Jeffrey Zuckerman: The Lecture WAS Really Cool!

Jeffrey Zuckerman: The Lecture WAS Really Cool!

Dina Famin

 

Jeffrey Zuckerman’s lecture was so rich, so informative, so well-developed that I don’t really know where to start with a response. Everyone asking for book-length translation thoughts from him can’t get enough!

Zuckerman began his lecture by talking about “the homes and the selves we make for ourselves out of translation,” a beautiful image reflecting the fact that “every translation is ultimately the reflection of a very specific, particular, and partial perspective.” This is the idea of the “Translation as Autobiography,” which Zuckerman summarized at the end of the lecture in three points:

• Translation is “an autobiography of our idiolect”
• Translation is “shaped by our readings and understandings of a text”
• Translation “reflects our biases, our knowledge, our background, our particular context”

In this, translation is a “time bomb,” not only a snapshot of a particular time, but a snapshot of a particular time waiting to be rediscovered and detonated. In contrast to just a snapshot, a time bomb is active and effective. “A ‘transparent translation’ simply doesn’t exist,” Zuckerman said. “And it doesn’t fit into our intuitive understanding of how a book can evolve and change.” But “You are everything that’s happened in your life,” as Zuckerman translates one of Louise’s friends in Jellyfish Don’t Have Ears. A work of literature too is not just the words on the page, although those are its base units. In translating, Zuckerman “[becomes] part of a broad, ongoing cross-cultural conversation” beyond the particular word. Zuckerman said: “Translation is fundamentally transgressive, a form of consumption and regurgitation.” (Cannibal translation, anyone?) “We have an obligation, as translators and otherwise, to engage with writing in new and different ways.”

A few other things stuck out to me in Zuckerman’s talk. (What follows is a list of cool things I really enjoyed, not counting the initial comparison between moi and soi that metaphorize the relationship between translation and literature.)

First, the introductory anecdote about poetry translation. Zuckerman said: “I visited the apartment after finishing a full first draft.” We often hear about translators immediately going right into the text and the author—listening to radio played at the time as the author to get a sense of voice, tone, and aesthetics; going on Google Maps to get a lay of the land as they’re translating—but this is something more gradual. The first impression is the translator’s; only in the second do they go back and ‘correct’ or merge the two realities of experience.

Second, it was interesting to hear that Zuckerman believes heritage translators to be uniquely suited to the task, which is the opposite of what we hear so often, that the key part is knowing your target language better than your source language in order to create a work of literature.

Third, I think I had a similar moment of oh when Jeffrey discussed vertical and horizontal identities as when he discovered Stigma. It’s such a great framework, and merges perfectly with discussions of language.

[Fourth,] Zuckerman comprehensively lined out why and how authors use language in their works. Guibert and Genet “used language as a crowbar to force open a door for fellow readers.” For Kevin Lambert, “the point wasn’t that the words were in English, it was that they were the language, the slang that Edouard and Laurence shared.” This allowed lambert to illustrate the “struggle between normativity and individuality,” a “struggle […] in no way a new one in literature,” with such a contemporary voice. In Jellyfish Don’t Have Ears, Zuckerman gave a specific example in which words have a function to plot. During Louise’s hearing test, “the set of words that’s heard is supposed to include most of the major phonemes that can be found on an audiogram. The ‘speech banana’ … will include just about all of these sounds. So I knew the list would have to change if I wanted it to be realistic in English.” These examples show that, yes, words matter. A translator must pay attention to what word are used and how they’re put together. But what matters more than blindly parroting this is knowing why the author made these choices, and to translate accordingly.