Looking back over what I’ve reviewed here this year, I notice something I didn’t plan on: more than half of it came to me through a translator. The Three-Body Problem by way of Ken Liu. We by way of Natasha Randall, though I’ve since gone back and read a chapter or two of the older Mirra Ginsburg translation for comparison. Poetics of Relation by way of Betsy Wing, who I think made the single hardest and rightest call of any translator I read this year, keeping Glissant’s density rather than smoothing it for an English reader who’d prefer easier going. Invisible Cities by way of William Weaver, who I own in two separate printings now, mostly so I can pull them both down on a slow afternoon and read the same city description twice, watching where the two versions diverge.

That last habit, reading a passage twice in two different translators’ hands, started almost by accident with a donated box that happened to include a duplicate, and it’s become one of my favorite quiet pleasures at the shop. You’d think a good translation should be invisible, transparent, a clean pane of glass between you and the original. I’ve come to think that’s wrong, or at least incomplete. Every translation is a specific reading of the original text, one person’s argument about what mattered most to preserve, rhythm or precision or cultural specificity, and you can’t preserve all of it equally. Something always gets sacrificed for something else. Reading two translations side by side is really reading two arguments about the same book, laid out next to each other so you can see where they disagree.

The seams show most clearly in the places where a language does something English simply can’t do natively, gendered nouns, untranslatable social concepts like shifgrethor in the Le Guin, the particular density of Glissant’s Creole-inflected French. A translator has to make a choice at exactly those points, invent an English equivalent, footnote the gap, or quietly let something go, and you can learn almost as much about a translator’s priorities from what they chose to sacrifice as from what they chose to keep.

I don’t think this makes me a more rigorous reader than someone who reads a single translation and trusts it, not exactly. But it’s changed how I write these reviews, I think, made me slower to credit or blame an author for a sentence’s rhythm without first asking whose hands that sentence actually passed through to reach me. A small, specific kind of attention, the same kind I try to bring to a stranger’s marginalia or a rulebook’s index. It’s mostly just this: noticing that someone made a choice, and wondering, honestly, what it cost them to make it.