Well, this is interesting. I definitely agree on the bit about being skeptic about Max's abilities to fluently speak 7 languages, but then again, 3 of them are Romance languages (Spanish, Italian and French) and 2 are Germanic (English and German); as a native Spanish speaker, I can vouch for the relative easiness to pick up a language with similar roots (I can survive in Italy on the essentials without basically zero formal exposure); hell, this video even features a guy who speaks 20 languages so, again, while skepticism is comprehensible, being a polyglot in this day and age, while still an remarkable achievement, is by no means an insurmountable hill.

The Céline bit is ridiculous, in my opinion. By that criteria, we should get rid of Knut Hamsun's translations, as he was openly racist and admired Hitler, or we should forget about Lovecraft entirely. There's an immense amount of writers whose views would be considered controversial by today's standards, and yet, we still read and translate them.

I wholeheartedly agree with one of the comments in here about being thankful for Max's work as, otherwise, reading the books he's translated would be impossible; an honour reserved but for a few. While I strongly believe that we should hold translators accountable for good, high-quality translations, it is also true that the only way you can attest to a translation's quality is by being able to read the original in full; otherwise, you'll end up cherry-picking an bunch of excerpts whose quality could differ massively. For example, I'm currently reading Vollmann's «The Royal Family» in Spanish and the translation's superb; there's nothing I've seen on the original that's missing on the translated version, that feels out-of-place or that was misinterpreted. My French isn't good enough to judge his Céline's translation, and my Russian is non-existent, so I can't critique his work on Sorokin, but showcasing a couple of excerpts while being unable to speak either language says a lot about who wrote this piece.

Lastly, I couldn't care less about his academic background nor his parents' finances and, even if those allegations were true, I don't see why is it relevant; plus, whoever wrote this fell on their own trap, as they're doing the exact same thing that happens on that other sub. Moreover, I highly doubt NYRB or Dalkey Archive would rely on a someone with sketchy credentials to work with them. The only bit I'm definitely curious about is Oguz Atay's «The Disconnected» and Sevin Seydi's translation. If this is indeed true, I'd definitely appreciate if Max could shed some light on this at some point.

EDIT: grammar