Revenge of the Translator

“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 Fülöp, 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 “An intensely thrilling tale of intrigue and translation with a comedic undercurrent, the novel explores the transcendent power of obsessive dedication and the blurred lines between reality and text.” — World Literature Today Winter 2019 Issue “A gripping and hilarious exploration of literature come to life and showcases translation as the ultimate act of creation. A wonderful read!” — Caravansérail bookstore in London, UK “If 2017 was the year when the translation community rallied around Kate Briggs’s This Little Art, then 2019 should be the year of Revenge of the Translator.” — Onomatomania “This barrage of symbols may sound overwhelming, but in fact the ingenious, and sometimes plain outrageous, devices Matthieussent engineers to continue reintroducing these elements into the text is one of the great joys of the book. This network of symbols, which the reader is constantly trying to process and make sense of, is what drives the novel on and stops it from descending (completely) into farce.”— Onomatomania “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.”—Largehearted Boy’s Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Books of the Week “It’s a credit to Ramadan that Revenge of the Translator, in its entirety, manages to feel like a necessary transgression. You could say that she didn’t do much, didn’t change much, didn’t stray much. But you could also say that it was her most transgressive, subversive move to forego revenge, content instead to disappear.”— Alec Joyner Full Stop “Ramadan opts for unabashed provocation, uprooting the text from its cultural stasis and holding it up to the piercing scrutiny of today’s most inflammatory concerns. It’s a work that amounts to a critical reinvention that aspires not to a spot among the translated literary canon, but to the unraveling of the very standards by which that canon is praised.”— Arshy Azizi, LA Review of Books “Wonderfully lost in the intricately woven plots, in the novel’s surreal atmosphere and rebellious humor, the reader encounters translation as a place for humanity—flawed, powerful, and shared.” — Asymptote’s August Book Club Selection "So Revenge of the Translator is an elaborate variation on the usual novel of an author playing a role in his own work, manipulating his characters even more directly...It's an amusing idea, and fairly amusingly played out, with Prote a significant figure, cruelly playing with his characters but then outflanked by the translator. Matthieussent has good fun with this, on its different levels..." — M.A.Orthofer, The Complete Review "A clever satire on American pulp novels... There are twists aplenty, not least of which are the many meta-fictional aspects." — Tony Malone