eco's bones
Registered User
The entire project for me was just one coincidence after another. I originally worked on it between 2001 and 2003. The motivation was to find out how the story ended and anyone who reads The Seven Madmen knows that it is really one half of a novel which Arlt finished off a couple years later with the Flamethrowers. What can I say--my hockey team the Rangers were providing me with very long summers back then. Anyway I made a few inquiries but it didn't elicit any interest and I ended up shelving it for 13 years. To be honest it was all done the old fashioned way--typed out on typing paper (no pdf) and then I'd made several copies worth of the manuscript. It was also a mess with hundreds of typos and a lot of wrong turns. Over at Librarything a couple years ago I got into a conversation with an ex-pat former taxi driver originally from Eau Claire Wisc. His name is Rick Harsch. He'd published several novels--had a bunch of unpublished ones and had been living in Slovenia for about a dozen years with his family including his baseball crazy son. Anyway Arlt's name came up and he told me that in his first three published books that he named all his characters as a kind of nod to Arlt's nicknaming of characters and no one had ever picked up on it. So I pretty much gave him a rundown of what happens in the Flamethrowers. And then he wanted to know how I knew and when he found out I'd translated it he wanted to see it and a couple weeks later I mailed him 200 pages worth of unbound typed manuscript.
He ended up talking to his editor about publishing it as is. I didn't like that idea and neither did his editor. Eventually we decided to clean it up and make a pdf. I started working on it again though and cleaning it up turned into not only cleaning but fixing everything. After that it was finding the right publisher.....or a right publisher. The idea was that if it were at all possible that the publisher would also publish The Seven Madmen---the obvious choice then was NYRB. They had the only publisher that were still in print on Arlt's Madmen. They had the Caistor translation though and I had always worked with the Lindstrom translation in mind and actually liked it better. NYRB were interested---I linked it to them--they lost it in the shuffle--I got back to them after about 3 monts---they apologized. In a conversation with the editor there I mentioned how I wanted both ends of the book out of the same house. He started running down Lindstrom all of a sudden out of nowhere and then things went south when I didn't agree with that. The fact is I'd had conversations with Lindstrom way back in 2002 and she was always nice to me. Things went quiet then. But the guy at Riverboat was interested too and I'd read his 1200 and some page Zabala novel---The Mad Patagonian which is f***ing awesome. It's more of a startup but hey I'm not bankrolling it and I'm an old punk rock guy and have all kinds of LP's off from 70's 80's independent record labels. That doesn't bother me. I never figured to make much out of this anyway.
