Earlier this year two books by the great Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin were published in English: Their Four Hearts — a wild, profane, absurdist quest through late Soviet period, and Telluria, a polyphonic novel set in a fragmented future. Both were translated by Max Lawton and mark the start of a multi-year project to bring all of Sorokin’s work into English.
In this podcast Max explains the delights of authorial delirium, sets us straight on whether or not a clone of Khruschev had sex with a clone of Stalin in a Sorokin novel, why Sorokin doesn’t have any safe books, and reveals his “head destruction list” — and much more. The transcript below was lightly edited for clarity.
Daniel Kalder: Hello, my name's Daniel Kalder and welcome to the Thus Spake Daniel Kalder podcast. Today, I am fortunate enough to be speaking with Max Lawton, enfant terrible of literary translation and general man about town, who burst on the scene earlier this year with two translations of Russia's greatest living writer, Vladimir Sorokin, Their Four Hearts and Telluria. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of some of the things Max has planned. So I'm very glad to have the chance to speak with him today. Thank you for coming on, Max.
Max Lawton: Thanks so much for having me.
DK: Well, I think probably some folk listening to this know who Vladimir Sorokin is, but some folk won't. So I'm wondering, can you just tell us who is he, and why should we care? Why does he matter?
ML: Like you said, he is Russia's greatest living writer. He's the best writer in Russia since Nabokov, I think. And Nabokov, I still consider to be a Russian writer, even though he wrote his greatest books in English. And Vladimir Sorokin, why should you read him? He's a writer with an astonishing amount of different modes with a very particular vision and a very clean, muscular style. So, I think what's so cool about him tends to be these oppositions, these ways in which he doesn't quite fit into a singular mold.
And I think he has certain elements of his work that are quite extreme and shocking. He also has a Tolstoyan vein of mysticism and Christianity. He also has a Nabokovian vision of how the world operates in terms of shapes, colors, patterns, a [inaudible 00:02:10] aesthetic vision of literature as such. He also is just himself. I think he's a flavor of writer, so to speak, that if you don't know, you haven't tasted it. And I think there are a few writers like that today. I think most writers fit into other people's modes of literature. He's just a writer who's unto himself entirely. There's no one else like him. So I think that's what makes Sorokin worth reading.
DK: I think that's great. And I'm sure we'll touch upon some of these themes as we talk about them. I think the point about this multitude of modes is maybe one of the first things that you notice. But I'm also glad you mentioned this mystical strand, because I think that's also very strong, though maybe not talked about as much. So say, about 10 or 11 years ago, well, I lived in Russia for a long time and-
ML: Your brother told me that. You speak Russian too.
DK: I speak it a bit. And actually, when I think of Vladimir Sorokin, I probably first read him in about 1997; there was a magazine called Glas…
ML: Of course. Classic.
DK: …and I think that was one of the first places he appeared. The issue was called Soviet Grotesque.
ML: Yes.
DK: And I read it, and it was an excerpt from Their Four Hearts, and it was pretty strong stuff.
ML: Yeah.
DK: And I was like, "Whoa", but then after that, while I was in Russia, his profile continued to build. I think it was maybe 1999 when he published Blue Lard, which was maybe a breakthrough for him…
ML: Definitely.
DK: Then after that, in the early 2000s, I remember he was writing screenplays for films. I remember going to see a film called Moskva.
ML: That's a good one.
DK: And then he wrote —
ML: Not to interrupt, but for those of you listening, that movie is on YouTube for free with good subtitles. I showed it to my Russian class. I don't know how you would Google, how you'd search for it on YouTube in a way that you could find it, but just if you search, "Moscow, Zeldovich, 2000," then it might pop up. But it's really worth watching. It's a cool movie.
DK: I'll try and dig up the link when I post this.
ML: I can send it to you.
DK: That's great. And then he even did a libretto for the Bolshoi Theater. I remember this was a huge thing, because it was the first new opera, or new libretto commissioned by the Bolshoi in a long time. And so he'd gone from being this underground figure 10 years earlier, I think he hadn't even been published in Russia yet, to writing librettos for the Bolshoi. But that also coincided with the outrage over Blue Lard.
ML: Yes.
DK: Which I think is often misrepresented. They often say it was a clone of…
ML: Yeah, I don't know.
DK: Maybe you can set us straight on that?
ML: I don't know. I've tried to say this in other places too, and I don't know why it's so eerily persistent. Even in programs of events we'll be doing, this will pop up. It'll be like, "How did this get here?" Yeah, so everyone seems to think its clones of Stalin and Khrushchev. But it's actually Stalin and Khruschev in an alternate reality of the Soviet Union having sex, not their clones. The reason I think there's a cross-pollination is because in the first part of the book, there are clones of famous Russian writers. But then the second part of the book is an alternate history. So that probably explains it. But no, not clones, don't write that they're clones.
DK: That makes all the difference. It's totally okay if it's another universe.
ML: Yes.
DK: But anyway, that was hugely controversial. I remember they erected a giant toilet, I think, outside the Bolshoi, and they were throwing copies of Blue Lard in.
ML: It's interesting, because you talk about how history books misrepresent things over time. And I think in this case there's a bit of a double misrepresentation. But the second error is quite a bit less grave. Actually, they were just pissed that the Bolshoi was putting on an opera with a libretto written by Sorokin. So they were throwing copies of all of his books into the toilet. And this was in 2003. So it was actually quite a bit after Blue Lard had been published. But I think the thing that most attracted their ire was the Stalin-Khruschev sex scene. Although I'm not sure. That's just how things come down to us according to the oral history that's not written down, of current events, of almost current events, of soon to be 20 years ago events. Hard to say.
DK: It's funny because I was in Russia at the time, but I never saw the giant toilet. I remember thinking maybe I should walk down, but I think they'd already taken the toilet away. It was around the time Putin was starting to emerge, because when he first came in, it was like, "Oh, who's Putin?" And then there was this strange youth movement called Moving Together. And it was around that time that they started to say things like: "Oh, we're going to bring back traditional values." And so Sorokin was pulled into that, the beginnings of this movement in Russia. But controversy is good for selling books sometimes.
ML: Blue Lard partially pulled Vladimir out of the underground, as he always says, but I think that notoriety also helped. There was a complicated three stage thing that happens in Vladimir's career, where up until Blue Lard, he's really writing for the underground. He wrote those screenplays that were produced in the early 2000s in the '90s mostly. He couldn't write novels for the time being. And he has a famous seven year pause after Their Four Hearts. Then he gets very notorious after Blue Lard and the Bolshoi debacle, writes the Ice Trilogy, which I think has a somewhat muted response, even though I like it quite a bit. But I think in Russia in particular, it had a muted response. Then he writes The Blizzard, which is Tolstoyan, Chekhovian, whatever you want to call it, it's playing with the classics.
And I think… no, before, that is Day of the Oprichnik, Sugar Kremlin, then The Blizzard. So after the Ice Trilogy, he definitely enters a different mode, where he's not afraid of being more literary in a direct way, I think. And it's at that point really from 2006 or '07 to now, it's been a gradually mounting wave of critical acclaim and acceptance. I would say, even in 2005, nary a one would have accepted him into the Russian canon. But as time's gone on, they've accepted him more and more, to the point that today, no one would say that he should not be a part of the canon. He's the only living writer who has a definite spot, I think.
DK: It's interesting you mentioned that the Ice Trilogy had a more muted response. Because I became fascinated by that trilogy. I used to go into Dom Knigi on the Novy Arbat and look at it. And in fact, it's one of the few…. when it came to reading in Russian, I usually thought there are people who speak it a lot better than me. So if I'm going to read Platonov, I'd rather Robert Chandler translate it, and then I'll read his version rather than try myself.
But I really wanted to read the Ice Trilogy, and I read Put' Bro, and it was fascinating. It was extremely difficult, because it was full of terminology about the taiga, and berries and different types of bushes, and meteors. But it was a fascinating experience. And even as I was reading it, I could tell this is a Silver Age novel. It's written in this style. It's like this exhumation of a literary style that no longer exists, that you don't see very much. It was very striking to me. I think that's one of Sorokin's… I mean you said he writes in a lot of modes. I think that ability to mimic, or not even mimic — he writes a new novel in a style that no longer exists. I think it is quite extraordinary.
ML: I'm actually excited to try to do my own version of the Ice Trilogy sometime. Jamey Gambrell did a very good job, but I think Jamey had an easy elegance to her writing, while I think I try to lean into the extremity of different modes. So I would like to really try to make, Put' Bro, Bro's Way, I think it is translated as, to sound like an early translation of Bulgakov or something from the '50s. And then to lean into the Ellroy rhythm of the latter two books.
DK: That would be great. So I'm curious. You mentioned Jamey Gambrell and the Ice Trilogy. And those books, there seemed to be a wave about 10 years ago, when there was a bunch of translations. I read that first volume of the Ice Trilogy because I despaired that it would ever be translated into English. I thought, "All right, I'd better just read it in Russian." And then suddenly it was like, "Oh, they're doing the whole trilogy in Russian.” Then they did Day of the Oprichnik, and The Blizzard, and then it just stopped. The Blizzard even turned up as a Penguin 20th century or Modern Classic in the UK. And I thought that's wild that this guy is being published under the brand of a modern classic, and yet it's just dried up. So I'm curious, how did your relationship with Sorokin begin? What drew you to Sorokin?
ML: Vladimir said at the UCLA event that we did recently, that it was the angels who did it. I think there's something to that. I mean, I'd always wanted to read him. He was the object of endless fascination for me learning Russian in college. Like you say, there were a lot of things that didn't seem necessary to read in the original, or that were just not that interesting. It would be weird, no one was going to learn Russian to read Pelevin. So I just had read about him enough and I read enough of him in French, to know that this was a major writer. So throughout college I would peck my way through his work, to the best of my abilities, read everything I could in French, which is a good number of books actually. Then I eventually got his email, right out of college from a family friend. My mom made a movie with a Russian filmmaker, whose friend is the owner of, you know the Terrace Club in the Ermitazh?
DK: Yes.
ML: Or the 3205. He owns it. So he had Vladimir's email. And I wrote him, sent him a 100 page chunk of Blue Lard, which was, I think a little, it was what you would expect from a young guy, but I think there were some good instincts at play in it. And as a result of that, he read it, sent it to his friends who read it, and then said he wanted to work with me. Then eventually, over the next, from then to now, has been six years, I just, a very famous Russian writer wanted to work with me. So I just had to work my ass off basically, to get my Russian as close to perfect as I could, which is not perfect.
No one's Russian is perfect, not even Russians' Russian is perfect, but to make it really good I had to read a lot, to practice all the time, I listened to audio books sometimes for two hours a day, reading along. Then I also realized that Blue Lard was a hard one to start with, like translating Ulysses before you translate Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. So I translated Nastya, Horse Soup and Their Four Hearts before returning to Blue Lard. And then from there, we were corresponding a few times a week initially, then more and more every day.
I went to Russia two years into our collaboration, maybe three years even into our collaboration. And we just hit it off, became buddies, and then it kept progressing from there. We'd correspond even more. But the crazy thing is that I didn't ever doubt it. I never thought, "This is really not going to work out." I translated three novels all the way through before we got a publishing deal. I think it was just because it was like a training camp, both for translator and for a writer simultaneously. Because I think, I always say this, because I write, but it seems to me that it's true, translating is writing. There's no difference. The only difference is when you're translating, you don't have to deal with ontological questions. You don't have to deal with structural questions of the text, "Why this and not that?" You just know the big questions. So you just have to deal with all the small questions of style and tone, et cetera.
So for me it's just been an incredible experience in training. It's been like going to writing bootcamp, and that continues with every additional project I do. I feel like it strengthens me, and I kind of feel my writing get more muscular, and I feel my ability to write becomes an instrument that you can control fully. So finally four years into that whole thing, I got in touch with Edwin Frank, the NYRB editor, who I never emailed before that. I don't know why, I guess I thought they'd had a problem with NYRB, which they hadn't. Some sort of falling out, which was just totally wrong. I don't know where I'd gleaned such an impression.
Then I got in touch with Will Evans of Deep Vellum, who soon acquired Dalkey, and we were off to the races. I managed to convince them to do eight books, which has now become, I think even more, like 12. Which is everything, because it's a successful, the vision I always had for it, is coming to fruition. Because he's just a good writer. If people give me credit, I think I deserve credit for having faith, and for putting in the work. But the books were always there, and the books are great.
DK: I'm curious: in the process, how involved is Sorokin? Is he reviewing your stuff and going, "Yeah, I like that?" Because I've had a couple of books translated, and I've only ever met one translator. I met the Polish translator once, but usually the book disappears, and then it comes back. Could be great, could be bad. I have no idea. (I'm sure they're great, I trust all those translators). So I'm curious about that. Is it quite a collaborative effort that you're translating things, sending it over, he's reading it, giving comments?
ML: Exactly. I think he picks his battles. He doesn't read everything. He reads a lot, but I think he tends to be more involved with newer texts. With older texts, he's maybe a little bit less concerned, seems to me. But not with The Norm. Norm, he actually specifically requested one of his friends to go over it with a fine tooth comb, but only one section, the famous “Dear Martin Alekseevich” section, which of course is a great favorite. So he will pick his battles. He likes looking at the swear words a lot, and that makes sense. And he likes asking me questions about that. A few times he's mentioned Frank Booth, lines from Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, and said, "Can we make it that?" And I sort of go, "Maybe." He's always very helpful with everything.
The two things I think he can sometimes have a very direct impact on the text, are with gibberish. Sometimes I'll offer a neologism, and he'll offer a better one. And he'll just give it to me, in English, but it's a neologism, so it's just gibberish. But Russian gibberish has to be different than English gibberish. And then with the object world of Russian and Soviet life, that can be just totally over my head. I've spent time in Russia, but the Soviet stuff, especially, to be honest. I can't really think of any examples right now. But there are times where certain terms have just gone out the window for household objects, or official rituals, or whatever. That's very helpful. And especially, I mean it's amazing how fast Russian has changed as compared to English, I think. The language of the '70s and '80s on display in Vladimir's early work is just gone. No one talks like that anymore.
DK: To even remember the Soviet Union now, you probably have to be in your 40s or 50s. It's a world that's completely vanished. When I went to Russia, it was 1997, so it had only been gone for six years and you could still feel it. But now it's like 30 years, and there's been huge change. So how did you decide on... the first two books, there's Their Four Hearts, which maybe he wrote it in the late '80s, is that right?
ML: He wrote it in 1991. He wrote the year the Soviet Union fell.
DK: So 1991, and then Telluria, which is much more recent. When's that one from?
ML: 2013.
DK: So we've got almost a 20 year gap between these — well longer than 20 years — between these two books. So how did you pick these two as the ones to reintroduce Sorokin to the English speaking world?
ML: The short answer, is I didn't, but I had a role in the process, and I think it turned out very well. I think if I had done it, I probably would've done Blue Lard, and Their Four Hearts. But the good thing is Telluria is a warm bath, where you get into it slowly. The important thing for me, in doing this whole project, is to not neglect either side of Sorokin's work. He's got the really extreme early stuff, and then he’s got the much later, warmer, baroque mystical idiom he slips into. To neglect either one of those, would be to dispense with what makes him a great writer. So I think it's great, because Their Four Hearts is a very extreme book. And Telluria is a relatively speaking, totally un-extreme book. So as a function of that, I guess, it's a very nice combination, because the two poles of his work are present in extremely legible fashion.
I think actually it's probably better that it wasn't Blue Lard, because that's a book that's going to get a lot of people excited. So it's nice that the launch gets people excited, then Blue Lard gets people excited. And there's all sorts of cool little Easter eggs too in the releases down the road, where we have to keep interest going. But I don't think it's going to be a problem. I think it's just, it's like Bolaño albeit on a slightly smaller scale. People are just excited, they feel like it's a great writer they're getting to discover in real time.
DK: I remember discussing this with my brother, when he mentioned that he’d contacted you, and you were translating Sorokin’s books, I thought, "Man, I would start with Blue Lard, to be honest."
ML: Yeah, and I would have too.
DK: I'm wondering… so in about maybe 2011, I wrote an article for Publishing Perspectives about Sorokin. I used to write about Russians who had not yet been translated that I wanted people to translate. It was probably around the time that the Ice Trilogy was coming out. Over the years, that article would float around on the internet, and periodically people would write to me, asking for information about Sorokin. And about — I don't know — a year, year and a half ago, some dude wrote to me from a small press, and I think he'd been contacted about publishing Their Four Hearts, and it wasn't the Dalkey Archive. And he was worried, because the book is so extreme.
ML: Really?
DK: Yes. It was vague, it was just sort of like, "Did I have any thoughts on publishing it?"
ML: Oh, I wish — I mean, you probably shouldn't say who it was.
DK: Yeah, I'm not going to say who it was, but I thought, "Well that's interesting." But at the same time I think back in the '90s ... Well, if you think back to a book like American Psycho, it used to be, in the '80s in particular, the dynamic was, "Okay, there's these religious conservatives, they hate these things." And so scandal was a way to success: "This is the most extreme book ever. You better read it." But I think he was worried essentially that if he published Their Four Hearts, it was so extreme it would have really negative blow-back for his press.
So I'm just wondering, when I read that excerpt in Glas all those years ago, I thought, "Man, that's nasty." And then I ordered it, and I thought, "I'm just going to read it now." And it's actually quite funny, right?
ML: It's hilarious.
DK: It's really funny. Because I was thinking this might be a really grim slog through just atrocities and late Soviet decline and horror. But actually it's pretty funny, and it's-
ML: It’s a light read, it's hilarious.
DK: It really is. I would read it in the morning when I got up, just before I started work: for half an hour, get a bit of Sorokin in, and it's kind of outrageous. But it does go to dark places with this dark humor and so I'm wondering, were you at all concerned? Like, "Oh man, if we go out with this book first, and people react to it badly, then we're done?" Or were you like, "Nah, I think it'll be okay?"
ML: Well, no, not really. I mean maybe I think the Russian current events have contextualized it well, unfortunately, because it's horrible that all this is happening. But I think people read it more the way that it's meant to be read, given what's happening now, and not just as Vladimir's sick fantasies. It was like, "Wow, actually, he's ..." I think, I've said this before, but it bears repeating, that I really think it's about a Deleuze and Guattari idea of, in Anti-Oedipus, they write about the libido of capitalism, basically. I think Vladimir was writing about the libido of totalitarianism. I think it's a libido that still exists in Russia today, and it's still equally relevant. And I think sometimes people miss that. Some Irish critic interviewed me about something about the work, and he was obsessed with the idea that it was a novel of the '90s.
And I was like, "Where? I don't see that at all. It doesn't have anything to do with the '90s." Maybe some small hallmarks that you could genealogically draw on. But to me it just seems like a timeless book about Russian life, like the foundation of it. So was I worried? Not really. I was more worried about the little things every translator worries about. The different ways you could render a weird bit of slang, missing a certain contextual shade.
And the other thing to say is that there aren't really any “safe” books that Vladimir has. Let's see, the short stories that are coming out next year, there’s a very graphic necrophilia story. I mean, there's a lot of bad stuff. Then Blue Lard has the quite brutal scene between Hitler and Stalin's daughter at the end of the narrative. Then The Norm, I guess is relatively okay. There's the incest in Marina's 30th Love. So there aren't really any safe books. That's because, as Vladimir always says, "I grew up in a country that was soaked in violence. In the kindergartens, on the streets, in high schools, in military training, in colleges, et cetera."
So I don't think that I was ever really worried. I think people somehow read literature in translation differently, with more context. And I think people knew how to read it, and they read it correctly. So congratulations reading public who read Their Four Hearts correctly, you understood it. And again, I think it is also a book about what's happening in Ukraine now. It's actually a very potent metaphor for the whole thing. What I would say is you could compare it to Hard To Be A God, it has a similar valance, the film more than the book.
DK: I think the idea of timelessness is an interesting one, because I think if you read Ice, for example, almost immediately there are references that you're in 1990s Moscow. There are gangsters, and gangster slang — but in Their Four Hearts, it’s not immediately clear that you're in the Soviet Union.
ML: I still don't exactly know when it's meant to take place.
DK: There are scenes when they're in some central committee building, and they describe Soviet reality. But even then, it's fairly… I guess it was late Soviet, it was all collapsing. So a lot had rotted away, and all that was left, was this edifice. But I agree you don't need to know vast amounts about the Soviet Union to read it. In fact, you don't really need to know very much at all.
ML: No, and I think sometimes people spoil their own readings when they go ... I don't know, some people have read it. That's been the more negative reception, when it's been like, "Oh, this is quite befuddling. It's a novel of its time." And I think that's like, "No, befuddlement is the point." It's not befuddling, it's about shapes that you don't understand, but you can still see.
DK: I also have to say, I love “the liquid mother” sequence. What really impressed me there, was the dialogue, actually, between the mother and the son. It was pure sovok, this stream of platitudes. And I heard that so many times. Nice people, but Sorokin really captured the way people talk; then, of course, terrible things happen. But that stuff I thought was great.
Anyway, Telluria though. Did you translate Their Four Hearts and Telluria back to back? Or did you come to Telluria later? Because to me, if you read Their Four Hearts, it's kind of like “one thing”, whereas Telluria is this real polyphony of multiple styles. I just sat and read Their Four Hearts, but with Telluria I read it more like poetry. I would stop after each section, I might read some of them twice. Some chapters were more narrative than others, some of them are parodies, or pastiches of particular types of writing. It seems to me that it would be quite a challenging book to translate. So did you do Telluria close to Their Four Hearts or had you translated quite a bit of stuff by the time you came to it?
ML: That was much later, because I did Their Four Hearts ... So basically I started working with Vladimir in 2016, fall of 2016, six years ago. Then I moved on to Horse Soup and Nastya, which I first sent out to New Directions, suggesting they should just put them out in a little book together, which is still not that bad of an idea. But now they're coming out in a big short story anthology, which is also great. Then after that, let me think, then I did Blue Lard the following year. That would've been… I'm getting all my years mixed up. So spring of 2017 was when I did Horse Soup and Nastya, fall of 2018 was when I did Their Four Hearts. Right. Then 2019, from January to September, is when I did the following two thirds of Blue Lard. And then the following, really the year after that, was when I was doing Telluria. Maybe a bit less than a year, but about a year.
DK: Telluria is a polyphony, a multitude of styles. How challenging was that to translate? I was enjoying it, and then about halfway through I thought, "Man, this is tricky — every couple of pages you have to change the voice.” So I'm curious about how you went about tackling that?
ML: I felt like I had freedom. I had freedom because I was working with Vladimir. He could co-sign my choices. And also, it's not a world that exists. So these are all idioms that he's made up fully. They don't really call forth anything in the imagination. Some of them do, but some of them are really just a product of authorial delirium. I'd say most of them are like that. In that situation, the translator is also entitled to, and in fact obligated to, have his own delirium. So that was actually one of the lighter experiences of translating, because it was just so fun. I felt like I was just collaborating with him. Whenever he would go in a certain direction, up to a certain point of extremity, I would do the same, but it would just be a different point, because it's a different language.
DK: I like the term authorial delirium.
ML: The cool thing about Telluria is that was the one where more of the choices were extreme. So the dialects, some people don't think you should ever use dialects in translation, which, fine, but okay, then there's no way to translate this book, because a whole bunch of it is written in skaz, right? This 19th century style of semi-oral literature. Well, guess what's the great thing? We have American English language, skaz, Faulkner. So you play with that register, when Vladimir's playing with skaz. And that was really the most important piece of the puzzle, because without that rural singsong-y narrative quality to it, I think the book wouldn't have worked.
DK: Didn't Dugin write a book about Telluria, isn't that from Dugin? We don't have to talk about Dugin if you don't want to. I was just…
ML: I don't really know that much about what that was. My understanding is part of it is Vladimir parodying some weird, stupid utopian idea that Dugin has.
DK: Right? Because I remember when I read it I thought, "Oh, am I going to have to read Dugin to ..." And then I thought, "I just can't be bothered." I spoke to a friend of mine who's read Dugin, and he goes, “Nah, don't bother." I mean obviously there are contexts in which you probably should read Dugin, but…
ML: Vladimir hasn't read Dugin. He would agree with this. If he's making fun of it, he's making fun of it as an image. That's the other reason this book wasn't actually as hard to translate as you might think, is that everything operates on a very surface level. Vladimir constantly would tell me not to delve into symbolism in my translation. What he meant by that, if something was sort of incomprehensible on the surface, to render the incomprehensible-ness in a parallel mode. Not to cipher it for the reader in a symbolist way. And what this meant, is it was just intensely liberating. I was just playing with funny shapes, mysterious shapes, confusing shapes. I could do that in the same way that Vladimir does, because Vladimir is often not thinking about things at ... No, I mean, I don't want to say ... I think he's sometimes, and especially in Telluria, I think it's like cartoons. I think this book is Loony Tunes, but it's geopolitical Loony Tunes.
DK: Do you have a favorite section?
ML: Definitely. I think my favorite sections to translate ... I'd be interested in what your favorite section was too, of the translation. My favorite sections probably to read, I would say, number one would be Magnus, the Crusades. I like that chapter a lot. I also really like the first chapter. Then to translate, all of the weirdo ones were really fun because it's just highly kinetic poetry. The robots chapter. I was fiddling with Celine's voice, in that I really love all the tragic skaz chapters, like where the guy, the liquid crosses that get lost. I think it's liquid crosses, or something — the liquid cutters, liquid cutters: some piece of incomprehensible machinery has been lost from a factory. And the guy writing the letter asks to have a tellurium trip to go meet his deceased brother, and find out where he has hidden them. I really liked all the chapters like that. The cleaning lady at the Love Hotel who listens to her guests have sex. The robot chapter, like I said. I like the chapters written from the perspective of, I think, a Smarty Pants. Remember the one where it's Sweaty Robin?
DK: Yeah.
ML: That one is super weird, and has a lot of incomprehensible little bits of gristle. I like the ones that were the most challenging to translate. I think they were the ones where I felt like I could differentiate myself the most in a sense.
DK: So I should say for people who haven't read it, which is probably most people listening to this, that Telluria has 50 chapters and is set in a future world that's fallen apart. Russia has fallen apart, but Europe has also become very fragmented, and there are all of these miniature states and statelets, but still some quite advanced technology. And tellurium is a material which, if you have it hammered into the top of your skull, can give you wonderful visions and experiences — or it can kill you. Is that a fair summary?
ML: Yes, definitely. I think actually, now that you mention it, maybe my favorite chapter, not from a translation perspective, but from a content one — I love the one about the guy who spent 10 years with Jesus, by way of tellurium nails. That's a fun one.
DK: Yes! That was a great one. I also like the one with the dogs, chapter 22, it's a play with these two highly articulate dogs, arguing with each other while eating flesh. Also the chapter towards the end, where they go through this “Stalin World”.
ML: That's actually a direct parody of Dau, the movie.
DK: Really?
ML: Yeah, because Vladimir wrote the screenplay, then Ilya ditched it, and decided to make this weird Stalinist Disneyland. So that's what that's about actually.
DK: So as you were translating these two books that were written 23, 24 years apart, what did you see as connecting them? How had Sorokin grown? What did they share in common? It's interesting that these two books from two ends of his career have appeared simultaneously in English; Russians would not have had this experience. So I'm curious, did you see anything uniting them across the years?
ML: Vladimir said something really cool at one of the events we did. He said that his experience after Roman, he began to parody Russian writers who didn't even exist in the 19th century. So it seems to me that some of Vladimir's books are ready-mades created out of extant materials. Roman is a great example of that, as is Marina's 30th Love. But Their Four Hearts and Telluria both seem to me like they're ready-mades in the Duchampian sense of non-extant materials. I think that's an abstract way to say it…
DK: I like it.
ML: I think that he's playing with modes of literature that don't actually exist, but playing with them as if he were writing postmodern commentaries thereon. That’s what really brings these two books together, and that's why I felt like I had that intense degree of freedom with both of them.
DK: You mentioned you were on tour with him recently?
ML: Yeah, and we had two weeks together, more, 16 days — New York, San Francisco, LA. Very fun, a great adventure.
DK: So what's it like going on the road with Vladimir Sorokin?
ML: It's hard to say without delving into cliches or banalities. We're great buddies at this point, which I'm very grateful for. To see his mind digest America was very fun.
DK: That's an interesting thought, “his mind digesting America”. Outside of these events, were there any things that he really wanted to do? Did he want to go to a giant Walmart or —
ML: He wanted to go to MoMA. He wasn't actually interested in American kitsch stuff. And I had to push him to do some of it. I got us pop tarts, which he then, I think, loved.
DK: I watched one of the videos [from the tour] and I noticed that people were often treating him almost like ... They were asking him a lot about the war in Ukraine, for example.
ML: Yeah, he hated that.
DK: I have this theory that Russian writers who become popular in the West, they have certain roles they're expected to play. One is the dissident, one is the prophet. And so people were asking him, "How is the war in Ukraine going to end?" And stuff like that. I thought, "Well, it seems a rather difficult question to answer.
ML: People do that a lot with him. I think that's one of the funny things. In a certain sense, going on tour with someone like that, is seeing behind The Wizard of Oz, but then it's not that there's just a little man behind it, but that there's another Wizard of Oz, who's just a lot different. And one of the things you find out about him, is that he absolutely hates questions like that, because it just, one, it boils his work down to weird intentional prophesying, and two, he doesn't know. He's writing art, he's not writing social commentary. And he hates the war in Ukraine. He hopes Putin falls, but he doesn't know what's going to happen. And it was very funny to actually bear witness to those constant questions.
DK: Was he patient with them or did he lose patience?
ML: No, he was patient to a certain extent. He does get tired of the questions, I think.
DK: I was going just ask a little bit about some of your other projects. So you've got all of this Sorokin coming, and I think that's fantastic. But there's some other stuff you've working on. Did you want to talk about that a wee bit?
ML: I mean, there's so much at this point, that it's hard to know where to start. But there are a bunch of ... So Andrei on the Untranslated has an amazing blog that I really recommend, and his Twitter's great too. He has been someone I've gone to for recommendations and advice for a long time. We're texting buddies, and he’s a very wise man, great taste, very difficult taste sometimes. So as a result of his list of favorites, I've translated big chunks of three books in particular. One is Schattenfroh, a German book with my co-translator, Matthias Friedrich, who's a great translator of Scandinavian literature himself, into German. You need a German native speaker for this, for sure, because it makes Telluria look so easy. It's so hard, but it's great.
Then I'm working on a book by Antonio Moresco, a great Italian writer. I translated a big chunk of the first book in his trilogy, Games of Eternity, and the Italian writer and translator, Francesco Pacifico is editing that, which is super cool. So those are pie in the sky projects, because they're very expensive. You just send to publishers, and hope that someone will have high five figures to spend on the translation alone.
Then there are smaller projects which I'm excited about as well. I'm working with Jonathan Littell — I mean, this isn't a smaller project, this is a huge project, but the books are small. I translated his book, The Damp and the Dry, which is a little book about a Belgian Nazi, Degrelle, which is coming out from OR Books next year. I'm going to be translating his other novel, the second novel, An Old Story, which is going to be just a dream come true, because for me, The Kindly Ones is one of the best books ever.
I'm trying to think which ones I can actually talk about. Let me pull up my list. I've got a huge list in my phone of just pretty much, the head destruction list, the brain destruction list. The thing is, usually you can talk about stuff that you have decided to do, but to the extent that other people are involved, you can't talk about it until it’s firm. It's funny how that works. I can talk about this: Céline. Iain Sinclair, who is a mentor to me, wants to work with me on a complete translation of Guignol's Band, which is a Great London novel, and to have Ian edit it, and put in some particularly British turns of phrase, or just make it Iain-y or make it Céline-y, but as seen through Ian and I’s spectacles. That would just be such an awesome project.
This, I can semi-talk about. This Turkish writer, Oğuz Atay, a really great writer, my pal and collaborator, Ralph Hubbell, whose translation of Atay's stories Waiting For Fear is coming out from NYRB in 2023, I think. He's a great translator. He and I are going to collaborate on translating a couple of Atay's novels, I believe… Those are very long as well, so it's a little bit of a mystery when that's going to happen.
There are also some even more pie in the sky-projects, that I haven't even pitched. But Guyotat’s later novels, which are like Finnegan’s Wake mixed with Sade, I would love to get a crack at, but no one's going to pay for those ever, I don't think. As for Russians, everyone always wants to know what Russian novels I would translate. The two Aleksey Tolstoys: I would do The Silver Prince and Peter the First, or Peter the Great, I guess. I think it should be translated as Peter the First, really. I think it was mistranslated as Peter the Great, Those are two novels with super kitschy historical language, like the language I play with in Telluria.
That would be a lot of fun. And I think there's some chance, though, of course, it's politically complicated, that I’ll do Limonov's, early novels. Someone wants to do them. We'll see what ends up happening with that. Limonov was a motherfucker of a guy, but his early books are really good, so we'll see.
DK: I was fascinated by Limonov, and I read a couple of his things. That was another book I read in Russian, The Book of Water, which I think he wrote when he was in prison. But he was a deeply unpleasant guy, maybe like many authors in the past. But you're saying someone is actually interested in Limonov or is that something you were interested in?
ML: No, someone is interested, which is interesting. We'll see what happens with that. I mean, It's Me, Eddie is the one that's really great, that should be in print. The good thing is he wasn't alive for the invasion. But the bad thing is that he is very tied up in this toxic nationalism issue, even though his most famous book is about being an immigrant in New York and having sex with dudes
DK: Have you read Diary of a Loser?
ML: Diary of a Loser I have read, yeah.
DK: I really like that one as well. I thought that was —
ML: That was good. So that one's not going to get published, though, I could say, because the content is much more aligned with the later issues. There are a few writers like that. I mean, Russian culture has now been poisoned by this… not in some, "Oh, cancel culture" way but "Oh, do I really want to be complicit with these figures who are doing these ..." It's such a cancer, this whole awful war, and it's eating up big chunks of the culture. It really, really sucks so I hope Putin dies soon, and the war ends.
DK: Yeah. Well —
ML: The last thing I'll say, is I have my own stuff, which hopefully ... It's been doing the rounds. I think it's interesting. I think I've done something interesting with my big novel, called Progress. And then I've got a bunch of short stories that I want to put out in illustrated collections, similar to what Dalkey is doing for Sorokin. That's hopefully going to come in the next couple years, and we'll see. But it's embarrassing, that if you're not a published writer, I think it's like talking about masturbatory habits. It's just like saying, "Yeah, I mean that's there, but then leave it at that.
DK: I think the scale of what you're working on is fascinating. You're only picking super interesting books.
ML: That's the goal.
DK: And I think it requires a degree of… sometimes I look at your Twitter, and it's like, "Man, you don't pick the easy ones." I'll just say that, you're only interested in very challenging, but very interesting books. So yeah, I'll be keeping an eye out, not only for the Sorokin, but for these other things you're doing.
ML: Thank you. For me, it's just a question of holding my own interest. I'm not good at doing stuff just for money, or just for ... I don't know. I really need to hold my own interest, and I started translating out of love for Vladimir's work. And I think that's the best way to do it, because I don't know how to translate something I don't think is great, because then you have the problem of, "This is not a good sentence, what do I do with this? Do I make it bad? Do I make it good? Is that a good translation?" So translating mediocrity for a paycheck seems to me that it would be much more difficult than translating the difficult great books that I want to do.
DK: Well, I think that's a good note to end on.
ML: Perfect. Thank you so much for having me, Dan.
DK: Thank you, Max. It's been a pleasure. Good luck with everything and…
ML: Cheers.
DK: ... I'll be keeping an eye out for what's next.
Thank you for reading Thus Spake Daniel Kalder. Hit the like and share buttons to help spread the word to the uninitiated. Also, don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already. Regards, DK.
