Lauren Elkin is an award-winning American translator and writer living in Paris, and author of BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week 'Flaneuse: Women Walk the City'. With a translation of the original preface to the French edition and an afterword by Ros Schwartz. Selected by Gabriel Josipovici in Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2017 Selected by Sophie Collins in The White Review Books of the Year 2018 Longlisted for the Jan Michalski Foundation Literature Prize 2013

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. In this half memoire, half philosophical treatise Gansel's debut 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.