Vlad’s bard

With long, dark brown hair and a trimmed moustache, Max Lawton looks a bit like a cowboy. In fact, he’s a translator. Well, maybe he’s a cowboytranslator. Riding out into the ruggedest terrains of foreign literature, he tracks down the unruliest texts, then drags them, snorting and kicking, into the English language.

Lawton, 30, has become the definitive English voice of Vladimir Sorokin, possibly the most eminent and almost certainly the most notorious living Russian writer. An example: Sorokin’s near-unsummarisable novel Blue Lard, published in 1999, includes a time-travelling religious sect known as the “Earth Fuckers”, and an intense, explicit sex scene between Khrushchev and Stalin. Shredded copies were ceremonially thrown into a giant papier-mâché toilet by a proKremlin youth group outside Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.

“I owe everything to this book,” Lawton writes in the “Extroduction” to his translation of Blue Lard, which was published in February. He first encountered it in French as a high-schooler in Wisconsin. (Lawton is American, but lived in Brussels with a French nanny for the first three years of his life.) After studying Russian at Columbia University, he was pondering what to do with his life, and thought: “Well, no one’s translated Blue Lard. I’ll give that a shot.” He got hold of Sorokin’s email and sent him a sample translation, and their relationship grew from there. Lawton is now in the middle of translating more than a dozen of Sorokin’s books.

This is no small task. Blue Lard features a futuristic Russo