This satirical novella purports to be a translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, itself a satire on the Soviet Union of the 1920s, where it was immediately banned. Written a century later, The Mind of a Cat translates Bulgakov’s story into something much more pertinent to modern times by substituting a cat for the dog and an operatic diva for the brawling busker whose transplanted gonads and pituitary gland transform the animal into a human being with tragi-comic results. Drawing on the latest scientific research into autism, domestication, and language, the resulting translation remains faithful to the form, presentation, and essence of the original but, like the animal whose bizarre transmutation it describes, transforms Bulgakov’s book into something completely new. Yet as a true translation, the moral of the story remains the same: human nature cannot be cancelled by any kind of culture, modern Western or Russian Soviet-even if saying so can be.