Mireille Gansel

Mireille Gansel has published translations of a number of distinguished poets including Nelly Sachs, Peter Huchel, and the great contemporary poet Reiner Kunze, whose work she introduced to French readers, as well as letters by Paul Celan to Nelly Sachs.

After living in Hanoi in the seventies, she published the first volume of classical Vietnamese poetry translated into French. For a long time she contributed to La Quinzaine Littéraire, the literary magazine founded by Maurice Nadeau. 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 by Éditions La Coopérative. Her latest book, Maison d'âmes (a volume of memoirs) was published, also by Éditions La Coopérative in spring 2018. She is also the author of Larmes de neige (poems, 2006) and Chronique de la rue Saint-Paul (2010). Further to its publication in English, Traduire comme transhumer (Calligrammes, 2012) has been translated into German, Italian, Catalan and Spanish.

Translation as Transhumance is translated by Ros Schwartz.

Related articles and media:
‘“One doesn’t translate the words but life and human beings.”’ Mireilla Gansel interviewed by Olivia Snaije for Bookwitty.

‘Gansel tunes herself most sensitively into many states of language, from dwelling in a mother tongue to opening ways of surviving in exile and estrangement.’ — Marina Warner

‘Pursuing this work of recovery and protection, translators like Gansel could be aligned with Platonists, committed to groping towards the elusive ur-truth of a literary work.’ — Marina Warner,  London Review of Books

‘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

‘Gansel cultivates a multidimensional understanding of language; it is likewise to excavate words, an archaeology of the strata of interpretation that extend from the merest surface inscription.’ — Emily LaBarge, Los Angeles Review of Books