This Translation Tuesday, we present Mireille Gansel’s account of a visit to a “Heimatmuseum” in Montafon, Austria, whose purpose it is to change what we mean by “Heimat”—a charged, tainted word—and to demonstrate its kinder, hearth-like, more inclusive connotations. We present also a note from the translator, Joan Seliger Sidney:
After reading several of Mireille Gansel’s poems about the Holocaust—we are both second generation survivors—I chose to translate them. The more I read, the more I saw how broad her scope, including translating all of Nelly Sachs’ poems, as well as the correspondence between Sachs and Celan; also translating and anthologizing Vietnamese poets; in addition, writing her own poems about refugees, and about their migrations as well as bird migrations, and our everyday environment. Gansel is a much-awarded poet, translator, and memoirist. Her Traduire Comme Transhumer (translated by Ros Schwartz) has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. Translating her poems is an honor.
to make a word habitable focuses on centuries of “migrations of misery and survival,” and how this Heimatmuseum—once taken over by the Nazis but since restored by its director and the community—with its “humble objects” bears witness to these migrations. This poem also shows us how these “asylum seekers” were welcomed by their neighbors and have become contributing partners to their new village. This poem makes us question, why, in our country, founded by both indigenous peoples and immigrants, refugee populations are being randomly picked up coming home from doing jobs Americans refuse to do, and being deported.
We have much to learn from this Heimat country and from Mireille Gansel’s poems and memoir.
— Joan Seliger Sidney
to make a word habitable
a thousand times more native…
the earth where all is free and fraternal
my earth
—Aimé Césaire
like a letter to Bruno Winkler
historian and educator at Montafon in the Vorarlberg
this winter morning. The village of Schruns of the municipality of Montafon. Mountains around and narrow streets all buried in the snow. And up to the small square where one finds the museum. Heimatmuseum: how to translate this word? and then Heimat? The native country and the house, home, the home. A word where there is intimacy: perhaps because in the Middle Ages the strong accent was put on the vowel that preceded the “t,” and was pronounced “o,” thus creating a misunderstanding with Mut. A word that speaks of qualms.
Heimat oscillates between the intimate and the collective, between the spiritual and the terrestrial. A “sensitive” word of the sort that exists in every language, marked with the stamp of a History. So the German language forged in the spiritual, moral, political hearth of the translation Luther made of the Bible.
Yes, how to translate today: Heimatmuseum? And first, how to understand it? Doubtless by taking into account the layers of history deposited in the word Heimat and this museum subjugated by Nazism. Perhaps also by on-the-spot visits. Taking the pulse. In the field.
You warned me: “Heimatmuseums, in the valley, there are three. But you will see, in this microcosm of global migrations, which is the valley of Montafon, our museum is atypical – unüblich.” And when I asked you why you have kept this name, you added: “It’s true, the concept of Heimat-Heimatmuseum has been perverted in the worst possible way in the past and still today by an ideology of exclusion of ‘the other,’ of ‘the others.’ But for us, Heimat ought to become synonymous of a welcoming country, and the museum, Heimatmuseum, also ought to take its part in this welcoming country. In the valley of Montafon. And rightly so at Schruns where they are lodged in the Foyer Caritas Santa Rast and in inhabitants’ homes, the refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Eritrea, Albania, Egypt, Ukraine, from Pakistan, Senegal, Congo, Kosovo, Dagestan, Sri Lanka, Georgia, Chechnya, Somalia, Mongolia. In order to take up this challenge, our Heimatmuseum set itself up in the valley as a mediator, moderator in the dissensions, clashes, positions taken, tied to this “brisante Präsenz” of the asylum seekers. How eloquent is your expression “brisante Präsenz!” These two words of foreign origins accentuate the weight of this “presence” and the “fragmentation” of the beings of the routes of exile, the “fractures” among the inhabitants of the commune.
Yes, the snow was high. The wind glacial. But there was your welcome so warm around the table and this good coffee of friendship while you talk about your initiative supported by the museum director, Andreas Rudigier, and the whole team, and accompanied by volunteers of the village and surrounding areas and by a young artist of Schruns, Rebecca Marent, helped by student friends at Les Beaux-Arts de Brême.
Yes, the wind is glacial. But how this other warmth radiates: along the windows and neighboring everyday objects by people of the valley and their crafts, and those of the shepherds and of pastoral life and high mountain pastures, and these documents about the shelters, places of survival along the border crests, places under high surveillance by the Nazis since Anschluss then rapidly forbidden to access then closed. Yes, neighboring frescoes painted by refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Senegal: large colored panels red to tell the country, the desert, blue for the sea, and in between, black fish, for their work as fishermen on the coast, and from left to right, consciously on the fringe of the whole picture, there’s Europe Austria Schruns. They arrived and are living. But still marginal.
And near an ancient sign of the Heimatmuseum, another painting. The colors recall the desert, the sun (red and yellow) and a small oasis (green). And the black lines are the borders. And all the way to the right in the painting, a series of silhouettes, refugees on route.
Yes, neighboring: humble objects witness of the migrations, which have the history of these valleys, made throughout the centuries, migrations of misery and survival: muleteers, seasonal children from Swabia, cabbage cutters, harvesters, migratory waves of Alsatians, of Walser, of Lombards.
Under these same ceilings, along these same walls, under this same roof, a group of musicians from Kenya and Congo with a young boy from Armenia, and a youth from Schruns practices with them on the djembe, they want to form a small orchestra which will play at the inauguration of the exposition in the Montafon room of the museum. They practice at the foot of statues of cherubs, and Virgin Marys haloed and gilded as if escapees from a baroque chapel.
You show me these photos of an art-therapy group: in front of a cherry tree in bloom of women and a child from Mongolia who have presented a dance in public, with long white veils they manufactured with women from the village. In a room where a series of cuckoo clocks are hung against a fir tree wall, a woman from Mongolia, mouth closed, holds, lifts in her right hand, a mask whose mouth is open. As if to speak.
Further away, refugees from Chechnya, Georgia, Afghanistan are wrapped up in blankets they look like silhouettes. Collapsed at the foot of a chair. And on a sort of stretcher, a sort of human form wrapped in white paper and fabric tied with band-aids. Muzzled with a white mask.
A Heimat-country. Where to put your cries without words emotions memories traumas beyond all languages. A work. A road. Collective. Never isolated. Always in companionship. A man from the village with a serious face looks at a series of designs in black pencil on a piece of wall a tunnel to a grill horizon.
And your Heimatmuseum: like a country. A threshold of a country where one has the right to enter to speak without words to meet those of here and those of there to share a meal with the scents and flavors of so far away links of friendship are forged many of these refugees these asylum seekers have learned the language learned a trade living in the village—
and became neighbors—
Translated from the French by Joan Seliger Sidney
Mireille Gansel has won major awards for both her translations of German and Vietnamese poets, and for some of her seven books of poetry. Her lyrical memoir, Translation as Transhumance—published in an English translation by Ros Schwartz—has contributed significantly to the field of translation studies. She received the Veu Lliure 2021 Prize from the Catalan PEN. In 2018, Mireille became the Laureate of the Great Prize of Translation Etienne Dolet-Sorbonne Université. Other awards include the Khoury-Ghata poetry prize, the Gérald de Nerval translation prize, an English PEN Award, and a French Voices Award.
Joan Seliger Sidney’s books of poetry include Body of Diminishing Motion, Bereft and Blessed, and The Way the Past Comes Back. Her translations, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Common and Asymptote, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is Writer-in-Residence at University of Connecticut’s Center for Judaic Studies and has received several fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and a Visiting Faculty Fellowship from Yale University.
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