This paper addresses the "afterlife" of Orhan Pamuk's Kara Kitap (1990) in Guneli Gun's and Maureen Freely's translations. It intends to problematize our understanding of concepts such as "translation," "adaptation," "free paraphrase," and "transfer," questioning the limits of these concepts. Gun's translation of The Black Book (1994) received harsh criticism by book reviewers in the Times Literary Supplement, who questioned her language skills and her "AmerEnglish." Their preconceived notions of how a Turkish text "should sound like" in English was belied by Gun's translation. Subsequently, Pamuk commissioned Maureen Freely to translate the novel anew. Given the dare situation of translation from Turkish into English, the imbalance of which is obvious in the history of translation between the two languages (only 177 literary works were translated between 1882 and 2007), the case of the new translation of a Turkish novel strikes us as unusual and unexpected. A close study of the two translations and how they have been received in the English-speaking world reveals interesting facts as to how a "world" writer travels abroad, away from the country, language, and culture of origin. It illuminates Pamuk's indebtedness to his translators' art and craft in order to make his works available to a wider audience. The study of translation reviews of The Black Book demonstrates that book reviewers treat translations as if they were transparent copies of the original. It shows how literary commentary in a largely monolingual public sphere overlooks the translators' role and agency, the process and product of literary translation, and the poetics and politics of it. When literary translation as an aspect of text production is overlooked, this may contribute further to homogenization of culture production and marginalization of notions of diversity, among languages, literatures, and peoples. It throws light on recent trends in globalization in the sphere of book and culture production. This approach aims to reveal an alternative view of a writer and his works, one that looks at him through his translators. It intends to create a forum for discussion on "world" literature in general and on Turkish literature in translation, in specific.