Linda Asher, who in nearly two decades at the New Yorker "edited the stories of literary luminaries like Haruki Murakami, Louise Erdrich, and A.S. Byatt and who was also a prominent translator of fiction from the French, including of novels by Milan Kundera, Yasmina Reza, and Georges Simenon," died September 15, the New York Times reported. She was 93.
 |
|
| Linda Asher | |
Asher "broadened the horizons of our fiction department," said Charles McGrath, a former deputy editor of the New Yorker who later oversaw the New York Times Book Review. "She was a genuine intellectual in a way the rest of us weren't. And she introduced writers to the magazine that only she could have--the biggest one was Murakami."
In her 18 years as a fiction editor at the New Yorker, Asher edited stories, and after she left the magazine in 1997, she continued to translate for books and articles.
"Linda's enthusiasm and excitement about the writing that interested her was an inspiration, and her translations of Kundera, among others, show her enormous sensitivity to the writer's intent," said Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker.
In 2020, Asher received the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for lifetime achievement. "Asher is singular in her ability and plasticity of language to convey what the original intent of the writer had in mind," Terry Tempest Williams, a member of the literature committee, said on the prize's website. "She makes 'reading between the lines' synonymous with 'translating between the lines.' "
Her husband, Aaron Asher, an editor at several publishing houses, was also a translator whose works include Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) from French in 1996 and Life Is Elsewhere (1973) in 2000.
Before joining the New Yorker in 1979, Linda Asher was a researcher at Life magazine; worked at Time-Life Books; was managing editor of the journal of the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences (now the Hastings Center for Bioethics); and was an editor at Psychology Today.
She was hired at the New Yorker by editor William Shawn. McGrath recalled: "We had this system of exchanging opinions so when a story was up for consideration, it got passed around to different editors. Each editor would write a paragraph or two, but hers were incredibly deep, like miniature term papers."
Asher served on the award jury for the French-American Foundation, for which she annually read at least a hundred new translations from current and classic French writing. She won the organization's award in 2000 for her translation of The Case of Doctor Sachs by Martin Winckler, and in 2008 for The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts by Kundera.
Her other translations include Reza's Babylon (2018); Simenon's The Yellow Dog (1987); Memoirs of a Breton Peasant by Jean-Marie Déguignet (2004); and The Human Comedy: Selected Stories by Honoré de Balzac, which she translated in 2014 with Carol Cosman and Jordan Stump. For her translations from French, she was recognized as a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic.
Erdrich recalled that "A Wedge of Shade," her first story published in the New Yorker, was accepted and edited by Asher: "I remember the thrill it gave me and the even greater sense of gratification when, after many rejections, she'd write, 'Of course we'll take this one.' It was as if we both knew the outcome, and with the others I'd been throwing wide on purpose."