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Jeffrey Zuckerman

@jmz.bsky.social

knight-errant + anti-vampire

46 Posts983 Follower502 Folgt
Jeffrey Zuckerman@jmz.bsky.social · 2d ago

« Tu prévoyais des dangers partout. » Language was the one way Christophe Bourdin could hold together a life threatening to come apart with his HIV diagnosis, and finding an English to convey this dread and this need was a breathtaking challenge. How moving that THE THREAD will now exist in English.

A yellowed copy of Christophe Bourdin's LE FIL, published by Éditions de la Différence in 1994, alongside a shiny Advanced Reading Copy of THE THREAD, in my English translation, to be published by Pushkin Press in Nov. 2026 (UK) and Feb. 2027 (US).Dear reader, I am not a hypochondriac, but when Christophe Bourdin's sole novel, Le Fil, showed up in my mailbox one afternoon, a used copy yellowed by three decades out of print, its first sentence thrummed across the years with frightening immediacy: "You foresaw dangers everywhere." The Thread is a novel of AIDS, but it offers no sweeping panorama of the epidemic; it is the deeply intimate story of one person in a circumscribed world of omnipresent risk, a life spent perpetually on guard, and as Bourdin's inordinately labyrinthine yet exacting sentences articulate that world closing in on him, they themselves all but close in on us. I couldn't shake how much The Thread felt like a dystopian novel-although so unlike any other that, in reading it, I felt compelled to translate it. Rendering Bourdin's sinuous sentences has meant pushing the English language almost to the breaking point. Astonishingly, as I immersed myself in this world of disarray and disease, Bourdin's precision became my bulwark: no matter how heartbreaking or worrying the reality being described was, his words and his syntax offered a clarity that his world—our world-could not. Bourdin died in 1997, just shy of 33 years old. The Thread, however, offers an ending remarkably different from any other AIDS novel I have read or translated—a glimmer of hope that has shined bright enough for the book to come back into print in France, and to find new readers in English. Some books live only one life; others live many lives. The Thread, by some miracle, does both. Here it is, in your hands. Open it and see where it leads you. JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN
Maria Dahvana Headley @mariadahvana.bsky.social · last wk.

All this is to say: any translator's translation of a text, however formal, is itself a strong, long opinion. To imagine that a translator should have no opinions on the text & on the work of other translators and adaptors is pretty silly given the many year labors we all spend on our translations.

Christopher Wiggins@cwnewser.bsky.social · last mo.

My interview: “I came to this country as an infant and became a U.S. citizen,” Roswell Encina said. “So sitting there, on the Fourth of July, I couldn’t help but think about the promise of America and the work still required to protect it.” www.advocate.com/news/people/...

Man in viral D.C. Metro photo says he was ‘terrified’ as masked white nationalists surrounded him

Roswell Encina, a gay Filipino American civic leader, said the Fourth of July encounter with Patriot Front was frightening and impossible to separate from American history.

advocate.com

j a k e@jakeismaking.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I know June is meant to reorient ourselves and double down on the pride we feel to be part of the LGBTQ community but can I just say - I'm deeply grateful I'm not straight year round.

Alyssa Harad@alyssaharad.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A heartbreaking story about Kenneth Grahame (of Wind in the Willows fame)’s son. As a child I loved WithW but Toad’s recklessness and manic energy always made me very uncomfortable. I later assumed he was patterned after Grahame’s alcoholic, neglectful father—another layer to the this story.

Tim Clare@timclare.bsky.social · 3mo ago

106 years ago today, on May 7th, an undergraduate at Christchurch College, Oxford, drank a glass of port then left through the main gates for a walk. I've been thinking about him, & his walk, for years now. It's taken a long time for me to figure out why - why I've kept returning, near obsessed.

Jeffrey Zuckerman@jmz.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Gordon Lish replies: “Captain Fiction’s powers? There are seven of them. One is the power to see the heart of the writer through a single word. The other six I forgot.”

Oscar Villalon@ovillalon.bsky.social · 6mo ago

FWIW, newspaper book review sections are part of the mission of journalism. Every year, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry titles tell us something we didn't know before, or advance the craft of verse and prose in new ways. This is the purpose of reviews: to alert us to the shaping of our culture.

K.C. Mead-Brewer@kcmeadbrewer.com · 7mo ago

oh no, are publishers getting squeamish about buying queer books right now for some impossible-to-guess reason?? sounds like our books need to get even more queer, relentlessly queer, battle-axe queer, cackling queer