Soul House - Mireille Gansel

In the first book of her poetry to appear in English, acclaimed French-Jewish poet, translator, and translation-theorist Mireille Gansel crisscrosses time and extends hospitality to exiled poets and peoples in her quest to recreate a lost literary and spiritual home. Gansel opens this meditative volume of prose poems with an epigraph from Gaston Bachelard: against all odds, the house invites us to say: I will be a citizen of the world despite the world. In these war-torn days of refugees fleeing to Europe, Gansel strives to describe what we have in common, creating a crossroads of people, places, and languages she has loved. For Gansel, a poet rebuilding her SOUL HOUSE, every word is a building block. At the same time that she welcomes the stranger to her lost house, poetry is her weapon--these migrant poems from all languages, these smuggled words that no border can stop--with which to fight persecution and exile. In her review of the French edition, Sophie Ehrsam wrote, The 'SOUL HOUSE' is anything that harbors a glimmer, a hope, including an open door or an outstretched hand. Preface by Fanny Howe: author of many books of poetry and prose. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009. Howe taught for the University of California at San Diego, where she is professor emerita. Mireille Gansel's book is what I have so often called for: truly nomadic writing, 'like a pact behind words and borders, ' as she puts it. And this writing, this writer, travels from & comes to rest in a house or a tent, what in Arabic is called beit, a word that also means a metrical unit of poetry. Seen from outside, this 'immobile nomad' (dixit Albert Memmi) may look that way in her house at her desk, but the travel goes on fueled by the nomadic activity that is writing or translation, the move between & through languages, through memory & time, a mining & panning of word-surface & soul-depth. Only a seasoned writer/translator of Gansel's stature can achieve such excellence in doing what I have called the poet's job, namely to 'pick up everything that shines / throw out the gold / keep the light.'--Pierre JorisMireille Gansel's SOUL HOUSE, in Joan Seliger Sidney's beautiful translation, is something to behold: a book of aftermaths, of ghost-breath in scraps of tales almost told, a post-scr