My review of Slovenian writer Evald Flisar's A Swarm of Dust is now available at Full Stop:
It would seem unambiguously desirable that more, rather than fewer, works of world literature be translated into English. But when the writer translated is largely unknown to most American readers and reviewers, and the literary tradition in which the writer works unfamiliar, how well-situated are we in fact to really appreciate the work in front of us, to feel we can adopt a perspective that allows us to assimilate the work even on a literal, denotative level? To what extent can we indeed plausibly claim to be focusing our attention on the text itself when the context needed to make the text fully intelligible might be missing?