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 have to choose I want to study under this professor in this department in this school, and I want to look at, I don’t know, the evolution of the anterior dorsal fin in this species and I want to do this for the next six years. At the age of 20 or 21, I wasn’t prepared to narrow down that much, basically. I didn’t feel I knew enough to do that. I had a professor who was a good advisor. He told me if you can imagine life without a PhD, then you don’t need one. I don’t know if you can call it advice, but that was his statement. So I thought about it, and I thought, Yeah, I can easily imagine life without a PhD. I hadn’t had one before, so I knew I didn’t want to go on and apply for a PhD, but then what do I do? So that was sort of a derailment for me. So I graduated from college … The other thing was that I had been studying French. My mother was born in France, so I’m a one-and-a-half-generation USian. My father was born in New York City. His father was from what is now Poland, and his mother was from what is now Austria. My mom’s parents were both from France, and she was also born in France. She spoke French with her parents, so I grew up hearing French. She did not speak it with me and my sisters because I found out when I was older that she thought it would alienate my father, although she never actually asked him. So I lost the chance to be bilingual, which is a shame, but I started studying it in high school and took some in college, even though that wasn’t my major. And I decided when I figured out I didn’t want to go into, get a PhD, that I would go to France for a while and try to get my French to a point where I was fully fluent and then see. I’m 20, 21 years old, I don’t know what I’m doing here. So I took this intensive course in French in Paris and was fluent in French. Probably in a way that I could never be in Czech, because I was younger then and French is easier than Czech for an English speaker. Then I came back to the States. That was the summer after I graduated college.

I came back to the States. I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, because my older sister was there. One of my close friends from college was there. I started looking for jobs where you could use French, and all the jobs that I found were at banks, and I didn’t want to work at a bank, so there I was, lost again. What am I going to do? And but what happened was that just after and before that stay in Paris, where I studied French, I had travelled around Europe with an old girlfriend of mine from college, and we went to Czechoslovakia for the first time. That was in ’87. And the reason we went to Czechoslovakia was when I was in college, she read a book by Milan Kundera, and she was a political science major. She had read this book in one of her courses, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and we were both readers. She loaned it to me, and I read it and liked it. And I would say that, pretty much based on that novel, we decided to go visit Czechoslovakia in 1987, when it was still communist. So I was there for a week with her in the spring of 87. It was April. It was like Easter. And then I went back, so after this. I went to an intensive French course in Paris and signed up to do an international youth work camp. So there was this organisation called the Council on International Educational Exchange, which among other things, issued Eurail passes to students, but they also had these programs, like this international youth work camp, which was designed to promote mutual understanding across the Iron Curtain, something like that. And they had these camps in the East Bloc, where you could go and people from the west met people from the east. And I wanted to go to Poland, because my father’s father had been born in what is now Poland, but I applied late, and so I didn’t get my first choice; I got my fifth choice in Czechoslovakia. So I ended up going to Czechoslovakia. That was when I started reading more about Czechoslovakia. And I cannot tell you today, I just don’t remember how, but I got interested in human rights, because human rights back then was not that big a thing.

Human Rights Watch didn’t exist yet. There was Helsinki Watch, which just focused on the Soviet Union. There was Amnesty International. I don’t remember any other groups existing at the time. Somehow, Anil, I got it into my head that I wanted to work in human rights. I wish I could tell you how I decided that. Have you ever looked back at any of the decisions you made in your early 20s and say, How did I make that decision? I have no idea. And I started looking for how I could do that, and again, this is before the internet, remember, so doing research was different, you know. You would go to the library and ask some person at a desk: “I want to try to get a job in human rights. What would I do to do that? Where would I find information on what to do to prepare? And they would say, there were books on career guidance or whatever. So I found a book that said that people who go into human rights usually have a master’s degree or a law degree. So I was like, well, I don’t want a law degree, so I guess I’ll see if I can get a master’s degree, and I started looking into the master’s programs. So there was this thing called International Affairs. The only school in the United States at that time–so now we’re in 1987–that had a master’s program in international affairs and somebody at the university who taught Czech, was Columbia University. And they had this Institute on East Central Europe, and they had a person teaching Czech named Peter Kussi, K U S S I, who was actually Milan Kundera’s translator. Before Michael Henry Heim. So I applied there and I think I got in mainly on the strength of actually having been to Czechoslovakia. I mean I had good grades but they were in zoology. I actually had taken a short Czech course when I was living in Cambridge; Harvard had like a, what do you call it, like a night school. You didn’t have to apply; you just paid the money, and I took an introductory course in Czech already in, I guess that would have been spring 88 with Karen von Kunes, who still teaches, I think. She was actually on a Zoom call that I was on the other day, but we were both in the audience, so I couldn’t say hello. Anyway, so I was accepted, and what happened was I went to this school in fall of ’88 to do a two-year degree in international affairs, and Kussi was my Czech teacher, and he was a translator, and he would bring in, he was working on the Kundera novel Nesmrtelnost, Immortality, at that time.

So he brought in pieces of it, he had the printout of Milan Kundera’s, you know, primitive, back then, word processing, whatever, computer, this was the early days of computer. And we would talk about like a page or two at a time. And we would translate songs and poetry. He was a translator, so that was one of his main teaching tools. So even though I was planning to go into human rights, that was how I got into translating. So like I said, I knew French, but it had never occurred to me to translate French. I had never met a translator before. You have to know that translation exists to want to do it, you know? I always say I caught the translation bug from Kussi; I discovered it was something I enjoyed doing, I was pretty good at doing it, and what happened was, in the second year of my program, fall of ’89, there was this, you know, uprising in Eastern Europe, the so-called Velvet Revolution, and the main organisation I had been hoping to work for in human rights was, again, Helsinki Watch. And I went on an informational interview there in spring of 1990, and the person there, whose name was Ken Roth, who went on to become the CEO of Human Rights Watch, but back then he was just a regular lawyer at Helsinki Watch. He actually told me that they were shutting down their program in the East bloc because they didn’t think there would be a human rights problem anymore. Years later, I read an interview with him where he talked about the mistake they made and how they reopened their programs eight or nine months later, because of course human rights were still a problem, but that’s how closed communist society was, that human rights groups from outside didn’t know, or didn’t understand, for instance, the situation of Romani people in Czech society, because it was kept so under wraps by the communist regime that it was impossible for those people to know about it. So that’s just one example. Anyway, but for me it meant I couldn’t go into this area that I thought I was going to go into. Meanwhile, I know this is a long story, but meanwhile, between the two years of grad school, so summer of ’89, I went back to Czechoslovakia, right? So I had been there for a week and then a month in ’87, and then I went back in summer of ’89, so that’s my third time there now under communism. I was there for two months; I did two month-long language programs. But somebody I met through my time in Czechoslovakia in the summer of ’89 told me in spring of 1990 that the Czechoslovak News Agency, Československá tisková kancelář, technically Czechoslovak Press Agency, had a wire service in English that was translated from Czech–they translated the Czech, and Slovak, wire service into English–and they were looking for people to work in their English-language section. So I applied for that job in the summer of 1990, and I got it. They offered me, you know, whatever salary and a subsidised apartment to stay in. And I took that job and I moved there in fall of 1990. And that was my translation school. So I spent two years full-time, five days a week, translating Czech and Slovak wire service into English, but when I say translating, really we did a lot of rewriting and revising, because the way that Czech and Slovak journalists wrote news was for a domestic audience, and we needed to add things, we needed to rearrange things to make it a more appealing product for non-Czech subscribers to the news service.

Harshaneeyam: Your first book-length...