Traducciones / mis propias palabras

I translated a ghost story last year. Novel-length, contemporary Mexican horror, for a US publisher. Won't say which one because the rights situation is complicated and the author and I had a disagreement about one of my decisions. The story was about a woman in Oaxaca receiving letters from her dead sister. The original Spanish is compressed and lateral, the dread building through what's left out. The narrator's voice has a register I kept losing. I probably failed that book by fifteen percent. While I was working on it: I kept stopping to think *I would have done this differently.* The sister's letters could have done more work. There was a scarier book waiting inside the one she wrote. So I started writing that one. Mine. I grew up in Colonia Narvarte in Mexico City. Juan Rulfo, who is not horror exactly but who horror writers should read before anything else. The first chapter of *Pedro Páramo* is the most frightening piece of prose I know, and it's four pages. My fiction is short. Slow horror: the scary thing is usually not the event but the before and after. The drive to the place. The week after. The translation work pays. Working in someone else's sentences all day makes you very attentive to what a sentence is doing versus what it appears to be doing. The horror genre in Latin America is excellent and almost entirely untranslated. I'm fixing it slowly, one commission at a time.