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.
Lia Swope Mitchell 