Josh Cook, "Words That Speak of What Is Human: On Mireille Gansel’s 'Translation as Transhumance'"
Josh Cook, "Words That Speak of What Is Human: On Mireille Gansel’s 'Translation as Transhumance'"
I confess I was not familiar with the term "transhumance" when I read the title of Gansel's book. As Wikipedia tell us (Transhumance - Wikipedia), "Transhumance is a type of nomadism or pastoralism, a seasonal movement of people with their livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures. In montane regions (vertical transhumance), it implies movement between higher pastures in summer and lower valleys in winter." That obviously provides an important clue to her thinking about translation.
As the Amazon page summarizes, "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." And her translator, "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."
Here is just one excerpt from the review that I found stimulating:
"[T]here is more at stake in Gansel’s translation of Vietnamese, beyond transferring its meaning into French. Her work is a direct confrontation with 'McNamara’s declaration that the US would ‘bomb ’em back to the stone age’ with the testimony of a culture that was several thousand years old.' She helps to 'answer McNamara’s threat with poetry,' introducing the idea of society that predates Western imperialism, and thus turning the fact of literature into proof of humanity. In the way of her transnational German, this humanizing of the Other, this erasing of borders between cultures, demonstrates that translation is an act of political activism, undercutting the boundaries used to control people, and strengthening the connections all human beings share. Translation has this effect, in part, because it changes how we identify ourselves and how we describe our relationships to everyone else."
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It seems to me that Gansel's comparing Vietnamese poetry with development in the West is illogical. I am probably mistaken, would not recorded Vietnamese poetry be produced by only a very elite group who were very privileged and poetry in the west was generated by people of several strata of the cultures. But perhaps she was only comparing the best of Vietnamese poetry with the best of Western poetry. On another point, I too am not acquainted with "transhumance". From what you have explained of it, it is difficult for me to perceive Gansel's use of the word in relation to poetry in two worldviews. It seems to me, also, that she did not understand that McNamara’s declaration was about war on a modern communist worldview, not on a ancient Vietnamese worldview.
Not sure if you are commenting on the review or on something in the book being reviewed. I took the point to be that her translation of Vietnamese poetry built a bridge from a Vietnamese poetic culture that reflects the humanity and the antiquity of a people who have survived despite being treated with nuclear annihilation and having suffered the actual annihilation of napalmed forests and villages. I think the relevance of transhumance is that just as there are no fixed borders for those livestock as they move from one place to another (or from some places to other places) at different times, so translation allows ideas and cultural memory to move around and find habitation in new contexts. As she writes, "So it is with the transhumance routes of translation, the slow and patient crossing of countries, all borders eradicated, the movement of huge flocks of words through all the vernaculars of the umbrella language of poetry." It allows us Vietnamese poetry to move from the high plains of Vietnam to the low valleys of France and francophone contexts (and then by further translation to America and other anglophone contexts), no longer bound by national or linguistic boundaries. I believe the declaration about bombing was about (and is understood in the piece to be about) attempting to destroy the culture and destroying innumerable people in the process, and not merely a metaphor for the undoing of a worldview).