John Updike commented on the translation in The New Yorker: "Translating from the Turkish, a non-Indo-European language with a grammar that puts the verb at the end of even the longest sentence, isn't a task for everybody; Erdağ Göknar deserves praise for the cool, smooth English in which he has rendered Pamuk's finespun sentences, passionate art appreciations, slyly pedantic debates, eerie urban scenes ... and exhaustive inventories."
Göknar's translation of Atiq Rahimi's Earth and Ashes (Harcourt) from Dari was shortlisted for the IMPAC Literary Award in 2004 and reissued by Other Press in 2010.
The translation was presented to President Barack Obama by the Turkish government during a state visit in 2009.
In 2013, Göknar published a work of literary and cultural criticism entitled Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge), which argues that productive tension between literary tropes of din (Turkish Islam) and devlet (state secularism) informs Pamuk's work and marks its currency as world literature.
His collection of poetry, Nomadologies (Turtle Point Press), appeared in 2017 and is a poetics of Turkish-American diaspora, addressing themes of cultural dislocation.