Alex Zucker about Czech Writer Jachym Topol and Translation contracts (Czech)

In this episode, Senior translator Alex Zucker spoke about his work, Translation contracts and the Czech Author Jachym Topol.

Alex Zucker has translated novels by the Czech authors Magdaléna Platzová, Jáchym Topol, Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, J. R. Pick, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also Englished stories, plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, song lyrics, reportages, essays, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera.

Apart from translating, he organises, on a volunteer basis, with the National Writers Union and the New York City chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice).

Conversation: 

Harshaneeyam: Welcome, Alex, to Harshaneeyam.

Alex Zucker: Hi, Anil. I am so glad to be here. Thank you for having me. 

Harshaneeyam: Before we move on to your literary journey, translations and all, I follow you on Twitter, and I see that you are very vocal about the current situation in Gaza. I also read that you worked for a human rights organisation earlier.

Alex Zucker: Yes, of course. For about five years, I was the communications officer for a genocide prevention organisation called the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation, AIPR. Now, as a communications officer, I was always a little bit disturbed at our name, because actually we had nothing to do with peace and reconciliation. We were working in genocide prevention. But they’ve since changed their name, by the way. But [that was] after I left. This was a small organisation, about five staff people based in New York City, doing education and training for mid-level government officers in genocide prevention. The idea of the organisation was that, all too often in history, there are government leaders whose countries are engaging in atrocities that are not quite maybe yet at genocide, or [actually] genocide, and of course there can be resistance from outside the government, [but] unless the government decides to stop it, it’s not going to stop. So the idea of [AIPR] was if they could get to these mid-level government officials, those people would rise up [through the ranks] and become the leaders of their country, and they would be people committed to preventing genocide. I want to say also that by prevention, what we meant was not military intervention. That’s stopping, maybe, a genocide in progress, but preventing meaning that it never happens in the first place. Also, keeping in mind that genocide, as people have been pointing out in relation to the situation in Gaza, but as in any genocide, it doesn’t necessarily involve killing, right? It can be preventing births within a group, any kind of creation of conditions that make it impossible for a group to survive. The key is that the intention is to destroy the group as such. So it has to be focused on a group of people, not just individuals. Having worked in that organisation for five years, I read a lot about genocide historically. I also was following very closely many genocides that were happening in the world at that time. For instance, in Myanmar, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is happening again now, in Sudan, that was happening the first time back then. I think the reason that I feel compelled to speak up about Gaza is because the genocide is being perpetrated by a state, Israel, that gets a huge amount of support from the government that I pay taxes to. To me, that’s a very straightforward moral and ethical equation. 95 per cent of the aid that the U.S. sends to Israel is military, right? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now the second time, two years ago, and probably committing genocide there as well, but none of my money goes to Russia, so I don’t feel responsible [for that]. I mean, it’s not that I don’t care about what’s happening to Ukrainians, but as a human being, if I’m looking at what I’m responsible for, what my money goes to is a very elementary piece in that. I know that some people don’t like to think that way, and they like to think in a more abstract sense of morals and ethics; everybody has a right to decide how they want to act themselves. But this is what makes sense to me. Besides tweeting, though, I should say that I am engaged also in other ways. I’ve taken part now, several times, in civil disobedience, both in Washington, DC, and here in New York, as well as uplifting, on Twitter, more disruptive direct actions that are either too far away for me to take part in or that I myself don’t feel physically capable of. I’ve also been calling, and will continue to call, as I have for months now, my representatives in Congress, to demand that they support a permanent ceasefire and stop sending military aid to Israel, and will continue to donate both to individual Palestinians, who are trying to get out of Gaza, and to organizations that are supporting the Palestinians in Gaza who either can’t get out, or for various reasons don’t want to. So I’m engaging in what organizers call a diversity of tactics, and I do so not only because of my responsibility as a taxpayer, but also because I’ve found, from my experience over the years, that to be blunt I just can’t live with myself unless I act in accordance with my values. 

Harshaneeyam: I have a follow-up question for that. 

Alex Zucker: Sure. 

Harshaneeyam: See, if there is a writer, he has the freedom and flexibility to express his opinions through his writing. What should a translator do? 

Alex Zucker: Yeah, I find that more difficult. Part of the reason, a big part of the reason that I’m involved in organising is because I don’t feel that my translating work can sufficiently express my values in that way. A writer of course can write whatever they want, right? You sit down, pick up a piece of paper, write, pick up your laptop and type, and it’s from you directly. As a translator, I can choose who not to translate, in the sense that if something is offered to me I can turn it down. And of course I can decide not to pitch or propose any number of authors. But I don’t have total control over who I do translate. And especially as somebody who is trying to make a living as a translator, it’s not a hobby, or a side hustle, or any of those other things. There are jobs that I take simply because I need to keep making money. Now, again, if something was objectionable to me on moral grounds, I can turn it down, and I have turned things down. I don’t take everything that’s offered to me. Sometimes I turn things down because I don’t have time, right? I feel like it would be much more difficult, as a professional literary translator, to translate only things that I felt expressed my politics and beliefs.

Here’s another thing I’ve thought a lot about, and I think that if you’re a translator working for any length of time, you have to reckon with this, which is that there are authors I translate who I’ve been translating now for decades. We’ll talk about some of them, I’m sure. For instance, Jáchym Topol or Petra Hůlová. Guess what? We evolve. My politics are not the same now as they were in the mid-1990s. And neither are theirs. There are things we agreed on then that we don’t agree on now. And there were things we disagreed on then that we do agree on now.

And also the Czech Republic is a country with a very different history from the U.S., and I don’t have any Czech heritage. I don’t translate Czech literature because I’m trying to represent the Czech state or Czech culture. It’s not a nationalistic project for me. If I were to translate only novels that I agreed with 100 percent in every aspect, I would be translating very little. Now I know there are other translators who do translate only things they 100 percent agree with. They may have the good fortune of either not having to work all the time, or maybe it’s just that the authors in that society happen to, there are more of them who are aligned with their politics. I would also say that I’ve noticed that younger Czech writers tend to have politics closer to mine, and there are some that I’ve been trying to pitch, but that’s a reality. Being a translator is not the same as being a writer. 

Harshaneeyam:  You were a student of zoology.

Alex Zucker: As an undergraduate, yes. I have a bachelor’s in zoology. 

Harshaneeyam: So how did you move into full-time translation? 

Alex Zucker: I studied zoology as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst. The reason I did that was that when I was a kid, when I was little, my idol was Jacques Cousteau. I grew up watching The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau and reading books with photographs of all these undersea, you know, sea creatures. And I was just really enthralled by it. And I had a mask and snorkel, and we would go to the–I grew up in Michigan, but we used to go to Cape Cod in Massachusetts in the summer, and I would swim around with my mask on. And that kind of fantasy of mine, or yeah, was something that lasted, so that began when I was maybe six, seven, eight. I went to college when I was 18. And so I was studying zoology, but what happened was that I had a professor. So, I was approaching the end of college and trying to decide what to do. I knew that I had to continue if I wanted to be a marine biologist. You can’t do anything with a bachelor’s degree. The problem was getting into a PhD program in whatever it would be. You have to say not only which school you want to apply to but also which department, not only which department but which professor. So you hav