Native language is not a set of grammar rules and regulations, it is the child's spiritual nourishment. (Janusz Korczak) Mireille 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 fragmented narrative illustrates the estrangement every translator experiences for the privilege of moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile. In addition, the book discusses the lives and work of Bertolt Brecht, Imre Kertesz, Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, the poetry of the Shoah, German poet Peter Huchel, dissident writer Rainer Kunze, Vietnamese revolutionary poets To Huu and Che Lan Vien, and French poet Rene Char, as well as Austrian ethnologist Eugenie Goldstern's pre-Nazi time documentation of language in the Alps.
