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Margaret Rigaud was born into a French and American family in Montpellier, France, and grew up into a fake bilingual (or bilingual fake, depending on how you look at it). After her studies in Paris (école normale supérieure de Fontenay-aux-Roses) and Oxford, where she was awarded a DPhil, she published a monograph on the deliciously inventive French and Belgian poet Henri Michaux’s search for a universal language (Oxford University Press, 2005). Her rather meandering academic career never really took off but took her to interesting places on both sides of the Atlantic (Harvard and the University of Virginia in the USA, Cambridge University in the UK) and gave her a chance to research other language dreamers, notably Guillaume Apollinaire. Realising that she was too much of a magpie for academia, she threw in the academic towel in 2011 and took the liberating but financially imprudent step of becoming a freelance translator. She set out to translate works that made her heart beat faster, but ended up settling for a varied diet of interesting work that could put food on her plate. She has now translated or co-translated over twenty academic books and museum exhibitions on subjects ranging from Édouard Manet to Roma music, Denis Diderot, Wampum beads, the 18th century industrialist and spy John Holker, torture, Nissim de Camondo’s bronze collection, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the Venetian Ghetto. While this work has been very rewarding, she misses the playfulness of poetry. Her collaborations with Richard Berengarten since 2017 have been a breath of fresh air.