I have come to think of criticism much as one of my favourite literary critics, Terry Eagleton, once perceptively described it: not as a screen between reader and text but as a set of provisional, sometimes awkward handles, useful for turning art in our hands until new facets or nuances catch the light, until it flickers differently, and, if we are lucky, more illuminatingly. Translation, likewise, is a kind of intimate, risky, and necessarily transformative handling. Translators lay their “grubby hands” (to borrow the phrase from my illustrious colleague Daniel Hahn) on the text, wrestle with it in unimaginable ways, and often make it speak powerfully in another tongue, even if, paradoxically, they are still perceived as “invisible”.
Evelio Rosero’s fiction often reads as if Goya had exchanged his brush for a fountain pen, and the challenge for any translator is immediate: domestic interiors blend farcical settings with terror, laughter echoes down corridors whose doors open onto graves, and an unsettling moral gravity lingers behind every interaction. House of Fury (Casa de furia, 2023 in Spanish; 2024 in English translation by Victor Meadowcroft, New Directions) continues that unmistakable Roserian choreography between the grotesque and the elegiac. I had the pleasure of reading Toño the Infallible – Rosero’s previous novel, co-translated by Meadowcroft and Anne McLean, which was shortlisted for the 2023 PEN Translation Prize and longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Translation Prize, while I was serving as a judge for PEN America that year. Seen alongside that earlier work, House of Fury confirms Rosero’s gif rendering the absurd and the sacred in the same brush stroke. The novel unfolds over a single evening, when Italia Caicedo, long dead, descends both literally and figuratively upon her insular, self-absorbed bourgeois family.
Rosero, one of Colombia’s most unsettling moral ironists, writes in a key where slapstick and apocalypse become indistinguishable. The Caicedo Santacruz clan is narcissistic, vain, and oddly devout in their hypocrisy. In the text, the visiting relatives, priests, and hangers-on seem to perform their grief as a form of melodrama. When Italia’s spectral voice cuts through their festivities, the novel’s entire fictional world quivers between hysteria and revelation. Like The Armies (Rosero’s 2007 novel of rural violence, translated by Anne McLean, 2010), House of Fury transforms political trauma into a domestic allegory; but here, however, the violence is moral, psychological, and, very powerfully, linguistic. Rosero’s Colombian Spanish revels in varied registers – ecclesiastical, bureaucratic, familial – each colliding with the next, oscillating between Biblical gravity and provincial gossip, its syntax loops mischievously before detonating in bursts of absurdity. It is a language at once mystifyingly decorous and lusciously corrupt, which, at least for me, captures the essence of the author’s celebrated grotesque-elegiac style.
Moving from translation as a concept to translation as practice, Rosero presents a peculiarly perilous case. Perilous not in its difficulty, but in its temptations; not because his novels resist translation, but because they almost seduce it into failure. To render his artfully disordered, intricately deranged prose into English is to precariously balance on a tightrope over a linguistic and cultural abyss, where any theoretical notion of literal fidelity or strict equivalence risks becoming a kind of parody; and reverence for the source text, if the translator is not careful, can slide all too easily into predictability, flattening, or even farce. Meadowcroft’s task, then, is a rather Herculean one: to make Rosero’s baroque prose breathe in English with the same elegance as the original, without smothering it in unchallenging exoticism or flattening it into over-explicit clarity.
In my view, the result, House of Fury, is one of the most lucidly strange translations of recent Latin American fiction: a book that reads fluently without ever appearing too domesticated (which is not necessarily a bad thing – in some cases, a more fully domesticated approach can have its own values and advantages), or, as Andrew Chesterman would claim in his seminal book Memes of Translation, never gives in to the temptation of overly accommodating the target-language “expectation norms”. Meadowcroft navigates the delicate balance between the foreign and the familiar, between Rosero’s distinct musicality and the pragmatic idioms of English prose – and he performs it in an extremely compelling manner. Refreshingly, his translation does not simply naturalize Rosero’s exquisite narrative (admittedly, a tempting but reductive route); with subtle and enticing cunning, it negotiates the blurred barriers of language and culture with nuanced, informed creativity, inviting the reader to listen attentively to Rosero’s dissonant cadences refracted through a new linguistic register, transposed into seductive English prose.
With this theoretical background in mind, Meadowcroft announces his intent in the opening line. The Spanish begins: “Asomada a un balcón engalanado con rosas y nardos, Uriela Caicedo… vio venir por la calle arbolada… igual que un tímido ratón…”. In English: “Uriela Caicedo… was leaning over a balcony festooned with roses and tuberoses when she spotted, advancing like a timid mouse between patches of sunlight, her Uncle Jesús coming up the tree-lined street.” The translator re-instates the rococo grace of “engalanado”, the resounding doubling of “rosas y nardos,” by the equally ornamental and resonating “festooned with roses and tuberoses.” It is, for sure, an old-fashioned verb, “festooned”, but nevertheless gracefully adequate, if not precisely right. The rhythm of the sentence, with its suspended clauses and slow unveiling of the uncle, is recreated almost note-for-note. In this contrasting mode of analysis it becomes clear that the translator resists the Anglophone temptation to simplify and be more direct. His prose does not keep Rosero’s arabesques so much as “recraft” them, to use Lawrence Venuti’s terms, it performs a kind of creative rewriting that preserves texture without illusion or pretension of transparency. For the reader – or at least for this one – the effect is an absorbingly supple, strangely immersive prose rather than merely florid one.
Building on the previous example, a few lines later, Meadowcroft demonstrates yet another of his inspired idiomatic choices, a finely tuned decision that characterizes his approach throughout the translation. The Spanish describes Uriela as “en plena flagrancia de su delito de mala educación”, literally something along the lines of “in the full flagrancy of her crime of bad manners”. The translation, “caught red-handed in her crime of bad manners”, transposes “flagrancia” into the colloquial legalism “caught red-handed,” astutely sharpening the comic inflection of the passage. In one of those rare moments when theory and practice seem to walk hand in hand – since many translation theorists (Venuti, Bassnett, Pym, among others) have pointed out that theory often trails behind or only retroactively describes what translators already do – this becomes a neat example of what Eugene Nida, in his influential study Toward a Science of Translating (1964), termed “dynamic equivalence”, meaning a kind of semantic and formal correspondence in which the idiom inevitably changes, and as a result the vibrancy and tone of the original resurface in the translation.
To bring Eagleton into the equation once more, if, as he once wrote, good criticism should be “at once demystifying and full of delight”, the same might be said of “good” translation. Meadowcroft’s evident jouissance in English demystifies, in many subtle and unexpected ways, Rosero’s ceremonious irony without dulling its irresistible mirth.
Conversely, if the novel’s opening scene establishes a mode of domestic comedy, the later “funereal laughter” passage reads more like a sudden detonation. In Spanish: “La sala se remeció del estruendo, pero no eran carcajadas felices sino funéreas, y, sin embargo, compaginaban muy bien con la gran fiesta que se oía desde el jardín.” Meadowcroft renders this almost verbatim:
“The room shook with the roar, but it was not happy laughter but funereal, and yet it went very well with the great party that could be heard from the garden.” What impresses here is the translator’s ear for the register. He re-establishes the literal syntax – the two antithetical clauses bound by “and yet” – but translates “compaginaban muy bien” (literally, “they harmonized very well”) into the more colloquial “went very well with”. The English loses some of the original’s intricate musicality but gains a playful alliterative texture through the repeated “w” sounds, which lightly punctuate the sentence while maintaining its overall queasy symmetry – an artful reshaping rather than a mechanical reproduction.
What I find especially striking, and in a way most crucial, is that Meadowcroft keeps the adjective “funéreas” as “funereal”, a choice I find both accurate and provocatively anachronistic. Few modern translators would dare use such a Latinate, faintly Gothic word, yet its stiffness perfectly suits Rosero’s diction, where moral decrepitude and social formality always seem to mirror each other. In addition, this line encapsulates what could be conceived as the novel’s tonal paradox: mirth as a kind of mourning and festivity as a kind of forewarning. Meadowcroft’s English preserves – or, better still, reinstates – that doubleness, ensuring that the laughter still sounds like an omen. Where a less confident translator might have paraphrased (“ghoulish laughter”, perhaps), it feels to me that Meadowcroft trusts his readers to experience the dissonance directly, without heavy-handed mediation. Interestingly, “ghouls” resurfaces later in the text to describe the Caicedos’ party guests (“It won’t be long before more ghouls arrive”), a sly micro-strategy of tonal recycling that, to my ear, lends the English a self-aware, macabre tonality, presumably stylistically aligned with the semantic shade of the original text.
Meadowcroft’s translation gives fury an English accent without neutralizing it.
Similarly, another curious and quietly inventive strategy can be observed in a passage involving Francia, one of the six Caicedo sisters. When she suffers a fainting spell in anticipation of the family’s big celebration, she melodramatically declares: “I’ll call myself Abandonada, she was saying. No. Better Repudiada. Or Despreciada Caicedo Santacruz. That’s what I’ll change my name to.” Meadowcroft keeps the Spanish adjectives intact and unitalicized, allowing them to function nominally as self-contained identities rather than descriptive modifiers, a decision that feels both natural and resonant, not least because these words are recognizable enough to an English reader to feel accessible and at the same time strange enough to retain their local texture. This effect is one of soft foreignization, to borrow Venuti’s polemical term. I particularly appreciate the low-key subtlety of this specific “foreignizing” choice, since the English text registers its otherness without turning it into a full-blown spectacle. In other words, the translator allows foreign linguistic elements to seep gently into English prose. It is worth pointing out that Antoine Berman might see this as letting “the trial of the foreign” remain perceptible but not ostentatious, and, most importantly for him, not effaced.
In contrast, in one of Rosero’s blackest jokes, Meadowcroft adopts a sharply different tactic. The episode involves Uncle Jesús, resurrected from his own premature obituary and thereafter nicknamed “el Desahuciado”. Wryly, the Spanish term overflows with meanings: “the hopeless case”, “the evicted”, “the terminally ill”. In this instance, English cannot contain that semantic range in a single word. Meadowcroft cleverly translates the nickname as “No Hope.” The choice may seem unpoetic at first glance, but it is, in many interesting ways, precisely pointed – a blunt brand of irony perfectly in keeping with the character’s own theatrical survival. While this decision discards the medical-legal echoes of “desahuciar”, its very flatness carries a reinvigorated comedic weight, almost as if it were a label morbidly pinned to a farcical corpse.
Unless a reader continually makes assumptions, a literary text cannot operate fully. The translator’s task is no different: interpretation must remain provisional and flexible enough to honour complexity without hardening into overdetermined renderings. To acknowledge another of Meadowcroft’s imaginative resources, one might turn to the broader orchestration of tone in House of Fury. Rosero’s Spanish ranges across contrasting focal points and perspectives, weaving distinctive voices together so that tonal clashes and unexpected harmonies animate nearly every page. Within a single paragraph, a priest’s Latinized piety may dissolve into the gossip of servants. Meadowcroft reassembles these tonal collisions through acute attention to rhythm and flow rather than lexis; he translates the movement of Rosero’s prose with absorbing flair, not merely its matter. In the English text, long rolling sentences give way to clipped exchanges, and punctuation often functions as a moral instrument. Where Rosero’s commas proliferate like guilt and inequity hovering over the text, Meadowcroft’s use of dashes and semicolons helps keep the prose breathable while preserving its delirious continuity. Perhaps the point is that translation, like comedy, depends on timing. To carry Rosero’s moral hysteria into English, the translator adjusted not just the words on the page but the enigmatic pulse of the narrative itself.
If we consider the general ambience and imagery of the novel, a room full of perfumed decay, the party that “could be heard from the garden”, laughter that serves as both social lubricant and moral corrosion, Meadowcroft’s English transmits this claustrophobic soundscape without ever over-adjectivizing it. It is prose that often, and rather stately, trusts cadence over colour. In my view, this restraint saves the translation from melodrama. Rosero’s world is already baroque; it needs an English that will not compete with it. At times, Meadowcroft even lets English austerity heighten the horror. When the narrator observes a character “flushed, caught red-handed in her crime of bad manners”, the brevity of the clause – its Anglo-Saxon monosyllables – contrasts beautifully with Rosero’s polysyllabic Spanish. Returning to my point above, the rhythm again becomes moral: shame in the fictional world of the novel is quick, provincial, and almost comic.
This points to, if not a final, an unavoidable truth about translation: its highest “fidelity” lies not in words but in atmosphere, in the moral weather or temperature that surrounds them. Meadowcroft understands this instinctively. His House of Fury is faithful in the only way that truly works, provoking a discomfort akin to Rosero’s original. If we, as readers, laugh, we laugh queasily. There is a strong sense of recognition in all this, as if we are able to recognize our own genteel barbarities reflected in Caicedos’ drawing room. In Eagleton’s parlance, comedy is “tragedy with its trousers down,” and for me, Meadowcroft keeps both garments, both elements, in sight. Where the Spanish reader hears the cadences of Catholic ritual collapsing into carnival, the English reader hears faint echoes of the Gothic: Dickensian grotesques, Mervyn Peake’s castles, Waugh’s funerary banquets. This is not a distortion but a dialogue. Translation, after all, is not a mirror but a séance: it summons the voice of the dead in a new language, hoping that the timbre remains recognizable. A mirror merely reflects; in contrast, a séance reanimates. Translation, too, does not replicate its source so much as re-voice it – an act of resurrection as much as interpretation. Meadowcroft’s séance is uncannily convincing in this regard.
By the novel’s end, Rosero has forced his characters and the reader to confront the mingling of violence and vanity that underpins their carefully maintained social world. His “house of fury” exposes the grotesque intimacy between bourgeois respectability and the cruelties it so elaborately conceals. Meadowcroft’s translation gives fury an English accent without neutralizing it. The laughter still curdles, and the party still sounds from the garden.
Few translations manage to feel both foreign and inevitable in this way. House of Fury does. Meadowcroft’s English stands where all good translations should, halfway between homage and heresy, keeping faith with Rosero’s vision while betraying it just enough to make it live for Anglophone audiences. The result is a novel that reads, in any language, like a never-ending wake, a comedy so dark it burns.
Evelio Rosero was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1958. He was awarded Colombia’s National Literature Prize by the Ministry of Culture in 2006 for his body of work, which includes several novels, short story collections, and books for young readers and children. The Armies, Rosero’s first novel to be translated into English, won the Tusquets International Prize and the 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. House of Fury has been published by New Directions.
Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s master’s program in literary translation. His published translations include stories by Agustina Bessa-Luís in Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (co-translation with Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus Books, 2018) and Toño the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize in 2023 and longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in the same year. His translation of Natalia García Freire’s This World Does Not Belong to Us was published by World Editions in 2022 and was short listed for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.
Elton Uliana is a Brazilian writer, literary critic, and translator based in England. He is co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL), where he collaborates on Translation Theory programmes. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, Massachusetts Review, West Branch, Latin American Literature Today, Reading in Translation, Routledge’s Art in Translation, Asymptote, West Branch, and Your Impossible Voice, as well as in the anthologies Daughters of Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023) and Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction: A Bilingual Anthology (UCL Press, 2024). Uliana was selected for English PEN Presents: Brazil 2026, supporting his sample translation of Carla Bessa’s Jabuti Prize-winning Vultures. In 2026, he and Amanda Sarasien were awarded the Massachusetts Review’s Jules Chametzky Translation Prize for their translation of José Luís Peixoto’s “The Woman Who Dreamed.” @elton_uliana
