The Translator’s Voice is a column from Ian J. Battaglia here at the Chicago Review of Books, dedicated to global literature and the translators who work tirelessly and too often thanklessly to bring these books to the English-reading audience. Subscribe to his newsletter to get notified of new editions as well as other notes on writing, art, and more.
Antonio Moresco may be well-known in Italy, but he’s still relatively unknown in English-speaking countries. Moresco is hailed as one of the authors who brought Italian literature into modernity and beyond, perhaps in ways we’re still not ready for—especially through his Games of Eternity trilogy, now being translated by Max Lawton for Deep Vellum. Book one, The Beginnings, is out in March 2026, with subsequent volumes to follow in the coming years.
Split into three sections, The Beginnings follows the narrator across three distinct phases of his life: in a seminary as he studies to become a priest; traveling the Italian countryside as a political organizer; and his later attempts to become a writer. All the while, we see not only the development of a worldview for the narrator, but a style for Moresco, seemingly trying out certain structures, even certain words, in real-time. The result is a hypnotic and dreamlike book, punctuated by moments of effervescent clarity.
Max Lawton is a man of many words—understandable for someone who knows seven languages. He spent his childhood speaking English and French, before his love of literature pushed him to pursue more and more languages. After hitting the literary scene with his translations of Vladimir Sorokin’s work from Russian, he’s since translated from several languages, like Michael Lentz’s German novel Schattenfroh.
While many translators specialize in one language, Lawton pulls from world literature, bringing attention to works that have been overlooked, sometimes even in their own language; he reminded me that The Beginnings was a flop when first published, and is now out of print in Italian. Yet the book has a mysterious charm. Making sense of it all is difficult for the reader, and was at times “nightmarish” for the translator. Luckily, he worked with Italian writer Francesco Pacifico in the edit to help keep his head on straight.
I spoke with Max Lawton via Zoom about translating a book that doesn’t make sense, working with collaborators and authors, and the pomocel (and Max Lawton) canon.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ian J. Battaglia
You famously speak and read a number of different languages—my understanding is that you grew up speaking English and French and built on from there.
Max Lawton
Yeah.
Ian J. Battaglia
When did you decide to pursue multiple languages beyond just what you grew up with?
Max Lawton
It was really in high school.
I went to public high school in Wisconsin, which was a good high school, but it wasn’t like some fancy East Coast prep school where it’s, Oh, you can take Hungarian and Japanese and whatever. But I was very lucky because the head of the Spanish department also was the head of the Spanish village at Concordia Language Villages.
Concordia Language Villages is a great program for kids—summer camp—in Northern Minnesota. And I actually started thinking, Why don’t I add another language? Which seemed crazy at the time in Wisconsin. People were like, Oh, you already know French. What do you need that for?
But I read Bolaño in my freshman year of high school. 2666 came out in what, 2008? 2009? (2008 in English translation) And I was like, I just want to learn Spanish to read this in Spanish.
Which is funny because the translations are so good, you don’t really need to. It’s better to read in the original, obviously, but I’m not like somebody who subscribes to the idea that it’s read in the original or nothing—
Ian J. Battaglia
It would be weird for you, as a translator, to feel that.
Max Lawton
Yes. I also think it’s a self-defeating thing that people say.
Certain books certainly don’t translate very well, and there are books where I’m like, Oh, I really didn’t get that from the translation. Bolaño, though, is not one of them. But anyways, I wanted to learn Spanish to read Bolaño. It was really cool. I went to the camp; I took Spanish. The Spanish department in my high school is fantastic, so I learned it very well.
And then I guess I really wanted to learn Russian because I love Dostoevsky. Ever since I read The Brothers Karamazov, it’s been the easy answer for my favorite book. Now it’s just one of my favorite books, but for a long time it was my favorite book. And so I just started taking Russian classes. I took two amazing Tolstoy and Dostoevsky classes and Russian language my freshman year. That was what I was mainly taking, in addition to the required classes at Columbia—with Liza Knapp, who’s a lovely, wonderful professor.
Then I read about Vladimir Sorokin. There was an article about Sorokin that compared him to Michel Houellebecq. The Elementary Particles absolutely blew my mind. I read all of Houellebecq. I would sit in the back of my French class because I didn’t really need to take French in high school, but I was doing it for credits. I would read Houellebecq in French in the back row, and my teacher was this very jovial, silly guy. He’d be like, Who does that? Who does that? But so when I read that Sorokin was like Houellebecq, I was like, I gotta read this guy.
That was weirdly my fixation through college when I was taking Russian classes. Blue Lard is really hard, obviously, especially the first part. I bought it on a class field trip to Brighton Beach. I was like, I can read a page of Dostoevsky with my teacher’s help, this will be a breeze. And I opened it. I was like, I suck. I’m an idiot.
Russian, for a long time, made me think my language-learning days were behind me because Russian is so hard. Spanish, I learned very easily. It’s not like I’m perfect in Spanish; I read very well, and I speak well, I would say, but I got to that stage very easily, and so I expected Russian to be like that, but Russian took forever, because it’s way harder. That made me think my brain had calcified. That was wrong; just Russian was very hard.
So then I met my wife at the end of college, and I was in Oxford while she was living in California. And so I learned Turkish and took classes at Oxford. Turkish is very easy in the beginning and then gets hard, so at the beginning, I zoomed up to intermediate pretty fast, and I was like, Oh, wow. Yeah, I guess I’m still good at learning languages. Then, in my PhD, I quickly realized I didn’t want to be an academic. I was working with Sorokin all the time.
I just took intensive classes for eight or ten hours a week in German and Italian for two or three years. The teachers would be like, What are you doing here? You’re an adult man taking these intensive classes with undergrads. And I’d be like, I just like Moresco. Or, I’m interested in this book called Schattenfroh that I’m nibbling at.
Finally, for the Italian, again, if you know French and Spanish, it’s very easy to read Italian if you take a few classes. German has more complexities, but again, it’s not that hard compared to Russian. And there are certain Germanic tendencies in English.
So it just happened organically, and the PhD was key for that because obviously those classes would be thousands and thousands of dollars in the real world. But they were free—I was actually being paid to take them.
Ian J. Battaglia
Walk me through how you got started with Moresco and The Beginnings. What brought you to this work?
Max Lawton
It was just Andrei, to be honest.
I found Andrei’s blog (The Untranslated), and Andrei was also inspiring to me because it was like, Here’s somebody who’s just reading in all these languages. You can just do it. Why don’t you just do it? Learn them and read. You start doing it, and you realize you can.
I have two great skills as a translator: to identify styles in a foreign language and to be able to re-render them into English. And those are kind of different skills. I don’t know if this is just me, but if I don’t know words, it doesn’t matter. You have to have the grammar, and you need to have a decent vocabulary. But once you have those two things, you can identify the style and feel it pretty easily, or I can, but I don’t think it’s that hard, to be honest. I think people could be braver about it, and also just read a lot.
I read a ton, and I’ve read a ton, and so I’m just a good reader, and that’s, I think, the whole essence of it: I’ve read a lot of books.
With Moresco, I read about the trilogy, and it just sounded awesome. And then I read it, and I was like, This is awesome. I read the first volume in French because it came out in 2020 when I was learning Italian, and I was like, This is weird. And then I read it again in Italian, and I was like, The Beginnings is crazy. It’s very hard to read. And then the Songs of Chaos is the best one.
The Beginnings is all about the development of a style. It’s about the development of a worldview, the development of a style. And it changes as it goes. It’s a life book. He wrote it until he was 45, then it was published, and it was a big failure. He put his whole life into it. So what are other books like that? I don’t know. It’s like a modernist life book. The Cantos are a life poem, but that’s different. The point is, he put his whole life into it. He put his life stories, his way of seeing the world and language and how it changed through time. It is very difficult to read at points.
He makes all these bizarre aesthetic choices that you can’t make. I really love it, but it’s an acquired taste for sure. Songs of Chaos is a lot different.
Ian J. Battaglia
I’ve heard you say before that Canti del Caos (Songs of Chaos) is one of your favorite books.
Max Lawton
It might be my favorite thing I’ve ever translated; I love it.
I think like for the Max Lawton canon—I don’t mean that in a self-serious way—but as Blue Lard, Schattenfroh, Canti del Caos; Schattenfroh is definitely spot three. Number one is between Blue Lard and Canti del Caos. And right now it’s Canti del Caos.
By the time I’m through with a book, I’ve gone through it like eight to ten times. I get sick of it. So it’s going to be a long time before I get to see what my actual favorite is. Right now, I feel like Songs of Chaos could be my favorite. I compared The Beginnings online to a crazy noise album, Rainbow Mirror by Prurient, which is four hours long. It’s an acquired taste.
People might be a bit befuddled by it, but that’s perfectly okay. Keep in mind it’s out of print in Italy! You gotta go deep with it to get anything out of it. That’s the thing. I went very deep with the translation; the editorial process was insane. Francesco and I were working for ten hours a day. There was a fast turnaround.
And there are so many indeterminate things in the book. It’s very hard to tell what he’s talking about a lot of the time. So pinning him down over Zoom and pinning the book down in the final draft was nightmarish. But I’m absolutely confident that readers of the English translation will have the same experience that Italian readers have.
Ian J. Battaglia
So you had some contact with Moresco?
Max Lawton
Yeah. A lot.
Ian J. Battaglia
Of course you’ve worked closely with Sorokin. Is that common for you to interact with the author like that?
Max Lawton
Yeah. I’m very close with all of Michael Lentz, Sorokin, and Moresco.
Sorokin and Lentz are both puckish. Lentz doesn’t want to spend time with it. So I’ll ask him questions, and he’ll be like, Oh, time for the questions! I don’t know, I’ve forgotten completely!
And then Sorokin likes to try to introduce errors into the English, I’ve realized. He will tell me the wrong thing intentionally. I think it’s just because he is very interested in the fallibility of language, and when language becomes non-representational, so he wants the language to just break apart in a new, interesting way.
For example, there’s this Russian expression “Yobany stos.” Which means like “fucking hell.” Stos doesn’t mean anything. Yobany means “fucking.” And I was like, “Vladimir, how should I translate this?”
And he was like, Make it “fucking stos.”
I had that for a day, and then I was like, Wait, Andrei, this is stupid, right? And he was like, This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t make it “fucking stos.” [Laughs]
Ian J. Battaglia
It’s hilarious to imagine the author trying to introduce doubt into the process.
Max Lawton
I think it’s that he likes when language breaks down. If you’ve read Sorokin, you’ll know he has those moments where language comes out from under itself. So he wants to do that to me.
Ian J. Battaglia
That’s almost something that happens in The Beginnings as well. There’s definitely a fascination with language, a lot of the repetitive phrases; obviously, the introduction from Francesco notes the use of the word “shucking,” but there’s a handful of little things like that, food described as like “shards” or “shattering,” for example.
How did that fascination with language, that level of detail, affect the translation?
Max Lawton
I just felt it as I went. You can feel the language becomes more standardized as he goes.
His later novels are like that style that comes to be in a process of fusion, emulsion; that becomes very; not mass produced, but it’s standardized. In The Beginnings, you feel that style coming into being.
As a translator, I felt that development, and then I allowed it to develop in the translation alongside the writing of the original. And I didn’t go back through and standardize it totally.
You can feel him kind of tentatively plucking at something, pecking, then suddenly it gets freed and, oh wow. I love that. And that’s what Francesco writes about in the introduction: you just feel him suddenly fall in love with something, and you feel him fall in love with a certain way of writing.
The Beginnings threatens to become a sort of Robbe-Grillet-style boredom, and then it becomes more active and less nouveau roman; thankfully.
Ian J. Battaglia
I found it very dreamlike in a way. There are so many scenes that I think are so powerful. I love the scene where the characters are going between the record players in the park… I don’t know, there are weird things that stick out to you. In your translator’s note, you said it’s a book that “doesn’t make sense.”
How much more difficult is it to translate a book that doesn’t make sense?
Max Lawton
Horribly hard!
It’s different from Sorokin, because for him it’s about the carapace; it’s about the edifice of how the language feels. Moresco is actually interested in what this stuff means; he actually has something in mind that’s real. Which is a problem because then I have to try to see like him or see like he does.
A good example with Moresco is in a moment where it describes tiny squares of deodorant on the ceiling of an elevator. Francesco and I are such pals now. I love him. He’s like my brother. So I would just text him, be like, Francesco, what is this? And he’d write back, Hahahaha, what IS that? with “is” in all caps.
That’s a big problem for a translator when there are no limits on the register. If you’re translating Elena Ferrante or something, you’re like, It should make a kind of sense and fit into this sort of structure. Whereas with Moresco, it’s like anything could be anything at all times.
For example, when I did the Canti del Caos sample, there’s this phrase… oh, what is it? Shaved cocks? Something like that. It’s more like they’re like trimmed cocks. It’s a porn phrase, and I just didn’t know. So I had it as their “trimmed cocks,” and Francesco was like, No, it should be something that you’d hear in porn. It’s because so many Italians have foreskins. They’re just imagining the foreskins rolling back. But it’s like in Moresco, it could be anything.That’s why, when I get a commission that I don’t choose for a more realistic book, it’s like a vacation. I’m like, That has to mean something. Whereas with this, I’m like, it could mean nothing. I’m sure stuff has gone through in my translations where it could mean nothing; I assume it means nothing. Then it actually means something concrete. I catch most of them. It’s a tricky thing for sure.
Sorokin has that problem too. I’ve talked about this before, but like the name of his radiator company in Moscow, he turned that into a noun for people. Like an insult noun. I was like, What does this mean? He was like, It’s just my radiator company in Moscow. I saw it by my desk and thought of it!, and I’m like, great.
Ian J. Battaglia
Would you talk a little bit about how you worked with Francesco? What sort of collaborative process do you have in your translation in general?
Max Lawton
I like collaborating with others. Right now, for example, the Canti del Caos, I have four or five people I send it to every day when I finish my pages. I just like having other sets of eyes on it. But there’s a difference between a friend who’s reading it, someone who says maybe this is a little tweak you can make, someone reading it for fun, and then somebody like Francesco who’s read the whole thing. Francesco is going through every page.
I have things in bold when I want to go back to check, I just put it in bold. And we were going back, and it was like, What is this? What is this? What is this? There were just so many problems. Going back and trying to understand a text that’s incomprehensible.
The Italian editor, when he got the book in 1990-something, he said, I don’t understand a fucking thing about this. He was talking about the use of imperfective form, but he was also just talking about the book. It really is an incomprehensible book. Parts two and three are much more comprehensible, but part one, that’s his family he’s visiting. That’s so weird! He’s said that in interviews that’s his family.
Obviously, he’s alienated from his family, but I’d gone through the book six or seven times before someone told me that, and I was like… Okay, huh.
Ian J. Battaglia
There are so many inscrutable things and inscrutable relationships. It’s not that he becomes that much more talkative as the book goes on, but especially because he’s silent in the first section, you’re reliant on his eyes, the things he notices. Yet it’s like looking at a Cezanne still life painting, where everything doesn’t quite line up.
Max Lawton
The terms he uses are all wrong for stuff, too. That’s the other thing. This is what I always say, and I will say it again: I just want to get the bones right. I want to try my best to get every little detail right, but it’s fine that scholars are going to go back and correct stuff, as I just want the books to live for a long time in my translations, like what has happened with the Moncrieff translation of Proust. There will definitely be things that scholars will go back and be like, What even is this? Max was close, but…
For example, when he’s talking about the window frames. He keeps using different words for these frameless windows. Francesco was like, This is completely incomprehensible. And then we asked Moresco, and he was just like, I just mean that it’s like a new building and there aren’t windows. So we’re just like, Okay, we’ll just say “frameless window holes” and make it consistent because he’s using crazy window words, and I’ll Google it, and Francesco’s like, I don’t think this is totally what it should be like, I think this is wrong. And we’re like looking at these pictures of window parts—it’s nightmarish.
There are a lot of things like that. Like the squares of deodorant on the ceiling are like air fresheners, like sticky air freshener squares. But, at first, I thought these were just squares of deodorant on the ceiling. Francesco was also befuddled until we got Antonio’s clarification. There were a lot of objects that stymied both of us.
I’m very proud of the translation. Schattenfroh is a dominatrix book. Lentz has these referential beats he’s hitting, there are tons of quotes, and there’s not a lot of artifice in the tone. Lentz is a professor, so it’s like a professor’s wild day. Which is still quite professorial, stately, and academic. He’s freaking out, but he’s freaking out in a kind of a controlled way. Moresco is freaking out in a totally different way. It allows me to stylize a lot more.
We did a final correction, probably since the version you’ve read, and changed maybe fifty to 100 things. A lot of typos. I was like, I just want to check one more time. And then I was rethinking stuff, seeing stuff again. There’s this moment where I was thinking it was the droplets of the wasps attacking his glasses. But it’s actually the wasps licking droplets off of his glasses. It’s impossible. But that’s what it is.
It’s a book you could endlessly redo. But that’s the fun of it. I’m excited to go back through the books of mine, the translations of mine that I adore like Henry James; you know, revise over time and rethink. These are living things, and they’re untranslatable books in some way.
I’m always confident the versions that I put out are at some very deep level giving you access to the quiddity of the original. And I’m always interested in authors who I have an identification with, because if I’m translating somebody who I don’t feel that identification with, there’s a lot of me, people can feel that I have a style that bleeds through a bit. Just impossible not to if you’re a writer. You want to pick writers for whom your way of writing aligns with in some way or another. Especially if you’re trying to stylize a lot or they’re heavily stylized books. It’s not a sin if a bit of your style is there.
Ian J. Battaglia
Is that something you’re trying to avoid generally? Is your goal to reduce the gap between a reader and the original as much as possible?
Max Lawton
Imagine a book as a drug. I just want the high to be the same for the reader of the original and the reader of the translation. That’s how I think about it.
Sorokin always says, “Translate worlds, don’t translate words.” And I always say, “But Vladimir, I probably shouldn’t forget the words, huh?” And he’ll say, “That’s true!”
I’m trying to reduce that gap. It’s just that I am a writer. I write the words. So you can definitely tell what Moresco’s style is, and Moresco’s style is there. But you can probably find a few of my tics and style, too.
Part of that is when you’re pushing the pedal to the floor stylistically. You lose control a bit, and that’s intentional. You have to. If you have full control, then it’s an academic press translation, and that’s my worst nightmare: for a reader to hear about how crazy a writer is, then read one of my translations and be like, It feels pretty normal. That’s happened to me with writers where you read the translation, and you’re like, I don’t get it.
Ian J. Battaglia
I do hate that feeling. Not to call anyone out, but I remember reading Han Kang’s The Vegetarian after reading reviews talking about how insane it is.
It’s cool, but I didn’t feel dirty after reading it or something.
Max Lawton
Schattenfroh befuddles people. I think you have to have some level of education to understand it in a way that I try to pretend is not true, but I have a PhD and half my dissertation is on Hegel, so it’s probably a bit stupid of me.
Whereas like Moresco, I think people will read it and really be like, Fuck, who wrote this? The style’s out of control in a very intentional way that I think definitely comes through in the translation.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my translation of the Limonov autofiction novels I’m also doing for New York Review Books. He writes in a very normal way. That’s going to be a fun exercise in totally eliminating the Max Lawton voice.
I think also my literary style has grown up alongside Sorokin and Moresco. Schattenfroh, I don’t think you could really tell is my translation.
Ian J. Battaglia
What do you think of as the Max Lawton voice? Are there things that you identify?
Max Lawton
It’s probably like a mismatch of registers, some degree of obscenity, weird images.
I think you could probably find some of me in the Moresco, and definitely there’s some of me in the Sorokin because Sorokin is my lit daddy. For as long as I’ve been writing, I’ve been translating him.
One way I’ve thought about it, actually, is like colloquial literalism. I like the translation to follow the original very closely. I like people to be able to feel the original behind the translation, which is why I like the Pevear and Volokhonsky Dostoevsky, actually. I think they really follow the peaks and valleys well.
But sometimes I feel like I take that literal style of translation and then act as if I were Tarantino doing a pass over it. Making it colloquial. So it’s like colloquial literalism. That’s why I would say my translation style is.
The Beginnings is very literal, intentionally, and in the afterward, I talk about the Chandler thing because it’s all about the ostranenie, the defamiliarization. I think following the Italian a little bit too closely was a nice way to defamiliarize the reader.
Ian J. Battaglia
I love getting that feeling of other languages when reading in translation. The only other language I read is Japanese, but I still read a lot of things in English translation from Japanese, and especially because Japanese is so different from English, I feel like you can often reverse-engineer it. I’ll read a sentence and know the Japanese sentence was probably like this.
There were definitely some times while reading The Beginnings I was wondering, is this just an Italian thing, or is this how the sentences are constructed, or something?
Max Lawton
A lot of that’s just him. The way he constructs sentences is very weird. The way I preserve some of that defamiliarization is by using weird words. For example, nodo for a tie. It means node, but it also can mean the knot of a tie. But I just kept node. That just feels like something Moresco would say. A translator could be like No. It should be knot. But I’m like, It’s node. The node of the tie. It’s cool.
Francesco was a great ally to have… He’s friends with Antonio, he’s a famous Italian writer. So I could ask him questions, and he’d be like, Yeah, that’s cool. Or No, that’s wrong, dude. Don’t be an idiot. We had that dialogue.
We were talking about translations that you read, and you feel like, Oh, what’s so good about this book? I can’t tell. When a writer is going out to sea, I’m like, Let’s go. But I like to have a native-speaker editor to make sure I’m not going farther than the writer or something.
Ian J. Battaglia
What’s your favorite language to translate from? Is that different from your favorite language to read?
Max Lawton
I just love German for some reason. I just love reading it and translating from it. I’m just in love with German, really. I think because it’s recalcitrant in a way. It’s very elusive.
French, I read it like I read English. And Russian I read very well too. Russian, I’ve just spent so much time with, it’s familiar. But it doesn’t have that long of a history in a certain sense; Russian literature. Not in a certain sense, it just doesn’t. Whereas German, you can go back to all these weird old things, and it can get so dense and screwy.
I’m fixated on these exploded garbage-bag novels of the German twentieth century, like Bottom’s Dream, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Joseph and His Brothers. Why did Mann have to write a 2000-page Bible fanfiction novel? It’s so weird. Even The Magic Mountain, like the whole construction of that book… He couldn’t stop writing what was meant to be like the first chapter, and then zooms through what’s meant to be the last 75% of the book in seventy-five pages after you’ve been reading 800 pages of the first chapter. It’s very weird.
Schattenfroh belongs to that tradition. Musil is Austrian, obviously, but The Man Without Qualities is a book he couldn’t finish. Hans Henny Jahnn, hopefully I’m going to translate Fluß ohne Ufer—we don’t know what we’re going to call it in English yet.
I also love Hegel. When I have enough renommée to teach at a university without having to be a publishing academic, I just want to teach a year-long seminar about Hegel, Heidegger, and Finnegans Wake, because those are things I could never get sick of reading.
German is elusive; I know it enough, but it hasn’t lost its sort of exoticism in a weird way.
Ian J. Battaglia
I think there are a lot of people who think translation is simply about fluency in a language. How do you view the skill of translation as separate from general language skill?
Max Lawton
It’s totally different. The best translators in history, maybe Ralph Manheim and Michael Henry Heim, they both had eight or nine languages. And for example, Manheim translated from Polish, but I’m sure all of my languages are head and shoulders above Manheim’s Polish.
You can always subcontract comprehension, but you can’t subcontract the ability to stylize. So, like I always say, my great skill is my ability to write in English. That, and my ability to read something and grasp the way it feels. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have to look stuff up, or that I don’t work with other people.
Of course, you need to reach a certain level of skill. It would be idiotic if you couldn’t even read it at all, like what I was doing in undergrad. I couldn’t translate Blue Lard when I was that undergrad who brought Blue Lard to Brighton Beach. But once you get past a certain level, I think it’s more about your intuitive ability or your aesthetic nose, let’s say: your ability to sniff out the style of the original, and then your writing ability in English.
I think Nabokov said that. Nabokov talks about translators, saying, Your ability in the language you’re translating from doesn’t have to be that good; your ability in the language you’re translating to has to be extraordinary. This isn’t an admission or something; I know these languages very well, and I am very confident in my ability in them, and I speak them all to varying degrees of fluency.
There’s this illusion that I think kills translation is that we want translators to be all academics who work very slowly on one book for ten years, and they’ve devoted their whole life to that language, and every translation of every sentence captures every single connotation of the original’s meaning. I’m not sure that’s really going to give the best or most life to these books.
With that said, I would love to figure out a way to tap more into the academy and allow the academy to be a part of the dialogue on these translations without them having to hijack it into this sort of pedantic space, or the sort of translation / academic press space. Just to have them have a voice and be guiding a little bit. I’ve done that with some of my Sorokin’s, like with Blue Lard. I like doing that. I like to allow academic rigor to have a voice. I think it’s pretty clear I want everyone’s input.
Translators want to create this idea of the omnipotent single translator who’s reading this text and going, Oh, here’s everything it could possibly mean in one vaguely elegant sentence that’s a little bit awkward. I think it’s silly. Translation should be more fun. It should be more free, it should be more stylized. Be careful yourself, but also let other people tell you where you’re coloring too far outside the lines.
Ian J. Battaglia
You’re somebody that keeps extremely busy. How do you balance all that, especially against your own personal writing?
Max Lawton
For my own writing, I just write the books in bursts, and then it’s done. I don’t write and translate during the same day ever.
For translation, like I said, I had a big head start. Things will slow down next year once the publishing schedule has fully caught up to where I am.
I just work consistently and work for five or six hours a day, and I think people can get a lot more done than they think. Bill Vollmann told me I’m a graphomaniac after his own heart—he writes a 1500-page book every year. He’s done that for his whole life. I’m not writing that much.
Look at European translators in their output. It’s pretty similar to mine, I think. Professional, European translators who don’t have academic jobs. In American translation, again, we have this notion that academics should do these translations while working very slowly. I can understand the appeal of it. Anyone can do whatever the hell they want. I’m just doing it this way because I like it, and I don’t have a programmatic recommendation for anyone. I think it’s a cool way to do it.
Francesco and I are going to go crazy on this book tour. When we start talking about The Beginnings, we’re two crazy people. We were texting about Malaparte and Buzzati last night, and Francesco’s like, These are two men after our own hearts. We could talk to them. That’s why we love them. And I’m like, We’re romantics who bring the romanticism down to the level of the distortion of the line. And Francesco goes EXACTLY; all caps. I’m in bed at one, I’m like, I should really go to bed.
We’re both insane. And it’s just because we love books. It’s all for the love of the game, and this is how we want to do it. I’m confident that the results are good, but it’s just that it’s different from the way other people have been doing it, which I think is what sometimes makes people uncomfortable or suspicious. There’s nothing to be suspicious about. If you don’t like the translations, that’s fine, there’s no grand conspiracy or whatever.
Ian J. Battaglia
You joked a little bit earlier about the “Max Lawton Canon.” Obviously, you’ve got a big connection to Andrei, who’s got a large curatorial project, but do you think about the “Max Lawton Canon” or as the translator as a curator? Especially somebody like you who can pull from different languages.
Max Lawton
Sure. Maybe you could translate something that you don’t feel as intense a personal connection to, just for a good paycheck; that’s a separate thing. But to the extent that you’re building this whole thing, it has to be books you’re into. I just want to share these books with people.
I get super excited to send people the Moresco pages every day when I’m working. I was insanely excited about Schattenfroh, just because I love it. Sometimes people have this wonky idea, like it’s a conspiracy or this or that.
With Schattenfroh, people were like, The promotional machine around it was deceptive! or something. The promotional machine around it was Andrei and I who loved the book, objectively, posting about it. That’s it.
Ian J. Battaglia
In a culture that’s dominated by Marvel movies and AI slop, if people are going to be excited about challenging, translated books …
On social media, you see stuff about “the performative male” or whatever. And I’m like, even if somebody’s “fake” reading Infinite Jest on the train, they’re doing a lot more for themselves than if they were just watching TikTok.
Max Lawton
Yeah, and Schattenfroh is fucking hard to read!
I just find that so ridiculous. This is not Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy’s a great writer, by the way. And I love Infinite Jest, it’s a great book! If somebody’s reading Infinite Jest, it’s a hard, critical book about being a human being in a very weird country. It’s an amazingly perceptive book.
Those slurs bother me so much. I understand them, obviously, but I’ve never met anyone I would, in real life, term a “book bro.” I know them on the internet.
I thought of a funnier term for them, which is “pomocel” (“pomo” as in post-modern; “cel” as in incel). It’s not about being a bro, a woman could be a pomocel too. It’s just you want everything to be written like Pynchon or Gass. It’s like the American 1960s to 1970s pomo-canon becomes the arbiter of all things.
That’s a problem for the books that I do, because they’re not as interested in a baroque individual authorial style as much as like Pynchon or DeLillo or Gass. They’re much more conceptual. I post about this a lot, and people are like, Yo, he’s just spinning it because the style’s not that good. No! When Lentz reproduces a twenty-page article from an East German architecture journal, it’s not bad style. Oh shit, I didn’t realize that was bad style. Dang!
There’s obviously a conceptual thing at work, and if you don’t understand conceptualism, that’s obviously a big part of whatever is happening in literature now. People say post-postmodernism; I think that’s stupid. Books today, we have autofiction, and then there’s a lot of conceptual stuff going on. And there’s a sort of willful inarticulateness as well, which I think is like a big part of the American canon.
But anyways, the point is to read whatever you want to read. If somebody’s hyper-annoying about Infinite Jest, fine. But it’s just so few people read. It’s all a CIA op to get rid of literacy in general.
Ian J. Battaglia
In general, just encouraging people to read a bit more and then trying to get people to read a little bit wider or beyond their normal scope would be a huge win, across the world.
Max Lawton
Reading is great. Yeah. Reading is great.
Ian J. Battaglia
What do you want people to know about your translations?
Max Lawton
I’m very happy that I get this opportunity to do this sort of grand project. These books are important to me. I do like the idea of people understanding what brings them together, what gives them their appeal, and reading them with an open mind as well.
I think that’s the one thing I would encourage people to do. If there’s one thing I think I would want to teach through the translations I work on, it’s to read with an open mind. And that can be in terms of content, in terms of form, in terms of opening up your ideas about the world. These books demand an open mind.
If you go in as a pomocel, you’re like, Yo, this isn’t well written, like the first hundred pages of Gravity’s Rainbow. What the hell is going on here? It might stretch you in a weird way. The best part about art is when you discover something that you didn’t know was possible before.
It is like drugs; it’s like hard drugs. And if you’re a drug addict, if you watch a lot of pornography, you constantly need to move into new realms of extremity. Otherwise, it’s boring. Otherwise, you’re like a fetishist. Don’t be a fetishist, be an explorer, because fetishists always want the things that they’re discovering to exist within the mode of what they’ve known before. It’s like you have the fossilized things you like, and everything has to match up with that. Whereas if you’re an explorer, you’re like, Oh man, this is weird, but there might be something to this. That’s the mode I try to read in.
I think in literature, people are a little bit more closed-minded because these are enormous canvases. A book is an enormous canvas, so you can’t just stand in front of it, or go to the concert, or watch the movie. You have to really spend a lot of time with it.
Once you learn the new thing that something you’re engaging with is doing, it can open you up in a new way, and you’ll understand a new direction. You’ll start to see it in a lot of different places, and it makes you a better reader more generally. So that’s what I encourage: when you read the books I work on, don’t expect it to just be ______-nationality Pynchon. That’s just not going to be satisfying.
Ian J. Battaglia
I think reading in translation is one of the best things you can do. Almost all of my most pleasurable experiences while reading have been by coming into contact with another culture, learning a new worldview, or way of thinking; opening yourself up to the possibility that literature, art, life can do something you didn’t expect it to be able to do.
Where best can you find that but translated books?
Max Lawton
I hope we can have more of it in English books, too—but that’s another conversation. The English publishing world is not ready to publish interesting books, yet.
Ian J. Battaglia
We’ll get started on that. We’ll chip away slowly.
FICTION
The Beginnings
By Antonio Moresco
Translated by Max Lawton
Deep Vellum Publishing
Published April 14, 2026
