Loren Kleinman, author and contributing writer to The Huffington Post, sat down with Sean Cotter to discuss his initial reactions and process of translating the Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding from Romanian to English.

“I decided to translate Blinding after providing a sample for a publisher. Only the first chapter—before doing the sample, I hadn’t read any further. But there is an arresting moment near the beginning, when the narrator looks out his window over Bucharest as a storm passes, and the sun penetrates the crack between the grey of the buildings and the charcoal of the clouds. Once I found the English for the colors of the sun dazzling the horizon, I felt I could translate the novel. I read the book after I signed the contract, and I discovered that I had had no idea how demanding the rest of the book would be, how horrifying and how sublime.”

Read the full interview here.