“If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide?”
—Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“Some notes arrive from the grave. Some sweets appease the living.”
—Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“allowing oneself to be vulnerable
                             is a political act”
—Laura Doyle Péan, Yo-yo Heart (tr. Stuart Bell)

You dream that you are walking down a path of red clay with your dying grandmother in your arms. You no longer remember whether she expired right there in your arms, or if it was the anticipation of her dying that caused you to weep. When you awaken from this dream your eyes are dry, but your grandmother is still dead. As she has been for almost a year now.

You get out of bed, make yourself a coffee, and settle down on the couch to read a section of the book you are translating. You are reminded of your dream instantly, as the mother of one of the children in the novel succumbs to a respiratory illness in the middle of the night. Her daughter awakens to find her blue, stiff, and shimmering in the early morning light.

You cannot stop thinking about the coincidence as you stare at the page, blankly scanning the words. Your grandmother died of stage four lung cancer nearly a year ago, and now here you are, reading a passage you will have to translate about a mother dying of a respiratory disease. You can hardly make it through a paragraph.

***

You speak with your mother on the phone while you walk around the town square. She has been re-admitted to the hospital. Her heart has given out again. She tells you that her kidneys are rejecting the treatment she’s been prescribed to keep her heart pumping. The call does not last long before the nurses tell you she has to hang up.

When you return to your office, you pick up your phone once more. You decide to read to your mother. You choose a passage from the novel you chose to translate because of your family history. This translation helped you accept the person your mother truly was. You record yourself reading to her as she once read to you, knowing that she may be sleeping when you finish the passage.

***

You awaken in the middle of the night, look at your phone, and see a text message from a friend asking you if there is a translation planned for a book you both adore. You say that you do not know. She tells you that she wishes you were the translator.

***

Your mother does not stumble and fall this time, like she did that day she pitched over into the azaleas when you came home with your father and your brother. No, this was more like the passage from another novel you translated, the one where the mother’s heart gives way as she steps down from the curb in downtown Port-au-Prince, spilling her wares into the street.

No, this time she falls quietly asleep in her hospital bed while your brother and your cousin fall to the floor, weighted down by their grief.

***

You’re in another city, but this one is familiar. You and an author you translate are visiting together. This is the first time you have ever done this. It is exhilarating.

You are still in that familiar city with the author you translate. You text her that you have a letter from a local archive addressed to her father-in-law on your computer. It was a thank-you letter that included a PS: “I hope your wife and child are well.” You show it to the author. The author tells you that the child mentioned in the letter was the person who inspired a character in her book, the one with the mental illness who’d reminded you of your family and who moved you to translate the novel in the first place.

Your families will be forever connected through this fiction.

***

You are pacing in a field of clover and crabgrass next to an interstate rest stop as you talk with your mother on the phone. You have just moved to a tiny town to begin your career, and this is the first time you have talked with your mother in what must be weeks.

You tell her about the move, about how the drive reminded you of a trip the two of you took to visit colleges in the 2010s, and about the translation you have coming out in a month’s time. You tell her about why you were so drawn to the book in the first place, how the book, with all of the familial silences therein, reminded you of your family. You tell her about the schizophrenic character in the book, about how he reminded you of your grandfather, the one whose OCD consumed him to the point that his loved ones could no longer recognize the person he had been.

She tells you that she would like to read your translation. She is glad that the book has helped you find language to express the anguish you feel about your family’s secrets.

***

You are still there at the rest stop, crunching sweetgum seedpods as you walk in circles. You remember how painful it could be, when you were a child, to step on one of the pods with bare feet, either by accident or after acceding to a dare. You and your brothers used to call them “monkey balls,” but you never thought to ask why.

You are still talking on the phone with your mother. You decide to break the silence and ask her about her father, but you do so through the character in the book you’ve translated. You tell her about the precipitating event, the moment in the book when the son attacks his mother with a kitchen knife. You ask her what caused your grandfather to be sent away.

She tells you that he threatened to cut your grandmother into pieces for turning off the water to the sink where he spent hours upon hours washing his hands.

Maybe the reason you never thought to ask before was because you knew that you could not handle the response. What did you accede to this time? All you know is that it hurts more than the monkey balls beneath your feet.

***

You find an anonymous character in the book you’re translating lying dead on a pile of trash. Then you see where your mother was sleeping before she was admitted to the hospital and it resembles yon pil fatra. You cannot forget this image.

***

You check your email one morning and there’s a kind book review in your inbox. You sob because the reviewer understands your work.

***

You’re at a translators’ conference in a city you have never been to before. You were charmed in the morning by the sight of an Anna’s hummingbird on the way to the morning sessions.

At lunch, you attend a reading where a translator expresses his grief through the words of another. He tells the room full of translators what it is like to have family members living and dying in a war zone. It is too much for you. You cannot hold your own grief, let alone this other person’s. You have to leave because your body cannot handle the strain of this much sadness.

***

Your friend leaves the session with you and the two of you walk somewhere to find something to eat. Along the way, your friend listens to you. You open your mouth and your aching heart pours out. You sob and your friend is there to catch you and your tears. You are not alone.

***

You’re still at the translators’ conference. And instead of attending the programming, you go to an elementary school talent show. The children remind you what it is like to enjoy what you do, no matter what it is. Their jubilation buoys you for the rest of your trip.

***

You translate five days of the week. You tell yourself this is the everyday practice that you need to sustain to finish the book on time.

You would normally translate today, but it is the day you’ve been dreading. The day when you have to translate the passage about the little girl’s mother and her blue corpse shimmering in the morning light. It is also your mother’s birthday, the second since she passed.

You do not translate today, but this does not make the day any easier to bear.

***

The coincidences are uncanny. This morning you received your part of the inheritance your grandmother left behind. This afternoon, you had to look up the language of heirship for the novel you’re translating.

Your grandmother, like the mother in the novel, could have been mistaken for somebody who had nothing, who came from nothing, who was nothing. These two women, real and fictional, grew up on small farms. They felt the hardship of tilling soil as women in a man’s world. They grew up in eras of extraction. Places where coal mines and sugarcane fields swallow people whole. Where silica dust perforates lungs and cane stalks lacerate limbs.

In the end, they spent their lives accumulating wealth that would eventually be passed on, when they passed on. Your task is to remind people of that fact, whether in reality or in fiction.

***

As the coincidences pile up, you continue gathering your notes. Your brother sends you a message. He asks, “How do you inherit more than you could make in a year and have it be the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”

You’re unsure how to respond to his outpouring of grief. You feel the exact same way.

***

You are translating another funeral scene. There is sadness, yes, but there is also merriment, storytelling, music, and a kinetic energy that leaves the mourners rapt by the wonderment of life and the soul’s transition from this realm to the next.

Your grandmother’s funeral was nothing like this. You wondered why everyone was so silent, how her brothers and sisters, your great-aunts and -uncles, could have made their way down the mountain to the city and not regaled everyone with tales of her life. A child behind you was wailing the whole time. Or was it you?

***

The first time you translated a funeral scene, a proper wake, the two brothers at the heart of the novel organized the whole affair. The one whose head was always caught in the clouds, or in a book, took care of the storytelling, while the other arranged the food and the venue. Everything went off without a hitch. A proper send-off.

For your mother’s funeral, you took care of the flowers and your brothers took care of the food. The three of you decided to let the preacher say his piece, and there was nothing peaceful about it.

You wish that you could go back and take care of the words, instead of the flowers.