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Translation as Transhumance
Translation as Transhumance is half-memoir, half-philosophical treatise musing on translation's potential for humanist engagement. One of the great contemporary French translators, the author has lived her life as a risk-taker. Going back to her childhood in post-war France she reflects on her origins as a translator. Gansel's travels took her to important places at seminal points of the 20th century, such as her encounters with banned German writers in 1960s East Berlin. During the Vietnam war, she went to Hanoi to work on an anthology of Vietnamese poetry. The book offers a fascinating account of wartime danger, hospitality and human kinship as the city under bombardment. Gansel is brilliant at conveying the sense of exile and alienation that is the price paid for the privilege of not dwelling exclusively in the comforting home of the mother tongue, as she explores her relationship with French, which she has come to know very differently because of her activities as a translator. Her lyrical, delicate text offers a profound engagement with humanist values and a meditation on communication. Foreword by Laura Elkin, author of Flaneuse
150 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 33 reviews
October 9, 2024
[rambly and off-topic] I am drawn to books on translation because
- English is not my mother tongue but is now my most used, most fluent language; and
- I feel there is a gap in my own expressibility, where I hold the core of a thought in Mandarin and no longer have the ability to verbalise it in Mandarin, but the thought is not perfectly renderable in English. Maybe I'm just bad at English, too.
All of this is to say that I appreciated Gansel's musings on translation as estrangement, politics, exile, hospitality.
- English is not my mother tongue but is now my most used, most fluent language; and
- I feel there is a gap in my own expressibility, where I hold the core of a thought in Mandarin and no longer have the ability to verbalise it in Mandarin, but the thought is not perfectly renderable in English. Maybe I'm just bad at English, too.
All of this is to say that I appreciated Gansel's musings on translation as estrangement, politics, exile, hospitality.
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April 11, 2018"For Gansel, translation is a wholly committed sort of engagement, one that compels her to learn Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, travel to Vietnam in the early 1970s, live in a war zone, and compile an anthology of Vietnamese poetry in French, based on her immersion in studying not just the language but also the music and culture of the people. Gansel writes that the only German her Jewish Hungarian father knew was the phrase “Du bist ein Stück Fleisch mit zwei Augen”: You are a piece of meat with two eyes. One senses that Gansel’s life was shaped by that fact, and by her desire to overcome the generalizations of Nazi bureaucracy to find the particular humanity that lies inside each language, each culture, each person." - Charlotte Mandel
This book was reviewed in the Jan/Feb 2018 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
This book was reviewed in the Jan/Feb 2018 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
September 8, 2024
"From that moment, translation came to mean learning to listen to the silences between the lines, to the underground springs of people's hinterland".
"In these times of solitude and solidarities : translation, a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no shore".
If books on translation theory is an inevitable genre for me because of academic requirements, books on translation by practicing translators is something I grab with all my heart. In this memoir of absolute lyrical beauty, Gansel reflects on her experiences of translation. Particularly the poets from East Berlin and Vietnam, places that witnessed political turmoils. Poets whose poetry stands as human resilience. Historical contexts and people's lived experiences form the centres of her engagements with languages while translation. A reiteration that is inevitable. Her words contain so much of love and consideration for other human beings. Gansel's experiences of translation show how the translation is an ongoing process. There is never a settlement. It demands a re-reading and reinterpretation over and again as the human history progresses. Well, apart from the disregard for borders, the transhumance in the title also hints at this nomadism.
Translation, for Mireille Gansel, is a “delicate seismograph at the heart of time". As someone
whose academic interest centers around translation studies, this phrase is going to remain with me.
Lauren Elkin says in the foreword,
"Translation is more than a grammar; it is listening. When we translate, we are not rendering a block of text in its immediate equivalent; we keep an ear out for what is unspoken, carried through language, smuggled inside of it. "
The word smuggle here is very important to me.
With her exquisite prose and extracts of some of her translated poetry, this was a lovely read.
"In these times of solitude and solidarities : translation, a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no shore".
If books on translation theory is an inevitable genre for me because of academic requirements, books on translation by practicing translators is something I grab with all my heart. In this memoir of absolute lyrical beauty, Gansel reflects on her experiences of translation. Particularly the poets from East Berlin and Vietnam, places that witnessed political turmoils. Poets whose poetry stands as human resilience. Historical contexts and people's lived experiences form the centres of her engagements with languages while translation. A reiteration that is inevitable. Her words contain so much of love and consideration for other human beings. Gansel's experiences of translation show how the translation is an ongoing process. There is never a settlement. It demands a re-reading and reinterpretation over and again as the human history progresses. Well, apart from the disregard for borders, the transhumance in the title also hints at this nomadism.
Translation, for Mireille Gansel, is a “delicate seismograph at the heart of time". As someone
whose academic interest centers around translation studies, this phrase is going to remain with me.
Lauren Elkin says in the foreword,
"Translation is more than a grammar; it is listening. When we translate, we are not rendering a block of text in its immediate equivalent; we keep an ear out for what is unspoken, carried through language, smuggled inside of it. "
The word smuggle here is very important to me.
With her exquisite prose and extracts of some of her translated poetry, this was a lovely read.
November 3, 2024
No word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.
Translation as Transhumance, a beautiful part memoir/part essay on the art of translation has itself been translated by Ros Schwartz from Mireille Gansel's original.
This is yet another striking book from Les Fugitives, "dedicated to publishing short works of general interest and of outstanding literary merit by francophone female authors previously unavailable in English". My shelf of reviews of all their books to date: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Daughter of a Hungarian Jew, with family members victims of Nazi Germany, part of Gansel's mission in both translation and his book is to recapture, in her translations to the French, the German language not of that regime but rather that of the wider community, including exiles. Discussing her translation of the work of the anthropologist Eugenie Goldstern on Alpine folk culture, she refers to that German language, the crucible language of Mitteleuropa, which she made the crucible of her writing. That language on which the Nazi ideology had no grip, because it is a language of the mind, without a territory and without borders and with multiple affiliations .... both supranational - as Imre Kertesz called that German without a territory: the German of Kafka writing in Prague, Paul Celan or Joseph Roth in Paris, Elias Canetti in London and Stefan Zweig in Brazil - and at the same time the sanctuary of each dialect of the places she visited.
As the opening quote suggests, Gansel doesn't believe that words driven by human experience can be untranslatable - but on the other she takes an immersive and extremely dedicated approach to the task - her translation of Goldstern was made with the help of a small team of anthropologists, architects, veterinary surgeons, art historians and botanists.
The book's title comes from her thoughts on translation as compared to the the movement of people, and the seasonal movement of shepherds to new pastures:
That little Provençal road made me think of transhumance: the long, slow movement of the flocks to distant places, in search of the greenest pastures, the low plains in winter and the high valleys in summer. All the ancient routes that have witnessed encounters and exchanges in all the dialects of the “umbrella language” of Provençal. So it is with the transhumance routes of translation, the slow and patient crossing of countries, all borders eradicated, the movement of huge flocks of words through all the vernaculars of the umbrella language of poetry.
Another of her long-term projects took place in the 1970s. While the Vietnam war raged, and as a counterpoint to General Curtis LeMay's infamous "bomb them back into the Stone Age" quote, she moved to Hanoi to produce the first ever French translation of classical Vietnamese poetry. A lesson she learned there was to reject exoticism, again focusing instead on the underlying human feelings in the work. Quoting the doctor Nyugen Khan Vien who interested her in the project:
Exoticism arouses simply a sense of foreignness without being able to communicate the emotions, the deeper feelings that inspire a work.
Although she eventually concludes that to replicate the tone of the language she needs to have her work read with accompaniment via a traditional Vietnamese monochord instrument.
And perhaps Gansel's most important lesson of all:
I remember clearly how, one morning as the snows were melting, as I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams, it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other. That was probably my most essential lesson in translation.
An impressive work - short (c100 pages) yet with much more depth than I can capture. See here for links to other reviews: https://www.lesfugitives.com/reviews-...
Translation as Transhumance, a beautiful part memoir/part essay on the art of translation has itself been translated by Ros Schwartz from Mireille Gansel's original.
This is yet another striking book from Les Fugitives, "dedicated to publishing short works of general interest and of outstanding literary merit by francophone female authors previously unavailable in English". My shelf of reviews of all their books to date: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
Daughter of a Hungarian Jew, with family members victims of Nazi Germany, part of Gansel's mission in both translation and his book is to recapture, in her translations to the French, the German language not of that regime but rather that of the wider community, including exiles. Discussing her translation of the work of the anthropologist Eugenie Goldstern on Alpine folk culture, she refers to that German language, the crucible language of Mitteleuropa, which she made the crucible of her writing. That language on which the Nazi ideology had no grip, because it is a language of the mind, without a territory and without borders and with multiple affiliations .... both supranational - as Imre Kertesz called that German without a territory: the German of Kafka writing in Prague, Paul Celan or Joseph Roth in Paris, Elias Canetti in London and Stefan Zweig in Brazil - and at the same time the sanctuary of each dialect of the places she visited.
As the opening quote suggests, Gansel doesn't believe that words driven by human experience can be untranslatable - but on the other she takes an immersive and extremely dedicated approach to the task - her translation of Goldstern was made with the help of a small team of anthropologists, architects, veterinary surgeons, art historians and botanists.
The book's title comes from her thoughts on translation as compared to the the movement of people, and the seasonal movement of shepherds to new pastures:
That little Provençal road made me think of transhumance: the long, slow movement of the flocks to distant places, in search of the greenest pastures, the low plains in winter and the high valleys in summer. All the ancient routes that have witnessed encounters and exchanges in all the dialects of the “umbrella language” of Provençal. So it is with the transhumance routes of translation, the slow and patient crossing of countries, all borders eradicated, the movement of huge flocks of words through all the vernaculars of the umbrella language of poetry.
Another of her long-term projects took place in the 1970s. While the Vietnam war raged, and as a counterpoint to General Curtis LeMay's infamous "bomb them back into the Stone Age" quote, she moved to Hanoi to produce the first ever French translation of classical Vietnamese poetry. A lesson she learned there was to reject exoticism, again focusing instead on the underlying human feelings in the work. Quoting the doctor Nyugen Khan Vien who interested her in the project:
Exoticism arouses simply a sense of foreignness without being able to communicate the emotions, the deeper feelings that inspire a work.
Although she eventually concludes that to replicate the tone of the language she needs to have her work read with accompaniment via a traditional Vietnamese monochord instrument.
And perhaps Gansel's most important lesson of all:
I remember clearly how, one morning as the snows were melting, as I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams, it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other. That was probably my most essential lesson in translation.
An impressive work - short (c100 pages) yet with much more depth than I can capture. See here for links to other reviews: https://www.lesfugitives.com/reviews-...
July 2, 2022
Abandoned.
The writing is unnecessarily flowery and the author takes 3 pages to say what could have been communicated in one paragraph.
There also didn't seem to be much of a point to what I read.
The writing is unnecessarily flowery and the author takes 3 pages to say what could have been communicated in one paragraph.
There also didn't seem to be much of a point to what I read.
January 30, 2023
I have so many wonderful things to say about this, but I can’t find the words! 🥹
August 14, 2019
Mireille Gansel's life was shaped by words, her thoughts, her inquisitive nature. As a very young child her father would read letters from relatives in Budapest and would struggle with some of the nuances of the nouns and labels.
The words were drágám, kedvesem, aranyoskám, édesem: my darling, my beloved, my little golden girl, my sweet. Technically they mean the same thing, but there are decided nuances, and also nuances depending upon who is saying them and to whom.
These are all the thoughts that a translator must think of when translating a work, along with the relation of the words to each other and to its original language, whether the nuance and history of a specific word can be conveyed in the language the piece is being translated to while still maintaining the original's rhythm.
In this brief memoir/philosophical treatise on the art and empathy of translation, Gansel addresses these issues and her own story of how translation has led her and can lead to greater empathy and understanding. Gansel's own family lost their language due to Nazi bureaucrats. Having this as the backdrop of her parents' experiences, it thus became the subtext for her own upbringing. How the negation of language can negate a person or group of people. And how the art of translation can keep alive the literature, the history, and the lives of people:
"In these times of solitude and solidarities, the price of a letter that gets past the censors...
In these times of solitude and solidarities: translation, a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no bridge."
Gansel's experiences in translation and oppressive, warring governments led her to translate an anthology of Vietnamese poetry into French, the first ever translation of its kind to protest the bombing of the North Vietnamese, knowing how the indiscriminate bombing would negate and entire culture and the individual histories of each person, how it could fundamentally change/alter a language. To accomplish this she had to learn Vietnamese, a language with a structure very different from her own, immersing herself in not only the language but the music and cultural history of Vietnam.
She describes this immersion into translation as transitory possession, trying to grasp something infinitely distant in one's hand and clutch it to their chest, like holding onto the tendrils of smoke, ultimately showing translation as a metaphor for an empathetic life:
Giving this short meditation on Gansel's philosophy and humanistic theories of translation greater resonance is that this edition is itself a translation into English from Gansel's original French.
"To my delight the section of the letter my father was reading was about me. He initially translated a word used by his brother or one of his sisters as "beloved," stumbled over the next word and repeated this...and then repeated this a second time. I asked, 'But in Hungarian is it the same word?' 'It means the same thing.' 'But what are the words in Hungarian?'"
The words were drágám, kedvesem, aranyoskám, édesem: my darling, my beloved, my little golden girl, my sweet. Technically they mean the same thing, but there are decided nuances, and also nuances depending upon who is saying them and to whom.
These are all the thoughts that a translator must think of when translating a work, along with the relation of the words to each other and to its original language, whether the nuance and history of a specific word can be conveyed in the language the piece is being translated to while still maintaining the original's rhythm.
In this brief memoir/philosophical treatise on the art and empathy of translation, Gansel addresses these issues and her own story of how translation has led her and can lead to greater empathy and understanding. Gansel's own family lost their language due to Nazi bureaucrats. Having this as the backdrop of her parents' experiences, it thus became the subtext for her own upbringing. How the negation of language can negate a person or group of people. And how the art of translation can keep alive the literature, the history, and the lives of people:
"In these times of solitude and solidarities, the price of a letter that gets past the censors...
In these times of solitude and solidarities: translation, a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no bridge."
Gansel's experiences in translation and oppressive, warring governments led her to translate an anthology of Vietnamese poetry into French, the first ever translation of its kind to protest the bombing of the North Vietnamese, knowing how the indiscriminate bombing would negate and entire culture and the individual histories of each person, how it could fundamentally change/alter a language. To accomplish this she had to learn Vietnamese, a language with a structure very different from her own, immersing herself in not only the language but the music and cultural history of Vietnam.
She describes this immersion into translation as transitory possession, trying to grasp something infinitely distant in one's hand and clutch it to their chest, like holding onto the tendrils of smoke, ultimately showing translation as a metaphor for an empathetic life:
Brief Postscriptum
At the bottom of a page, in the corner, right at the edge, Che Van Lien had made a note in tiny handwriting, with a red ballpoint pen, as though it were a rough draft. He had jotted down four words whose significance he explained to me while we were talking about the etymology and roots of words:
thu: letter
tho: poetry
I found that pleasing--as if translating a poem, for me, was always a little like translating a letter, both exceedingly distant and infinitely close.
Giving this short meditation on Gansel's philosophy and humanistic theories of translation greater resonance is that this edition is itself a translation into English from Gansel's original French.
November 10, 2021
I reviewed this book here: https://readingindie.substack.com/p/t...
June 30, 2024
una delícia menuda, una petita meravella, un tros diminut de llengua, un bocí xicotet de llum
(una pot llegir moltes novel·les o molts llibres però sempre sempre sempre tornarà a la poesia com qui torna a casa. una pot llegir moltes novel·les o molts llibres però sempre sempre sempre tornarà a la poesia com qui mai no ha marxat)
(el verset “el miracle és que els que moren de set esdevenen fonts” i el verset “jo veig venir tota una primavera cap a nosaltres” i el verset “tantes llavors a les arrels de llum”)
(una cosa que no es pot traduir no es pot dir)
(una pot llegir moltes novel·les o molts llibres però sempre sempre sempre tornarà a la poesia com qui torna a casa. una pot llegir moltes novel·les o molts llibres però sempre sempre sempre tornarà a la poesia com qui mai no ha marxat)
(el verset “el miracle és que els que moren de set esdevenen fonts” i el verset “jo veig venir tota una primavera cap a nosaltres” i el verset “tantes llavors a les arrels de llum”)
(una cosa que no es pot traduir no es pot dir)
August 23, 2021
I read it in one go, but it should be savoured a little at a time.
February 7, 2019
I happened across this beautiful book by chance while browsing at the library and I’m so glad that I picked it up. Set aside a couple hours of your day to sit down and let yourself fall into it. This book is a fascinating and introspective meditation on humanity; the importance that literature and language hold in carrying us through life, bringing people closer together or realizing what separates them. If you love reading or are interested in the intricacies of language and expression this book is definitely for you. Not only in the subjects that the author speaks of, like how the inherent meaning of a poem can change if you don’t seek out the proper way to translate the feeling into another language, but also the language the author herself (and her translator) uses to convey the process of translation. Always entrancing and at times heartbreaking in its intimacy, this book was a wonderful experience and I am grateful that it found me.
February 15, 2024
Mireille Gansel grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, her Jewish family having lost everything, even their language. It is in this world of estrangement and exile that Gansel develops her wonder and love of language.
“Translation became the clay from which I would fashion my own interior language.”
She is drawn to the German language, authors like Nelly Sachs, and the questions around overcoming the different walls and barbed-wire fences that encircle it physically and metaphorically.
“How do you bridge the abyss created in the German language by the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers of history? How do you reach the shores of a language of the soul?”
She takes on the task of learning Vietnamese and traveling to the war zone in the 1970s to translate and assemble an anthology of Vietnamese poetry in French.
“From that moment, translation came to mean learning to listen to the silences between the lines, to the underground springs of people's hinterland.”
For Gansel, translation becomes an act of transhumance, the seasonal migration of shepherds and flocks to other lands and greener grasses, a nomadism that crosses borders and languages, much like Gansel as a translator and seeker of humanity.
“No word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.”
“Translation became the clay from which I would fashion my own interior language.”
She is drawn to the German language, authors like Nelly Sachs, and the questions around overcoming the different walls and barbed-wire fences that encircle it physically and metaphorically.
“How do you bridge the abyss created in the German language by the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers of history? How do you reach the shores of a language of the soul?”
She takes on the task of learning Vietnamese and traveling to the war zone in the 1970s to translate and assemble an anthology of Vietnamese poetry in French.
“From that moment, translation came to mean learning to listen to the silences between the lines, to the underground springs of people's hinterland.”
For Gansel, translation becomes an act of transhumance, the seasonal migration of shepherds and flocks to other lands and greener grasses, a nomadism that crosses borders and languages, much like Gansel as a translator and seeker of humanity.
“No word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable.”
January 24, 2018
Interesting, poetic, heartfelt exploration of language and translation, which for the author is a process of going deeply into another person's writing and life to excavate the emotions, experiences, deeper connotations of one writer's work in order first to understand it (as much as possible) in all its dimensions, and then translate it into another form/another language. To choose just one quote from the book "translation, a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no bridge." I would recommend this short but also vast book to anyone who is interested in language and poetry, interested in how language forges connections between people and places and can express the wonders and traumas of life.
September 1, 2023
I am writing this review long after I have read the book, but I want to note that this translator's memoir was influential for me as a literary translator. The central concept of 'transhumance' -- a word that refers to the seasonal migration of shepherds and flocks to another land is what Mireille uses to describe the trajectory of her life as a translator. It's an apt metaphor for what a translator does with language -- each season of a life is permeated by language, first from the mother, and then later with the society in which the person grows up, and then, in the acquisition of other languages. All of this is a kind of movement between cultural terrains of experience.
December 17, 2024
Having read this without reading Gansel’s work on translation excites me to scour her work.
I admire her engagement towards translation as transhumance. I have nothing to write more of how I’ve felt reading this and why it calls something so deeply to me.
“It is in this extreme care to highlight every synonym, every word grasped and articulated not simply through repetition but in the expression of all its nuances and in the
'understanding of etymologies', that Buber and Rosenzweig developed their Hebraic German, creating a new space for responsibility instead of being crushed under the weight of original sin.”
In most days, I am lucid and yearn to do this with poetry.
I admire her engagement towards translation as transhumance. I have nothing to write more of how I’ve felt reading this and why it calls something so deeply to me.
“It is in this extreme care to highlight every synonym, every word grasped and articulated not simply through repetition but in the expression of all its nuances and in the
'understanding of etymologies', that Buber and Rosenzweig developed their Hebraic German, creating a new space for responsibility instead of being crushed under the weight of original sin.”
In most days, I am lucid and yearn to do this with poetry.
November 19, 2025
[As] I sat at the ancient table beneath the blackened beams, it suddenly dawned on me that the stranger was not the other, it was me. I was the one who had everything to learn, everything to understand, from the other.
Some nuggets of wisdom, some severe cases of blinders being glued on: she might be open to others' experiences as people, but there are very few attempts to understand their values.
May 15, 2018
Anyone who has ever read a book in translation (which is most people, I would think), should read this short, exquisite book. Gansel's thoughts on the importance of translations being immersed in culture (on both ends of the writing/reading), are important and affirmed by her experiences as a translator post-WWII and in the Vietnam War. One of my favorite nonfiction reads.
July 6, 2018
Hansel describes, in this short and focused memoir, the role of empathy in giving meaning to words, and how humanistic study develops that empathy. She argues that "no word that speaks of what is human is untranslatable."
I read Hansel's book while abroad, and her thoughts shaped my experience. And all this even though the translation required was from one English to another English.
I read Hansel's book while abroad, and her thoughts shaped my experience. And all this even though the translation required was from one English to another English.
December 21, 2017
Translation as Transhumance is a rich and resonant read. The lucid, concise prose of award-winning translator, Ros Schwartz, brings alive an exceptional life dedicated to translation as activism.
Reviewed on The BookBlast® Diary 2017
Reviewed on The BookBlast® Diary 2017
February 10, 2019
Devastatingly beautiful. A set of autobiographical reflections on translation, this book breathes its title in the author's accounts of visiting the places in which the authors she translates lived. Strongly recommended for anyone who translates, or who teaches other to do so.
January 9, 2026
The care & compassion with which Mireille Gansel approaches translation is so inspiring, her appreciation for the authors & their languages & cultures is so evident. I could have easily read many more of these mini essays.
September 15, 2019
4,25 stars
Read
August 10, 2020"In these times of solitude and solidarities: translation, a hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no bridge."
August 24, 2021
Interesting ideas about translation, especially on the impact of exile. #14 for women in translation month.
Read
March 23, 2023I truly wanted to connect with this book because I find the topic so interesting, but I ultimately couldn’t.
Want to read
April 6, 2023to-read
August 19, 2023
L'analogia entre la transhumància i la traducció està agafada amb pinces. Em grinyola força i m'ha impedit gaudir del missatge central del llibre.
April 25, 2024
Beautiful and theoretical
June 2, 2024
I can appreciate what she’s trying to stay but I did not care for the way she said it.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 33 reviews