{"id":69982,"date":"2021-01-31T21:55:11","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T02:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=69982"},"modified":"2022-02-02T11:12:30","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T16:12:30","slug":"wakefield-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/01\/31\/wakefield-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Wakefield Press, an Appreciation by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wakefield Press is a Cambridge, Massachusetts independent press, publishing works in translation by famous and lesser known authors in beautifully designed paperback editions. Tom Bowden interviews publisher Marc Lowenthal, and translators Jamie Richards, Erik Butler and Scott Nicolay, concluding with short reviews of selected titles. Wakefield Press is a labor of love, supported by indie bookstores and devoted readers of weird, surrealist, and avant-garde writing. Their books can be found at Bookshop.org<\/a>, and direct from Book Beat. <\/p>\n

\n

Wakefield Press, an Appreciation by Tom Bowden<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a>Founded in 2009 by Marc Lowenthal and Judy Feldmann, Wakefield Press<\/a> set out “to increase the availability in English of obscure and avant-garde authors from the past who wrote in foreign languages.\u201d<\/p>\n

Define \u201cobscure\u201d? OK. The categories and sub-categories by which Wakefield promotes its books include Imagining Architecture\u2014fantastical architecture, imaginary urbanism, and hallucinatory dwellings; Imagining Science\u2014outsider science, extreme empiricism, aberrant experiments, and imaginary speculations; The Library of Cruelty; The Margins of Dada; The School of the Strange; Subverse; and The Envelope\u2014Silence: A Surrealist Library.<\/p>\n

The books, authors, and topics share eccentricities, generously portioned. Balzac, Perec, and Huymans may be the best-known of their authors; others were popular in their time and are ripe for rediscovery; and others may not have been well-known even in their own time but are overdue for an audience.<\/p>\n

Interview with the publisher, Marc Lowenthal<\/span><\/h3>\n

TB: The entry on Wikipedia about Wakefield says that \u201cThe aim of the company is to increase the availability in English of obscure and avant-garde authors from the past who wrote in foreign languages.\u201d But to be clear, by \u201cavant-garde\u201d Wakefield does not mean \u201cdifficult, hard-to-follow\u201d \u00e0 la Finnegans Wake or other Modernist pinnacles. How would you describe the literary vanguard(s) you\u2019re drawing attention to?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Publisher and editor Marc Lowenthal<\/p><\/div>\n

ML:<\/strong> Indeed, I wouldn\u2019t say the authors we publish are difficult to read. But \u201cavant-garde\u201d has taken on a range of nuances over the past century, with the general one being a sense of pushing against a cultural status quo. Since we\u2019re primarily focused on historical literary works on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what was once considered to form the avant-garde\u2014Dada and Surrealism, for example\u2014represents something different today than it did a century ago: still challenging if the reader is expecting a conventional novel, but not as bewildering as when it had first manifested itself. I personally lean to adjectives like \u201ceccentric\u201d in thinking about these things (or how our overseas colleague, Atlas Press, defines their publishing mission as covering the \u201canti-tradition\u201d), but I will say that the cultural status quo I do find interesting to push against is that of the canon, be it the writers left out of it, or overlooked aspects to writers in it (however Balzac was regarded in his day, he is solidly in the canon today, but I find it more interesting to look at his lesser-known essays than at his novels, for example). And one could define the avant-garde as being that which eventually makes up the canon. Kafka was a little-known, extremely eccentric and experimental author in his day; nobody considers him to be a \u201cdifficult\u201d read today, but that is because we\u2019ve developed categories and concepts through which we read him more easily (including that infamous concept that generated out of his work, \u201cKafkaesque\u201d). But the process is never-ending; some publishers are continuing to bring out his writings in new translations now that he is in the public domain; I\u2019m interested in exploring some of his German-language contemporaries and representing them better (Ferdinand Hardekopf, Alfred Lichtenstein, etc.).<\/p>\n

None of that really describes the literary vanguards you asked about, though. Maybe I\u2019m avoiding doing so to avoid the risk of getting programmatic. The same way that Borges had described Kafka as having created his precursors (who, when set side by side, may prove to have no commonality) rather than vice versa, one modifies the past when one presents or publishes it. All this is to say that Wakefield is interested in publishing \u201cmissing pieces,\u201d but the puzzle they belong to isn\u2019t one I\u2019d currently like to define.<\/p>\n

TB: Wakefield has passed the 10-year mark, which is a milestone for any endeavor, let alone a literary endeavor. What do you think that Wakefield\u2019s books are tapping into that appeals to audiences now and\/or that audiences respond favorably to decade after decade? What is your sense of your audience, of who they are?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Edward Steichen of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of Honor\u00e9 de Balzac, 1911<\/p><\/div>\n

ML: <\/strong>I actually missed that 10-year mark, but it is something to celebrate. It really is tough for independent publishers to maintain the momentum year after year, as enthusiasm is really the primary ingredient to keeping things going. I think the publishing world we inhabit these days shares some of the characteristics of the music industry (I\u2019m thinking of something like Numero Group\u2019s Eccentric Soul<\/a> series, for example), where music lovers seek out lesser-known or newly discovered aspects to the music they love. All of which has opened up over the last couple decades through the internet, where smaller communities can come together even if they\u2019re geographically separated. At a certain point in your listening life you might stop listening to Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/em> and start seeking out Os Mutantes or Can instead (not that they\u2019re obscure today the way they were for me when I was in high school).<\/p>\n

I think there are roughly 300 people out there who trust our publishing program to the extent that they will pick up whatever we publish\u2014the way I do with some publishers, with whom, even if I end up not liking a particular title they\u2019ve published, I still want it and read it because it forms a part of a larger whole that they represent for me. Anything beyond that really breaks down title by title. I think we can take some credit for bringing broader attention to some authors we\u2019ve published (Marcel Schwob, Paul Scheerbart); others remain only a tad less unknown in English than they had been before we published them\u2026<\/p>\n

TB: At the outset, Wakefield only published works by deceased authors. Brief Lives of Idiots<\/em> is the first title published by a living author\u2014a book whose tone is utterly apiece with that other cataloguers of human behavior: Balzac, Lou\u00ffs, Fourier, etc. Do you foresee publishing more books by living authors?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>ML: <\/strong>Gis\u00e8le Prassinos would have actually been our first living, if very old, author, but she actually passed away before we brought out her collected stories. But we have previously published the living Pascal Quignard\u2019s A Terrace in Rome<\/strong> and our first Romanian (and living) author, T. O. Bobe, with his little book, Curl<\/strong>. But yes, we have a proclivity for the historical and the deceased as a rule. There are publishers like Open Letter, Dalkey Archive, And Other Stories, Europa, etc., who are focused on living contemporary authors, but they also have publicists working to promote their lists and authors. Wakefield is just my wife and myself and we both work day jobs: standard publishing needs such as marketing and publicity are not something I\u2019m able to devote resources to, and a contemporary author requires a certain kind of attention that I\u2019m not able to provide. Though that aside, I am more inclined to search through library stacks than the Frankfurt Book Fair.<\/p>\n

That said, I\u2019m not averse to living authors, though as you point out, I would want them to resonate with our list. Someone actually expressed surprise to me that Ermanno Cavazzoni (author of Brief Lives of Idiots<\/strong>) is alive\u2014I\u2019m presuming because he seemed to fit so comfortably into our list. I\u2019m very fond of his work and intend to bring more of his books out in English. Overall, the living will need to be a smaller portion of our list, but there will be some others. The living Alain-Paul Mallard, for example, whose slim, Borgesian Evocation of Matthias Stimmberg <\/strong>we\u2019ll be bringing out later this year.<\/p>\n

TB: Who else should readers of Wakefield\u2019s books read\u2014authors, additional publishers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Black Bat Orchid: Tacca Chantrieri<\/p><\/div>\n

ML: <\/strong>I suspect most of our readers are pretty savvy when it comes to English-language publishers whose catalogs would interest them, but anyone who likes what we put out will like the publishing program of Atlas Press<\/a> or Twisted Spoon Press<\/a>\u2014two publishers of translations I read with enthusiasm. Rixdorf Editions<\/a> is a new labor of love based in Berlin, focused on bringing out underrecognized German texts of the pre-Weimar period; James J. Conway, who started it, writes the Strange Flowers blog<\/a>, a \u201ccabinet of human curiosities\u201d that should appeal to and inform readers of our list: his year-end \u201cSecret Satan\u201d post always rounds up a lengthy list of books that had come out over the year and had completely escaped my radar.<\/p>\n

Siglio<\/a> has carved out an interesting body of hybrid books straddling the literary\/art divide that don\u2019t fit into any other easy categorization than \u201cSiglio.\u201d<\/p>\n

And finally (though for the sake of disclosure I should mention that my day job overlaps with their activities), discovering Strange Attractor<\/a> a few years ago gave me that rare dreamlike pleasure of discovering what felt like a secret room I hadn\u2019t known existed: they\u2019ve been publishing a body of books interweaving occult accounts and life histories that really make them one of the more unique and exciting publishers going right now. Their publication of Amy Hale\u2019s long-awaited book on Ithell Colquhoun (Genius of the Fern Loved Gulley<\/strong><\/a>) should be entering the market shortly, which I\u2019m eager to read.<\/p>\n

TB: What\u2019s coming up, and what is on your wish list\u2014what you would love to publish, and how?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Weird fiction author Jean Ray (1887-1964)<\/p><\/div>\n

ML: <\/strong>The pipeline is a bit overstuffed (ambition and over-commitment are usually the main factors to lead to an indie publisher\u2019s demise, I should note). This spring we\u2019re continuing with our program of bringing out the Belgian Jean Ray\u2019s work into English with his fifth, and best-known, book, the weird-horror novel Malpertuis<\/strong>, along with our biggest book to date, the Mauritian Malcolm de Chazal\u2019s Sens-Plastique<\/strong>, an aphoristic work that maps all of nature onto the human body (and which contains some of the most poetic analogies for the sex act that I think are to be found). Along with that will be another forgotten German author of the Expressionist era, Curt Corrinth, and what in his time had been an infamous short novel, Potsdamer Platz, or The Nights of the New Messiah: Ecstatic Visions<\/strong>, which he wrote under the influence of Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Gross and his theory that sexual orgies could liberate people from their inhibitions. And Robert Desnos\u2019s novel, which we\u2019re titling The Die Is Cast<\/strong> (the title is difficult to translate but could be rendered in a number of ways: The Bed Is Made, etc.). Atlas Press has published most of Desnos\u2019s surrealist prose in English; this was his semi-social-realist novel that he somehow managed to publish during the Paris Occupation when he was working with the Resistance, about drug addiction among a group of misfits. The translator has described it as a pre-War Parisian Trainspotting<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still working out our fall season, but it will include The Mill: A Cosmos<\/strong>, the sole prose work of the rather unknown Expressionist poet Bess Brenck Kalischer (the only visual document of her that I know of is a somewhat unflattering woodcut portrait by Conrad Felixm\u00fcller). It presents an encoded account of a woman being held in a mental hospital (which I will say is pretty \u201cexperimental\u201d in execution). Marcel B\u00e9alu\u2019s novella The Impersonal Adventure<\/strong>, which will continue our exploration of French-language fantastical fiction; the first translation of G\u00e9rard de Nerval\u2019s The Illuminated<\/strong>, an eccentric portrait gallery of eccentrics and visionaries. I read in French so a lot of authors in the pipeline are from that language: Max Jacob, Georges-Olivier Ch\u00e2teaureynaud, Gaston de Pawlowski, Charles Cros, Philippe Soupault…<\/p>\n

For the reason I mentioned above, I should probably steer clear of wish lists: I don\u2019t have the resources for more than what we\u2019ve been doing, and I am realizing I probably need to leave some things by the wayside. Such as a series of autobiographies (or biographies by known writers as opposed to \u201cofficial\u201d biographers) of \u201cpeople of interest,\u201d which I would have liked to launch with the autobiography of my publisher-hero, Eric Losfeld<\/a>. Or a series of visually oriented books (literary photo-romans, surrealist graphic novels, etc.) Or a series of \u201cmissing pieces\u201d in philosophy, which I would have liked to have started with Charles Fourier\u2019s The New Amorous World<\/strong> <\/a>or Peter Wessel Zapff\u2019s On the Tragic<\/strong>; but the scope of such undertakings would quickly put Wakefield under, financially and otherwise\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Brief Lives of Idiots<\/strong><\/a>
\nBy Ermanno Cavazzoni (Jamie Richards, translator)<\/p>\n

Modeled after the medieval Lives of Saints<\/strong>, Brief Lives of Idiots<\/strong> devotes 31 chapters to persons of exemplary idiocy. (Generally, one person per day but three of the days are devoted to aggregates of \u201cworking,\u201d \u201ccollateral,\u201d and \u201cnear\u201d suicides.) Brief Lives<\/strong> rekindles hope in a return to times when idiocy was kinder, gentler, almost pure in its lack of guile\u2014idiocy straight up. Here we find a Marxist who thinks Jesus was an alien; there, a fellow who walks around the countryside offering free blood-pressure tests because he believes that blood pressure gauges have healing powers; another no longer recognizes his family, but since they leave him alone, and the woman even makes him meals, he decides to say nothing. Women idiots roam this planet, too, of course, including one who sits looking out her window as she sews, imagining that the passersby below insult her as they walk by, yet remaining deaf to the compliments her employer pays to the quality of her work.<\/p>\n

The cynicism is sunny, and the idiots (largely) harmless cranks with (usually nonfatal) obsessions.<\/p>\n

Interview with the translator, Jamie Richards: <\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

TB: What attracted you to Cavazzoni’s book? <\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Editor and translator Jamie Richards<\/p><\/div>\n

JR:<\/strong> I began reading Ermanno Cavazzoni many years ago and was drawn to the strangeness and humor of his work, and the way it evokes and parodies the past. In holding nothing sacred, everything becomes sacred. His first novel was the basis for Federico Fellini\u2019s last film, The Voice of the Moon<\/strong><\/a>, which shows us a constitutionally wonderstruck Roberto Benigni soliloquizing into wells, at graves, or to the moon. I like Cavazzoni\u2019s exploration of lunacy, of marginal subjects and curiosities.<\/p>\n

TB: What in your translation do you hope comes across that you particularly liked in the original?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JR:<\/strong> What I appreciated in the original was the understatedness of the language and the way that its very deadpan tone managed to convey a kind of cosmic, bleak hilarity. Everything is surface, everything is in the language. I hope I was successful with the puns I had to create for \u201cThe Failed Whore\u201d in particular, a story that required a degree of acrobatics not only to come up with new puns but also ones that matched the physical gestures accompanying them, a kind of verbal slapstick.<\/p>\n

TB: Apart from 31 chapters for each day of a month, what in the novel is in the tradition of OpLePo \/ OuLiPo<\/a>, and did it pose a challenge for translation? <\/strong><\/p>\n

JR<\/strong>: The Italian \u201cOpLePo\u201d is more of a loose affiliation, especially now, but it can be a useful category for describing writers who pay particular attention to literary form and structure. In Idiots<\/em> the structure is made plain: based on hagiography, we have an idiography, and instead of a one for every day of the year, we have one month\u2019s worth, punctuated by idiot suicides on Sundays (the day of rest, after all!).<\/p>\n

TB: Who are Cavazzoni\u2019s influences, and what else would you recommend a person read who enjoys Brief Lives?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JR:<\/strong> Cavazzoni counts among his influences the Renaissance poet Ariosto, Giacomo Leopardi, and Italo Calvino. Among contemporary Italians in a similar vein, I\u2019d recommend Stefano Benni and Gianni Celati, if you can find them in English, and Nanni Balestrini\u2019s Tristano<\/strong>.<\/a> Or, if you haven\u2019t read them, Gogol and Kharms.<\/p>\n

TB: Do you have other translations in the works?<\/strong><\/p>\n

JR:<\/strong> I translate a lot of comics\u2014and have graphic novels forthcoming by Gipi, Manuele Fior, and Massimo Mattioli\u2014but I\u2019d like to do more comic fiction. Currently, I\u2019m working on the memoir Down the Square No One\u2019s There<\/strong> by Dolores Prato and the experimental novel The Hunger of Women<\/strong> by Marosia Castaldi.<\/p>\n

TB:<\/strong> Website for translator and editor Jamie Richards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Psychology of the Rich Aunt<\/a><\/strong>
\nBy Erich M\u00fchsam (Erik Butler, translator)<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, when families were larger and women\u2019s lives were more circumscribed than now, the category of \u201cRich Aunt\u201d arose. (M\u00fchsam\u2019s book was originally published in 1905.) Spinster or widow, these were women who\u2014according to Erich M\u00fchsam\u2019s taxonomy\u2014were assumed to by avaricious kin to possess enormous fortunes that would surely all be theirs one day. The psychology of the rich aunt depends equally upon the psychology of the (non-) deserving nephews and nieces, who often do what they can to speed up the mortality process in the wretched beast they would otherwise have nothing to do with, in order to pay off bills they have accumulated in anticipation of future riches. In other words, the 25 profiles of rich aunts, alphabetically arranged, serve as a catalog of schadenfreude for readers.<\/p>\n

Interview with the translator, Erik Butler<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

Given M\u00fchsam\u2019s reputation as a satirist, how did you choose PotRA to translate as opposed to his other works?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Author and translator Erik Butler<\/p><\/div>\n

EB:<\/strong>The book’s short and punchy. M\u00fchsam really held radical views, and the quick pace lets him get away with some pretty outrageous stuff without ranting or sermonizing. There’s also an element of self-deprecation that I appreciate. It’s a bit like a cabaret performance or stand-up.<\/p>\n

TB: I\u2019m not sure the category of \u201crich aunt\u201d exists anymore, or at least to the extent it occurred during M\u00fchsam\u2019s life. In England at least, and for a long time, women of any station in life were not allowed to inherit estates. What was the economic status of women at the time PotRA was written? Are there cultural implications in the book that might be lost on readers unfamiliar with the social status of German woman, circa 1900?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: <\/strong>I’m not sure how much of a reality the “rich aunt” was, even in M\u00fchsam’s day. I think he was looking for, and found, a clever conceit for highlighting the absurdity and injustice of property relations, the law, and various institutions (especially the family). Each aunt is a caricature, and everybody after her money acts cartoonishly. The details M\u00fchsam includes are historically and culturally specific, but they make the proceedings more vivid and engaging. The kind of antics people get up to will hardly strike twenty-first-century readers as foreign or out-of-date.<\/p>\n

TB: What in your translation do you hope comes across that you particularly liked in the original? <\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: <\/strong>The author’s talent for unflattering portraits that still manage to capture human pathos; his knack for conveying gravity in farcical situations.<\/p>\n

TB: Who are M\u00fchsam\u2019s influences, and what else would you recommend a person read who enjoys Psychology? <\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: <\/strong>Karl Marx was a brilliant satirist and master of put-downs. If you read him for style, you’ll see his influence on M\u00fchsam. His contemporary and friend Heinrich Heine is also an important point of reference\u2014another German-Jewish writer who turned deep disaffection into biting wit. Among M\u00fchsam’s contemporaries, I’d recommend Salomo Friedlaender<\/a> and Oskar Panizza<\/a> (conveniently published by Wakefield!), as well as Karl Kraus and Kurt Tucholsky.<\/p>\n

TB: What other translations in the works do you have?<\/strong><\/p>\n

EB: <\/strong>I’ve been hoping, for some time now, to translate a few works by Jean-Pierre Brisset. He was a (largely) mild-mannered railroad employee who came up with a grand theory of human origins and religion based on puns. Among other things, he claimed that the Roman Catholic Church invented Latin to retain a monopoly on the Bible and that we’re descended from frogs. He also devised a method to teach people how to swim on land.<\/p>\n

TB:<\/strong> In addition to Erik Butler\u2019s translations, he\u2019s also most recently written The Devil and His Advocates <\/a><\/strong> \u201cWritten in the spirit of M\u00fchsam and other crackpots I admire,\u201d says Butler.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Great Nocturnal: Tales of Dread<\/a>
\nBy Jean Ray (Scott Nicolay, trans.)<\/p>\n

A Belgian writer of eerie stories in the tradition of Poe, some of Jean Ray\u2019s stories were translated into English during the 1930s and published in such pulp treasures as Weird Tales<\/strong>. In workman-like fashion, he cranked out and published stories by the dozens, under varieties of pseudonyms. Thanks to the efforts and Wakefield Press and translator Scott Nicolay, Ray\u2019s oeuvre is being represented by fresh translations, new editions, and (I believe) a complete edition.<\/p>\n

Although Nicolay believes that Nocturnal<\/strong> is not Ray\u2019s strongest work, he also believes it is his most consistently representative of Ray\u2019s themes and methods. An excellent afterward sets the stories in this collection within the context of his other works, pointing out the interrelationships among character, incident, and place.<\/p>\n

The stories aim to stir unease within readers, anxiety and fear of the loathsome and morally wrong. Ninety years later, the dread may be less palpable, but the stories are still fun to read. The story telling is ardent but not over-the-top, and Nicolay\u2019s translation uses contemporary (but not anachronistic) idioms, keeping the language fresh and easy to engage with.<\/p>\n

Interview with the translator, Scott Nicolay<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

TB: Something that I thought came through in your translation was Jean Ray\u2019s joy of telling a story\u2014perhaps it was the settings and pacing. Which characteristic(s) of Ray\u2019s storytelling were you trying to convey with your translation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Author and translator Scott Nicolay, photo credit: Tyra Huyana Nicolay<\/p><\/div>\n

SN:<\/strong> If that was a major takeaway for you from reading these translations, then I am very happy, as that joy is much of what I wanted to share with English-language readers. When my friend John Pelan first sent me his beater copy of Ghouls in My Grave<\/strong> and turned me on to Jean Ray back in the \u201990s, I was immediately and profoundly affected by what struck me as the freshness of the writing\u2014even though I was reading thirty-year-old translations of sixty-year-old stories. The writing felt fresh in a timeless way. Not too many authors have that power. The only similar experience that comes to readily to mind was my first encounter with Charles Willeford\u2019s fiction a few years earlier. Or first reading Alistair Rennie\u2019s story \u201cThe Gutter Sees the Light that Never Shines\u201d in The New Weird<\/strong>. Aickman maybe. Some of the credit for the impression Jean Ray had on me must go to Lowell Bair, who translated those stories. When I began my own translations, Bair\u2019s work was my yardstick for capturing that quality. I felt he gave Jean Ray a voice in English that read like Jim Thompson channeling Poe, each at their best. And once I\u2019d read the original French, that seemed spot on to me, at least for 1964. I haven\u2019t deliberately gone after the same thing with my translations, this being a different time, but my goal has been something comparable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Cover of Guy de Maupassant “Le Horla,” illustrated by William Julian-Damazy (1865-1910).<\/p><\/div>\n

As a storyteller, Jean Ray was almost a force of nature. Although his biographical deals have been infamously muddled, we have long known that he could write at a pace that approached automatic writing. Sitting at the typewriter, he became something close to the teletype operator in H.F. Arnold\u2019s classic weird story \u201cThe Night Wire<\/a>,\u201d who types a different story with each hand and continues to type even after his death. My mental image of him is this sinister guy who emerges from the darkness at the end of the bar offering to tell you a story if you buy him some whiskey\u2014good whiskey\u2014and keep it coming<\/em>. And once he\u2019s had that first whiskey, buckle your seatbelt. This was a man who lived to tell stories. That something that always comes through from his work.<\/p>\n

Take \u201cThe Mainz Psalter\u201d for example. I think that novella has gotten enough attention in English now that a significant audience recognizes it as one of the<\/em> essential texts in weird fiction. It\u2019s often compared to Lovecraft and Hodgson, for obvious reasons\u2014and it definitely cribs a bit from Hodgson\u2019s The Ghost Pirates<\/strong><\/a>, and possibly also from Lovecraft and even H.G. Wells\u2014but it\u2019s a far wilder story than any of them could have written. That may be a bold claim for me to make, but I dare anyone who\u2019s read it to disagree. It\u2019s simultaneously pulpy and beautifully written. The title, which is the name of a legendary incunabulum, suggests a narrative along the lines of an M.R. James story, so the reader is caught unawares. Early on we get a whole page of Dickens references (something mysteriously missing from Bair\u2019s version \u2026 and then we\u2019re off on a bonkers bazonkers high seas adventure that reads far more like Robert E. Howard at his greatest then any of the writers mentioned above. The story is a literary rollercoaster ride. It\u2019s sheer joy for the reader and I can\u2019t help but believe Jean Ray must have had a blast writing it\u2014in Ghent\u2019s Nieuwe Wandeling prison, a hellhole straight out of Foucault.<\/p>\n


\nTB: Parallel to your work as a translator is a successful career as a writer of fantasy and weird stories, for which you won a World Fantasy Award. How has translation affected your own writing? I\u2019m thinking both of your translations of weird fiction in general and close work with a single author in particular. When you\u2019re working that closely with the mechanism of storytelling, what do you learn about the medium? Your afterward to Nocturnal is a model of close-reading scholarship.<\/strong><\/p>\n

SN: <\/strong>Jean Ray has been a major influence on my fiction from the start, although that may not always be obvious. Much of what I take from him is the central concept of his weird fiction, the emphasis on the interaction between the \u201cintercalary worlds\u201d and our own. My most recent novella, the capper of my second collection, is all about that, from the intimate perspective of a single salamander to a vast intergalactic scale. Beyond that, I think I aim to capture some of that freshness and immediacy of his work, and the vividness of the settings. There is often a claustrophobia to his settings as well, and I think that is something my work shares in, though that may be natural on my part (not that I am claustrophobic: as a caver, I am exactly the opposite).<\/p>\n

Translating is a process equivalent to but different from writing my own work. Whether I am writing or translating, if it\u2019s going well, I feel plugged in to what Jack Spicer called \u201cthe Martian.\u201d The difference is that with translating I can in certain ways lose myself even more deeply in the process. So deeply that it becomes difficult to shake some of Jean Ray\u2019s settings. A doomed part of my soul lives forever in the Berlin of \u201cMondschein-Dampfer,\u201d for instance.<\/p>\n

Then of course, there is the attention to detail. Only Steely Dan lyrics come close to mentioning as wide an array of alcoholic beverages as Jean Ray. Brand names become demonic invocations. And the descriptions of food\u2026 Although I think I apply this approach to other kinds of detail in my work more than for drinks or food.<\/p>\n

TB: Who were Jean Ray\u2019s influences and contemporaries that readers might want to pursue after reading Ray\u2019s works?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>SN:<\/strong> Obviously all the other authors from the Belgian School of the Strange. In addition to the four Jean Ray volumes (with more to come), Wakefield Press has also published excellent translations of collections by Marcel Brion<\/a> and Michel de Ghelderode<\/a>. Edward Gauvin<\/strong><\/a> has translated stories by a number of these authors, many of them available online, and he is simply one of the finest translators working today. One of my favorites from the Belgian School is Anne Richter<\/a>, who is still alive today. Alice B. Toklas translated her first collection into English. She also edited some interesting anthologies in French, most notably perhaps Le Fantastique F\u00e9minin d’Ann Radcliffe \u00e0 Patricia Highsmith<\/strong> (The Feminine Fantastic from Ann Radcliffe to Patricia Highsmith<\/strong>). That was the volume that taught me to recognize the weirdness in Virginia Woolf. Claude Seignolle only died a couple years ago, at the age of 101. A few translations of his work into English exist, but none are in print.<\/p>\n

As far as influences, more people in the Anglophone world should read Guy de Maupassant<\/strong>. He was one of the great short story writers and I don\u2019t feel like he gets his due anymore. I was lucky enough to encounter him as a child thanks to CBS Radio Mystery Theater\u2019s adaptations of \u201cThe Horla<\/a>\u201d and \u201cThe Hand.\u201d Both these stories were clearly important to Jean Ray. And then of course there is Ray\u2019s fellow Belgian (and mentor) J.-H. Rosny. Rosny was actually two brothers writing under one name. If you know of them, it\u2019s probably because of the wonderful 1981 film The Quest for Fire<\/em> <\/a>with Ron Perlman and Rae Dawn Chong, which was an adaptation of Rosny\u2019s prehistoric novel La Guerre du Feu<\/strong>. A few years ago I translated the deeply weird novella Les Xip\u00e9huz<\/strong><\/a> for Dim Shores Press, although this one was probably written only by the older brother \u201cRosny a\u00een\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n


\nTB:  What about this style of storytelling appeals to you? How do you keep fresh the joy of imagining weird worlds and provoking anxieties?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SN: <\/strong>To me the world really is weird. Deeply weird. Yet I struggle to see the places where this weirdness shows through. I\u2019ve spent decades contemplating the vastness of the universe and my own\u2014our own\u2014insignificance within it. But where in our lives do we encounter the truly weird, the genuinely other? The signs are missing, at least on our plane. Writing weird fiction, or translating the work of a weird master like Jean Ray, puts me in the world as I believe it exists\u2014somewhere. As terrible as the worlds of weird fiction are, they offer a glimpse of the genuinely awesome that we are missing today in a world where people are so eager to discard reality in order to believe the stupidest and most ridiculous things.<\/p>\n


\nTB:  What other projects are you working on now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

SN: <\/strong>I finished my second fiction collection, And at My Back I Always Hear<\/strong>, a few months ago. It\u2019s currently with a publisher who had expressed interest after my first collection. And of course there\u2019s my dissertation research on Mimbres Cave Ritual, which has to be my priority right now. I also finished editing another work of the heart, Research into Marginal Living: The Selected Stories of John D. Keefauver<\/strong>, which should be out soon from Lethe Press<\/strong><\/a>. Keefauver is another writer who wrote almost entirely short fiction and who deserves to be better known. I\u2019ve been a fan of his work since the \u201970s. I connected with him a couple years before he died and have been working with his family on this volume for several years. Beyond that, gardening, canning, cooking. And I hope to get back out into the field and map some caves this summer. The entire discipline of archaeology lost a year of fieldwork due to the pandemic. Other groups have had it worse, of course, but it was still a great loss, and a wrench in the works of my research.<\/p>\n

TB:<\/strong> Scott Nicolay\u2019s website is www.scottnicolay.com<\/a>. \"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Micro-reviews of other Wakefield titles<\/span><\/h3>\n