Additional information
by Mireille Gansel (Author), Ros Schwartz (Translator)
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. Winner of a French Voices Award, Gansel's debut 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.
Author Biography
Mireille Gansel, who taught German at the University of Lyon, has published translations of a number of distinguished poets including Nelly Sachs, Peter Huchel and Reiner Kunze, as well as letters by Paul Celan. After living for a time in Hanoi in the seventies, she published a volume of classical Vietnamese poetry translated into French.
Ros Schwartz has translated a wide range of Francophone fiction and non-fiction authors. In 2010 she published a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, and is currently involved in re-translating a number of Georges Simenon works for Penguin Classics' new Georges Simenon editions. In 2009, she was made Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
