Intrigued by the collaboration between Max Lawton and Francesco Pacifico, most recently on the translation of Antonio Moresco’s Gli Esordi (The Beginnings, Deep Vellum, 2026), a surreal, experimental novel which is the first book in the author’s Games of Eternity trilogy, I decided to ask them about it.
Anne Milano Appel: I haven’t read Moresco’s The Beginnings yet, but I am intrigued by the fact that the credits read: “translated by Max Lawton / edited by Francesco Pacifico.” Since editors are not usually credited for their contribution to a text, I wonder about the dynamics of the working relationship in this case. Would you talk about that?
Francesco Pacifico: Max asked me to get involved in this as he sensed that Moresco’s Italian in Gli Esordi was kind of deceiving. I confirmed and told him I would be a sort of witness of Moresco’s whims. Most of my work turned out to be notes where to his “can’t be what I think it means” I’d reply “and yet…”. In short, there had to be somebody to confirm that the level of fun Moresco had in warping the normal usage of words was as simple as the fun of reading him in the original.
Max Lawton: I think it’s nice to let Francesco have the first word in this interview. It is his wisdom that makes this work possible. He was a mentor to me as we went along. A big brother. An elder seer. And just as we were getting started, he said something to me that has stuck in my mind throughout the process: it is impossible to get out of English in your translation of Moresco in the same way that Antonio got out of Italian in his original text. “Be brave, Max! You can’t get out of it in the same way!” So I attempted an escape from English that was parallel to Moresco’s from Italian. Platonov’s escape from Russian in his texts was also very inspiring to me as I worked. Like Bill Vollmann (an old friend of Antonio’s) told me on the phone when I described The Beginnings to him: “So much defamiliarization it sounds like Platonov would be envious!”
I would also like to express my gratitude to Richard Dixon, whose brilliant translation of Distant Light caught my fancy during college and whose translation of Clandestinity, Moresco’s first book, should be read as an introduction to the great writer––perhaps even before The Beginnings. Clandestinity was a late debut––published when Moresco was 45. And Dixon is enormously successful at tapping into the feral energy of Moresco’s early style. Which I have also attempted to do in The Beginnings.
AMA: A great word, defamiliarization, that goes beyond Venuti’s domestication and foreignization. When did you two start collaborating? And is The Beginnings your first project together?
FP: It’s our first project. We have the whole trilogy to tackle, and maybe some other stuff.
ML: I wrote to Francesco when I was in Istanbul in 2021. I was very intimidated to be writing to him. I remember I was alone at a neighborhood tavern eating a spiral of intestines (kokoreç) and drinking rakı as I composed my email. I felt like I was asking permission to take on a great labor. To do justice to the William Blake (and Cosmo Kramer) of Italy. But also the Marquis de Sade. I felt the enormous responsibility of the work on my shoulders. But Francesco was very relaxed and, having been put in touch with me by Mark Krotov, the first person who published my Sorokin translations in n+1, I think Francesco naturally trusted the purity of my intentions and believed in my ability. The work started slowly. I sampled the first two books of the trilogy and Francesco edited my samples. A few periodicals considered publishing excerpts. Didn’t. Bigger, more cowardly publishers considered the samples, then declined to publish the trilogy. Will Evans of Deep Vellum took a leap of faith and that was that. We are also going to (hopefully) do Horcynus Orca together for Will, as was previously announced. But that was before certain, ahem, political difficulties reared their heads.
AMA: Do you share a similar philosophy and approach to translation, or do your methods and views differ? If so, how?
FP: I think we both see it from the chaotic perspective of admiring fellow writers. One thing I noticed working with editors on my novel is that an editor who is a novelist will have deep empathy for whatever strange thing you are trying to do, since they know how difficult it is to move bodies, and things, and language, on the page. Maybe it’s the same with translators who are writers. For us the main thing is the amazement at how the writer we’re translating is managing to conjure up magic from the most mundane words.
ML: I think Francesco and I are both bad babysitters. We are interested in and in love with writers who swim as far out to sea as they can. I translate in the same way that I babysit my nephew. Whatever he wants to eat (within reason), he gets. Whole boxes of Eggo waffles. OK. Egg McMuffins. OK. Milkshakes. OK. You want to watch Gremlins? Great, but I’m gonna fast-forward the scene when the kremlin gets blown up in the microwave.
The only difference is there’s no fast-forwarding with the books I translate. Francesco and I are both willing to go off-road. Not just willing. If our author goes off-road, we MUST follow. I think translators are sometimes frightened of going off-road. You shouldn’t be! If your writer is misusing language, you have a moral and ethical obligation to follow them in also distorting, mangling, destroying… See how far out you can swim. I promise you won’t get eaten by sharks. As a reader, there is no worse feeling than hearing about an extreme and original author, then reading that author in translation and encountering a totally neutered thing.
AMA: I have never done a co-translation, and my editors have never played the role of co-translator. I sense that this is not the usual translation “a quattro mani.” Indeed the copyright is attributed to Max: “Translation copyright © 2026 Max Lawton”. In what way does your translation differ from what is generally understood to be a co-translation?
FP: I think you can figure out the answer by now. I was more of a co-pilot. He was doing the hard work, I was telling him if he was driving off the road (he wasn’t, but Moresco’s road looks a lot like he’s off the road). All in all, the style is all Max’s. I was a fan shouting “go get him, brother, go crash against that wall!” It was exhilarating, at least for me. Max, on the other hand, seems to be able to take a lot of physical punishment from these long translations. I am still recovering from a thousand pages of Dickens (Bleak House), and I don’t know when I’ll have the courage to do some translation work again.
ML: Francesco was my spotter. We were squatting Olympics-worthy amounts of words. Man, did our thighs get big… Of course, Francesco sometimes offered alternative choices for tricky bits, but, for the most part, his job as noted earlier was to make sure we were departing from English in the same way by which Moresco had departed from Italian. Our discoursing about the translation and the original was hilarious and mind-melting in equal measure. I’d highlight something in my translation and paste the Italian into a comment.
“WTF???” I’d write.
“Hahahahahahaha what IS that?” Francesco would respond.
We would die laughing on Zoom as we tried to parse some of Antonio’s more radical moments. For a man who I don’t believe ever took psychedelic drugs, Antonio manages to pixelate (shuck!) the world more effectively than any DMT trip. As Francesco writes in his intro and I write in my afterword, this is one of the most strangely written books in the history, not just of Italian, but of any language that I can read. Some of it is almost impossible to parse. Whereas some of it is as smooth as butter and segues nicely into the Hollywood rhythms and readability of Songs of Chaos, the second book in the trilogy.
AMA: How does your collaboration affect the final outcome? Does it improve the translation? In what way?
FP: Sometimes translation feels like a new layer of editing work. The need to bring stuff into another language lets you catch whatever had remained a bit unresolved. But still we’ve let Gli Esordi be crazy and mostly unresolvable. I think we haven’t ruined it, I think it sounds impossible and simple in the English as well. From us, it was pure love and laughter.
ML: Yes, exactly, pure love and laughter. The collaboration allowed me to be extremely bold and not normalize strange moments. In fact, Francesco often encouraged me to be even more out to lunch. Without Francesco, I think I would have tiptoed more, thinking that there was no possible way the original could have been as bizarrely denatured / defamiliarized as it seemed. Well, most of the time, it was!
AMA: On a practical level, how did you divide the various phases and aspects of the work?
FP: Max worked. He texted me. Usually at a time when it was dark in Italy. I almost always replied from my phone, from the street, or from my bed. He wrote whenever he was suspicious of a word’s misuse. He was right almost all the time. I’d give him some context about the word and confirm Moresco was misusing, and to what effect. This was the bulk of my involvement. Then I also read the thing twice to see if it was moving in a way that wouldn’t misinterpret Moresco’s fictional persona and world building.
ML: I’d produced a third draft by the time I sent it to Francesco. Then Francesco gave me notes. Then the deadline came up faster than expected and we had the most difficult 40 days of editing I’ve ever engaged in. This was six or seven hours a day of mental gymnastics. I don’t think my brain will ever recover. Our editor at Deep Vellum, Walker Rutter-Bowman, and our proofreader, Dylan MacNeil, were also deeply important parts of this process. Before we started editing, we had this insane fractal. An unusable Word document with a billion comments. We had to turn that into the photograph of a fractal, but also a polished gemstone that you can purchase at a shopping mall. I still don’t know how we managed it. I must have been in a fugue state. Francesco made himself so available to me and was a true knight of literature through the whole process. He should’ve been paid a million dollars! After this first book, we are already brothers for life. God knows what we’ll be after the whole trilogy and Horcynus Orca…
AMA: Max, you have been primarily known to translate Russian literature into English, though you speak six or seven languages. How did Italian come to be part of your toolbox? In a video you mentioned studying Italian for two years, as well as your use of editors, and expressed the idea that a translator should “not have the hubris of doing everything on your own.”
FP: Just want to confirm that Max speaks good (and funnily poetical) Italian.
ML: Thank you for defanging the conspiracy theories, Francesco! Well, French is actually my first language and I have taken a lot of Spanish and Italian classes. I like to joke that I am fluent in three modern dialects of Latin. At Columbia, during my PhD, instead of focusing on my dissertation, I took two years of intensive, eight-hour-per-week Italian classes with a bunch of undergrads. Did the same with German. My Italian teacher thought I was very odd and didn’t understand my obsession with Moresco and D’Arrigo. Meanwhile, my dissertation advisor was bummed I was spending so much time in Italian and German classes. I am also lucky to spend a lot of time in Italy––Florence specifically––at the Baronessa Beatrice Monti’s retreat for writers. She is a great patron of mine, I suppose you’d say in the Renaissance sense, and she is very strict about my Italian. Instrumental in making me speak well. Nothing like a 98-year-old old woman who hung around with Malaparte and Pound correcting you!
I have spent a truly enormous amount of time studying Russian and with Russian people, so I feel very confident in Russian, just as I feel confident in French. With my other languages, I just want somebody to look over my shoulder. I read with great fluency in all of my languages, but there are so many subtleties in written language––I don’t want to miss any of them if I can help it! Even with French and Russian, I want other eyes on my ms. Why not?? I think this should be more standard practice, especially for publishers with budget to burn. I always want more comments and feedback rather than less. And I think Francesco will be credited differently on Horcynus Orca. As a “with” translator rather than as an editor. Which means I will still be leading the charge and doing most of the work, but this will open up an avenue for him to do more direct interventions in that truly impossible book.
AMA: Francesco, in a 2017 interview you are quoted as having said “I loved changing things in the translation …Choices have to be made.” And you recalled that you and the interviewer once “rewrote an Emilio Gadda story in English.” Which of course reminded me of Borges’ Menard. It raises the questions such as where do the borders of translation lie? As well as questions of authorship. Would you talk about that?
FP: Thank you for bringing that up. Well, Adam Thirlwell and I did that fun thing on a Gadda story and realized one (we) could not simply translate it. My idea is that a thorough translation is more of a thing that the market requires, for its implied taxonomy. But when you translate you get sucked in the whirlwind, and it makes you fret, makes you want to add layers. I also think that Italian, for all its Latin and Medieval undertones, is always adding a ton of layers to whatever we translate into it anyway.
AMA: And a question for you both: Do you see yourselves in the “traduttore-traditore” role, or as transformers and re-creators, maybe even liberators of the original text?
FP: I wanted to be a novelist as a teenager. I’m in awe of having access to word files where books (mine or otherwise) are fermenting.
ML: I like something Vladimir Sorokin always says to me: “You should translate worlds, not words.” I agree with this approach. “But don’t forget the words as you go!” I would also add. I aim to stylize in parallel with the original. Indeed, I want the reader of my translation to have an experience of the text that is similar to the native speaker’s experience with the original. Affective translation. World translation. But never forgetting the words! Like Francesco, I am in awe of this access I have to fucked-up Word files that crash constantly––Word files in which we are building the future of world literature.
When I think that my job for 2026 is to work on books by Moresco, Sorokin, and Limonov, this really is a dream come true. I adore the work I do and am enormously lucky.
AMA: Thank you, Max and Francesco, for your candid responses and for your enthusiastic willingness to let readers get to know you.
Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. His translation of Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh was one of the most anticipated English-language titles of 2025. His first novel Progress is coming out with Verso in 2027. He lives in Los Angeles, where, when he isn’t writing, he plays heavy metal and noise music.
Francesco Pacifico is the author of The Story of My Purity (Penguin). He has written for a number of Italian publications, as well as for Rolling Stone and GQ, and has translated into Italian the works of Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dave Eggers, Will Eisner, and more. He lives in Rome.
Anne Milano Appel has translated texts by a number of leading Italian authors for US and UK publishers. Her shorter works have appeared in a variety of literary journals. Her website is: https://amilanoappel.com/
This is a timely piece that I will circulate widely. Collaboration is at the forefront of my mind, especially collaborations that are transparent to the reading public. Thanks for this.