Desert, Longing For Sand
By Hibah Shabkhez
My words, whispered the translator, all my words, as the award announcer called out the author’s name in the language of the translation, to deafening applause. My words, all my words, and they call them this smirking author’s work. The words they read, all these beaming judges and shouting fans, the only words they ever actually read were my words.
Like the school-days when she did everyone’s work but her own, and watched them get the marks, seven, eight, nine out of ten while the teacher scowled at her three, the failure and disappointment poison her blood like spitting thick-tailed scorpions. Por qué, pourquoi, why, kyun, – they did ask her, but no one waited for the answer. If you do ours you can do yours, they laughed, those who got the sevens and eights and nines for her work, and yet she did not do hers, not ever, knowing it would not be good enough, despite the sevens, eights, nines screaming that it was, that she was, just as that glinting shield was screaming now. She had always known that for the ones whose words really mattered in the end, there would always be something more that she could have done, some error or omission that would make everything she had managed to achieve worthless. Instead she had taken to glutting herself on the reproaches that rained so reliably upon her when the direst of prophecies ineluctably fulfilled themselves, finding a vicious satisfaction, strangely enough, in never quite having tried.
My words, all my words, and my name is nowhere, I am nowhere, I am nothing, I am foam upon the water in the wake of a ten-thousand-ton destroyer. She imagined herself standing before them with just such a shield, forcing them to acknowledge it, but the bones cringing into jelly within were already shooting back myriad barbed retorts in the voices that had been pulverising her head from before she could even speak, and the dream dissolved. A life spent effacing and erasing a self too inadequate for anything but derision comes to its logical climax, thought the translator, standing in the shadows, translating as she railed against the bitter fruits of her translation, translating the thought into the author’s language and back out of it.
Then it struck her, suddenly, inconsequentially, as the author began, to thunderous applause, a speech someone else hunched in a cabin somewhere was translating in the standard, self-effacing murmur, synced grin to grin with the author – the afterlife, they always say, whether in paradise or in the other place, has only one language. ¿Es verdad? she asked God, looking upward at the blue visible from the skylight. Por favor, dime que eso no es verdad, s’il te plaît, dis-moi que ce n’est pas vrai … So she began to pray, the translator: in the hereafter, let there be many languages to translate into and out of, out of and into, and in all of them let my words be accounted mine.
Bio: Hibah Shabkhez is a writer and photographer from Lahore, Pakistan. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.
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Author’s note: This piece draws on my personal experience of having my literary translations of poetry and the French play Topaze read and critiqued, and explores the complex emotions that the experience stirred within me.
