Revenge of the Translator

Matthieussent’s debut is boisterous and beguiling from the first page to the last, tracing the complex story of le Traducteur (known as Trad, Ted, or Brad to his friends), an anguished translator living in contemporary France. Trad shares his distaste for his latest work in progress—a metafictional novel called Translator’s Revenge, which he is translating into French—in a series of elaborate footnotes. Soon Trad is rewriting, embellishing, and deleting entire sections of the book, determined to create out of it something much more beautiful. As he tells his reader, “When I resist the temptation of censorship or when I don’t dilate the original prose as I please, I am an indelicate transporter, a clumsy mover, a seedy trafficker.” While Trad works to recreate the characters—including Abel Prote, himself a novelist; Abel’s secretary and lover, Doris; and Abel’s own translator, David Gray—they begin to blur the lines between fiction and reality by inserting themselves in Trad’s life as real people with plans for vengeance on Trad and one another. 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. [em](Oct.) [/em]