Revenge of the Translator - Softcover

"At once a powerful satire and an ode to a collaborative art form, this delightful novel will have readers scratching their heads, retracing their steps, and delighting anew in the art of translation, including Ramadan's own skillful work here." -- Publishers Weekly "Here is a thrilling meta novel originally written in French - a peek into the mind of an obsessive, and increasingly unstable translator. Written entirely of footnoted annotations, it's about a French translator translating a fictional work back into its original language, attempting to justify his growing changes to the text." -- Librairie Drawn & Quarterly..".stuffed with symbols, mises en abyme, and direct and indirect comments that state or suggest that we cannot know where the limits of fiction and pretence lie and how far they extend." -- Erike F l p, University of Hamburg "Matthieussent's novel is a revenge indeed, a postmodern tour de force where the notions of original, translation, source and target texts, author and translator, are blurred to the point of becoming irrelevant, shedding a whole new light on the concepts of faithfulness and creativity, and redefining typographical and cultural spaces." -- Pierre-Alexis Mevel and Dawn Cornelio, University of Nottingham "We are at the heart of Literature, with its capacity to make the real vibrate, to reach it using words." -- Le Monde "Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant... worthy of our Umberto Eco." -- Riccardo, Rossiello, SoloLibri

The work of a masterful novelist and translator collide in this visionary and hilarious debut from acclaimed French writer Brice Matthieussent. Revenge of the Translator follows Trad, who is translating a mysterious author's book, Translator's Revenge, from English to French. The book opens as a series of footnotes from Trad as he justifies changes he makes. As the novel progresses, Trad begins to take over the writing, methodically breaking down the work of the original writer and changing the course of the text. The lines between reality and fiction start to blur as Trad's world overlaps with the characters in Translator's Revenge, who seem to grow more and more independent of Trad's increasingly deranged struggle to control the plot. Revenge of the Translator is a brilliant, rule-defying exploration of literature, the act of writing and translating, and the often complicated relationship between authors and their translators.