Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel
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'
Selected by Gabriel Josipovici for the Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2017'To Mireille Gansel, the sinuous link between language and migration mirrors that between translation and transhumance, a seasonal movement of herds to and from mountainous heights to verdant valleys that has occurred across Europe since shepherds began.Gansel's pursuit of her own legacy (Hungarian/French/German - fluent, with Czech and Yiddish on the side, plus acquired English and Vietnamese) transhumes into love of poetry in its own tongue.' (The Jewish Chronicle) 'A revelation.' (Kirkus Reviews). 'Gansel's slim and sensitive memoir has just been elegantly translated into English by another outstanding translator, Ros Schwartz...there is a deeply insightful and humanistic approach to their work.' (Bookwitty) '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)
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780993009334 |
| ISBN 10 | 0993009336 |
| Title | Translation as Transhumance |
| Author | Mireille Gansel |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Les Fugitives |
| Year published | 2017-11-01 |
| Number of pages | 128 |
| Prizes | Winner of PEN Translates! 2017, Winner of French Voices Award 2016, Runner-up for Jan Michalski Foundation Literarture Prize 2014 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |