Translation as transumance

Mireille Gansel’s memoir of her experience as a translator, bridging different languages and cultures, is a beautiful and personal narration of the process languages go through to become meaning, and how meaning varies according to ones’ own personal view of the world, shaped by familiar expressions and lost customs, a slow movement across the land, never settled.

The journey travelled by words to convey substance is likened to the seasonal movement of cattle or sheep to and from richer pastures, a constant seeking. “This is the German that has been puntcuated by exiles and passed down through the generations, from country to country, like a violin whose vibratos have retained the accents and intonations, the words and expressions of adopted countries and ways of speaking”, she writes, as she examines the difficulties of conveying a language’s rhytm and intonation in poetry, changing it entirely into “a different kind of poetry”.

She delves into the variation of idioms, sayings, and names across the Alps, where French melds into Italian, which then melds into German, from Slovenia to Savoie, from Piedmont to Tyrol; “for instance, the word maison in Low-Valais means “kitchen”, while the word chalet in French-speaking Switzerland reflects and entirely different social and cultural reality from the same word used in Savoie”, all the while highlighting the nature of translation, the interpreting, re-shaping, re-working of language in an effort to maintain the message as intact as feasibly possible, or at least, to surrender to the idea that the knowledge of language goes far beyond the simple, clear-cut understanding of words, requiring a sort of “cross-border anthropological approach”.