He got up off the sofa and flicked at the ivy trailing down my bookshelf. I knew he was thinking about the qualms I’d sometimes raised regarding his masculinity or whiteness. It felt like Adam had forged a case against me in our time apart.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No … no. You know what, you’re right. Forget it. I was trying to say that it’s … very cool, isn’t it? What do you think you’ll do now? With the language, I mean.”
“Well, so far, I’ve just been chilling. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. But I guess I’ll start reading some German novels, watching films? And then, scope out translation opportunities.”
“I’m sure you’ll be great,” he said. “You’ll be very … strategic.”
I felt like he’d said the word with some bitterness—strategic—and I wondered if he thought I’d been strategic in dating and then disposing of him when it suited me. It wasn’t true, of course. If I were strategic in the least, my life certainly wouldn’t look the way it did. In fact, if anything, Adam had been the strategic one. His last girlfriend had been a Brazilian lawyer, and before that, he’d been going out with a Sri Lankan academic. The man clearly had a type. But whatever. I let it go.
“So, when you were at the Centre, did you come across someone called Shiba?” I asked.
Billee meowed an order for petting, so I shifted from the sofa to the floor to oblige.
“Oh yeah, I remember her vaguely. She’s one of the managers, right?”
“Yeah. She was my supervisor.”
“She’s fit.”
I laughed. “Yeah.”
“Did you two become friends?”
“I think so.”
Billee, who’d been blissfully purring while I rubbed his belly, shifted without warning into a murderous lunge for my hand.
“He’s excited to see you,” Adam said.
“I’m glad. I was worried that he’d forget me.”
Adam scooted off the sofa and sat next to me on the floor, cross-legged. He rolled a little ball around. Billee leaped enthusiastically.
“He’d never forget you.”
I felt an urge then to lean into Adam, to have him hold me like he used to. I sensed the urge float its way over to him, felt him catch it midair the way only he could, but we refrained. There was no point, he’d said to me again and again, if I wasn’t going to commit. I thought this was, I don’t know, somewhat cowardly, that we needed to let our feelings emerge naturally and follow them, do their bidding, not the other way around. Ultimatums … well, ultimatums are an insult to the heart. In Adam’s mind, intimacy could only come from deep commitment, but in mine, it was the other way around. Commitment could only come from deep intimacy. Maybe this was the fundamental problem between us. But I don’t know. Maybe I would have felt the same in his shoes. And so, we allowed the urge to pass, and it did, but not before leaving a certain softness between us in its wake.
“Seriously, Adam. Thank you so much for telling me about that place.”
“It’s a big deal, you know, that I used up my referral on you.”
“I will be forever grateful.”
“Save yours for someone special, okay?”
“I will.”
He said this in a sweet way, not implying that he had wasted his referral on me but that he had indeed used it rightly. That familiar earnestness touched me. When we first broke up, I would long for Adam incessantly. Well, incessantly until he arrived. Then, more recently, things had flipped, and I would cringe when I thought of him, wondering why we’d ever dated in the first place. But in that moment, I could see both: why I had dated him and why we broke up. A necessary step, I thought, toward real closure.
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.
·
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.