Argentinian author Pola Oloixarac’s latest novel, Dark Constellations, is an exploration of mankind’s obsession with knowledge, control and progress. It spans 19th-century science and modern-day cyber-surveillance and even peeks forward into humanity’s likely near-future. Throughout the book, Oloixarac weaves an intricate blend of technical detail, deliberateness and evocative lyricism to create the magical realist world in which her epic saga takes place. Combining esoteric sciences, arts, technologies, cultures, philosophies and even lexicons with heightened, poetic and dreamlike scenes and descriptions, she transports readers into a reality at once entirely extraordinary and all too familiar. Effectively reproducing this linguistic alchemy in the novel’s English-language translation was, for translator Roy Kesey, “the single greatest challenge of the book.”