Translating the post-exotic writer Antoine Volodine

Antoine Volodine is the primary pseudonym of a French-Russian writer of many books. The meditative, postapocalyptic noir Mevlido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm, is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse that asks what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world. Here, Stamm is joined in conversation with Joshua Armstrong about translating this key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe.

Gina M. Stamm is assistant professor of French at the University of Alabama.

Joshua Armstrong is associate professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Mevlido’s Dreams: A Post-Exotic Novel is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“Translator Stamm does an admirable job of rendering Volodine’s serpentine prose in English, and the noirish, surrealist story turns into an unlikely romp as it riffs on the absurdity of 20th-century political institutions and pop culture.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Certainly the strangest and arguably one of the most accomplished contemporary writers of fiction in French, Antoine Volodine has created a vast and perplexing universe of bad dreams in several dozen works under a variety of pseudonyms over the past forty years. Mevlido’s Dreams provides a new pathway into Volodine’s labyrinth, which for all the horrors it recounts is always cast in stylishly crafted prose.”
—David Bellos, Princeton University