Her Actual First Name Was Edith

Israeli Harry Potter fans thronged the series’ Hebrew translator at the Jerusalem Book Fair this Wednesday. “Devotees of British writer J.K. Rowling's series about a young wizard sat and stood for an hour Wednesday listening to Gili Bar-Hillel discuss the process of translating the six Harry Potter books,” according to an AP report. “‘It's ridiculous, this is something that never happens to translators,’ Bar-Hillel said after speaking at the Jerusalem International Book Fair. ‘The attention I've received is because I'm translating Harry Potter. It's Harry, not me."‘ ... Fans crowded Bar-Hillel for handshakes, hugs, pictures and autographs.... Yuval Avrami, a 17-year-old in a Harry Potter scarf that his aunt made for him, said he had to come to hear Bar-Hillel speak because he's read all the books in English and Hebrew. The fifth book, he said, was even better in Hebrew.... The book fair teased fans by hinting that Bar-Hillel might give some educated guesses on the content of the seventh book, but she wasn't talking. ‘I know one single shard of information, but I'm not allowed to reveal it,’ Bar-Hillel said.” ... In other news -- It’s one of those bylines we’ve all seen countless times — especially if we’ve hung around much in thrift stores or old people’s bedrooms. Before she died in 1982, Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 detective novels that sold many millions of copies, including Death in Ecstasy, Tied Up in Tinsel, Died in the Wool and A Surfeit of Lampreys. Most of them were set in her native New Zealand. Yet the author “is barely remembered in her home country,” according to Scoop.co.nz. So a scholar on the faculty at Unitec, New Zealand’s Institute of Technology, has just been awarded a fellowship with which she plans to write a book about Marsh. “Ngaio Marsh should be remembered alongside Sir Edmund Hillary and our sporting icons as a great New Zealand figure, but there’s no awareness of her here at all,” Dr. Joanne Drayton is quoted as saying. “Marsh didn’t help matters very much because she made it sound like she lived a dull, uninteresting life in order to avoid attention. But I hope with my book I can show her as the lively, funny person she was.” Supplied by her missionary uncle, the name Ngaio — pronounced “nye-oh” — is a Maori word for a species of flowering tree, but it also means “bright.”