“Well, that’s the difference between us,” she said. “For me, happiness doesn’t just happen. It’s already there, just …” she made the motion of plucking a piece of fruit from the air, “reach out and take it, you know? But listen, I have to go. In the meantime, you need to work on this. Homework: gratitude journal.”
“You know I’m not gonna do that shit. Listen, stay awhile longer. Let’s make dessert.”
“Wish I could,” she said, gathering up her cards and tucking them away in a silken square of fabric. “But I have a client at five.”
“Tarot?”
“Tantra. He’s actually one of my faves. Thirty-one and never had an intimate relationship. Can you believe that? Really sweet guy. We’re moving slowly, carefully. It feels like I’m kind of putting him through an initiation.” She laughed. “As if I’m his gateway girlfriend or something.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s sweet. He brings me flowers sometimes, and I make a meal, and then we practice intimacy. Sometimes we watch Netflix and things after. He books four-hour sessions, imagine.”
“That must be a lot of money he’s paying you.”
“I don’t charge him that much. It’s actually a cozy way to spend the day. I look forward to our sessions every week.”
Naima slipped her arms into her oversized fluffy olive-green coat and slung her backpack on.
“He’s lucky he has you to initiate him,” I said.
“Hope so. I have to be careful, though, that I’m his gateway girlfriend and not his replacement girlfriend, you know?”
“How do you do that?”
“I dunno. Just … intuition. Reading each moment and moving from there. Maybe, ultimately, I’ll have to stage a kind of break up. We’ll see.”
Naima’s tantric work baffled me. In that realm, the sexual realm, where all borders and boundaries become blurred, I didn’t understand how she maintained integrity. She would say, though, that the blurred boundaries were precisely the point, that it’s exactly in that place of orgasmic bliss or, sometimes, sheer terror where the stuff we normally keep repressed floats to the surface, ripe for transformation.
“You’d be surprised,” she’d once said, “how often they cry. That’s the release they’re really craving.”
After Naima left, I sat down with my books and laptop to do some translations, just for me. I wouldn’t do anything with these texts I worked on; it was more of a meditative exercise, in the same way that some people like to do puzzles or crosswords. When I really got into a translation, I would become so absorbed that I’d forget myself. It felt a bit like … disappearing. And it would often take rumbles from my belly or pangs from my bladder to remind me to return to the world.
Sometimes, when I was translating a text, it felt like I was writing the novel itself. Like I was Nabokov. Like I wrote Lolita. Lo-lee-ta. The tongue takes the same trip down the top of the mouth whether you trip over the syllables in Urdu or English. In fact, the tongue does an even more precise dance with the soft t in the Urdu. Lo-lee-ta.
That day, inspired by a piece in the New Yorker, I’d pulled out a copy of L’？tranger from my bookshelf, along with an English translation of the book. In the article, the writer—something Bloom—meticulously takes apart the very first line of the novel: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” My English edition translates this to “Maman died today.”
Maman. It’s a tough one, isn’t it? What is the emotional resonance of that word in its context, and what in English comes closest? Bloom concludes that “Mother died today” is too clinical, too cold, and then ponders other options. Mother, my mother, Mom, even Mommy. Ultimately, he argues for retaining “Maman,” just as my edition does. Personally, I think I’d opt for “Mum died.” That feels like a more faithful rendition to me. But who knows. It was Bloom who was, after all, the published professional while I was just standing there, head in hands, staring at the dry patch.
Anyway, that’s just the beginning. There’s also, crucially, the placement of the aujourd’hui, “today.” Most if not all translators put the today at the end, but Bloom suggests, ingeniously, “Today, Maman died.” It’s subtle, but there is a difference between “Maman died today,” and “Today, Maman died.” The latter offers a soft emphasis on the today and, for Bloom, hints at the narrator’s tendency to be in the moment. I think it also points to a certain missing-of-the-point on the narrator’s part, an emotional distancing from the death of his mother. Also, crucially, the emphasis on the “today” reinforces the absurdity of the second sentence: “Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas”—“Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know”—thereby foregrounding the strangeness of the stranger and the strangeness of ourselves. The truth is, in this wholly unembellished text, each word hangs ferociously on to the previous. One mistranslation and the whole thing unravels, and in my copy, there were numerous mistranslations.
And what if I were translating this passage into Urdu? What would I do, for instance, with the died? The literal equivalent of “Maman died” in Urdu—“Ammi mar gayeen”—sounds super harsh. It feels a bit like “Mama kicked the bucket.” And so, even though a certain hardness is required in that opening sentence, I’d probably opt for a translation closer to “Mother passed away.” I felt a kind of buzz as I considered the possibilities. What a joy and a struggle it would be to translate this novel into Urdu. It would, I imagined, be quite the intimate experience.
It’s not that translation is a subjective process, exactly. In fact, in a way, it’s highly mathematical. It’s about retaining the feeling, the thing underneath. It’s as if you go underground, and there are all these shapes and colors, and there you see that, oh, died in this language is closest in color and shape, consistency and texture, to passed away in this other language. And it feels like a personal accomplishment when you make the match and haul the pair back up to the surface. And somehow, I was able to make those matches. I could just feel them. But the problem was that this feeling didn’t translate into any kind of significant action, and for reasons I couldn’t grasp, I was unable to get to that place I longed to reach. Whatever that gap was between editor and writer, print-copier and painter, midwife and mother, well, I’d spent my whole life trying to leap over that gap and had consistently fallen into the abyss. The truth is, whenever I saw a beautiful painting, or read a great novel, I felt joy, of course, but something in me would also seethe. Jealousy is an ugly thing. Even ambition, particularly in a woman, can be undesirable. But this other feeling—this feeling of a life not fully lived—that was worse, practically unbearable. I felt constantly thwarted, and I didn’t even know by what.
Still, I was lucky that at least the leap was conceivable to me. If you could recognize it, I reasoned, if something in you vibrated in attunement to good work, then surely you also contained the capacity to create that kind of work. And on a good day, I even felt like I’d been working toward it, no matter how haphazardly—the leap over the abyss. I had some proximity, after all, to my desired career. I was tuned into my own curiosity and following it, more or less. And so, I reasoned, I needed to keep myself close to what moved me until something emerged. And to this day, despite the horror that was to come, I maintain the importance of following one’s curiosity. One’s desire. It is the only way.