The Centre(31)

Then Adam left, and Billee made himself at home straightaway. I put the hot water bottle away, and he snuggled next to me while I pored over The Sorrows of Young Werther. A million times better in the original German.

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Over the next few weeks, my amazement at my miraculously acquired fluency settled into acceptance, and I decided it was time to put my skills to use. I was already connected to a bunch of linguists through mailing lists, social media, work, and conferences, so it wasn’t difficult to plug into the German translating scene. I dug deep into online literary forums and looked up obscure German novels at the Goethe-Institut and British Library. I followed specialists in the field on Twitter. I emailed writers and joined reading groups. At all times, I kept my antennae up. Then, I found it. A slim volume, 150 pages, written by a forty-five-year-old poet based in Berlin. It was called The Quiet of the Songbird.

In the novel, the protagonist, shortly after being rejected by his lover, retreats into the forest and turns into a bird. Here, the other birds teach him their language. Bird language was a complex dialect, meticulously worked over by the writer. It was a tongue both make-believe and completely decipherable (to the German speaker), incredibly vast in scope, with words for sounds and objects, colors and entities so subtle that we humans hadn’t bothered to put names to them. Also, the language used only the present tense, but in a way that enhanced rather than diminished communication. The man, by living among the birds and learning their language, discovers an entirely new way of being. Eventually, when he’s returned to his human form, he finds that his personality has changed completely. The new language has rendered him more fully in the moment yet with an instinctive drive on how best to meet his primary needs. His ex-lover sees the change and begs for him back, but the man has had a burst of clarity about the previously skewed nature of his desire for her and walks away.

The novel hadn’t made a massive splash in Germany, but those who liked it loved it, and when I read it, I knew two things straightaway: that it would, in fact, resonate deeply with English readers and that I was the perfect person to translate it. The strangeness of the novel and the wildness of its premise excited me, and the invented bird language was so expansive that it allowed for a flexibility in translation in which, while staying loyal to the text, I could nonetheless bring out what I felt were the language’s strengths through subtle emphases and rearrangements. I couldn’t wait to get started, and for the next several months was deeply immersed in the world of this novel. I began when the first daffodils of spring were starting to raise their yellow ears, and by the time the leaves on the tree outside my window turned auburn, I was ready to send it out to agents. Immediately, there was interest, and then, after a much longer process than I’d imagined, the book was signed up by a prestigious publishing house. Then, after several back-and-forths of editing and proofing, Songbird was finally published. It was met with rave reviews.

Now, not many people pay attention to the translator’s name on a book’s cover, even when it does well. Almost all the reviews and opinion pieces featured only the writer and publisher. But nonetheless, once the book was out there, a steady stream of emails started trickling into my inbox. Publishers wrote to ask whether I had any other translations, and writers and fellow translators inquired about my interest in collaboration. I shared some of my Urdu short story translations with the publishers then—most of which had been hiding in my drawer unseen or else been instantly rejected. But now these projects, too, were swiftly accepted, published, and celebrated. More and more, people started paying attention to me, wanting to chat, inviting me to events and discussions. I found myself on the other side of the same kinds of panels that I used to attend so assiduously in the past, speaking about obscure, complex shit like the intricacies of translating bird language or the imperialist undertones behind the industry’s disregard for Urdu literature. And they listened, when I spoke, with wide eyes and sympathetic nods. My thoughts were suddenly “compelling” and “urgent,” and afterward, people would come up to me and give me compliments and ask me questions and sometimes even have me sign books.

There were times when I enjoyed this. I’d see someone look at me with admiration, and I would be seduced by this gaze and by the object of it, which was me but also not me. Plus, my parents were proud, giving copies of Songbird to all their friends. And doors opened more easily for job stuff. Also, frankly, it felt nice to have people being so nice to me. Being respected felt nice. Being taken seriously felt nice. I felt that people were listening to me the way they listened to men, carefully, attentively, as if something of great value might drop out of my mouth at any moment.

Other times, however, this attention made me feel like the world was a shallow, fickle place, without depth or substance, hollow, vacuous, matlabi, and cruel. It was as if, overnight, my words mattered, even when they were, frankly, somewhat mundane or being uttered by a million others who were patronized or outright ignored. The same people who I’d previously been invisible to were now looking at me with something like awe. And not just awe, not always awe. I sometimes detected a kind of presumed beneficence in their gaze that reminded me of photographs of white missionaries in India. So proud were they of having a brown woman on their stage, of humbling themselves by taking her seriously. And other times, I saw a variation of that beneficence, something more like penitence, like they wanted me to tell them what was wrong with them. As if, by having me up there, they were somehow atoning for their sins.