Mireille Gansel

Translated by Ros Schwartz

Tenth anniversary edition to be published on 22 April 2027

Winner of an English PEN Award 2017 and a French Voices Award 2015
Selected by Gabriel Josipovici in Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2017
Selected by Sophie Collins in The White Review Books of the Year 2018
Longlisted for the Jan Michalski Foundation Literature Prize 2013

Native language is not a set of grammar rules and regulations, it is the child’s spiritual nourishment. (Janusz Korczak) 

Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything – including their native languages – 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. 

Gansel’s fragmented narrative illustrates the estrangement every translator experiences for the privilege of moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile. 

In addition, the book discusses the lives and work of Bertolt Brecht, Imre Kertész, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, the poetry of the Shoah, German poet Peter Huchel, dissident writer Rainer Kunze, Vietnamese revolutionary poets Tố Hữu and Chế Lan Viên, and French poet René Char, as well as Austrian ethnologist Eugenie Goldstern.

Read excerpts in Literary Hub, Asymptote, Granta, Words Without Borders, Modern Literature, and an audio version on Asymptote
See reviews in the London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books and more

‘Like a shepherd guiding her flock across changing landscapes, Gansel moves between languages and cultures with extraordinary attentiveness and care.’ — Xiaolu Guo

‘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 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

‘(Gansel) recognizes the fact that poetry is the lifeblood of a language and a culture; it saves language from the meaningless currency of everyday exchange—the language that Nazi bureaucracy thrived on—and transforms it into words that breathe, that live their own life, that create an entirely different reality from the roots of words and transforms them into “glowing stones.”’ — Charlotte Mandell, translator of Maurice Blanchot and Mathias Énard

‘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 Jabès

Tenth anniversary edition:
With two additional chapters newly translated from the updated French edition
Forthcoming on 22 April 2027
134 pages
paperback, 198 × 127 mm
ISBN 978-1-9194800-4-6

Second edition:
With a translation of the original preface to the French edition and an afterword by Ros Schwartz
First published in November 2017
Reprinted with colour photograph on the front cover in December 2020
128 pages
paperback, 203 x 127 mm
First published November 2017
ISBN 978-0-9930093-7-2

First edition: out of print