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My book (Feldman 2006), the first scholarly study of the midtwentieth-century Afro-Peruvian music revival, was translated into Spanish in February 2009, for publication in Peru. Overseeing the translation of my book—originally written in English based on ethnographic interviews and research conducted primarily in Spanish—immersed me in the problems of translation.

The first challenge was the impossibility of literally translating some core concepts. A longstanding debate in translation studies addresses the (un) translatability of original works (see Bassnett 37–42; Quine; Heidegger; Nabokov), and translation editor Robert Wechsler estimates that only 80% of most non-English literary works can be accurately conveyed in English (55). In my book’s case, when I began to proof the chapter drafts, I was reminded, to my dismay, that the word “performance” has no Spanish equivalent. As performance theorist Diana …