Scholar-translator Simon Breden offers a brief summary of the plot of Black Tenderness and describes the choices he made in translating it without over-domesticating it by ‘keeping a reflection of its Spanish origin’. Breden’s strategy involved concentrating on the way thought is structured in Spanish, in the belief that ‘the way a character speaks is the way a character thinks’: this often meant mapping the syntactical structure of sentences in Spanish onto the English, while all the time attempting to stay away from the idea of the literal.