Leaf by Leaf

IN THE WAKE OF THE WAKE: The Calf by Leif Høghaug - Translated by David M. Smith

The video reviews Leif Høghaug’s experimental novella The Calf, newly rendered into English by David M. Smith. Smith chose a Southern Appalachian dialect to mirror the original Norwegian regional speech, turning the translation itself into a literary performance. Chris explains how the book collapses waking life and dream logic, using cubist imagery—cubes, spheres, multiple perspectives—to create a looping, Sisyphian narrative. The text repeatedly returns to “chain‑tooth voices,” a metaphor for the internal chatter that persists across memory and language. Key passages cited include a sky‑scraping hourglass emptied to the bottom and a counter‑clockwise summer‑night dream that folds into an elevator plunge. Høghaug opens with a fall reminiscent of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and closes with a hopeful apple, underscoring the work’s cyclical structure. The review argues that The Calf demonstrates how translation can be an act of creation, blurring the line between source and target. For publishers and readers, it signals a growing appetite for avant‑garde works that challenge conventional narrative and linguistic boundaries.