An Interview with Douglas Robinson

I’m a much-published scholar of translation, literature, rhetoric, and semiotics (forty books, one hundred and twenty articles) who has always wanted to be a published novelist – and now my fourth published novel is out! My first novel followed the life of Finland’s most controversial poet and translator, Pentti Saarikoski – published in Finland, in Finnish translation. My second novel, The Last Days of Maiju Lassila, was a pseudo translation: I wrote it but pretended I translated it. My third was Insecticide: A Republican Romance, an alternative history where the Bush family creates a new Republic of Texas as a police-state paradise. I’ll tell the story of my fourth novel in this interview, but I also want to mention a book I’m particularly proud of: Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia, a transcreation of an unfinished posthumous novel by Finland’s greatest modernist writer, Volter Kilpi. In a way it’s the opposite of The Last Days of Maiju Lassila, where that was my original novel that I pretended to have translated, Gulliver was Kilpi’s original novel that I trans-created but pretended to have edited in English.

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Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

This was an easy one. Since the novel begins with my stage adaptation of Pushkin’s 1837 verse novel Eugene Onegin and is partly narrated by Vladimir Nabokov’s ghost (and the character Douglas Robinson tells Nabokov’s ghost that he found Nabokov’s English translation of Onegin boring, because he didn’t DO anything with it), there was only ever one possible title: the joking one Nabokov gave Eugene Onegin. Nabokov, a Russian, knew of course that Onegin is pronounced ahn-YAY-gin, with a hard g as in gate; but it’s funny to read it wrong as one-gin, with the soft g as in cotton gin. And once you’re saying one-gin, why not reduce Eugene to you-gin as well?

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

I’ve always loved Atmosphere’s book covers. The design team is brilliant!

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I have always loved writing – academic books, plays, novels, translations – because I’ve always loved reading and have longed to create things as wonderful as the books I’ve enjoyed in my life. There have been lots of influences, especially the long list of classic comic novels beginning with Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. But by far the biggest influence on this book was Vladimir Nabokov, especially his tripartite novel Pale Fire: first 999-line poem in heroic verse by John Shade, one hundred and fifty-page commentary on the poem by Shade’s neighbor Charles Kinbote that hijacks the poem in order to tell a cockamamie story of a deposed king (supposedly Kinbote himself), and a gloriously funny index. So instead of a poem, I have a play – a stage adaptation of Pushkin. Instead of a line-by-line commentary, I have a two-part narration of the bizarre incidents arising out of the student-and-faculty production of the play at the fictitious Liberal State University in Liberal, Kansas. And instead of the index (how I wish I had thought of that index before Nabokov!) I have a whole convoluted frame in which the managing director of the Liberal State University Press introduces the volume (and gets it wrong) and then at the end receives a letter from the president of the Kansas State Board of Regents claiming that neither Liberal State University nor the Liberal State University Press has ever existed. The managing director notes wryly that that person is not only NOT the president of the Board of Regents but is also a completely fictitious person.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I’ve been a professor of English and translation studies for decades, but have also worked as a lifeguard, a green-chain puller in a sawmill, and the guy who fed the digital instructions into the cutting machines in a steel mill. I once had a dog named Champ. My parents named him out of patriotic pride at the many US gold medals at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, when the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc nations boycotted the event, in retaliation against the US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

Hard to identify just one, because the whole experience with Atmosphere Press was absolutely wonderful! Okay, two stand out: my novel is/was strange, but the development editor really got it and helped me improve it in many ways; and the design team was a miracle.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Russian pop/rock songs by Nogu Svelo (Russia’s Frank Zappa – especially one like Poslednyi Put (The Last Journey) and Mango Mango, especially Gorit Benzobak, Puli, Kosmonafty, and Golub.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

Loves great literature but isn’t pious about it; enjoys weird sf/fantasy.

What creative projects are you currently working on?

Lord Trump the Undead Through the Looking-Glass (the sequel to Lord Trump the Undead, forthcoming from Nat 1 Publishing.

How was working with Atmosphere Press? What would you tell other writers who want to publish?

I was writing plays and novels that I thought were wonderful – wonderfully weird – and no one wanted to produce the plays or publish the novels. Atmosphere took a chance on my Last Days of Maiju Lassila, and the experience of seeing that book through production gave me confidence in my ability to write a publishable novel. The result has been two more published novels and one forthcoming one!

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