Aline Kessler

Aline Kessler grew up in Munster, in the valley, where people moved from Alsatian to French in the middle of a sentence without thinking about it and where German was never a foreign language. She taught for about ten years, then began recording texts for an association producing audiobooks for the visually impaired. She never left. She lives in Eguisheim.

She reads mostly poetry and short narrative, with a preference for ballads and for whatever the German nineteenth century produced that was dark. She says a ballad is told, not declaimed, and that a line of verse stands on its own if you do not try to hold it up. Her working rule fits in one sentence: say the text at the speed you would tell the same story to someone sitting opposite you.

She records in the evening, once the village has gone quiet, and always reads aloud the day before to find the places where she stumbles. She works with Itamde on the French-language Voctale catalogue.