#jeffrey zuckerman

[whilereadingandwalking]

Eve out of Her Ruins is a brutal, powerful novel, poetic and gorgeously written, about a struggling neighborhood in Port Louis. The novel is written by Mauritian author Ananda Devi and translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. 

It centers on magnetic, driven Eve, a girl willing to sell her body if it means survival, if it means she can eventually escape her abusive household. The only person she can truly trust is Savita, sweet and kind, with arrogant parents—the two girls share something deeper than the others can truly recognize. Saadiq, with his puppy love for Eve, writes his poetry and dreams, but he spends his days immersed in the toxic, macho world of teen men, including the rebellious Clélio, whose hard exterior hiding a brother who left for France and has never come back. 

It is a book of capitalist and imperialist policies, the power hierarchies and structures, that form neighborhoods full of young people who must grow up too fast. Full of young people who know that there is no way out. The teen men flare with rage, the unspoken rules of the neighborhood spark trouble. Savita and Eve dance with each other, carving a sapphic, trusting space for themselves in a world out to break them. It is lyrical and brutal, honest and searing, told in monologues by the four young people who quietly yearn for more than what they have, than what they can hope for. 

Content warnings for rape, rape culture, trauma, homophobia, femicide, murder, domestic violence and abuse, profiling, suicidal ideation.

[thefeministpress]

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

—T.S. ELIOT, The Waste Land: The Burial of the Dead

From The Living Days by Ananda Devi, trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman

[arablit]

New Fiction: From 'The Palace on the Higher Hill'

Winner of the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie, Karim Kattan’s The Palace on the Higher Hill — beautifully translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman and out this month from Foundry Editions — opens when Faysal receives a letter about the death of aunt he can’t remember. He leaves life and lover behind to return to the village where he was raised in Palestine, and particularly to his family…

New Fiction: From 'The Palace on the Higher Hill'

[womenintranslation]

I was honored to help with the translation of a few words, along with Chagossian activists, researchers, artists, and academics. Patel had rightly insisted that many instances of Chagossian diction remain in Kreol, and [translator Jeffrey] Zuckerman worked in an atypically close collaboration with her so that she’d be 'front and center in speaking for this book and for the Chagossians whose voices it represented'.

Ariel Saramandi, “Acts of Memory, Acts of Power: On Shenaz Patel’s Silence of the Chagos” in LARB.

[womenintranslation]

Despite everything I’ve been able to say about languages, English and French especially, despite my declared and reiterated attachment to English as my true language, as my language of creation, despite all my accounts of its suppleness, its compactness, its vigorous neutrality, and even though I’ve repeatedly argued for the choice I made—a literary choice, personally literary, a permission, the possibility of inventing my own territory because it wasn’t mine from the outset, but rather taken up, taken over, thoroughly taken in while I was an adult, fully aware, because for me it was the opposite of a heritage, a terra incognita for which I had only the coordinates, a treasure map, a space I created in discovering it, word by word, literally, because ultimately it was never truly mine but I used it and practically reinvented it, and in using it—in usurping it, rather, and extracting some added value—it was possible to see the entire construction or etiology of my identity as a writer, despite these more or less inspired—but always sincere—affirmations and declarations, the fact is (c’est bien là le point) the fact is that I’ve never written anything in English.

from Céline Minard’s “So Long, Luise,” translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman in this month’s issue of Words Without Borders.

[therumpus]

Mary Ruefle, on the contrary, scrutinizes reality, reveals emotional depths beneath, and then somehow finds a greater weight beneath. A short story, in Mary Ruefle’s hands, is not simply a snapshot of our world made permanent with words; it leaves a fiery trace on our unsuspecting minds; it works on another level.

Eight Meditations About Mary Ruefle by Jeffrey Zuckerman.

[therumpus]

This act of self-revision and self-correction, I realized as the lecture continued in that large impersonal hall, was perhaps the most intimate thing a poet could put down on the page. Emotions were easy enough to manufacture—but to show how words could fail to encompass the reality they were meant to depict seemed a far more humbling and heartrending admission. In that moment, the poet wasn’t revealing a weakness as a friend or human being. It was a confession of failure as a wordsmith, the one thing a poet meant to do well.

A Clean Break by Jeffrey Zuckerman.

[therumpus]

At the end of SJ Naudé’s story collection The Alphabet of Birds, an older man goes to a student drama festival. Despite his ennui, one dance performance stands out: “The kind of movement piece that does not create abstract shapes, but is built around the temperament of individual dancers. The risk of injury, of damage, provides the main source of energy.” It was a feeling I recognized in myself as well: the idea that art, today, is too easily satisfied by productions of beauty and technical mastery. The more compelling moment, in our era, is that of a body or a soul pushed to its limits, as if the artistic process were also, in the most concrete and dangerous sense, a test of the artist himself. This description of dance, indeed, could double as a description for Naudé’s narratives in this book: “Dancers throwing their bodies frenziedly against the floor, the escaping breaths sounding like something between a sigh and a hiccup . . . The audience shrinking away, tingling, imagining their own bodies into the dancers’ . . .”

Jeffrey Zuckerman reviews The Alphabet of Birds by SJ Naudé.