The Translator

Agnes had translated forty-one books without once missing a deadline, a record she regarded less as an achievement than as a form of moral hygiene. She worked in the mornings at a desk that faced a wall rather than a window, having long ago concluded that views were merely distractions with better publicity. By noon she had usually produced four pages; by evening she had usually crossed out one of them.

The novel on her desk that spring was the last its author would write. He was eighty-six and had said as much in interviews, with the cheerful finality of a man closing a shop. It was a quiet book about a widow selling the house she had lived in for fifty years, and Agnes had moved through it with the steady pleasure of someone walking a familiar route. Then, on the final page, she came to the word.

It was a short word, two syllables, and her dictionaries were unanimous only in their silence. The widow, packing up the kitchen, sits for a moment in the chair her husband always used, and the sentence that describes what she feels there turns on this one word. Context suggested the warmth that lingers in a seat after someone has risen from it. But the husband has been dead for a year, and the chair, as the author has taken pains to establish, stands beside a window that faces north.

She tried the obvious candidates first, the way one tries the keys already on one's ring. "Warmth" was too cozy and, given the north window, simply untrue. "Trace" belonged to detectives and "residue" to chemists; "echo" was a sound, and the word was not a sound. "Presence" was worse than nothing. It was what people said at funerals once they had run out of things to say, and it had been said to Agnes often enough, two winters earlier, to have lost whatever meaning it once possessed.

For a week she circled the word. She wrote it on index cards and propped them against the lamp; she rewrote the paragraph twenty ways, each more ingenious and more wrong than the last. She tried leaving the word in the original, in italics, where it sat on the page like a stone in a shoe. A footnote was out of the question. A footnote, she had always believed, was the translator's equivalent of explaining a joke: technically informative, and fatal to the thing explained. Her editor, who had been patient for longer than editors usually are, wrote to ask whether the last page was nearly done. Agnes replied that it was, which was the first lie she had told an editor in thirty years.

In the end she did something she had never done before: she wrote to the author. She chose her words with care, apologizing for the intrusion, explaining that she had consulted every dictionary she owned and two that she did not, and asking, as plainly as she could, what the word meant to him.

His reply came three weeks later in an envelope addressed by hand, and it contained a single card. "You will not find it in any dictionary," he had written. "It is not in our language either. I made it up the winter my wife died, because I needed it and nobody had thought to provide it. You have my permission to do the same."

Agnes read the card twice at her desk and once more in the hall, where her husband's coat still hung on the hook nearest the door. She had told friends that she kept it there out of laziness, and had very nearly come to believe it herself. Now she took it down and put it on. It was cold, of course; it had been cold for a long time. And standing there, with the sleeves too long for her and the collar smelling faintly of nothing at all, she understood that the word had never meant warmth. It meant reaching for the warmth and finding the cold instead, and going on reaching.

She returned to her desk without taking off the coat and typed a word that had not existed that morning. It was not beautiful. Her editor would query it, and some reviewer would no doubt call it an affectation. She left it exactly as it was, and that evening, for once, she crossed nothing out.