paris, and holds the rank of officier in the Orde national des Arts et des Lettres. He was the recipient of the 2019 Howard T. Berhman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. He is currently translating Victor Hugo’s last novel, Quatrevingt-treize, and is working on a popular history of the French language.
Books:
The Novel of the Century. The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables. Penguin, 2017
Georges Perec, Portrait of A Man, transl. David Bellos. MacLehose, 2014
Ismail Kadare, Twilight of the Eastern Gods. Translated from the French of Jusuf Vrioni and with an introduction by David Bellos. Canongate, 2014
Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Penguin, 2011.