Awards

• Runner-up for Jan Michalski Foundation Literarture Prize 2014
• Short-listed for Jan Michalski Foundation Literarture Prize 2014
• Winner of French Voices Award 2016
• Winner of French Voices Award 2016
• Winner of PEN Translates! 2017

Overview

Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything - including their native language - to Nazi Germany. In the 1960s and '70s, she translated poets from East Berlin and Vietnam to help broadcast their defiance to the rest of the world. Winner of a French Voices Award and an English PEN Award, this half memoir, half philosophical treatise is a humanist meditation on the art of translation. Gansel considers estrangement as her price paid for the priviledge of moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy among those in exile. `In this memoir of a translator's adventures, Mireille Gansel shows us what it means to enter another language through its culture, and to enter the life of another culture through its language. A sensitive and insightful book, which illuminates the difficult, and often underestimated task of translation - and the role of literature in making for a more interconnected and humane world.' - Eva Hoffman, author of 'Lost in Translation: A Life in A New Language'

Full Product Details

9780993009334

Table of Contents

Reviews

'In this series of delicate memoir essays about living in translation and living as a translator, Gansel tunes herself most sensitively into many states of language, from dwelling in a mother tongue to opening ways of surviving in exile and estrangement.' Marina Warner; 'This memoir tells of a life forged by encounters, by the humble desire to reach out to and understand the other. It is a subtle, moving, and at times sad testimony that talks of poetry, the dialogue with consciousness, commitment and values that are essential to literature and to life itself.' La Quinzaine litteraire

'Very moved by it. A rare work of literature with translation at its heart. And a translation to match.' - Anthony Rudolf, author of Silent Conversations and translator of Yves Bonnefoy and Edmond Jabes; 'In this beautiful memoir of a life lived in and through translation, Mireille Gansel defines the process of bringing words from one language to another as a kind of seeking, tied to the land. Transhumance refers to the seasonal movement of a shepherd and his flock to another land, or humus. It is the opposite of settling and farming: it is a form of nomadism, a search for richer grass, and it provides an apt image for her own trajectory as a translator.' - Lauren Elkin; 'This beautiful and moving meditation on her life's work by a renowned translator, though extremely short, yields a history not just of twentieth century poetry but of that dark century itself, from the rise of the Nazis to the American bombing of North Vietnam, and yields too a rare insight into the nature of language and the splendours and limitations of translation.' - Gabriel Josipovici. 'In this series of delicate memoir essays about living in translation and living as a translator, Gansel tunes herself most sensitively into many states of language, from dwelling in a mother tongue to opening ways of surviving in exile and estrangement.' - Marina Warner. 'This memoir tells of a life forged by encounters, by the humble desire to reach out to and understand the other. It is a subtle, moving, and at times sad testimony that talks of poetry, the dialogue with consciousness, commitment and values that are essential to literature and to life itself.' La Quinzaine litteraire

Author Information

Mireille GANSEL has published translations of a number of distinguished poets including Nelly Sachs, Peter Huchel, and Reiner Kunze, as well as letters by Paul Celan. After living in Hanoi in the seventies, she published the first volume of classical Vietnamese poetry translated into French. Gansel's second and third books as an author, Une petite fenetre d'or and the poetry collection Comme une lettre, were published in France in 2017.

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