For those interested in translation, this slim, delicate book will be a revelation.
A personal meditation on the challenging art of translation.
This extended essay by the gifted translator Gansel, a fine translation unto itself, weaves together memoir and a discussion of the nuances involved in translating foreign texts, especially poetry. The book is divided into three autobiographical sections: the author’s early years, her time spent in Vietnam during the U.S. bombings, and the challenges she faced translating the Jewish German-language poet Nelly Sachs. Gansel’s elaborate methodology, carefully developed over the years, was to do extensive research about the lives of the poets she was working on, meet with them personally whenever possible, and immerse herself in the language and the writers’ habits and writing processes. For her, translation was like a “hand reaching from one shore to another where there is no bridge.” It became the “clay from which I would fashion my own interior language.” Gansel grew up surrounded by languages: Hungarian, French, German, and some Czech and Yiddish. Early on, in Berlin, she worked on Bertolt Brecht and then the East German poets Reiner Kunze and Peter Huchel, both of whom she was able to meet and learn from. The repressive political milieu of the German divide loomed over her work. After struggling with a key word in a Kunze poem, Gansel recalls returning to the West side after a Kafkaesque checkpoint experience, smuggling “back the word I had come to seek.” In Vietnam during its darkest days, she worked with a small group of Vietnamese poets on a “vast and entirely different kind of poetry.” Gansel concludes with her personally difficult experiences translating the “deeply painful poetry” of Sachs. The poet escaped Nazi Germany, but many of her family members were sent to concentration camps and died.
For those interested in translation, this slim, delicate book will be a revelation.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55861-444-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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