On Earth As It Is Beneath is one of this month’s New York Times “Best New Horror Books”

I’m both excited that The New York Times ran a lovely review of my translation of Ana Paula Maia’s chilling novel On Earth As It Is Beneath and puzzled that the fact of it being translated wasn’t mentioned in the review. Yes, it’s a short piece, but it specifically praises the book’s prose without engaging the question of how it came to manifest in English. Ana Paula is a wonderful writer and I would never want to take anything away from her artistry, but this does highlight the issue Edith Grossman discusses in her book Why Translation Matters, which I happen to be reading with my Translation Workshop at the University of Arkansas this fall: that few reviewers know how to assess a translation. I think I can offer some suggestions, starting with a simple acknowledgment that the prose is translated, describing how it reads, and judging it against itself for matters such as consistency, charge, tonal appropriateness. Sure, you may not be able to speculate on its relation to the original, but most readers won’t have access to the original either, so that’s not an excuse for pretending the text didn’t cross over. I’m not saying it should be the focus of a review, not at all, just one salient aspect, not simply to be overlooked.