Transhumance
Mireille Gansel’s Traduire comme transhumer is at once an autobiography and an essay on the translator’s art, which like all art presupposes craft. The notion of transhumance is suggestive. It refers to the practice of moving livestock from one grazing-ground to another in a seasonal cycle, permitting the finding of like nourishment differently. Gansel has dedicated her life to the translation of massive, complex works. She has rendered Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs; she has revealed the sonorous universe of Vietnamese poetry. With quiet authority she evidences rather than argues that literature has a political dimension in as much as it transgresses boundaries, making me see that understanding does not always come from drawing the other to myself, but from letting myself be drawn into it: ‘I well remember that morning when the snow was thawing and I sat at an old table under darkened beams and suddenly realised: the stranger is not the other, it is I — I who have everything to learn, to understand from him. That was no doubt my most essential lesson in translation.’
