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.