Infinite Jest Around the World: Translating DFW's 1,000 Page Mega-Novel

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TL;DR

The single best map the archive holds of Infinite Jest as a world object: Veronica Esposito's 2016 (20th-anniversary) LitHub roundup, built from interviews with writers, translators, and publishers in eight countries. Its through-line is how slowly the novel has travelled — five languages in twenty years, a Greek sixth only 20% drafted — and why: the same American cultural saturation the book satirizes is what makes it legible abroad (the "Trojan Horse" irony Esposito enjoys). Along the way the translators give craft testimony that doubles as prose-design evidence — Wallace's 500-plus-word sentences, his register-mixing, his purposefully obsolete vocabulary, his acronyms — the very features they most struggle to carry. It is also the fuller, English companion to Blumenbach's German Spiegel interview.

Key claims

The slow globalization. Infinite Jest, "released in the States in 1996, it has in 20 years been translated into just five languages. (A sixth translation into Greek is currently in the works.)" Esposito clocks it against faster travellers (Knausgaard's My Struggle, in 20 languages within five years) and slower ones (Quixote).
Italy first, 2000. Giovanna Granato (translator of The Pale King and Oblivion) places Wallace in an Italian cult for difficult writers — "There has always been a cult for difficult writers such as Joyce or Pound, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein" — and frames Italian readers' relation to him as love: those who take him on "accept everything that comes from him, even if it’s alien to them, and find it beautiful." She read Infinite Jest twice, the second time nightly while translating The Pale King "to keep hearing Wallace’s voice in my mind".
Spain, 2002; Argentina; Mexico. Javier Calvo and Marcelo Covián translated it in 2002; the novelist Germán Sierra recalls the early scene as "kind of ‘culty’". Wallace's strongest Spanish-language mark is on the aggressively postmodern Nocilla Generation. In Argentina, Rodrigo Fresán finds "Jest is far more talked about than read, a thing that has increased since the novelist’s suicide and sanctification". In Mexico, editor Guillermo Nuñez says it is famous but likely not read in full, and appeals because it "talks very clearly (with its complexity) about the ethos of our time and our downward spiral into a tyranny of Entertainment and Spectacle."
Germany, 2009 (the Blumenbach data). The decision to translate followed the 100,000-copy success of a stand-alone "Shipping Out." Blumenbach reports "Unendlicher Spaß has by now sold 70,000 copies, which in Germany is an absolutely fantastic success for a book of this complexity" — a reception, he guessed, unmatched since Wollschläger's Ulysses in 1975. He annotated the text and "the publishers put those sixty pages of annotations on their website for a while", relied on the OED and "the German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm" to replace Wallace's purposefully obsolete words with equally archaic German, and closes on veneration: "I love him. He is (okay: up there with Joyce) THE author of my life."
Brazil, 2014. Caetano Galindo — who also translated Ulysses — used the DFW Wiki and wallace-l; he ranks Jest his second-hardest translation ever. To him Wallace is "a freaking genius. Probably the most ‘honest’ writer since Tolstoi."
France, August 2015. L'Infinie comédie "launched with a boom, selling 20,000 copies in its first four months." Publisher Olivier Cohen credits the French love of the écrivain maudit — "A writer who seems to have been sacrificing his life on the altar of literature is seen as a hero" — and notes most of Wallace's other work had already been translated: it was "as if all of Joyce’s work had been published, except Ulysses".
Greece, the bleeding edge. Kostas Kaltsas, ~20% through, names the hardest problems as prose-design problems: Wallace's 500-plus-word subordinate-clause sentences, and register-mixing where "the mixing of registers in some passages is despair-inducing". Acronyms defeat translation — the ‘N.C.A.A.’ legible inside ‘O.N.A.N.C.A.A.’ becomes an opaque ‘A.B.N.A.N.K.A.Σ.’ — and Greek's lack of an "’s" possessive turns Wallace's chained possessives into "the pulleys of the rope of the flag of the flagpole of the station."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's prose is built from features engineered for effect — very long subordinate-clause sentences, rapid register-shifting, chained possessives, and a deliberately archaic/obsolete vocabulary — which is why they are precisely what translators fight hardest to preserve

Crux: prose-tempo-design
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [secondary] Esposito, reporting Kaltsas's challenges: Wallace's "love of 500+ word sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses"; on registers, "few writers in recent memory used more than Wallace" — and Kaltsas directly: "the mixing of registers in some passages is despair-inducing". [Greece section]
- [secondary] The acronym design in Kaltsas's own words (the ‘N.C.A.A.’ inside ‘O.N.A.N.C.A.A.’ orients the reader; the Greek ‘A.B.N.A.N.K.A.Σ.’ is "just hopeless"), and Esposito's report of the chained possessives ("the pulleys of the rope of the flag of the flagpole of the station") — features that resist translation because they are load-bearing in the original. [Greece section]
- [secondary] Esposito on Blumenbach's method: the Grimm dictionary "helped him replace Wallace’s purposefully obsolete words with equally archaic German" — the obsolescence treated as intentional design. [Germany section]
Notes: Translator testimony is craft evidence: what a translator must reproduce is a description of what the prose is doing. Endorses prose-tempo-design (rhythm/length) and touches encyclopedic-design (the archaic-vocabulary and acronym systems). Convergent with Blumenbach's German-side punctuation-as-breath claim (see cross-refs). Two of the three bullets reach the note through Esposito's narration of what the translators told her, not direct translator speech — attribution preserved as such.

THEORY: Infinite Jest reads abroad as a clear diagnosis of a culture given over to entertainment and spectacle — its central thesis transmits across cultures precisely where American media culture has saturated them

Crux: entertainment-lethality
Stance: mentions
Evidence:
- [secondary] Nuñez: the novel appeals to Mexican readers because it "talks very clearly (with its complexity) about the ethos of our time and our downward spiral into a tyranny of Entertainment and Spectacle." [Mexico section]
- [secondary] Esposito's framing: American cultural saturation is what makes the book legible abroad — a "Trojan Horse" delivery of a critique of the same capitalism. [throughout]
Notes: A reception-side sighting of the entertainment-addiction thesis, not an argument for or against its mechanism; recorded for the popularity axis (cross-cultural legibility of the thesis). Kept to mentions — no translator develops the lethal-film continuity claim.

Themes

Translation and world reception (eight national receptions of one novel); prose and design (long sentences, register-mixing, archaic vocabulary, acronyms, chained possessives — the features translation stresses most); the écrivain maudit myth and the suicide's effect on reception; entertainment/spectacle as a cross-culturally legible theme; American cultural hegemony as both obstacle and vehicle.

Cross-references

The German section is the English companion to Blumenbach's Spiegel interview Zehn Wahrheiten: the two cross-reference each other, and Esposito supplies the German sales figure (70,000), the OED-plus-Grimm method, and the sixty pages of annotations that the Spiegel piece does not.
The French section (Cohen, L'Infinie comédie, the écrivain maudit) is the compressed version of the saga told at length in «L'Infinie Comédie» and reviewed critically in L'infinie comédie et la tâche ingrate du traducteur.

Notable passages

Verbatim (curly quotes, em-dashes, and the Greek Σ preserved).

"released in the States in 1996, it has in 20 years been translated into just five languages. (A sixth translation into Greek is currently in the works.)"
Granato: "During the day I translated the book and at night, before going to sleep, I read Infinite Jest to keep hearing Wallace’s voice in my mind".
Kaltsas: "the mixing of registers in some passages is despair-inducing".
Kaltsas: "the ‘N.C.A.A.’ in ‘O.N.A.N.C.A.A.’ sticks out in the original, so the reader is at least partially oriented the first time she comes across it, but in Greek you end up with something like ‘A.B.N.A.N.K.A.Σ.’ which is just hopeless."
Blumenbach: "I love him. He is (okay: up there with Joyce) THE author of my life."
Cohen: "A writer who seems to have been sacrificing his life on the altar of literature is seen as a hero."
Galindo: "a freaking genius. Probably the most ‘honest’ writer since Tolstoi."