Acclaimed French poet, translator, and translator-theorist, Mireille Gansel, joins Joan Seliger Sidney for a reading from Gansel’s first book of her poetry in English translation, Soul House, followed by a conversation about the nature of language and the splendors and limitations of translation with Olivia Sears.
Translated by Joan Seliger Sidney, Soul House crisscrosses time and extends hospitality to exiled poets and peoples in a quest to recreate a lost literary and spiritual home. In these war-torn days, Gansel strives to describe what we have in common, creating a crossroads of people, places, and languages she has loved.
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.
Gansel’s half memoir, half philosophical treatise on translation, Translation as Transhumance (translated by Roz Schwartz) illustrates the estrangement every translator experiences for the privilege of moving betweeen tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile.
The Jewish Community Library is located on the campus of the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, with free garage parking(opens in a new tab) at 1227 Pierce Street between Ellis and Eddy.
Co-presented by World Poetry Books and the Jewish Community Library.
Mireille Gansel has won major awards for both her translations of German and Vietnamese poets, and for some of her seven books of poetry. Her lyrical memoir, Translation as Transhumance—published in an English translation by Ros Schwartz—has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. She received the Veu Lliure 2021 Prize from the Catalan PEN. In 2018, Mireille became the Laureate of the Great Prize of Translation Etienne Dolet-Sorbonne Université. Other awards include the Khoury-Ghata poetry prize, the Gérald de Nerval translation prize, an English PEN Award, and a French Voices Award. Soul House (World Poetry, 2023) is her first book of poetry in English translation.
Joan Seliger Sidney’s books of poetry include Body of Diminishing Motion, Bereft and Blessed, and The Way the Past Comes Back. Her translations, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Common and Asymptote, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is Writer-in-Residence at University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and has received several fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and a Visiting Faculty Fellowship from Yale University. Her translation of Mireille Gansel’s Soul House was published by World Poetry in November 2023.
Olivia E. Sears is a translator of Italian poetry and founder of the Center for the Art of Translation, where she edited the journal Two Lines for over a decade. Her translations of contemporary poet Mariangela Gualtieri have recently appeared in Arkansas International, Circumference, The Common, and Copper Nickel, among others. She is currently completing a manuscript of Gualtieri’s poetry in English, When I Wasn’t Dying.