Recalling the publisher and translator, who died just over 50 years ago
Her friend and fellow translator Michael Glenny saw Manya Harari as “a frail wisp of a woman who might, one felt, be blown away if one coughed too hard”. But there was more to Harari than met the eye. Her life was such that only a robust constitution could have sustained her; her work demanded intellectual rigour and application, underlain by a strong will, doggedness and firm commitment.
She died just over 50 years ago; today she is perhaps best remembered for her joint translation (with Max Hayward) of the first British edition of Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, published in 1958 by Harvill Press, which she co-founded. Harvill and its later parent William Collins, of which she became a director, gave her a place in world literature and politics far wider than her role in Zhivago, which was to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in dramatic circumstances, Pasternak first accepting, and then, under pressure, declining.