Horror in translation: Mariana Enriquez and what gets lost by reyes_mx

I've been thinking about how Mariana Enriquez's work reads differently in English translation than it does in Spanish, and I have some feelings about this. The translations are good. Megan McDowell is excellent. But there are places where the fear has been softened by the need to explain, and in horror, explanation is often the enemy of effect. In Spanish some of the menace in Enriquez comes from things that are named without being explained, references to Argentine political history that carry a weight for Argentine readers that the English text has to work around. This is not a criticism of the translation. It's the nature of the problem. You cannot fully transfer the cultural load of fear from one language to another. What you can do is build equivalent fear from different materials. I translated a Mexican horror story last year where the author used a reference to a specific saint's feast in a specific state that would be instantly recognizable to a Mexican reader as deeply wrong, wrong in the way that the image appears, wrong in the time of year. I spent two weeks figuring out how to create the equivalent wrongness for an English reader without a footnote. Interested in hearing from anyone else working on translated horror or dark fiction, or anyone who has read the same work in two languages and noticed where it changes.