I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity.

Be careful what you wish for, Nabokov…

Contents

1. Introduction
2. How to Play
3. Files & Features
4. Purchase

Introduction

This is a game about a Writer and a Translator who have every reason to be the dearest of friends, most vicious of enemies, or even both. Writer left their home under great duress, bound for a foreign land; Translator, out of pity and admiration, supported them in their time of need. Now, Writer is working on their magnum opus; Translator is appending their lines with footnotes to relay its deeper meanings… or so they think. Perhaps Writer disagrees. Perhaps Translator knows them better than they know themself.

The two are set on an inevitable collision course:
like armies marching grimly in their battle lines;
like hands reaching elbows in jocular embrace;
like skyscrapers blotting out the sun.

How to Play

Like Skyscrapers Blotting Out The Sun is a 2-player game of excessive footnotes, killing the author (figuratively only, please), and woes in translation.

It begins with a single page of paper. One of you plays Writer, setting down their story line by line from top to bottom. The other of you plays Translator, sitting across the table from Writer and writing footnotes up the page from bottom to top. Each footnote links to something in Writer’s story and explains what (Translator thinks) it means and how it connects to Writer’s history and opinions on all kinds of things.

Each page ends when Writer’s lines and Translator’s footnotes inevitably collide. Between pages you discuss the events of Writer and Translator’s life together before either starting another page or ending the magnum opus.

Along the way, you can turn to four card oracles for inspiration:

• The Seed Oracle gives Writer 52 themed key words, phrases, and ideas for their story, or the next page, or their next turn.
• The Footnote Oracle gives Translator nearly 52 subjects for their footnotes, ranging from Writer’s opinions on the new country’s culture or the act of translation to linguistic techniques and veiled remarks about your peers.
• The Event Oracle gives both of you over 13 events that might happen in Writer and Translator’s fraught life together, such as news from the old country, literary fads, and the dreaded writer’s block.
• The Figure Oracle gives you nearly 52 people Writer and Translator might meet in their day-to-day lives, from other writers, to book-making and -selling labourers, to government officials, to literary critics.

Files & Features

Like Skyscrapers comes in 2 forms: an HTML file with custom fonts and interactive features and an EPUB file/ebook.

The HTML file is TTS-friendly, responsive to your screen size, and has a slew of display controls, from colour schemes to text formatting! Not only that, it has play diagrams to explain the game, navigation links to help you traverse the text, and even a built-in generator for grabbing random prompts from the oracles. All this is encoded in the file itself, so you only have one file to handle, just like a .pdf.

1. “left their home”, a fictionalisation of Vladimir Nabokov’s complex emigration from Russia to the U.S.A. from 1917 to 1940.
2. “supported them”, referring to the U.S. literary critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson, who became fast friends with Nabokov and helped him find work.
3. “magnum opus”, meaning “great work”, often defined by critics as an enduring masterpiece that aims for or receives critical praise.
4. “battle lines”, a double meaning referring to lines of text as well as military formations.
5. “jocular embrace”, referring to an entry in Nabokov’s dream journal after his and Wilson’s bitter falling-out over his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: “somebody on the stairs behind me takes me by the elbows. E. W. Jocular reconciliation.”
6. “like skyscrapers”, referring to Nabokov’s demand for “translations with […] footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page” while arguing for direct translations with extensive explanatory notes rather than “localised” translations that change the writer’s original meaning to something familiar to the translator’s audience.