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, 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.
Author
Mireille Gansel
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. Her second and third books as an author, Une petite fenêtre d’or and the poetry collection Comme une lettre,were published in France in 2017.
Photo credit: Jean-Yves Masson
Translator
Ros Schwartz
With over 60 titles to her name, Ros Schwartz has translated a wide range of Francophone fiction and non-fiction authors including Dominique Manotti (whose Lorraine Connection (Arcadia) won the 2008 International Dagger Award), and Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé, whose Kite (Seagull Books), was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in the USA. In 2010 she published a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (shortlisted for the Marsh children’s book award) and she is involved in translating a number of Maigret titles for Penguin Classics’ new Simenon edition.
Ros frequently publishes articles and gives workshops and talks on literary translation around the world. She is co-organiser of a 2014 translation summer school in association with City University, London. In 2009 she was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her services to literature.
Published by
Les Fugitives, 2017
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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, 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.