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 cowboy-translator. 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 pro-Kremlin youth group outside Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.
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