The English-speaking world notoriously consumes fewer translations than anywhere else. But it’s not just a question of parochialism. Anglophone readers have a huge choice of literature in a global range of vernaculars, before they need to turn to what many see as second-best: a muffled, possibly misleading version of, say, a novel, in which language is supremely important. On the other hand, a lasting effect of postmodernism has been to play down literary “purity”, and to celebrate mediation and hybridity. The tide may finally be turning.

Among the latest publishers to specialize in translated literature, two are boldly “niche”. Les Fugitives, a collective led by Cécile Menon, translates two short works per year by women writing in French. Charco Press, founded in 2016 and led by Carolina Orloff, pairs contemporary Latin American authors with emerging translators. Its inaugural batch of three novels comes from Argentina, an extraordinary fount of inventive writing just now.

Die, My Love (Matate amor, 2012), the first of Ariana Harwicz’s three novels, is set in France. The author’s training in drama informs the gestural febrility of her narrator’s rage. Throwing herself to the ground, marching through plate-glass windows, she performs the role of the Latin firebrand, shacked up with a mild French salesman. Provincial life, separate beds and a “sweaty, hungry, sharp-nailed baby” have already driven her over the edge by the time we meet her on page one, in the midst of one of her efforts to act normal: “I looked at myself and saw an ignorant country bumpkin hanging out the laundry . . . . They had no idea. Hanging out the clothes had been a success. I lay back down among the tree-trunks”. There is little plot or character development. She carries on sulking, lashing out and screwing the hot neighbour; her partner continues to forgive her.

The formal challenge of this novel is to sustain a repetitive crisis, as if in variations played by Glenn Gould, who recurs as a symbol of high culture unknown to the locals. The other pole of yearning is undomesticated nature, and here the baby may redeem himself; in one fantasy he is a “child of the forest”…