Max Daniel Lawton is a Los Angeles-based writer and translator who has distinguished himself by the breadth and variety of his English translations. I sat down with him to discuss the recent publication of his translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, the unique challenges that Sorokin’s work poses, and the changing nature of literary translation as automation smooths the gap between any two languages.

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How did you come to translate Blue Lard?

I was just out of college, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life. I was going to grad school in the UK, but I had always wanted to read Blue Lard in English. I had read it in French, but a book like that is weird to read it in a secondary language that’s not the original. I felt like I had read it through a screen of milk. I didn’t fully grasp it. After college, I just started translating it. My coursework at Oxford didn’t monopolize any of my time. The first year, I had to turn in one paper, and that was it. So, I translated a big chunk of Blue Lard, got Vladimir’s e-mail, sent it to him, and he liked it, even though, looking back, there were some issues. It was the sheer luck of him needing a new translator, and me being in the right place at the right time.

Its was met with a lot of blow-back in Russia.

Yes, but it was never state blowback. Sorokin is controversial. It’s changed since I was studying Russian at Columbia, 2012 through 2016. I’d bring up Sorokin and it would be like bringing up Bret Easton Ellis to an English professor. They’d be like, “Oh that’s funny, you really like that? Huh. Okay.” Now they would say, “Oh, Sorokin, that’s very serious, that’s very good.” In the last ten years he’s been fully allowed into the canon.

Has that got anything to do with his accessibility to Anglophones?

Probably. In Russia they obviously look to America to see who’s being translated and who’s being talked about as a prestige thing. I think it also has to do with him being seen as prophetic, so he’s canonized for the wrong reasons a lot of the time. People will read him and say, “Oh, well he predicted everything.” Not really.

How would you define his style?

You could call it surrealist. He would call it conceptualist. It always operates on a conceptual basis. That’s the uniting valence throughout his work. Whatever’s happening linguistically in terms of the events of the text is justified or conceived of on a conceptual level before it comes into play. It’s hard to think of the first part of Blue Lard as being surreal because the shock of surrealism is to make normal things seem abnormal. Sorokin takes great pains to make things seem normal, so it’s almost like reverse surrealism.

It’s easy to read the first part as surreal if you haven’t taken a careful look at the glossary.

The glossary is also sort of a joke. It doesn’t really work. For the Chinese words, it works, but for the neo-logistic English or Russian expressions it doesn’t. It will be like, “to snot relations” is “to do ‘n’ disharmonic things on the witty scale”––that will be the definition. I like the first part a lot. That’s probably my favorite thing Sorokin’s ever written.

Which of the texts by the Russian bots did you have the most fun translating?

Dostoyevsky. He’s the best translated into English. We have the best approximation of his idiom in English.

Do you have a favorite Dostoyevsky translator?

I like the Pevear and Volokhonsky. They get a lot of flack, but their fucked-up English is a good match for Dostoyevsky’s fucked-up Russian. Dostoyevsky didn’t write with minute attention to detail. He dictated a lot of his books in the wee hours of the night when he was in gambling debts. “P and V” is what I came up on. That’s what we had to read in college.

There’s a lot of cursing, stuff which, as a translator, would make me wonder, “how are people talking about this these days?”

I have a weird fearlessness with translation. I get nervous after it’s published because I don’t want Russian professors reading it and critiquing me for this, that and the other. But I follow the Benjaminian notion that translation is the afterlife of a text in a foreign language. It’s like a cover version. My main goal is for the texts to stand up on their own, as self-contained systems. Of course, it is always important that they be accurate. But there is a kind of accuracy that’s detrimental to the creation of good translations. If someone is supposed to be swearing in a flowery way, then I translate directly because it makes sense in the context of the text that someone would say “May you eat your mother’s dried cunt”. Were someone to say something like that in a more normal context in the text, it would be wrong to translate it like that because it would call attention to itself. I think it is context driven. Sometimes I also translate metaphors literally because Sorokin will work with the metaphor in a literal way. I don’t think the translations can’t speak with an accent.

This is a text where you actually had to make people speak with an accent. There’s a Georgian accent that keeps coming up and you need to render that into English in a way that’s accessible to people who don’t understand what Russian sounds like, or what Russian sounds like with a Georgian accent.

I thought about that one a lot. That was a hard one. I was listening to videos of Georgian people speak Russian and I was listening to videos of Russians imitating Georgian accents. The characteristic thing that people do is flip all the vowels around. So, I thought, well, that’s something we could do in English. And I think it makes sense. When I hear it on the page, I hear a kind of weird accent that fits. I remember when an author I know read part of Telluria and asked why I made the characters speak in “Southern” English. What should I have done? They speak in rural accents in Russian. I could do it in standard English, but I would be losing a huge part of the book. When you’re dealing with a lot of colloquialisms, it is necessarily tough. You’re necessarily going to have to strive for something, and hope that a conceptual framework will map on. I think the nice thing is that the southern, Faulknerian stuff, especially in Telluria, that really is equivalent in Russian and English. Because it’s coming from this whole genre of oral narratives by a few different nineteenth-century Russian writers. And that does neatly map on to Faulkner, or McCarthy. But the Georgian thing is me kind of going, okay, we need to speak in a non-standard way. I’ll identify with a Georgian accent, and hope that people get something that approximates the experience people are having in Russian.

There was a part in Telluria that reads like Beowulf. Did you struggle to render that part of the text into Old English?

The cool thing about it is that Sorokin shoots from the hip, so I can shoot from the hip too. I don’t have to think “what is the precise suffix on this Anglo-Saxon word.” I just want it to feel right. If you showed it to an Anglo-Saxon scholar, they’d think it was an insane mess. That’s true of the Russian text as well.

That’s what’s freeing about fiction; you’re not an academic, you’re not tied down to reproducing historical, linguistic structures.

If it works, I’m really not that concerned with what Slavists say. One guy on his blog pulled out some lines from the giant who speaks gibberish and said: “This is Max Lawton’s version of Southern dialect. It’s incomprehensible! I’m confused.” I was like, it’s fully gibberish in Russian, this is disingenuous. But I really am writing for English readers. That’s not to say I’m not worried about accuracy in any sense of the word. I am definitely concerned about it. But I want the text to be a total experience in English. People can always come back after I’m dead and, where my translations aren’t precise enough, can correct certain elements of them––like with the Moncrieff Proust.

I’ve always thought that if we had a vibrant intellectual culture then we would be able to have multiple translations of the same text and they would serve different purposes. It wouldn’t necessarily be a question of there being an authoritative one. Unfortunately, I think we’re at a point where we just see translation as a one-to-one process. There is one word in the target language that corresponds to one word in the source language, and you either get it right or you don’t.

Exactly. People view it as translating words. And that’s so wrong. If you think of it as translating words, then you have to at least think of it as translating sentences. And probably you’re better off if you think of it as translating paragraphs. But it doesn’t past that test, if you’re reading it and it doesn’t feel like real English.

Many people seem to view translation as a mechanized process, one that could be easily accomplished by an algorithm. Could you make a case to defend the role of a human negotiating between two languages?

I don’t think a machine can render literary style. Literary style is created by so many small decisions that are…what preposition to use? Do you use “on” or “onto”? What verb shades perfectly here, not only as regards the meaning of the original, but also in the context of the new sentence you’re writing. It’s a lot of micro-decisions that a machine is incapable of making at this point. Because you also have to be trained on literary style; to have read a lot of books and to show some sort of aesthetic judgment.

Again, people misunderstand translation, which explains why they think a machine could do it. In fact, translation is discernment. It’s being able to look at the original and understand what’s really being said, how it’s being said, and then in your home language, being good enough at it that you know the best way to convey the quiddity of the original, based on a wide experience and literary texts in that language.

Are the clones in Blue Lard machines or humans?

They’re humans.

Are they doing that work of capturing style?

That’s how Sorokin sees them. It’s not pastiche. He corrects people when they say it’s pastiche. It’s an essence-hunt. Each of the clone texts is a hunt for the essence of the writer. Nabokov text bears no resemblance to Nabokov, right?

Can we read a straightforward allegory into the substance of the blue lard?    

It is definitely an allegory for the way the Russian state uses writers to maintain, create, and bolster their power. In Russia, the writer is not just a creator of literary texts. They are the guarantors of the country’s roots within the past and of the government’s origins. There are Pushkin statues everywhere. There are Dostoyevsky statues everywhere. They have writers on their postage stamps. It doesn’t really have to do with the quality of their writing. The government uses them as a guarantor of their power. It’s like a credit rating. I think the fact that the writers are the generators of a weapon is important. This is an allegory for how the Russian government uses these writers in a way that is instrumental, violent, and fundamentally distorts them. So, on one hand, it is an allegory. But then again, what’s cool about Sorokin is that he’s not Solzhenitsyn. It’s not a direct allegory. It always pushes beyond that to some aberrant territory.

You mentioned earlier that you came to this novel through a French translation. Why do you think it’s important for Anglophones to read world literature, or literature outside of their native language?

Right now, translated literature or literature from other countries is really the only access we have to literature that’s not been watered down into a heinous neo-realist idiom, which is the only thing that gets published in America and the UK. Translated literature is a bit better. I think if you were to read only stuff originally written in English coming out now, it would be tough.

What do you think it’s robbing from the landscape?

I don’t think it’s the classic white guy, “transgressive literature.” It’s more just about being able to express everything. I think that literature has to be honest, and it can be honest in a variety of ways. That doesn’t mean you have to write a confessional narrative. But I think the moment we’re sanitizing things for ideological reasons, we are censoring ourselves, and changing the way that the book turns out based on that. The issue isn’t that there aren’t any sex scenes in books. It’s a broader issue, that we’re changing the books we write at every level because we need to not do certain things. Literature doesn’t have to be a moral thing. It’s like the famous Norman Mailer review of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, that it follows the Emersonian dictate that literature must be about our own rejected thoughts coming back with alienated majesty. I think if there is a space where we can explore every part of what it means to be human, it should be books.

I don’t know what it is exactly about literature today that feels so awful. It’s not just content. It’s not like it would be better if everyone were writing horrible, transgressive stuff. Something’s missing. And I think it’s also just that you’re asked to hit certain goalposts. It’s not just because of censorship of what’s there, of what you’re not allowed to say in the negative sense. It’s also the extent to which you’re not allowed to be inventive in the way your write. There are so many no-go zones combined with the fact that you then have to write in a very straightforward way.

The Rabelais quote that introduces Blue Lard addresses synesthesia. When certain letters are assigned different colors, they come together in words that defy meaning. How does this quote serve as an appropriate preface to the novel?

I think Sorokin is operating on purely visual terms. He is a sensuous writer above all else. And I’d be interested, as he gets into his 70s, if I have any influence over what he writes—and, of course, no truly great writer is influenced by anyone else, so I’m sure I have none—if I could convince him to write a Jamesian novel. That would be super interesting, what his version of a Jamesian novel would be, something with a lot of interiority. Because I think he could do it.

There is very little interiority in Blue Lard. Sorokin is mainly fixated on social and political critique of Russia.

It is his fixation. And you know, there is a little bit more interiority in the last book he wrote, Doctor Garin, that he’s starting to warm up to a little bit. Of course, there’s a lot of metaphorical stuff dealing with Russia, too. That is true for Russian writers in general, and also for Turkish writers, but it is something that we in the Anglophone world don’t really deal with. If you were that obsessed with America, it would be weird. I can’t think of anyone who is. Literally every Russian writer is like that: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky. There are maybe a few who aren’t, but they really love thinking about Russia. That’s definitely true.

Is there a tradeoff? So much American writing is about interiority, and what we’re lacking is kind of birds’ eye view of America as a nation, a critique of it. Do we have anyone doing that?

Don Delillo does it pretty well, I think. He zooms out. He’s pretty obsessed with America. It’s a different kind of obsession. Russian writers are obsessed with Russian in a super naïve way. But I don’t know… I’m only reading nineteenth-century stuff these days. That’s the funny thing. I translate and work on such crazy books, but I’m becoming such a weird little conservative in my reading habits.

What was your favorite part about this experience of translating Blue Lard?

It’s sad to think of now, just because of what Russia has become. But for me, the book and my relationship with Vladimir was the path to another life. For my whole life, there’s a before Blue Lard and an after. On the first night I was in Russia I met him and all we talked about was Blue Lard. My first summer in Russia, which was my first period of time spent in Russia, I lived in a shitty AirbNb, and I translated Blue Lard. And the whole time, the book was my prism for understanding the country, looking at the place I was in through this text. And it was also my prism for understanding literature. It really was a big book for me for a long time. It still is, but I’ve grown up a little bit unfortunately. Things stay important. It’s still so important, but then you find a new thing to get high on. Blue Lard was getting me really high for a long time, and I think it taught me a lot about writing, which was a dangerous thing. I think I had to learn to write not quite as crazily as Sorokin does, because he taught me how to write like a maniac. And I had to be like, okay. Let’s temper Sorokin with Henry James a little bit. But still, Vladimir taught me everything I know about literature and writing. I wouldn’t be a writer, I wouldn’t be a translator, without this book.

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Blue Lard is available now from NYRB.

Max Daniel Lawton is a novelist, musician, and translator. He has translated many works by Vladimir Sorokin and is currently working on translations of works by Michael Lentz, Antonio Moresco, Stefano D’Arrigo, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He is the author of two novels, The Abode and Progress, as well as a collection of short stories, The World. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn’t writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music with Nadya Tolokonnikova. Twitter: @maxdaniellawton

Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, La Piccioletta Barca, and on her Substack. Twitter: @monalisavitti.