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Reviewed by George Henson

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Translation is both necessary and dangerous. Necessary because it carries a text—a culture—into another language, another readership, another field of attention. Dangerous because carrying is never neutral. It is handling, and handling leaves fingerprints.

Those fingerprints are most legible where the stakes are highest: in a translation’s handling of racial epithets and slurs, where a choice that looks like mere intensity or “grit” can, in fact, dislocate the novel’s geography of contempt.

Megan McDowell[1] is one of the most visible translators working from Spanish today, building her reputation working with major contemporary writers from Spain and the Southern Cone, including Sara Mesa, Gonzalo Torné, Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enríquez, and others, translations widely praised and repeatedly recognized by prizes and shortlists. There should be no doubt, then, that she is a competent, and often inspired, translator. The question is whether the Spanish of those authors—from or oriented toward Spain—is preparation for translating Mexican literature. From my reading of Eating Ashes, McDowell’s translation of Brenda Navarro’s Ceniza en la boca, I’d say it’s not.

When a translator becomes A-listed, she becomes marketable: a name that can be sold, often more than the author or book. In that system, translators are treated as broadly interchangeable across “Spanish,” and the question of fit is subordinated to the comfort of a familiar byline. Renown functions as a marketing asset and a risk hedge, and it can outweigh the translator’s specific knowledge of region, register, and social language, which begs the question: what happens when the industry’s incentives reward recognizability over linguistic and cultural competence.

Brenda Navarro is a Mexican novelist whose work has become central to recent conversations about migration, class, misogyny, and the abrasions of language itself. Eating Ashes makes unavoidable not only the question of how language wounds, but the question of who gets to carry that language into English, and what is lost when the translator doesn’t fully know the social and linguistic world the novel inhabits.

It is hard not to notice the bitter aptness of Navarro’s novel’s own vocabulary of the mouth. The Spanish title names a mouth, a “boca,” and McDowell’s English gives us eating and ashes, ingestion and residue. Yet what the translation serves up is not the mouth as organ of speech, with all its local grain and social music, but the mouth as palate: a controlled taste of Spanish, a calibrated heat. What remains in Spanish can feel less like preservation than placement. It is not the everyday Mexicanness of speech, its small intimacies, its unshowy idioms, that is most consistently allowed to survive, but the bits that read as garnish: a sharpened insult, a burst of profanity, a strategically placed token that signals “flavor” without demanding anything of the reader.

Eating Ashes is a novel of migration and aftermath, told in an intimate and unsparing voice. It follows an unnamed narrator and her younger brother Diego, shuttled between Mexico and Madrid in the wake of their mother’s migration for work, as they navigate school, labor, and the daily humiliations of class and foreignness, until Diego’s spiral and death leave the book haunted by what cannot be repaired. The book is also about language, about how contempt travels through nicknames, jokes, epithets, and inherited hierarchies, and about how a person’s register changes depending on who is listening and who is judging.

If the novel is, in part, an anatomy of register and contempt, then the translation’s handling of the most ordinary words is where its ethics become visible. At times, the domestication is so thorough it begins to feel less like a strategy than a compulsion to disinfect, to wash away any hint of Mexicanness that might cling to the sentence. The effect is as if even the smallest, most ordinary markers of a family’s speech, words as basic as “mamá” and “papá,” would somehow defile the English page unless scrubbed into something blander, safer, more easily digestible, such as “mom” and “dad.” The resulting transparency is not neutral. It is the transparency of a surface wiped clean.

Interestingly, however, McDowell does retain “abuelo” and “abuela.” That inconsistency is not a minor stylistic quirk. It becomes one of the translation’s tells. The Spanish that survives is not always the Spanish that is most intimate or most ordinary, but the Spanish that can be read as either “local color” or verbal aggression. “Abuelo” and “abuela” stay, while “mamá” and “papá” are scrubbed, as though grandparent terms confer warmth without demanding proximity, while the parental terms carry too much daily life, too much unglamorous domestic frequency, too much plain Mexicanness to be permitted on the page. (Curiously, the more formal “madre” is allowed to surface only when it arrives weaponized, in obscenities such as “chinga tu madre,” as though the language can be permitted its “madre” only in the form of a curse.)

This is, admittedly, a difficult topic. A review that criticizes a translation has to take the translator’s tradeoffs seriously: the constant choice between leaving Spanish in place or translating it, between preserving local texture or smoothing for ease, between readability and excessive glossing. And yet, the trouble here is not that choices are made. It is the direction those choices tend to take. The English repeatedly softens what is ordinary and locally marked into what is broadly legible, while preserving a narrower, more sensational band of Mexicanness. The result is an asymmetry: the foreign is invited to appear mostly when it can be read as insult, caricature, or menace, while the quieter textures of social language are pressed flat. At its worst, the translation does not merely carry over xenophobia, it retools it, collapsing distinct histories of contempt into a single, familiar Americanized repertoire, as though the only racism that can be intelligible in English is racism already prepackaged for English. This is not only a problem of meaning. It is a problem of where the translation chooses to locate Mexico on the English page: not in the rhythms of ordinary speech, not in the social calibration of address, but in a curated strip of verbal heat.

There is a grim irony that the translation itself supplies the perfect metaphor for what it too often does. “Who knows how the neighbors thought of us—as panchitas, Latinas, a nuisance, a stain on their neighborhood that couldn’t be washed away” (100). The word “washing” appears as an image of social contamination, the immigrant family as an unclean mark. But in this translation, washing becomes method as well as metaphor. The English repeatedly scrubs away the very kinds of linguistic residue that would let a reader encounter the text as written rather than as filtered. It offers the reader a stain, then hands them the detergent.

This is where the book’s ugliest choices become the most revealing. A slur is not a free-floating unit of grittiness. It is a historical instrument, with a target, an era, and a cultural radius. What the word “india” can do in Spain is not what it can do in Mexico. A translator has to hear those weights, not merely substitute whatever sounds harshest in English.

This is why translating “india” as “squaw” is neither bold nor daring; it imports a specific North American Anglo history of contempt that is not the one Navarro is staging. Importing that vocabulary does not preserve the book’s violence. The term does not simply “sound racist.” It drags behind it a whole cinematic history, the residue of mid-century Hollywood Westerns whose caricatures are so grotesque they are difficult to imagine being reproduced now without shame. The novel is not a 1950s Western, and Spain’s contempt is not that American frontier fantasy. It replaces a Spain-specific social weapon with a different, louder, more familiar American racism, as if the two were either contemporaneous or analogous.

The same replacement of specificity with a ready-made American script, appears in McDowell’s handling of “panchita.” The slur is doing double duty. On the one hand, it riffs on Pancho, the common Mexican nickname for Francisco, and the diminutive does what diminutives so often do in slurs: it miniaturizes in order to demean, turning a name into a dismissive category. It also borrows a cheap metonymy from its other meaning, a fried, salted peanut, letting the peanut’s color stand in for skin and turning a person into something you can name and dismiss. In Spain, it lands as condescension aimed at Latin American migrants, at once dismissive and contemptuous, a slur that both dehumanizes and racializes.

That is precisely why translating it as “wetback” is not merely imperfect but fundamentally misconceived. It swaps a Spain-specific slur, with its particular tonal mix of diminutive disdain, for an American border insult that belongs to a different history and a different scene. Whatever brutality “wetback” carries, it is not the brutality Navarro is staging, and the substitution flattens nuance into a blunt instrument. Repeated again and again, it does not clarify. It rewrites. It also invites a second distortion: once the translation has chosen that American repertoire, it starts to sound as though every instance of Spanish contempt is simply another synonym for that same border lexicon. Which is exactly what happens when “No son de aquí, son panchitos” becomes “They’re not from here, they’re panchitos, wetbacks, illegals” (29). The Spanish line is already sufficient in its contempt. The English is a racist pile-on. McDowell repeats the pile-on in her translation of “India, maruja, maruja!” which she renders as “You peasant, you wetback, you greaser!” (50). I can live with “peasant” (it is certainly preferable to “squaw”), but nothing about “maruja” (a nickname for “María” that is also used as a classed slur for a small-minded “housewife” type, gossipy and vulgar) suggests either “wetback” or “greaser.”

None of this is to deny the real pressures a translator works under, or the difficulty of these choices. It is to insist that the difficulty not become an alibi. The task is not to flee from culturally specific language but to run toward it, or, in the words of Schleiermacher: “Either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer toward the reader” (42). McDowell too often makes Schleiermacher’s second option the default setting: rather than letting Navarro’s Spanish remain itself and asking the English reader to lean in, she normalizes the text into the idiom of U.S. readability, leveling dialect and tone and replacing local contempt with a familiar American lexicon of hate.

What follows from this is not a demand for purity, nor a wish that the novel be made “nice.” The novel is not nice, and it should not be. The demand is narrower and more serious: that the translation preserve the book’s social intelligence, its distinctions, its geography of contempt, its shifting registers of belonging and exclusion.

Nor is the aim of this essay to police every choice McDowell makes. Her translation is workmanlike as one might expect. The deeper issue is a recurring pattern of substitution. Consider a small example that would be easy to dismiss if it were not so revealing: “And we fucked, follábamos, fuckeábamos. Roughly” (60). Not only does the adverbial form seem stilted, but it hints at a meaning error. Admittedly, “a lo pelón” in Mexican Spanish is bisemous, meaning not only “sin rodeos” or “sin adornos” (saying or doing something plainly) but also “raw” as in “without a condom.” Some readers of the original will understand the former, others the latter. And some will embrace the term’s ambiguity. When an equally ambiguous option isn’t available in the target language, the translation must choose. In this case, the issue isn’t simply that “roughly” is incorrect from a meaning-transfer perspective, the problem is that it’s another instance of smoothing the mouth, replacing a phrase with local swagger with an English that is at once stilted and misrenders the idiom.

Notwithstanding, McDowell generally handles Eating Ashes with competence, with passages where the English moves fast, clean, and cutting. But the longer the reader stays with the book, the more a pattern emerges that feels less like translation and more like laundering. Not only does the English often erase the foreign, but it also scrubs it down for a reader presumed to be impatient with linguistic and cultural difference, or, worse, for a reader who arrives with a prepackaged, stereotyped idea of Mexican literature, an idea that may itself be the downstream result of publishing decisions about what gets translated, how it gets marketed, and who gets chosen to translate it, and why.

Publishers’ choices, however, are rarely made on dialect expertise. They are too often made on speed, existing house relationships, prior commercial success, a proven “house voice,” awards and shortlists, risk management, and marketing considerations, often by editors who do not hear the regional registers at stake, if they read the source language at all. When those criteria determine the match, the results are predictable: a book whose central subject is language and social meaning is pressured into a generalized, export-ready English that blurs the very distinctions the novel is built to expose.

This same pattern is hard to separate from the larger machinery that rewards it. Again and again, the work that gets rewarded conforms to a publishing industry formula, a template for what translation is supposed to sound like, and the template becomes its own proof. The result is a self-fulfilling cycle: the same voices are rewarded, the same styles are taken for “quality,” and any translator who doesn’t fit the model is ignored or passed over if they are considered at all. And the cycle doesn’t only shape who gets hired and praised; it shapes what survives in the English itself.

Navarro, Brenda. Eating Ashes. Translated by Megan McDowell. Liveright, 2026.

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George Henson (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Dallas) is a visiting professor of Spanish-to-English and literary translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. Dr. Henson specializes in the translation of contemporary Mexican prose. He is the author of eleven book-length translations, including works by Cervantes Prize laureates Sergio Pitol and Elena Poniatowska,  in addition to works by Alberto Chimal and Luis Jorge Boone. His translation of Argentine novelist Abel Posse’s A Long Day in Venice was longlisted for the 2023 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize. In addition to his own translation work, he frequently reviews translations and academic monographs on translation for various academic and literary journals. He has delivered papers at national and international conferences and recently served as a judge for the National Translation Award in Prose, presented by the American Literary Translators Association. From 2022 to 2024, he was a Tulsa Artist Fellow. He currently lives in Monterey with his nine-year-old Havanese, Henry Pipo.

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Works Cited

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “On the Different Methods of Translating.” Translated by Waltraud     Bartscht, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by Rainier Schulte and John Biguenet, University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 36–  54.

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[1]For the sake of full disclosure, Megan and I studied in the same program at The University of Texas at Dallas, home of the Center for Translation Studies, though I cannot remember whether we ever took classes together.