Translation as Transhumance

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 privilege of moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy among those in exile.