English text
The commission sounded straightforward: translate six recorded recollections for a neighbourhood exhibition.
By the third recording, Leila had begun to distrust her own fluency.
The speaker repeatedly abandoned a sentence just before naming the person at its centre.
In polished English, those hesitations became awkward interruptions that an editor would naturally remove.
Yet removing them would imply a willingness to speak that the recording did not contain.
Leila marked the unfinished passages and requested a conversation with the speaker.
The curator worried that another interview might unsettle an arrangement already approved in principle.
Nevertheless, he agreed that approval of a project did not necessarily settle every detail of its presentation.
The speaker listened to the proposed translation with her hands folded beneath the table.
It was accurate, she said, except that it made her sound certain.
She had intended the gaps to remain gaps, not invitations for somebody else to complete her account.
Together they developed a version that retained the pauses without dramatising them.
Leila resisted the temptation to explain every absence in a footnote.
The exhibition opened with fewer words than the curator had anticipated.
Several visitors lingered over the unfinished sentences rather than passing quickly to the next photograph.
One asked whether a technical fault had damaged the recording.
Leila explained that the silence had arrived intact.
For once, she regarded what she had not translated as part of the work.