A few years ago, I met the artist and filmmaker Morten Traavik at a literary festival in Norway. Traavik is most famous for his documentary Liberation Day, an account of a concert performed in North Korea by Laibach, a band from the former Yugoslavia with a penchant for totalitarian aesthetics. This was the culmination of a series of increasingly ambitious and absurd artistic events that Traavik had organized in North Korea, and is a highly entertaining and insightful film which you should watch if you have not done so already. In our conversation we talk about art and totalitarianism, the importance of “play between the trenches” and more. Enjoy!

Morten Traavik official site.

Liberation Day film on Vimeo.

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Liberation Day trailer.

DK: Hello and welcome to the Thus Speak Daniel Kalder podcast. Today I'm delighted to be in conversation with Morten Traavik, artist, filmmaker, theater director, provocateur, and (perhaps) trickster from Norway whose most famous project is probably Liberation Day, a film about the first concert by a Western rock band in North Korea, but who has done many other interesting things over the course of his career, which we shall also discuss. Thank you for coming on, Morten.

MT: Thank you, Daniel. Happy to be here and thank you for the great introduction.

DK: You're welcome. So we met a couple of years ago and we just have a bit of a chat about some of the interesting things you've done. So first of all, I think I first heard about you when the film Liberation Day came out, which was about a concert by Laibach, a quite famous underground industrial band from Slovenia or former Yugoslavia.

MT: That's right. Well, it was Yugoslavia when they started back in 1980 actually. So it's quite incredible how long they've been going.

DK: Yeah, and I think it's an important point that they were from Yugoslavia. They were themselves from a police state and a dictatorship.

MT: Absolutely.

DK: But it was quite a long road that led you to that film. You were in North Korea many, many times before that, I believe. Can you tell me how you got started working in North Korea? What was your first project there and how did that come about?

MT: Sure. But first maybe it's worth mentioning that around that time… when was it that Dictator Literature came out? Was that 2018?

DK: Yes, 2018.

MT: That was definitely one of my top three reading highlights that year, and the year after, and the year after that. So you remember, I decided just to shoot you an email to give you a well-deserved shout out for that incredible Herculean undertaking that you had taken upon yourself. And then you answered that you were familiar with me and my work through the Liberation Day movie, and I was kind of boosted by that. So we come from a place of mutual recognition, one could say. And my first visit to North Korea was back in 2008. And that was kind of an adventure in itself because at that time, the so-called “International Counselor” of this weird friendship organization called the Korean Friendship Association with which I believe you are familiar, it's led by a uniformed Spaniard with strong authoritarian fetishist tendencies, Alejandro Cao de Benós.

And it's got these small, you could say, offices in different countries in Europe. And the Norwegian office was led by a guy who was a friend of a friend, and he kind of advertised that he was arranging tours to North Korea through this friendship association. So I managed to get a seat on one of these tours, which was definitely not your average charter trip. It was both an unusual destination, but definitely also an unusual group of people because those people were, you could say, the Dusseldorf office of the German-Korean Friendship Association sub-chapter of Alejandro's Korean Friendship Association. And these offices are basically just a guy and his dog, but in good socialist communist tradition they always have these very fancy monikers like “international counselor” or “vice president of foreign relations” and so on. And I was on a trip with a bunch of these guys for two weeks in North Korea and I had a kind of epiphany. This was back in 2008 and that was, if I'm not mistaken, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea. So there was a huge military parade on Kim Il-sung Square, which is the most important square in the whole country, in downtown Pyongyang. And you cannot not be impressed by the precision and the goose stepping and the 500,000 people in perfect synchronized harmony becoming human pixels in this huge placard-held slogans and so on.

But then the next day we took one of the Japanese-made minibuses that ferried us everywhere because we were not allowed to go anywhere on our own, obviously, which took us out of town. And, literally, a 15-minute drive from this huge spectacle of militant opulence people are doing their laundry in half dried out riverbeds in March. That discrepancy told me something: not only is this a Third World country that's extremely good at putting on appearances, but also that there's no way that this country can be a danger to that many people except its own population. So that made me curious because there was this huge gap between the press, the headlines, the very freak show-ish news that we tend to get from North Korea and the very mundane dusty ill-kept crumbling reality on the ground. So that was kind of the first impulse that there is always a huge gray area between what we think we know and what reality is really like.

DK: It's interesting that you said it was a “friendship society” that took you there. There's a book by Anthony Daniels, he went to North Korea maybe the late 1980s and

MT: Yes— The Wilder Shores of Marx

DK: Yeah, something like that. I think it's got two titles—

MT: It's brilliant. I love it.

DK: It’s a fantastic book. And he talks a lot about the people on these tour buses from various friendship societies, but even though communism was quite dilapidated by 1988, there were still believers. They didn't know it was all about to collapse. It didn't look good, but you could still theoretically understand to some extent that there might still be friendship societies. But I think that to be running one in 2008 is another level of commitment to illusion. I'm just curious about those people. Did you talk with those folk at all? Was it worth talking to them? When they saw this dilapidated landscape, or people washing their clothes in the dried up muddy riverbed, did they just screen it out? Did they not care? Or was it because evil American imperialism was doing this to them?

MT: Well, that's also the psychology of idealism. I don't even know if idealism was the thing that drove these guys, because as you say, in 2008, the show had become so run down that to be an ideologically pure friend of North Korea… I don't think you meet that many true idealists even inside North Korea these days.

So the whole Juche ideology, Kim Il-sung’s homemade ideology of self-determination and self-sufficiency and so on, it's never been that believable. And each year it becomes even less believable. But they are definitely going through the motions and playing the game once every third year, which is when they have saved the money to go to Pyongyang and get, I don't know, a third class bronze medal for international friendship and some diploma with a North Korean stamp on it and feel slightly important for two weeks.

So there is kind of an exchange here, but when they see the dried out river beds and the dry fields and the whole very unavoidable conclusion that this is nothing like on the propaganda posters, there is one very easy explanation and that that it's because of the US and it's because of the sanctions. And if the whole Roman empire was not surrounding us, then our brave Asterix the Gaul, the last outpost of straight upstanding socialism would be like it is on the propaganda posters with yellow harvest fields and blue skies and booming industry and so on. So you can always blame somebody else, which I believe also is a very recognizable thought pattern. And in today's discourse also in many ways, it's always somebody else's fault.

DK: I think that's absolutely correct. And you just reminded me as you were talking—to change topic for a second—that when I was in Turkmenistan, I picked up a copy of The Ruhnama…

MT: I'm envious of that.

DK: It was an atrocious book, but there was this guy in Wisconsin, I think he was called “Steve from Wisconsin”, and he ran a blog called something like Reflections on the Ruhnama. And every couple of days he would publish an extract from the Ruhnama. You may be jealous of me, but I was jealous of him. He had Ruhnama volume two as well as volume one.

MT: Respect.

DK: He was hardcore. And he would say, “It's just outrageous that people misrepresent this country. Listen to the wisdom coming out of this book!” And it was strange because with a friendship society, there are the words “friendship” and “society” in it, so it presupposes that there are at least a couple of people sharing this delusion. But I got the impression that Steve from Wisconsin was a one-man band who was just blasting out this thing. And I followed that blog for a couple of years. And after Turkmenbashi died, he kept going. It was like he was flying the flag and he was upset that they were starting to deconstruct the personality cult.

MT: It became even more important for him to go on after the great leader died, I guess.

DK: Exactly. But anyway, what was the first project you did? Was it the a-ha thing or did that come later?

The “a-ha thing”

MT: That was the first project that was public. But the first real, “implemented” big event was the Norwegian national holiday festival on May 17th, which is Norwegian Constitution Day. In Norway, that is the biggest celebration of the year. Everybody goes outside, we put on our national costumes, we wave Norwegian flags, and we march through town. It's like a really, really cute and feel-good version of a military parade without the guns. I don't know if you've ever been…

DK: I’ve only been to Odda for that literary festival.

MT: Oh, you've only been in the dark fjords in October when it’s pouring rain.

DK: Yeah.

MT: That's Norway too. But May 17th is a very, very significant day. A cornerstone, I would say, of Norwegian identity. So having succeeded to work around Alejandro Cao de Benós and the Korean Friendship Association who were very, very possessive gatekeepers, you could say to North Korea — I mean Alejandro, that was his claim to fame for many years, to be the special representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and go on the BBC and CNN and pose in his suit that was tailor made at the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, which has a tailor where you can get basically anything you want made, such as Kim Il-sung suits. So Alejandro had his special North Korean army uniform tailored for him there. So he has been on television, promoting and parroting the party line for years. And then people like me started coming who could offer the North Koreans perhaps more meaningful cultural exchanges than just a handful of—I'm looking for the right word— eccentrics and their pocket money a couple of times a year. So I managed to have some separate meetings with the so-called Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, which is a North Korean state organization supervising cultural exchange. And I invited two representatives from there to Norway to the big cultural festival in the Norwegian far north in 2011.

And they were quite impressed, not least because I had the Norwegian queen as my, what do you call it? The one who sits across you on the table when there is this state dinner? You have your table lady? No, what's it called?

DK: I'm not sure, but I know what you mean.

MT: She was my lady for the evening to a dinner where I also invited the North Koreans, and you would think that they would be anti-monarchists, but on the other hand, they're absolutely not. They are definitely monarchists, it's just that they call it something else where they come from. So that made us, me and them, start thinking about what we could do in return back in Pyongyang. And that's when I decided let's try to do a Norwegian cultural festival on May 17th.

So I brought a group of musicians, actors, visual artists with me to Pyongyang, and we had our national costumes, and we did an exhibition, a concert with Norwegian everything from traditional to pop rock music in one of the big concert halls of Pyongyang and we had our national costumes, and we duly made probably the world's smallest, but not the quietest, Norwegian celebration march across Kim Il-sung Square.

We brought a form of— and I think this has been key to most of my North Korean projects—that I offer something that is exotic and strange to them, but not alien, not unrecognizable. So when we come and celebrate the Norwegian king in our national costumes and with our national music, they understand this because this is what they do all year, basically. But it also created quite a stir back in Norway, not only because we managed to get inside, allegedly, the most isolated and mysterious place on earth, but also that we kind of promoted Norwegian values inside it. And that was a big surprise to many, I think, that the North Koreans let us so unashamedly promote another country's values and nationalism. But I think also because Norway, we are so small and cute, if, I don't know if we had been German, that we could have gotten away with it in the same way.

DK: So what do you think was in it for the North Koreans? Were they just interested that somebody was willing to come, that they were no longer pariahs? Was it that they could show this to their people? “Look, we're not isolated, here are Norwegians. They also have parades.”

MT: Well, I think as in any system, and especially in any monolithic state system such as North Korea, and also Russia for that matter these days, or the Soviet Union or any authoritarian society, to get anywhere you need to be ambitious. But in some places you will also find people who have a certain genuine interest in what they do, not only opportunists or careerists or concrete heads. So I was lucky and also not to be too modest about it, after having worked with theater and artistic projects and all kinds of social artistic interventions for some years, I do have a certain gut feeling about people. So that gut feeling together with some luck took me in the direction of some people within the North Korean cultural authorities that were genuinely fun guys to be with, who had a sense of humor, who had been outside North Korea, who knew that what the world was like outside, who also came to Norway on several locations and who understood, I think, that culture might be one of the few arenas left where you can actually have a look at each other and play together “between the trenches” in a way.

I do believe that those few people who I also befriended, that we really managed through working together on these more and more ambitious and even absurd projects, culminating with the Laibach concert in 2015, that we developed a very strong bond of trust between us. But as you say, there was also something in it for them because not only did I bring more or less delectable foreign artists to Korea, I also brought out North Korean artists to Europe and to Norway through the same exchange projects that we conducted for all these years.

DK: I think the idea of “play between the trenches” is very interesting, of culture as this one remaining place where these kinds of things can happen. There's an ambiguity to some of it that enables this… I wouldn't say freedom, but something to slip through.

MT: Exactly, yes.

DK: What does this mean? Well, it's not really on the surface. It means one thing, but maybe that's not really what it means, there's something else going on. And so that first one you did, was it well received in Norway? You must've had a lot of backing from the Norwegian state to bring Norwegian artists over to stage a parade. Were they up for it?

I think that the reception back in Norway was split between and along quite predictable political lines. That the right wing spectrum on the political scale were very indignant that anybody could collaborate in any way with the most evil regime in the world. And the more leftish part of the commentariat were more, how do you say? Carefully enthusiastic. It was kind of a classic hawks against peaceniks to simplify quite a bit kind of distinction in the debate at that point.

DK: I'm still thinking about that comment about this “play between the trenches”. I think it's a very interesting idea.

MT: Well, I'm sure you know this, but this expression comes from this, I don't know even if it's a legend or if it actually happened, but supposedly on the western front on Christmas day, was it 1917 or something, that there was a lull in the fighting or there was a temporary armistice and the Germans and the English soldiers came out and played football in no-man's land or something like that. Actually, I think Paul McCartney did a quite cheesy video…

DK: “Play the Pipes of Peace.”

MT: “Pipes of Peace”, that's right. Yeah, sorry for introducing that image.

DK: It was height of the Cold War, the Spies Like Us era when Paul was getting heavily into heartwarming political commentary.

MT: Yeah, you can always count on Paul.

DK: So the first mega project was this cultural exchange, but you did many other things. You went back and forth over 20 times, culminating with this giant concert, or maybe not a “giant” concert, but a very spectacular concert in its own way.

MT: It felt giant.

DK: You could feel that from the film, that this was a significant moment — Laibach performing The Sound of Music in Pyongyang. So explain a little bit about Laibach: who are they, why were they of interest you, and how did the concert come about?

MT: I'll try to compress it into some digestible format. Laibach, as you touched upon initially, were founded in then-Yugoslavia in 1980, the same year that Tito, the strong man who basically founded and built Yugoslavia, died. And that was the start of the process that would lead to the collapse and civil war in Yugoslavia. When the strong man died, then things fall apart, the center cannot hold. And I think what inspired me most about Laibach, partly I liked the music part of what they did because Laibach was not only a band, they were also a part of a greater collective of artists calling themselves Neue Slowenische Kunst who appropriated a lot of the aesthetics from both fascism, communism, all these heroic aesthetics of propaganda posters— happy workers, brave partisan soldiers, not only visually in their art and visual material but also in their music.

They have been defined as both an industrial inspired band, which is partly true, but also as a martial band because they use a lot of military soundscapes like marches and Wagnerian I would even say in their best moments. They are very, very unashamedly flirting with totalitarian aesthetics and the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, who is also Slovenian and who is a contemporary of Laibach and has even defended them publicly against accusations of real fascism through the years, he's elaborated quite a bit on Laibach’s tactics of over-identification, that they are criticizing or ridiculing, but not only ridiculing, they're kind of celebrating and ridiculing totalitarianism at the same time. And that allows me, or us as their followers or listeners or the fans to release our inner fascists from time to time, to march a little bit to their music. But at the same time, it is a game. We are not fascists, but we have, as I believe most people have, we have an urge to dominate or to be dominated. And music like Laibach’s, not only music, but the whole Laibach aesthetic kind of liberates us who are honest enough to play with our inner Sturmbannfuhrer from time to time.

DK: And it also contains a great deal of absurdity in these incredibly pompous cover versions of “Life Is Life,” for example, which becomes “Leben heißt Leben” or the Queen song “One Vision” which is “Geburt einer Nation.”

MT: Absolutely.

DK: One of the first times I encountered Laibach music was in Moscow, when I went into the Soyuz record shop on the Arbat. I didn't know what it was, but it captured the ambiguity I think quite well. I heard this “Leben heißt Leben” and it took me a while to realize that it was “Life is Life.” And the shop assistant, this Russian guy, was goosestepping around the shop while I was browsing in the CDs. It was extremely strange. He was in his own world, and he was quietly mouthing the lyrics to himself. And I thought, “I think this is a joke, man.” But it wasn't clear: was he joking? Was he not joking? Did he understand what was going on or was he just enjoying the liberation of his inner totalitarian or…

MT: Goose stepper.

DK: His inner goose stepper? It was a very strange experience. But I felt that it showed you the music working, because it was this extremely arch joke in this extremely totalitarian style. And I was looking at this kid goose step and I was uncertain what was going on. So there was this ambiguity, which I think is also key to their long success and how they could slip into North Korea, because of this ambiguity and recognizable aesthetic.

MT: Absolutely. And this also, I mean, you are absolutely onto something and I think that any band that can get the record store personnel to goose step around the shop in front of any passing customer merits checking out, at least.

DK: It does.

MT: And that's also part of their genius, which was a huge turn on for me back in the day, is how they reveal and they bring out the totalitarian tendencies even in pop and rock music and pop and rock lyrics. If you listen to “One Vision” by Queen, which in Freddie Mercury's rendition is this kind of happy hippie-ish “Imagine” by John Lennon kind of celebration of let's all have a huge group hug and fight for justice kind of thing. But then in the Laibachian rendition, it becomes this kind of frightening Nurembergian.

DK: Yeah, it's completely different, and yet it's the same song.

MT: There is this quite obvious parallel between the worship of rock, gods rock stars and the worship of dictators or charismatic figures in religion or any kind of ideology.

DK: So how long did it take from the idea of taking them to North Korea to actually making it happen? There's a very interesting part at the start or in the film where Laibach are at some kind of banquet and a state official is reading a letter condemning them as a vile influence, and they just sit there. It was a very curious, “welcome to North Korea”.

MT: That was literally the opening, that was the first evening. We literally drove from the airport to that opening banquet to be roasted by that quite high up state official.

DK: It's a full denunciation for ideological crimes. So it's quite a welcome. It's interesting too from that question of ambiguity…. that nonetheless, despite all of these warning flags and signs within the regime, that maybe they want Laibach back here.

MT: Well, first I just want to elaborate a little bit on that divine scene that you just described, where we were treated to this very big, opulent welcome banquet. And Mr. Yu, who is also my good friend, had prepared this welcome speech, which in its way was trolling Laibach. He was playing with the language of power and turning the mirror against Laibach themselves.

Because what he had done was that he had gathered all the critical comments from people in the North Korean state apparatus that he had had to deal with after having invited them. And so all the resistance, all the accusations that he himself had had to wrestle with, he now turned them on and read it like a welcome speech to Laibach — which to me was totally genius. I was proud of him because he had somehow sensed very, very correctly and very clearly what the Laibach technique was about.

So it was definitely a prank from his side. He was not saying that, “Oh, I think you are horrible and you shouldn't be in here” because if he personally had thought that we wouldn't be there. But what he did was, after this long, accusatory and very condemning collection of criticism against inviting Laibach to North Korea, he rounded off by saying, “So without trust, without confidence, we could not have invited you here.” It was also psychologically very smart of him because after having scared the whole of Laibach entourage shitless, he then put into words the common bond or the common project that we were doing together based on trust and confidence, which was also quite beautiful actually.

DK: It's a fantastic moment. As you say, he turns the Laibachian method against them.

MT: And North Korean officials, I mean, what are the odds? And I think that also shows, I think you were also touching upon that, it isn't really….the ambiguity of Laibach, they are on one superficial level celebrating everything which is militaristic and strong and the language of power. That dimension was the entry ticket into North Korea because that was the obvious dimension that most North Korean audiences and I think most North Korean functionaries would notice. And that was what made it palatable to them. And of course, when Laibach perform “Life is Life” in English, though not in German, that would be a little bit too over the top, I think, for an anti-fascist, socialist dictatorship… still when those words were performed from the stage of the theater of the Ministry of the Interior of North Korea, they take on two, three, four new levels of significance. I would say.

DK: So they covered a lot of the songs from The Sound of Music.

MT: Yes. They also released an album of the whole Sound of Music musical, their covers, not so long after the North Korean concert. So this album called The Sound of Music is directly inspired by the whole North Korean adventure.

DK: I do enjoy that. Some of the songs are quite entertaining in the Laibach versions. But my understanding is that one of the few shared cultural experiences between North Koreans and Laibach was the Sound of Music. It was okay to watch in North Korea, and it was a film that Laibach had grown up watching in Yugoslavia. Is this roughly why it was selected, or was it proposed by Laibach and accepted by the North Koreans? How did that come about?

MT: Well, this is where this weird kind of magic or karmic dramaturgy comes into place. When it started becoming clear that this would actually be possible to do, and the North Koreans started asking what kind of songs would Laibach be bringing, this is when Ivan Novak, the ideologue or, you could say the brains behind most of what Laibach is up to proposed The Sound of Music because the aforementioned Slavoj Zizek has had this hang up on The Sound of Music for many, many years. And he has developed his own theories about what The Sound of Music is about. And in his usual prankster spirit Zizek proposes that the real heroes in The Sound of Music are actually the Germans because the whole Sound of Music story, for those who don't know it by heart, is that in Austria right before the invasion by Germany, there is this family of seven children and a widower in this Austrian castle who are in need of a nanny.

And Julie Andrews is playing this nun Maria, who is a rebellious nanny, and she becomes this breath of fresh air in this very stifling disciplinarian home of the Count Von Trapp, who is this strict widower father. But the whole circumstance is the impending invasion of or annexation of Austria by the Germans, and the Germans are the villains of the film, and the Von Trapp family becomes part of the secret resistance against the Germans. But Zizek turns this on its head and says that the Germans are actually the ones trying to bring culture and cosmopolitanism into this rural Austrian region, and that it is actually the Von Trapp family that can be viewed as some kind of hidden villains of the film.

So that's in the Laibachian spirit of inverting established truths and ambiguity. Then Laibach proposed covers from The Sound of Music. And then it turned out, as you say, that The Sound of Music is actually one of the few Western cultural exports that are actually well known in North Korea. And there, I don't think they have analyzed it from a Zizek point of view, I think it's more, it's the music and it's the superficial narrative of evil Germans and the heroic Von Trapp family resisting the Germans in this beautiful mountainous landscape of the Alps of Austria. And North Korea is also a very mountainous country. I mean, they have a mountain in their founding national mythology, Mount Paektu, which is this volcano or former volcano in the far north where supposedly Kim Il-sung, the founding father of the nation, his guerillas were resisting the Japanese occupants back in there. They had their guerilla bases on this mountain. So there are actually also these parallels when you notice them. And it turns out that The Sound of Music is even used in universities for learning spoken English.

DK: Really?

MT: They make people memorize the tunes because you can use the rhythm of the songs to memorize words and so on. And what I heard from a friend, an Australian friend who was working in a western-run touring company that organizes trips to North Korea, is that one of his North Korean colleagues, when he started singing one of the songs from The Sound of Music, just for fun, the North Korean guide put his hands over his ears and ran away demonstratively because he was so fed up with the soundtrack of The Sound of Music. So it turns out that actually you can weaponize it as well, to scare North Koreans.

DK: So one last question. I could keep going forever, but I think we have to draw things to a close at some point.

MT: Yeah, the first episode.

DK: We talked about this idea of “play between the trenches” and introducing ambiguity. [The authorities] wouldn't let Laibach perform “Let's go to Mount Paektu,” which is their own song about a sacred mountain. They couldn't introduce ambiguity around that. But still, this event occurred and it's a great film and I would encourage everybody listening to watch it, and I'll include a link afterwards, but what do you think was the legacy of the event inside North Korea? This introduction of Laibachian ambiguity? Or was it just a one-off event that was extremely cool? Or do you think it has some lingering reverberations afterwards?

MT: I think I'll take the easy way out, and quote the then Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai, when he supposedly was asked in the early seventies, what were his thoughts on the effects of the French Revolution, and he answered: “I think it's too early to say.”

DK: Right.

MT: What I am very happy about, apart from the basic fact of actually making it happen, is that for a short while we introduced ambiguity to North Korea and we introduced something that was beautiful and ugly at the same time, something that was familiar and deeply alien at the same time. And ambiguity is a state of mind that most people, be that in North Korea or anywhere else, tend to shy away from

DK: Absolutely.

MT: So weirdos like us, who cherish ambiguity, are few and far between, no matter where you are. This is also why I think that what you can do as a culture worker or as any kind of creative person is that you can introduce something to somebody, but you can never force it on them. You can show people something and then whether something takes root or if some seeds are sown, it's not actually up to you. So I think I'm absolutely sure that whenever the day comes that North Korea in its current form ceases to exist, or takes on another shape, or maybe opens up more, I'm absolutely confident that there will be people who will still remember the Laibach concert and who will be able to talk about it and to describe their feelings in a more complete way than what is currently recommendable, I would say.

Thank you for listening. Please like, share and subscribe & consider upgrading your description if you haven’t already done so. Regards, DK.

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.

Once again you can access the magic of Thus Spake Daniel Kalder on the go, directly in your ears! Behold, the audio version of Balmoral Death Trip .

The last time I made one of these I did a single take into my old skool Sony IC recorder. This time I figured out how to edit in QuickTime and so didn’t have to do a complete retake each time I messed up. There is one edit, besides that I made it all the way through without stumbling. My gear remains very lo-fi, but at least my neighbor’s Pit Bull wasn’t barking in the background this time.

Original text is here, once again I invite you to share with anyone you know who is learning English as a second language, especially if they would like to master a Fife accent.

Substack now offers podcast capabilities, so I thought it would be fun to record an audio version of the inaugural Supermarket Magazine Review (PREPPER SURVIVAL GUIDE). Now you can access the magic of Thus Spake Daniel Kalder on the go, directly in your ears.

NB: I don’t own any podcast audio gear so this is a single take recording dictated into my old skool Sony IC recorder. However, I once used it to record contributions to a BBC radio documentary and they used the files I sent over in the final broadcast, so the quality is…decent. One or two stumbles here and there, and every now and again some faint background noise is audible (my neighbor’s giant Pit Bull remonstrates with the moon a few times) but I made it all the way through in the end.

Original text is here, feel free to share with anyone you know who is learning English as a second language so they can listen and read along with Mr. Kalder.