I follow the Borges credo that literature is the friction coming from the veils and the levels and the frames, all the obstacles keeping a reader from obtaining the dream of truth. A translation is just one more literary veil added to the others. There’s no direct truth to be stared at. For this reason I love the work of Antoine Volodine. He is a French novelist who writes like some made-up Russian author in translation, and his collaboration with translators is at once strong and unbelievably free. His Italian accomplice, Anna D’Elia, is a wild visionary who conjures up a dreamy Italian that doesn’t feel like a translation from a particular language, only a big joke on what feels literary, what feels spooky, a fake séance where she jokingly pretends to believe in the myth of the urtext.

I can translate a dominant, weak soul with my eyes closed. This monologue smacks of David Foster Wallace and J. D. Salinger to me. It feels so good to live in a century that has ceased to celebrate that voice. I can be sentimentally attached to it, of course, but its delightful shallowness is drying up not because some of its exemplars have been canceled or problematized, but because it’s a voice that’s been outgrown — just as the decadent voice before it retreated and the romantic voice retreated before that. The voices have become niche forms of expression, and now the male ball-hogging neurotic voice is fading too. Some people will continue to use it, but it’ll come to sound more and more like the way a creep or a stalker uses Milady or Principessa. And I will always be able to translate that voice. It is in my DNA forever.

I had an early fall deadline, which meant that from May to August I had to rush through the long novel. Its unrelenting cruelty entered my imagination at a disorienting pace, the nonsense of every vignette in the book a whirlwind of pain and revelation I couldn’t just stop and process. Every day I ate up entire sequences, seeing them go impeccably wrong, seeing bad outcomes transpire without being able to stop. Ellison writes so that you can tell he can inhabit the murderer and the victim, the dumbest character and the smartest. He feels lost all the time, he doesn’t rule over his novel, he’s a devil, he’s in the details, he has no Tolstoyan ambition to lunge upward, he can inhabit the ugliest heap of furniture thrown onto the sidewalk during an eviction, he can inhabit the faint affectation of the vain old white trustee whose inanity shocks the plot forward. When I was translating scenes like the one where that young man is murdered by police, the rushed work gave me the feeling that I was a part of a well-oiled machine that killed young Black men for no reason — and then on to the next one.

GRANULAR WORK on literature has shown me that there’s no way to stay whole if you are to participate in the publicity spin cycle that enfolds books the way it does everything. Working on translations helps in this respect. You get very close to the imagery and the sentences. You live in a kind of slow motion that reveals that there is no atmosphere, no halo sustaining the sentences. The halo emanates from the cover, not the page. The page is dry, it’s creaking, it’s a desert. No, that’s misleading. What I want to say is that the more you delve into a complex book, the more you appreciate the way it is composed and all the invisible senses it arouses and performs inside your mind — the more you feel the emptiness, the void that stares at you at the bottom of all the wealth. Engaging with complex work takes you away from the possibility of learning things from a book.

I EDIT THREE TYPES of work: my writing, other people’s writing, and the two-headed monster that is my translation work — a mix of my writing and somebody else’s. When I teach creative writing I also close read the so-called classics with my students. These four activities amount to a lot of extremely slow reading, and I’ve come to regard that slowness as the only thing I love about literature. When you speed it up, it becomes news, it becomes content, it becomes entertainment. When it’s slow, and it’s slow for hours, for days, it helps you glance beyond the hollow network of meanings that we cater to in order to be a functional society.