Thank you Anij for your reply. I have read a bit about the grammatical structure of ASL and understand that it's different from English, particularly sentence order, but I've also seen many youtube videos of ASL versions of popular songs, so I thought perhaps that the song could be translated not literally but in a way that captured the spirit if not the rhythm of the words..
To answer the question about why make a character deaf, my interest in deaf culture came from growing up on Martha's VIneyard and being picked up by a number of deaf drivers when I used to hitchhike a lot in the mid-80s. Nora Croce's book, Everyone Spoke Sign Language Here, had just come out and the drivers had it on the passenger seat next to them. From there, i met some older residents who remembered some of the signs used by the deaf community of Martha's Vineyard which had become large enough at its peak in the 19th century that 1 in 5 people were deaf and nearly everyone spoke sign language. When I decided to set a part of my novel in Martha's Vineyard in the 1930s, a young deaf woman appeared in my imagination and wouldn't leave.
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