Here is something like a translation memoir,
the story of Mireille Gansel’s multiple and changing relationships to various
languages and to the act of translation. The author begins, in delicate prose, with
stories of Hungarian and German in her French childhood. Gansel comes from a Jewish
mitteleuropäische family spread across exiles in Europe and Israel, who speak
Hungarian (which she does not understand as a child, but loves to hear her
father translate aloud) and the German of the pre-Nazi Austro-Hungarian empire.
She writes beautifully about the inflections of Czech, Yiddish and Hebrew in
her relatives’ accents, their language as a relic of history. Her translator
Ros Schwartz has given us a polished rendering, letting the author’s precise and considered voice shine through and always staying this side of kitsch, but I
would have expected no less from her.
Gansel learns German at school and goes on
to study it and eventually translate its poetry, but for her, language is a
literary medium that has a deep association with the individuals who speak it.
Transhumance means taking sheep from one pasture to another, but every time I
read it the word human stands out – a productive misunderstanding. Writing
about the poets she has translated, Gansel tells us very personal stories about
them. How she discovered their work, what happened when they met (if they were
still alive), what influenced them, the melodies of their verses and voices.
Her repeated query is: How was I to translate this? Each writer necessitates a
different approach. It seems almost to be a question of passing a poem between
two human beings, and to do so Gansel seeks a close understanding of the work
and its creator, spending time with them and then finding the fitting place to
translate.
Gansel writes fascinatingly about her work
in Vietnam on Vietnamese poetry, taking a new tack as bombs were falling during
the 1970s. Her translator Ros Schwartz told me: “A good translation doesn’t
colonise the work but preserves the joys and beauties of its ‘otherness’
without resorting to weird foreignization.” Gansel herself quotes the
translator Nguyen Khac Vien’s guiding principle: “‘Staying faithful means first
and foremost seeking to recreate the work’s humanity, its universality.’ An
approach that meant liberation from all forms of exoticism, appropriation, and
the cultural and spiritual annexation characteristic of the translations
produced under colonisation.” She does just that, not only in her translations
but in the way she thinks about poetry and people, moving directly from the Vietnamese
To Huu’s lines on casuarina forests to Brecht’s thoughts on the
near-criminality of talking about trees in difficult times – though conditions
are very different in a country stripped of vegetation by Agent Orange.
To help her work on the texts of minority
language-speakers in the Vietnamese mountains, she looks to field ethnology gathering
spoken language in the Alps, “absorbing the rhythms and cadences of those words
and voices, discovering an entire register of expressions, accents and
constructions.” All this helps her to understand the nature of orality and
form. People, I understand from her working method, are human wherever they
are. That shepherding metaphor has at its heart a sense of less crossing but
rather ignoring and defying boundaries. Over its long history, German has been
spoken across shifting political borders and overlapping with other languages, as
Gansel points out, making the notion of pinning language to nationality a
fallacy.
That helps, I’m convinced, to reclaim
German from its abuse by fascists, as Brecht did and as many exiled writers attempted, including Nelly Sachs, whom Gansel translated with great care. It’s hard for
me to judge her work in this instance without understanding French; by necessity,
the book uses various translators’ English renderings, which vary in
effectiveness. But the questions she raises, of how to capture Sachs’s dense Hebrew-infused
poetry, are fascinating. In the face of repeated right-wing calls for everyone living
in Germany to adhere to an ill-defined Leitkultur, asserting a pluralist vision
of German language, literature and culture is still a key task. The “German-speaking
world” is a place where many languages are spoken, now too, and where those
languages permeate each other to produce exciting writing, influenced far more
widely than by any standard canon. Mireille Gansel reminds us that the world is
more complex and wonderful than those who call for a single dominant national
culture would have us believe.
That, and her lessons about taking great
time and care over the human aspect of translation, will stay with me for a
long time to come.
