A pox on translations! We long for a writer's natural line, and we usually get a voice that sounds broken and silly. It may not even be the translator's fault. How do you render the "music" of one language into another and still manage to hold on to the meaning of a word? And what if the prose has an unconventional "music," a rhythm that depends heavily on the exact placement of words? Such is the predicament of "The Cubs" ("Los Cachorros"), the title piece of Mario Vargas Llosa's first collection of stories in English ["The Cubs and Other Stories"]….

Vargas Llosa himself has said that "The Cubs" is "a story more sung than told and, therefore, each syllable was chosen as much for musical as for narrative reasons. I don't know why, but I felt in this case that the verisimilitude depended on the reader's having the...