When Jeffrey Zuckerman says translation is a form of autobiography, he has a strong case to make.
After all, translators take words from one method of communication and make them intelligible in another. And Zuckerman is not only an award-winning translator of literature from French to English, but he also is deaf, using a cochlear implant to augment his hearing and help understand the world around him.
To complete the circle, Zuckerman translated a moving debut novel from Adèle Rosenfeld, “Jellyfish Have No Ears,†about a young woman named Louise who is losing her hearing and weighing the delicate question of whether to have a cochlear implant and what effect it would have on her life. He’ll be at Left Bank Books on Sept. 19.
In a recent lecture at Boston University, titled “Translation as Autobiography,†Zuckerman said that as he went through the novel several times to get the English version as right as he possibly could, he developed a close affinity with the book’s subject.
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“I kept thinking, that’s not Louise, that’s me,†he said. “This sense of identification, I found it impossible to overcome.†The result, according to the Financial Times, is “a profound, sometimes playful, meditation on deafness.†In his acknowledgments in the novel, Zuckerman puts the experience this way: “This translation may have been three months in the doing, but the truth is that it was three years in the making.â€
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In “Jellyfish,†Louise is depicted as stuck in what the novel’s blurb describes as “in-betweenness†— a state suspended between hearing and deafness. A cochlear implant would help, but it would be irreversible. She would be able to hear better, but she would lose the ability to hear the way her life has been shaped so far.
The novel, told in the first person, opens in an audiologist’s Paris office, where Louise is shut inside a soundproof booth that anyone with hearing problems will quickly recognize.
“He set the headphones on my ears, delicately, as if he were placing electrodes on a chicken’s head, and handed me a joystick.†Next comes a series of sounds, pitched high and low, in one ear then the other. “Then it was time for the words, I had to repeat the list like a messed-up parrot. Most of it was absurd, and I had to resist letting my imagination fill the gaps. ‘woman lemon boulder soldier poppy button blacksmith apron shoulder.’â€
Later, when she views a copy of the audiogram starkly representing the state of her failing hearing, “I took careful note of the concave curve on the paper, a tight grid of x and y lines quantifying the remaining sound. It was like a bird’s-eye view of the Normandy coast: the tide of silence was now covering more than half the page.â€
Hearing and sight
Zuckerman, who is 36, is a ºüÀêÊÓƵ native who graduated from Parkway North High School in 2006. Unlike Louise, he did not have to face the decision about a cochlear implant himself. While he was a young student at Central Institute for the Deaf, his parents made that choice for him in 1995 — one for which he is grateful.
At a ceremony in 2024 where he was named a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France — one of the French government’s highest civilian honors — he thanked his parents for that decision, “for being endlessly supportive, for giving me the words in English without which I would not be talking to you today, much less penning these translations I’m deeply honored to have brought into the world.â€
The translations give him the opportunity to view the world through others’ words, but he says the experience can be unsettling. That’s become particularly true as he has begun to lose peripheral vision due to Usher syndrome, the same condition that led to his deafness.
“Over the past couple of years,†Zuckerman says, “I’ve had to face up to the fact that I’m seeing less and less to the sides, above me and below me. It’s literal tunnel vision.â€
Working on “Jellyfish,†he said in the Boston U. lecture, presented a stark situation. “I was working on this book about a woman losing her hearing at the same time that I was going through the same process of losing more and more of my sight,†he said. “I knew, as I sat down to translate the whole book in earnest, that in doing so, I would have to face parts of myself that I hadn’t wanted to grapple with.
“This novel, written by someone else, in a different language, about someone of a different gender, nationality, you name it, would become a mirror by which to see myself honestly. What I connected with was her emotional response to the experience: bewilderment, anxiety, exhaustion at having to perform or be on in a way that doesn’t stand out to others.â€
In a later interview, he expanded on his situation:
“As with any major change in life, there’s been a degree of denial and depression — which were also reflected in ‘Jellyfish Have No Ears’ as Louise maps the progression of her hearing loss, and which especially resonated with me during this process of loss. This is another way in which I see translation as autobiography: with the right book, it can be a way to put words to something very difficult to articulate, and to become more comfortable with the sentiments I might come to make my own.â€
Becoming a translator
After high school, Zuckerman went on to Yale and now lives in New York City. Even in his teenage years, his knowledge and insight set him apart, says Ruth Adams, who interpreted for deaf students at Parkway North.
“He and another student were the first ones that I ever had in honors classes,†she recalled. “So I was very intimidated by that. I honestly wasn’t thrilled about it because I thought I was going to be with a bunch of little know-it-alls. But he was not like that. He was always wide-eyed. He totally paid attention, which is a phenomenal thing, because these days the kids don’t want to do that so much.â€
Adams envisioned him using his skills at a job such as the United Nations. Instead, Zuckerman entered the world of literary translation, where he has won honors and recognition, translating authors such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Genet. It’s a process that he says amounts to making authors sound just like themselves, only better.
The works he translates, he says, “are products of their time and their circumstances, and I’d go so far as to say that translations reveal their makers. This was especially the case with ‘Jellyfish Have No Ears’: Many of the book’s chapters take place in spaces that are alien to hearing people, but deeply familiar for me, and so I could immediately convey them in an English that would make sense to a hearing person and ring true to a deaf reader.â€
Artificial vs. human intelligence
In the growing world of artificial intelligence, translating from one language into another can sometimes take little more than copy, paste and a few keystrokes. The ensuing words may be grammatically correct, but making them express the same sensibility in an intelligent, sensitive, insightful way is far more difficult. Because there is a big difference between simply rendering what the words say and getting across their meaning and context, Zuckerman doesn’t view AI as much of a threat to his profession and his craft.
“Machine translation and computer-assisted translation can be useful in legal and technical translation,†he says, “where particular terms have to be translated in particular ways. But even then, post-editing is required to make sure the end result coheres with the original. AI translations operate by probability: Based on the corpus of texts it has access to, it will offer the most likely translation of a word or chunk of words vis-a-vis the surrounding words.
“Ses sandales can be translated as ‘his sandals’ or ‘her sandals,’ but a probability-based process of translation won’t be able to maintain consistency across a text, let alone account for unexpected word usage or shifts in historical usage. So, I don’t feel particularly worried about AI when it comes to my career. Good writing requires an eye for detail, nuance and consistency that AI will never be able to master.â€
Primarily, though, translation is a way of portraying someone’s life that may initially appear foreign but ultimately reveals a more universal nature.
“This process of facing an experience that could be seen as traumatic,†Zuckerman said, “and processing it through someone else’s words, through digesting those words and making them my own, was a deeply moving one and is probably going to be one of the most important points in my career as a translator.â€
“There are so many ways that a translation can be an autobiography. It’s obvious that any translation we do is limited by the range of our vocabulary. Even if we expand it while doing the translation, it is still an autobiography of our idiolect. And that any translation we do is inevitably shaped by our readings and understandings of a text.
“The earthy, rotund sentences of GarcÃa Márquez, the clipped unobtrusiveness of Kafka, and even the fleet-footed dactylic hexameter of Ovid are all hard to render convincingly in English, with its rigid syntax and rules of grammar. A fine translation will provide the English words, but with only a shade of the original flavor; a superlative translation will find ways to harness our language to reflect the particular tone, the shifting lexical registers, the unexpected yet perfect word choices that make an author so different from every other — and this labor of refinement is how a translator makes an author writing in another language shine in English.
“We have an obligation, as translators and otherwise, to engage with writing in new and different ways.â€