The Assassination of Literature by the Coward Max Lawton

An analysis of an up-and-coming translator and his work.

This piece of literary criticism by Admiral Fell Promises is an expansion of an earlier work that appeared previously on his Substack. Nathan Eitingon served as an editor for this new expansion. The opinions contained within this essay should not be taken as representing the views of the Futurist Letters team.

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When we consider the place of “experimental literature” in the public consciousness, two main points are clear: it is a difficult sell due to its highly niche character, and those that champion it unfortunately often harbor an elitist need to use this literature to reflect their erudition.

Max Daniel Lawton is a thirty-one-year-old contemporary translator and purported speaker of seven, yes, seven languages. These are French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, German, and English. Lawton is best known for translating Telluria by Vladimir Sorokin, probably the most prominent Russian-language novel to be translated into English in the last decade. He is quick to characterize his online presence and his general image as one of true, unabashed devotion to literature’s “highest reaches.” Lawton praises difficulty and scoffs at easy platitudes, priding himself on being one of the select few bold enough to undertake the venture of bringing obscure and abstract foreign literature to a wider market.

Lawton on Twitter (now X), “Bingeing on unearned attention.”

This, of course, is usually done through expressing easy and banal platitudes on Twitter about the simultaneous zany novelty and literary importance of these books, often backdropped by his well-stocked shelves.

Of the books he praises, none are as promoted as those he has had the “opportunity” to work on himself. Many of these are released by or forthcoming from Dalkey Archive, a forerunner in importing foreign experimental literature that has its own score of separate issues.

Dalkey Archive, his publisher, consistently put out a wide range of opaque, dense, and abstract books, at times over a thousand pages long. These span from novels written in Sicilian fishermen’s dialect (Horcynus Orca; 1,376 pages), to stories in various registers replete with cultural jokes and wordplay (the Russian Vladimir Sorokin’s oeuvre, published by NYRB; 200-600 pages), to astoundingly drawn-out free-association philosophical ruminations on scatology with obscure references to history and art (the German Schattenfroh; 1,004 pages), all of which have been translated or are being translated by Lawton.

To many native speakers of each of these languages, these books already pose a considerable challenge to read. To attempt to translate them into another language is a different beast altogether. Lawton, however, holds no reservations in his capacity to do these works justice. Citing qualifications provided to him by his alma maters, Columbia University and Queen’s College, Oxford, under the pretense that they enable him to translate profoundly dense experimental tomes, Lawton insists he is the man for the job.

Objections, though, have gradually begun to mount. Some critics quietly speculate that these qualifications and, by extension, Lawton’s career in translation, are derived not through merit, but allegedly from funds and influence exerted by his parents.

Lawton is swift to respond to these accusations with the assertion that he has not received any financial support from his parents since his time in college. Relatedly, Lawton is currently in the process of writing a PhD at Columbia University, thereby still being in college.

He also enjoys routine international travel, justified by his desire to better immerse himself in the cultures that characterize these books, many of which are slated for 2025-2029 releases. Of these projects, Lawton claims that “they pay the bills,” which is “why [he works] at such a clip,” translation of niche literature apparently being lucrative enough to fund such a lifestyle. Of course, he also claims he “[does] not make that much money.”

Lawton does not work alone. Andrei, the famed anonymous administrator of the blog The Untranslated, scours the literary landscapes of foreign countries for neglected books and platforms them with summaries and reviews on the aforementioned blog. Many of these are then taken up for translation by Dalkey Archive and contracted to Lawton. Andrei routinely echoes Lawton’s commentary, promotion, and praise of these books on his own Twitter. He also presents himself as just as much of a polyglot as Lawton is in his ability to read through and speak on all these books, as seen responding to a comment attributed to Paulo Coelho about how “nobody has read [Ulysses], yet everyone claims to have read it,” to which Andrei valiantly replies “I have read.” (Not “I have read it,” but “I have read.”) We can also see him respond to a promotional announcement of the publication of one of Antonio Moresco’s works with a resounding and enlightening “Si.” (“Yes.”)

Some question Andrei’s ability to understand so many languages, and speculation about him lifting reviews and synopses from the work’s original language and translating them algorithmically into English have been made. One particular instance of Andrei's questionable linguistic capabilities is when he failed to recognize that Galician and Portuguese are essentially the same language, despite claiming that he understands both Galician and Portuguese.

Alongside their fanfare for these never-before-translated books comes a reckoning with certain books that already have English translations, or are in the process of receiving one. In the case of the former group, Lawton dismisses the existing translations entirely, announcing that it is time that they receive a “proper” translation. When criticized for this, he will often renege and claim that these translations are in fact great, to save face and appear more gracious, such as with Sally Laird and Jamey Gambrell’s translations of Vladimir Sorokin’s books.

The latter group, however, has been an intriguing point of contention, namely in the case of Oguz Atay’s 720-page novel The Disconnected, which is lauded as the “Turkish Ulysses” for its density and difficulty, and was featured on The Untranslated. Lawton, with Andrei, seems to have initially approached Sevin Seydi, its English translator, under the auspices of support and encouragement, before subsequently attempting to list himself as a co-translator without Seydi’s consent or knowledge. Seydi, understandably, denounced this soon after.

Following this exchange, Lawton and Andrei have gone on to publicly lambast her translation in numerous heated exchanges, many of which have not survived Lawton and Andrei’s routine deletions and purges of their own posts to maintain their public image.

A new translation of The Disconnected, set to come out by 2029, is now contracted to Lawton, who is still in the process of learning Turkish. In the meantime, he is also publishing his own intellectually stimulating novels (plural) and releasing music of…questionable quality.

Lawton’s default mode of correspondence with his critics is oftentimes passive-aggressive or mocking, claiming these criticisms arise out of envy, or, in select cases, are libelous, meant to intimidate by threat of social and vocational ruin on the flimsiest of pretenses. These accusations are usually levied regardless of the nature and legitimacy of the criticism in question.

If all else fails, Lawton uses his friends, one of whom is a moderator on the experimental literature discussion hub r/TrueLit on Reddit, to suppress criticism while turning a blind eye to Lawton’s bullying.

Curiously, for a man who stands so steadfastly against Nazism, Lawton also has no reservations about promoting and translating the work of a known Nazi supporter and collaborator Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a virulent antisemite. As a matter of fact, he proudly displays a shelf dedicated to Celine’s books, of which one volume contains Celine’s compiled collection of racist and antisemitic tracts.

Lawton, through his translation, is the entire reason a whole new wave of readers is going to encounter antisemitic and pro-Nazi rhetoric!

This leads us to the golden question: Can Max Lawton live up to the image he has made for himself as a translator and scholar? His aim to bring these books to a wider English audience, which seems noble enough, could very well be justified if the quality of his work was as staggering as it is made out to be. This, unfortunately, is not the case.

Like others, I have always found it somewhat improbable that someone so young could have a firm enough hold on each of these languages to be able to undertake the task of translating these dense and abstract books and doing them justice. Already, there have been dismissals of his translations of Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria and Blue Lard from Russian speakers, although these complaints rarely penetrate the Western world.

Anglophones also sometimes express disappointment about the quality of the work, unable to determine whether these awkward, stocky, and stilted phrases were a byproduct of Lawton’s treatment of the text, or if they originated with Sorokin himself. Tellingly, Lawton’s repeatedly and falsely asserted that he rendered an entire section of Telluria written in Old Church Slavonic into Old English, a staple of his routine of over-promising and under-delivering in his promotions and interviews (including one published in 2024, two years after the book’s publication!), with the falsehood also appearing in reviews of the book itself.

Looking into the matter, one can see the true extent of that false claim. Instead of writing in the proper equivalent for Old Church Slavonic (the most primitive form of the Russian language), which would have indeed been Old English, Lawton opted for a shoddy pastiche of Chaucerian Middle English. Comparing this with a work actually written in Middle English, one can see that, no matter how many “eth”s and “en”s Lawton sprinkles in, he is hardly writing in Middle English either. This entire charade is broadly indicative of the shameless laziness and deception that characterize his work and its promotion.

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Alas, earlier this year, Lawton happened to post a progress update on Twitter regarding his upcoming translation of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Guignol’s Band, among his first translations from French slated for publication.

Needless to say, reading through the excerpt, one is completely taken aback at its sheer incomprehensibility, its asinine structure, and its confusing syntax. For the sake of thoroughness, I have taken pains to illustrate the incoherent and entirely avoidable mistakes in this particular passage in great detail. If you take away anything from the following, let it be that you should not trust Lawton or his translations to give you anything either stylistically artful or representative of the original text. For the sake of convenience, I have reproduced his translated excerpt below:

I know it all too well!...

Keepers of secrets both brazen and superb… arrogant or vile or mute… one after the other… all malefic stinkers to be disgorged by torture moon gall and accursed vows! Poisons, black messages… Martyred calves!

Let everyone attack the demon! that they persist, tie it down, occisate it, incite disgust, find the withered song in their heart… the graceful secret of the cuties… or may he perish a thousand deaths then be resurrected to a thousand pains! To suffocation so atrocious, a thousand flayings of approbation and green contortions of wounds, to boiling pitch, so tenacious, pliered apart, muscles into ribbons, paddling thus for a whole day and three months, a week in the hollow of a pot both hot and greasy, hissing serpents nestled in with bloated toads, with leprosy, juicy, yellow with venom, greedy salamander suckers, repulsive vampires ‘pon the bodies of the damned, wrigglers in your entrails to awaken your pain, in shreds of creased flesh, remasticated with fiery darts, thus for thousands upon thousands of years, only appeasing your thirst when it wishes to with a wineskin full of vinegar, with vitriol of such ardor that your tongue peels, bulges, bursts! then you pass into a painful death screaming about Hell torn to bits! day after day! thus for an eternal spell…

You see how serious the thing is.

Immediately one can note the bizarre schism between the subject and the connotations of the form, where stops and articles flood phrases and trip up the flow of the reading, and whimsical flourishes detract from all the bleak and gruesome drama being outlined by Celine. It reads less like a scornful implication, less like a tableau of sadism, and more like a wheedling soliloquy with over-the-top, ostentatious affect, hopelessly purple. More blatantly wrong, however, are certain phrases that make no sense whatsoever, items like “torture moon gall” and “green contortions of wounds.”

Spurred by my own confusion, I opted to check the original French text and juxtapose it with Lawton’s translation. Reproduced below is the French version of the excerpt, as written by Celine:

Je le sais bien!...

Effrontés cachottiers superbes… arrogants ou vils ou muets… l’un après l’autre… tous empuantis maléfiques à dégorger sous la torture fiel de lune et vœux maudits! Poisons, noirs messages… Veaux martyrs!...

Que chacun au démon s’en prenne! s’acharne, l’arrime, l’occisse, révulse, retrouve en son cœur la chanson, flétrie… le secret gracieux des mignonnes… ou bien qu’il périsse à mille morts et puis ressuscite à mille peines! A suffocation très atroce, mille écorcheries d’agrément et vertes contorsions de blessures, à poix bouillante tenacé, tenaillé, de muscles en charpie, barbotant ainsi tout un jour et trois mois, une semaine au creux de marmite grasse et chaude, serpents sifflants accolés de crapauds bouffis, de lèpre, juteux, jaunes à venins, sucons goulus de salamandres, vampires repoussants au corps des damnés, gigottiers en vos entrailles à réveiller votre douleur, à lambeaux de chairs froissées, remachonnées à dards de feu, ainsi de mille à mille ans, n’apaisent à gré votre soif qu’à l’outre pleine de vinaigre, de vitriol de telle ardeur que votre langue péle, bouffle, éclate! et passez à mort de souffrance tout hurlant d’Enfer déchiqueté! jour aprés jour! ainsi durant temps éternels…

Voyez que la chose est sérieuse.

It’s not difficult to assess Lawton’s various points of departure from the text.

Keepers of secrets both brazen and superb

The first egregious mistake occurs in the phrase “Effrontés cachottiers superbes,” wherein the noun “cachottiers” is sandwiched between the two adjectives “effrontés” (“brazen/cheeky”) and “superbes” (“superb”). Where did Lawton get the notion that these two adjectives qualify the secrets and not their keepers?

Nowhere in the original French does Celine distinguish the secrets themselves as a separate entity and subject within the phrase. “Cachottiers” directly refers to individuals hiding or keeping a secret (derived from the etymological root “cacher,” which means “to hide”). As such, these two adjectives can only refer to those personages, and not their secrets. This is further validated by the next phrase, “arrogant or vile or mute,” referring to the keepers of the secrets, and not the secrets.

“Cachot” is also the French term for “dungeon,” and so “cachottiers” may very well be a pun on the word “secret-keepers”, referring both to secretive individuals, and also the “secret keeps” (dungeons) of a castle. What’s more, reviewing Lawton’s translation, one must ask how a secret can be brazen in the first place. If a secret is bold, then it makes itself known, at which point it is no longer a secret.

I know it all too well!

The addition of “all too” in the preceding statement (“Je le sais bien!...”) also introduces the wheedling quality of Lawton’s translation, as if Celine is not writing in a rage but in a languorous swooning recline, speaking not with force and chagrin but with near-helplessness. Taken at face value, the sentence in French reads “I know it well!...” no more, no less. For a writer as scathing and sharp as Celine, any romantic affectation, which he continually decried in his letters and critical texts, is tantamount to insult in its complete disregard for Celine’s style. Call it what you want, but you cannot call it Celine.

all malefic stinkers to be disgorged by torture moon gall and accursed vows!

Moving on, the use of “malefic stinkers” clashes awfully, with two registers completely at odds with one another. “Malefic” builds a florid tone that “stinkers” completely deflates, turning the whole sound of the sentence into some tittering tantrum. But no matter—the main issue in this sentence is Lawton’s translation of “sous la torture fiel de lune” as “by torture moon gall.”

“Sous la” obviously means “under,” and “fiel de lune,” while literally translated as “gall of moon,” does not refer to audacity or temerity, as “gall” is generally understood to denote. “Fiel” is used by Celine as a term to refer to gall as in the “gall” bladder, where bile is produced, which can be interpreted as possibly referring to moonlight expelled from the moon like bodily fluid.

An additional note could be made that “fiel de lune” might be a play on words for “clair de lune,” which does indeed mean “moonlight.” While, yes, one of gall’s English synonyms is “bile,” the general reader will not know this, and rendering the phrase the way Lawton did is nonsensical regardless. “Bile” would also create a much clearer connection to the later use of “venom.” Stylistically speaking, “fiel” and “clair,” and “(moon)light” and “bile” are both assonant with each other, which only further justifies translating “fiel” as “bile” instead of Lawton’s “gall.”

Lawton attempts to correct this in a supplementary comment.

He writes “all malefic stinkers to disgorge moon gall and accursed vows by torture,” but once again completely omits “sous la” (under) from his translation. Some may counter with the notion that “sous la” could be translated into “by,” but that precludes the double meaning of Celine’s text, which may equivocate “sous la” to both the moon and the torture. It is also a much larger and much more unnecessary leap in logic to render “sous la” (predominantly understood as “under” in French) as “by” (as in, “as a result of” or “through”; predominantly understood and rendered in French as “par”).

“All malefic stinkers to disgorge” makes zero grammatical sense in English as well.

“By torture” would necessitate the inclusion of “par,” or some other (any!) article to specify and justify such a turn of phrase, none of which are present in the original French. It is also incoherent. Are the malefic stinkers disgorging this moon gall and these accursed vows themselves? How would they do so through torture? Would this not be the torture? Where is the turn of phrase in the original French that indicates that “moon gall” and “accursed vows” are unambiguously derived from torture? Or are their torture victims the ones disgorging moon gall and accursed vows? But, then, why would their victims be the proliferators of these awful things? And what exactly is “moon gall”? These questions are left hopelessly unanswered in Lawton’s text.

that they persist, tie it down, occisate it, incite disgust

The syntactical carnival comes to a head here, lacking all consistency through the abandonment of parallel structure in a way that the very propulsive original “s’acharne, l’arrime, l’occisse, révulse” does not. Celine uses “l’arrime” in the sense of lashing something down (as in tying something down, but “tying” does not hold the connotations of violence and the double meaning that “lashing” does), which could also be doubly rendered as lashing at something (whipping something; which continues from the preceding image of the demon being attacked).

Most damningly, occisate is not an English word! Why create an unnecessary neologism (the root word means “violent death”) when countless substitutes (brutalize, slaughter, butcher, etc…) exist in English? A counter-argument could be raised to point out that Celine was no stranger to creating neologisms himself, which fails to mention that Celine’s neologisms all come from origins that could be intuited by his French readers, as is the case with “l’occisse,” which is derived from a Latin term, but which, by virtue of English only partly deriving from Romance languages, adds up to several layers of removal from Latin, making the root word all the more obscure to English readers and making “occisate” nonsensical.

a thousand flayings of approbation

Lawton slips up again by translating “écorcheries d’agrément” to literally mean “flayings of approbation,” or, flayings that approve. How is approval relevant to the act of flaying? How can being flayed be an act of approval? Unfortunately for him, d’agrément has a second meaning: “ornamental.” Ornamental (or “decorative”) flayings makes sense, and maintains that voice of gleefully grotesque sadism.

and green contortions of wounds

Immediately after that is another embarrassment, where he mistakes “vertes” in “vertes contorsions de blessures” (“‘green’ contortions of wounds”) to literally mean green. “De” (“of”) clearly distinguishes “contorsions” from “blessures,” so Lawton could not have meant to describe the wounds as green. In fact, the original French makes it absolutely impossible for “vertes” to refer to “blessures” by virtue of its grammatical conventions that indicate that the only feasible subject for the adjective “vertes” would be “contorsions,” due precisely to the inclusion of the article “de” (“of”). If “vertes” referred to wounds, it could only have been written “contorsions de blessures vertes.” Things become clearer when you factor in that “vertes” also means “unripe” or “undeveloped” in French (or, more obscurely, “harsh” or “crude”), and that the word “vertes” has a much stronger connotation to the idea of immaturity or a rudimentary state in French far more so than in English. Green can also be taken to mean “not ripened” in English, but, once again, translating it thus only introduces unnecessary confusion, since the general reader will not know this and default to the much more prominent definition of green as a color descriptor. And seeing as how Celine is referring to the shapes (contortions) of a flesh wound, the term “unripe,” or something akin to it, indicating a rudimentary state, would also fit the imagery much better; a concession to replace “green” with “unripe” or a synonym must be made for the sake of coherence. “Crude” may be the perfect intersection between all coherent definitions, since it could be taken to mean “undeveloped” or “unrefined,” in both a state of development (as in “crude oil”) and in a state of character (as in “vulgar”) at the same time.

to boiling pitch, so tenacious, pliered apart, muscles into ribbons,

This is at once wheedling and diminutive, and also inaccurate, since Lawton introduces an additional dependent clause trammeled by commas (“, so tenacious,”) not present in the original French (“à poix bouillante tenacé,” literally “to a pitch of tenacious boiling”). There is no need to isolate “tenacé,” since it can easily maintain its original syntax, and “a tenacious boiling pitch” is far more accurate and coherent with the structure and character of Celine’s text.

“Pliered apart, muscles into ribbons” also feels too purply; “charpie” means “shreds,” and “muscles in shreds” (describing a state of being) makes much more sense as a dependent clause than “muscles into ribbons” describing, possibly, some sort of action. It would make more sense if Lawton used “in” instead of “into,” but “ribbons” still feels over the top.

“Pliered” also doesn’t appear to be an actual English word, and, regardless, “tenaillé” describes a state of being ripped or pulled apart, not being pinched or gripped.

a week in the hollow of a pot both hot and greasy, hissing serpents nestled in with bloated toads

“Both” is not present in Celine’s text. Similarly, “nestled in” is another purple rendering of a phrase that is not there in the original French (more accurately translated as “joined by”).

repulsive vampires ‘pon the bodies of the damned

Another deflation of Celine’s prose into a mode of over-the-top affect is the bizarre use of the modified “‘pon” instead of the normal “upon.” Where in this paragraph has the precedent been set to introduce some twee or olden affect? “Au corps” is standard French!

in shreds of creased flesh

“Creased flesh” also feels too light of a descriptor to accompany “shreds.” Creases can be visually interpreted, after all, to be as innocent as wrinkles. It is better and more accurately translated as “crumpled flesh” here. Perhaps, in Lawton’s lack of artistic discernment, his deficiencies in translation extend to deficiencies in English as well.

only appeasing your thirst when it wishes to with a wineskin full of vinegar

The inclusion of “when it wishes to” while referring to the feeding of vinegar is another one of Lawton’s fabrications; it does not appear in the original French. “N’apaisent” is understood as “not appeasing,” and “gré” could be understood as “will,” or “willing.” “Quand il” (“when it”) or any other similar, relevant articles that could potentially justify Lawton’s addition are entirely absent from Celine’s text, making Lawton’s translation read all the more stocky and stilted as a result. His rendition of the sentence implies the torturer has thought to feed his victim vinegar of his own volition as another conscious form of torture, while Celine more readily showcases the torturer’s actions in feeding his victim vinegar as a sadistic reversal of mercy, as if the torturer is relenting by doing so.

with vitriol of such ardor that your tongue peels, bulges, bursts!

Translating “bouffle” as “bulges,” when earlier Lawton translated “bouffis” as “bloated,” is another inconsistency.

then you pass into a painful death screaming about Hell torn to bits!

Here, “d’Enfer” means “from Hell,”, not “about Hell.” No Francophone would use “de” to entail a space and its dimensions (i.e “about Hell” or “around Hell”). Even Frechtman’s translation, with all its liberties, agrees that “d’Enfer” is rendered “from Hell”. If we are being generous, it can also be understood as “hellish” by rendering it “of Hell,” in reference to “hurlant” (shrieking). Even “dans l’Enfer,” which places the subject (“you”) inside Hell, is rendered “in Hell” and has nothing to do with traversing Hell’s dimensions in the way that “about” (as in “around”) implies. It is absolutely impossible to read “d’Enfer” as “about Hell” under any circumstances. This is basic French, known to even the most uninitiated of beginners still in A1.

You see how serious the thing is.

Celine never alludes to the extent or severity of the thing’s seriousness, which is proven by the inclusion of “que” (“that”), verifying the characterization of the thing as serious, precluding any allusions to how serious it is. It is enough that it is serious. “Voyez que la chose est sérieuse” literally reads “You see that the thing is serious.” There is no reason to muddle it when the English equivalent is so exact.

Having thus gone through and enumerated Lawton’s various errors and strange unfaithful stylistic choices, I elect to try and reconstruct the entire passage myself. I have attempted to replicate, or at least parallel, Celine’s stylistic flourishes, syntax, and intent as best as I could, with minimal additions of my own. I have also sought to carry over or approximate certain literary devices (alliteration, assonance, parallel structure, etc.) I noticed in the original text.

My aim with this translation is not to provide a definitive rendition of the passage; its literalness only serves to be juxtaposed against Lawton’s translation and highlight Lawton’s various errors. It is not without its flaws.

I know it well!...

Superbly brazen secret-keepers... arrogant or vile or mute... one after the other... all that befouling evil disgorging under the moon’s torture bile and accursed vows! Poisons, dark messages... Martyred calves!

That everyone would attack the demon! persisting, lashing, slaughtering, repelling, finding in his heart the song, withered... the cuties' graceful secret... or let him perish a thousand deaths and then resurrect to a thousand sorrows!

In truly atrocious suffocation, with a thousand ornamental flayings and crude contortions of wounds, to a tenacious boiling pitch, torn, muscles in shreds, paddling thus for a whole day and three months, a week in the hollow of a hot and greasy pot, hissing snakes joined by bloated toads, with leprosy, juicy, yellow with venoms, gluttonous salamander suckers, repulsive vampires upon the corpses of the damned, wrigglers in your entrails to awaken your pain, in shreds of crumpled flesh, remasticated by darts of fire, so for thousands upon thousands of years, only willing to appease your thirst with a wineskin of vinegar, with vitriol of such ardor that your tongue peels, bloats, bursts! while you pass into agonizing death all shrieking from Hell torn to pieces! day after day! persisting thus eternally...

You see that the thing is serious.

I encourage the reader to judge for themselves, in light of everything discussed above, whether or not Lawton’s translation holds up to scrutiny well enough to warrant publication, especially considering the fact that Lawton self-professedly reads and understands French at a native level. Not only that, he claims to have grown up speaking French in his own home with his parents.

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I contend that Lawton has failed. I contend his translations are insufficient, and are wholly divorced from their contextual, cultural, and authorial bases and origins. I contend they go so far as to completely gut the original work of its potency and character, instead replacing it with a shallow, shambling jaunt. There is perhaps no writer less disposed towards such a makeover than Celine.

Lawton’s treatment of Celine’s writing has transformed it from an acerbic, spiteful, and hateful screed into a melodramatic, sanitized, and passive victimizing soliloquy. The result is worse for the literary world than if we had no translation at all. One can imagine this process might parallel Lawton's contortion of his own troubled inner feelings and intentions into the farcical construction of his docile, harmless, and blameless public image.

Considering all of this, Lawton’s mission statement of bringing unique literature to readers solely out of a benevolent desire for its wider recognition seems dubious to say the least. I also raise the question of what these fundamental misunderstandings of the language in this excerpt of Guignol’s Band, and Celine as a writer as well, imply or indicate with respect to his treatment of the rest of the book, and, by extension, his comprehension of the French language as a whole. This is not even to mention the remaining languages in which he is apparently less fluent.

If so many errors abound in a single passage translated from his best-known language, what can we surmise about the rest?

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