Tag Archives: Megan McDowell
What the Translator Puts in Our Mouths: “Eating Ashes” and Performing Hate
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.
The Uncanny in Our Back Yards: Mariana Enriquez’s “A Sunny Place for Shady People,” Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell
A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories is Mariana Enriquez’s follow-up to her brilliant and terrifying novel “Our Share of the Night.” This new collection is a triumphant return to the short form, a return that still contains the horror and sophistication of her novel but in more digestible bites. Readers of Enriquez will recognize her exploration of horror in this collection, all the while offering something new, something frighteningly comprehensible and insightful into our contemporary human condition.
Cruel Imaginations: The Stories of Mariana Enriquez and Silvina Ocampo
Reviewed by Rebecca DeWald At the Edinburgh International Book Festival last summer, I heard Mariana Enriquez read from her short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire, the first English translation of her work, by Megan McDowell. Twice, in fact: At the official reading, and at a more informal evening event with readings and […]