KREE by Manuela Draeger: out today!

Today is the official release day for Kree by Manuela Draeger, the second post-exotic novel (after Solo Viola) that I’ve had the pleasure and challenge of translating for University of Minnesota Press. I’d say it’s a long, strange trip of a book, but that would imply moving along in a chronological manner from one definite location to another, and this novel offers nothing so comforting and reliable as linear progression.

here is the book in my hot little hands!

Bizarre is the word Yann Étienne of Diacritik uses to start off his review of Kree. He places this novel “in a borderland between reality and fiction, between reality and dream, with no way to say what belongs to one or the other” (“dans une zone-lisière entre le réel et la fiction, entre la réalité et le songe, sans pouvoir dire ce qui appartient à l’un ou à l’autre”). It’s a world dominated by estrangement, Étienne writes: “This is our world, but so violently deformed that we almost can’t recognize it anymore, because it is the world of after. After the catastrophe, but also after death” (“C’est notre monde, mais déformé si violemment qu’on ne le reconnait presque plus, car c’est le monde d’après. D’après la catastrophe, mais aussi d’après la mort”). This strangeness arises throughout the novel, in its organization, its imagery, in its very language, and at times that means Kree isn’t an easy read; sometimes, as Étienne says, “perhaps one must accommodate this strangified reaction that comes from this reading” (“il faudrait peut-être accueillir cette réaction estrangifiée née de cette lecture”).

The characters’ dialogue gives an especially striking example of this. When I corresponded with the author, I learned that these characters are speaking “the language of the dead”; an eroded, impoverished language with a distorted grammar and vocabulary, nothing corresponding to any specific existing slang. I tried to convey this, in part, by translating the dialogue fairly directly, without rearranging or otherwise smoothing out the words to create phrases that would sound more “natural” in English. So if you find yourself reading the dialogue and thinking, What the what? … well, those little stumbling blocks are intentional. As Erik Leborgne writes, “Corrupted dialogue reflects the speakers’ state of deterioration […] The characters speak, with difficulty, of what is destroying them from the inside.” (“Le dialogue corrompu reflète l’état de délabrement des locuteurs […] Les personnages parlent, avec difficulté, de ce qui les détruit de l’intérieur”). As readers, we search for meaning, and in some books we can expect answers: Chekhov’s gun will be fired, the meaning will be revealed, the metaphors will fall neatly in line. But in books as in life, sometimes we struggle for meaning, and don’t get it.

This might all sound a little heavy—but Kree is also, at times, funny, smart, heart-rending and stomach-churning. It’s a book I loved on first read, and I’m excited to share it with everyone. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.

For your reading bafflement: “Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky” by Antoine Volodine, up at The Baffler

 

My translation of Antoine Volodine’s Shaggå of the painfully infinite sky is available to read at The Baffler as of today. I’m so excited to share this piece with everybody—originally I translated it for Palais, the magazine of the Palais de Tokyo, but that was only in print and you’d have to be pretty motivated to get a copy of it here in the United States. So when the kind people at The Baffler asked if I had any Volodine translations to share with them, of course I said heck yeah and sent this one over.

The Shaggå of the painfully infinite sky comes with its own introductory remarks, although if you’re not familiar with Volodine’s work or the larger body of work called post-exoticism, that explanation—which is part of the fiction—might also need some explanation. Lionel Ruffel’s foreword to Solo Viola may be helpful here. He cites a talk that Volodine gave at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France:

One must see and understand Antoine Volodine as a collective signature that undertakes the writings, voices, and poems of several other authors. […] One must allow my presence here as a spokesman. A spokesman for post-exoticism, an imaginary literature, coming from elsewhere and going elsewhere, a literature that proudly proclaims its status as foreign and strange, that proudly claims its singularity, and that refuses any attribution to a specific and clearly identifiable national literature.

Lionel Ruffel then goes on to explain that:

Post-exoticism […] forms that frame narrative. Sometimes it is explicitly mentioned in the texts, but more often it is left implicit, giving these works a supplement of meaning that carries us elsewhere […] In this frame narrative, political activists, militants of radical egalitarianism, are imprisoned, nearly or already dead, and are trying to communicate amongst themselves, as if with their last breath—trying to give new form to the beauties and disasters of an already ended world.

So it helps to understand (or even, maybe, to not understand) that the Shaggå of the painfully infinite sky is a story within a story within a story. I’ve always felt proud of this piece, and the author was generous enough to share his time and help me with it, and kind enough to praise the result. I hope you enjoy it.

In other news:

Kree by Manuela Draeger is coming out in October, but it’s available for pre-order now!

On a nice drizzly day in late June, I once again jogged from Two Harbors to Duluth in the annual Grandma’s Marathon. Now looking forward to running the Twin Cities Marathon in early October.

More news soon, I hope.

Updates on Kree, by Manuela Draeger

Just a quick post to show off this very stylish cover that the University of Minnesota Press has chosen for Kree by Manuela Draeger, translated by yours truly. This is Draeger’s most recent contribution to the post-exotic oeuvre, which is being produced by a person who also goes by the names Antoine Volodine (author of Solo Viola), Lutz Bassmann, Elli Kronauer, and a few others. I have had so much obsessive fun with translating Kree, and I’m really looking forward to sharing it with the world.

We’ll all have to wait until it’s officially published in October, however—so if you need something to scratch your post-exotic itch in the meantime, check out the recent Black Village, by Lutz Bassmann (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman), or you can look for Mevlido’s Dreams by Antoine Volodine (translated by Gina Stamm), coming out in June 2024.