(Untitled)

[agoraphiliac]

out in August.

"TERMINUS RADIEUX
Antoine Volodine

Taïga sombre et immense, steppes infinies… La scène se passe d’abord après l’irradiation complète de la Sibérie et l’écroulement de la Deuxième Union soviétique, puis des siècles plus tard. La région, dévastée par des accidents nucléaires, est à jamais inhabitable. Entourés de paysages grandioses,

Comments

[proximoception]

Waiter there's a Stalker in my Ark?

[agoraphiliac]

Definitely. He speaks highly of the movie, and he translated another Strougatski brothers' novel, though not that one.

[localcharacter]

Well, that certainly sounds like one of the outer frame narratives. And 624 pages! Maybe "Antoine Vollmann"?

[agoraphiliac]

Yes, Antoine Vollmann, except that the editions from Seuil are very generous with the font size, the paper. Lately, with these translations coming out, I feel a little sad to see how skimpy the English versions look--here's that book I drifted through in a fog for weeks, like it was the Zone in Stalker, and it turns out to be something one could polish off in a few sittings.

[grashupfer]

What's this mean in English? I'd love to know.

[agoraphiliac]

Thanks for asking. I'd love to know, too; I'm still never quite sure what French texts mean, which makes them so exciting to me. But now that you ask, I realize it's not totally opaque to me, so here you go, a rough and ready translation:

Radiant TerminalImmense and somber taiga, infinite steppes… The scene unfolds after the total irradiation of Siberia and the collapse of the Second Soviet Union, centuries afterward. The region, devastated by nuclear accidents, is forever uninhabitable. Surrounded by landscapes of grandeur, phantom soldiers, the living-dead, and disturbing princesses who go on following the Soviet dream. From now on the center of the world has a name, Radiant Terminal, a kolkhoz whose nuclear reactor has sunk underground. Solovieï, the village president, puts his supernatural powers in the service of his dream of total power: life and death, eternal love, rebirth. Aided by the immortal Mémé Oudgoul, he reigns over the destiny of the men and women who’ve pitched up there. Not far from the kolkhoz is a fairy-road on

[grashupfer]

Sounds great.

[agoraphiliac]

D'oh. I really should've made that awful translation private. Une voie ferrée, as even a child knows, is a train track. I read une voie féerie, a fairy-road. (But féerie is one of the post-exotic genres, may I add in my defense.) Or I read une voie féeriée, a fairied road, which I'm pretty sure you can't say in French though it might be a Volodinism, it has the sound of one.

How much of my fascination with him is due to my constant misprisions? In the end, it's not such a bad reading, if an awful translation, since there is something magicked about those train tracks in the novel.