Something that struck me in the first story in In the Devil’s Territory (and others in Praying Drunk) was how immediately unlikeable the protagonist is, yet also how his voice compels us to continue reading, even as we squirm at how he phrases things, what he objects to, or how he views his family. Is the concept of needing a likeable protagonist a myth?

I don’t ever think about likeability or unlikeability. I think about want, need, desire, grievance, and preoccupation. Sometimes I think that one result is that the stories can become something of a Rorschach inkblot test – different readers respond differently to different narrators, and it might say as much about the reader as it does about the narrator. . . .

You have been working with Gelman’s poetry for several years. In what ways has translating so much of his work contributed to your development as a translator?

I find his work contagious. When I first read Carta abierta, I thought I was exploring ways to write about grief but ended up so moved by the text that I decided to translate it. The book is loaded with euphony and torture, and I realized I needed to recreate that clash of elements, which took a lot of experimenting and polishing. Another thing that struck me about this book was his neologisms: difficult to render, but a lot of fun in the search for analogous roots, prefixes, suffixes, or compounds. . . .