I don’t usually post press releases, but this one from “Deep Vellum & Dalkey Archive” demonstrates such daring and ambition (in a realm that concerns me intimately) that I have to share it:
With the groundbreaking success of Mircea Cartarescu’s SOLENOID—a “towering work” (Dustin Illingworth, New York Times)—Miquel de Palol’s THE GARDEN OF SEVEN TWILIGHTS—“equal parts unwieldy and extraordinary” (Ben Hooyman, Los Angeles Review of Books)—and Luis Goytisolo’s ANTAGONY— “brilliant…daring” (Colm Tóibín, New York Review of Books)—Deep Vellum, together with the rejuvenated Dalkey Archive Press that merged with Deep Vellum in 2021, has demonstrated its affection for daring work of astonishing literary ambition. In the span of mere months, we published two groundbreaking novels written by living legends and annual Nobel contenders. But those books merely set the stage for what’s in store for 2025 and 2026 (and beyond!): the publication of translated works more ambitious than any that have been published by more traditional houses in decades past.
Starting in 2024, Max Lawton will share his vision and talent with Deep Vellum to translate, edit, and shepherd into English some of the world’s most exciting fiction and to cement the press’ reputation as the champion of maximalist literature in the Anglosphere––of the badass avant-garde masterpieces that would otherwise not be translated or published.
These masterpieces have come to Deep Vellum and to Lawton thanks to Andrei, a friend of the press and the founding steward of The Untranslated blog, the seminal reference for great books not yet available to English-speaking audiences. Andrei, a Russian-speaking book blogger from Eastern Europe, launched The Untranslated in 2013. He has described the idea for the blog as having come from reading Gravity’s Rainbow as an undergrad and wondering if there were similar works in other languages. As a PhD student of comparative literature, he became fascinated by the short reviews of untranslated books in the magazine World Literature Today––by the idea that you could tell the world about a book before it was translated. Andrei therefore dedicated his blog to reviewing significant literary works unavailable in English translation. Last year, he celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Untranslated, the ultimate Anglophone source for reviews of innovative literary works written in or translated into the eight languages other than English that Andrei can read. Deep Vellum owes a debt of gratitude to Andrei for discovering and championing all of these books; he was also instrumental in encouraging Lawton to undertake their translations.
This new era begins with a book like no other: SCHATTENFROH by Michael Lentz, translated by Lawton, edited by Matthias Friedrich, a renowned translator of Nordic and Catalan literature into German, and scheduled for publication in 2025. Peerlessly strange and rich, dense with references and homage, equal parts Hieronymous Bosch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lentz’s novel begins with a writer named Nobody composing the book we’re reading in his mind, which is also a panopticon ruled by his father. The writer leads the reader through realms of history and art, of horror and pain, and of personal reckoning with his father, the titular Schattenfroh. What if a schizophrenic municipal employee in provincial Germany attempted to write his own Bible? You’d get something like SCHATTENFROH. As Andrei puts it: SCHATTENFROH is a “baroque and surrealist explosion of a novel [that] belongs to the pantheon of the best works of world literature published in the past two decades.”
We have discussed both The Untranslated (e.g., 2017, 2018) and Max Lawton (e.g., 2022) a number of times; Deep Vellum has been mentioned in connection with their publishing Elina Alter’s translation of Alla Gorbunova. You can read about more projects at the link; it astonishes me (though perhaps it shouldn’t) that in this mercantile, conglomerated world there are still publishers who dare to take on books like these, and I wish them a long and profitable existence.
There is a sequel to this press release 🙂
https://www.deepvellum.org/news/horcynus-orca
That’s great! You must be very pleased at having had this kind of influence.
Andrei actually inspired my current work on Portuguese, in the sense that I was thinking about starting another language and Andrei’s example moved me from “someday” to “what am I waiting for.” In a couple of years I will likely move on to Spanish. And after that, who knows, and why stop there.
This is aside from the excitement about reading some of these big crazy novels in English. I like big crazy novels.
Anderson Tepper wrote for the NY Times (archived) about Deep Vellum and the associated bookstore, Wild Detectives, and in the process answered my puzzlement as to the name: the publisher’s headquarters are in “the storied and diverse Deep Ellum neighborhood” of Dallas. “Ellum,” in turn, is a deformation of the name of the area’s principal thoroughfare, Elm Street. (Thanks, Lizok!)
Max’s translation of Schattenfroh has appeared and gotten good reviews. Anahid Nersessian wrote about it for NYRB (archived); here are the last two paragraphs, the first praising Lawton’s work and the second sounding the alarm for “publishers who dare to take on books like these” (to quote myself):
Looks like a portmanteau of Schatten “shade, shadow” and schadenfroh as in Schadenfreude.
Only known to me in the “small guillotine” sense.
Skafot in Danish is just the platform. ODS says it’s from Italian catafalco through French echafaud. (I suspect some phological nativization in German Schafott).
According to Pfeifer, Schafott is a 17th century Dutch loan, ultimately from Old French chafaut, itself probably from Vulgar Latin *catafalicus.
The OED on “scaffold”:
At least that helps with the s-. And here’s “catafalque”:
I assume they didn’t give Diez’s derivation because somebody might have misremembered that it was accepted.
Is the M. before “Paul Meyer” his initial or monsieur? I suppose it’s the latter.
Etymonline says confidently of *catafalicum (s.v. “scaffold”):
Diez, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen (4. Aufl., 1878) on it. catafalco:
@ulr: Thanks!
@me: Wiktionary even more confidently gives the Etruscan etymology as 𐌚𐌀𐌋𐌀 (fala), with a link to this entry, which glosses it as
1. column, pillar
2. pole of wood, pile of wood
3. siege tower
and cites Massimo Pittau’s Etruscan dictionary.
Is that OED etymology recently updated? I find it curious that they give the thoroughly obsolete form cadahalso as if it were current. I’ve only ever encountered cadalso, and that as a literary term
It’s from 1910, last modified in this very month, but still not completely revised. The etymology for “catafalque”, last modified in July, 2023, doesn’t even say that cadafalso is obsolete.
According to wordreference, cadalso is only the gallows. The scaffold next to a building is andamio.
Etymologies are almost never touched by the “partial interim updates” except for mechanical reformatting, such as expansion of abbreviations and hyperlinking of cross-references. You can click through to the Second Edition from the entry history box to confirm that those are the only changes to the scaffold etymology since 1989. And as far as I know there were no updates to etymologies in 1989, they were just copied from the previous editions, even if they were known to be wrong (e.g. zebra). You can also look up scaffold in the first edition to confirm that the etymology was unchanged from 1910.
There are a few entries that have had the etymology recently revised but not the whole entry, e.g. five and several other numerals, but in those cases the entry history box says so: “The following sections of this entry have been updated: Etymology (2019), Forms (2019)”.
Andrei has a new post at The Untranslated:
A commenter says “I’m 600 pages in! I wish I had this earlier. Nevertheless, wow! We really need this guide!!!!!! Thank you!!!!!” Excitable but appropriate; it’s a great resource.