All Marked Up with No Place to Go

I've been working on and off over the last couple months with the amazing editors at the Bellevue Literary Review, who have been giving my story, which will be published in their spring issue, more attention than I expected to get at any magazine. It's been polished and re-polished, and it's reading downright well.

The one open issue in my opinion is a technical one. The story, about a retired Sanskrit professor, has several transliterated Sanskrit words within the text. These are not in any way anglicized words, like pajamas (which yes, did come to us from Sanskrit), and I'm feeling a bit kerfuffled about how best to render them: with the correct diacritical marks or without, with italics (and diacritics?) or without.

It's one thing to include commonly-known marks for languages that use the Roman character set. I mean who doesn't have solid appreciation for the umlaut? But it's a whole 'nother thing to include marks for letters and sounds for which there's not even a close approximation in the English alphabet, like certain palatals, and retroflexes, and long vowels.

One question is whether diacriticals are more likely in these cases to help readers with pronunciation or to further confuse them. Another is whether by including diacritical marks you run the risk of making a work of fiction seem overly academic (though admittedly this story's protagonist would probably never render such words himself without the appropriate marks). The Chicago Manual of Style says it's crucial to use diacritical marks for transliterated South Asian words, but (and let's just keep this between us) The Chicago Manual of Style may be a bit old school--no harm intended to Chicagoans. My sense is that copyeditors may be steering slowly but increasingly away from diacriticals, though I have little to substantiate this.

So, if you have some style advice on how to render foreign words in published English-language fiction, please, please, hand it over.