Ä¢¹½´«Ã½ a month ago, I was in an airport and I picked up a newspaper and discovered an obituary of Barbara Wright, who had died, aged 93. And for a moment, in my displaced state, I remembered a random word – Howcanaystinksotho – and, oddly, felt about to cry.

Maybe this seems strange. It requires some explanation.

I don’t have many heroes. I certainly don’t have many heroes I would ever want to meet. But I had always wanted to meet Barbara Wright. Once, I contemplated the idea of sending her a fan letter. But, I thought, surely Barbara Wright – the translator of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Jarry and, especially, of Raymond Queneau – wouldn’t want to be bothered with fan letters? Or wouldn’t even be still alive? And there, in a random airport, it turned out that I could have done, and therefore should have done. [. . .]

I thought about all this, in my airport, because I was thinking about Wright, and her miraculous translations of the French novelist Raymond Queneau. In an essay on Queneau, she mentions one aspect of his novelistic project, which dated from a holiday he spent in Greece in 1932, where he noted the huge discrepancy between modern spoken Greek and classical Greek, and realised that modern French was hopelessly in thrall to the conventions of the 16th and 17th centuries. His emphasis on language as a game was an attempt, like Joyce’s, to desophisticate language. So that, for instance, there is what Wright called “his logosymphysis” – his depiction of spoken words run together, like the first word of “Doukipudonktan?” – which stands for: “D’ou qu’ils puent donc tant?”, meaning “How come they stink so, though?” Which she rendered like this: “Howcanaystinksotho”.

Barbara Wright really was one of the best.

John Calder called me this afternoon to give me the sad news of Barbara Wright’s death last night, after complications from a hip operation. Barbara was one of the greatest and most influential translators from the French, and was almost as instrumental as John in making available the works of some of the greatest authors of twentieth-century French literature, such as Queneau and Sarraute.

Before she moved from her house on Frognal, and before I left Dalkey Archive, I used to go and have dinner with Barbara Wright every time I was in London. I swear, I could’ve listened to her talk for hours about how she became a translator, about James Laughlin, about John Calder, about the first time she met Beckett . . . Thankfully, I still have a few of the postcards she used to send me along with a special “Tolling Elves 5” brochure that was printed in honor of Raymond Queneau’s centenary and features samples from a few of Barbara’s translations of his work. (Speaking of which, her story about how she invented a few of the pieces in Exercises in Style while translating the book is another classic story . . .)

She was one of the all time great translators, and also one of the kindest people I ever met. She will be greatly missed.