Revenge of the Translator’s metatext concerns itself primarily with translation rather than storytelling: the muzzy lines between translation and composition, the layers that exist between author, character, translator, reader, and author again. To be fair, this one doesn’t do exactly the same thing as If on a Winter’s Night. Brice Matthieussent has written another one.
There are things about the book I don’t enjoy-the unshakable maleness of it, for one thing-but it’s still, genuinely, the singular and unrepeatable book of my dreams. When I read that book, I felt twinned senses of utter joy and utter sorrow: joy that someone had written the book of all my readerly fantasies, the only book I ever wanted to read, and sorrow that there was only one book exactly like it. Have you read Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler? It restarts itself every chapter, tumbling its narrator through multiple unfinished narratives, making itself an inexplicable, unreproducible matryoshka doll. I can’t even explain the print layout, much less summarize the damn thing. See, I’m already getting tangled up in attempting to describe this book. Many of the pages use an asterisk to refer between the translated novel’s body-above the line-and the translator’s home, but the asterisk is most often attached to blank space, because the translated novel does not actually exist. Most of the pages of Revenge of the Translator place their text below a horizontal line, an area designated as the translator’s home space: the location of his work and the only area he possesses to reveal his existence. Normally I would save a string of adjectives like that for the end of the review, rather than putting it at the beginning, but this novel turns the act of writing upside down (figuratively and literally, on the landscape of the page), so I am doing the same. It’s a metatextual novel, and it’s confusing, sexy, intelligent, funny, disarming, irresistible. I truly do not know where to begin with Revenge of the Translator. Brice Matthieussent, Revenge of the Translator, translated by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum, October 2018), pp.
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