I had imagined a tiny miracle: my mother, sitting cross-legged on the charpai, the fan creaking above her, holding a stapled copy of the translated text in her hands, nodding at the lines about voice, agency, and the politics of location. I imagined her pausing after every paragraph, looking up at me, smiling, as if to say, “Yes, I know this. I have lived this.” 

That moment never arrived. 

Instead, the words fell flat. They sounded foreign, even in Hindi. The language didn’t sound foreign in the sense of ‘English is foreign in my village,’ but rather foreign in the sense of mistrust. The rhythm of the sentences didn’t suit her tongue. The cadences didn’t match her silences. I had taken someone else’s voice and tried to braid it into hers. And in the process, I rendered both unintelligible. I was trying to stitch a river. 

I wanted her to learn from them, from these women who wrote essays, theses, and polemics. Alcoff and Ahmed. Beauvoir and Butler. Those who theorized violence and identity and care. But I had not paused to think about how much she already knew, how many of those very ideas she had carried through stories, scoldings, and the knowledge folded into countless rotis and refusals. I thought I was being generous. 

I thought I was giving her the world. But she did not need it. She did not need me to tell her what she already knew in her bones. 

I, on the other hand, was intoxicated by the power of perception. I could see feminist language in English. I could decode its claims. I felt chosen, important. I thought my fluency would save us both. I wanted to save her, but I never could. Because she didn’t need saving. Not from me, not from the world. She had survived both. 

I still translated. Hoping that one day she’d see the work that I put in for what it was. An act of love. An act of revolution. But what was I doing? Was I translating her? Translating Linda Alcoff into her? Translating her out of herself? Was this love, or was it an act of epistemic theft? 

Love, too, is a form of translation. It is an approximation, a continuous reaching beyond oneself into a realm that often lies outside the boundaries of one’s own being. Like all translations, it attempts to carry meaning across difference. It is marked by gaps, distortions, and failures. Love, despite its best intentions, often falls short. Not because it is insincere, but because it is tasked with bridging something fluid. We still return to it, knowing that the porous, imperfect meaning is worth carrying.  

I was reading about untranslatability. Some theorists argue that there are words, phrases, and even entire modalities that simply cannot be carried across languages without loss. But perhaps it’s more than words that resist translation. What if lives are untranslatable? What if the distance between my mother and Linda Alcoff is not just lexical but ontological? What if they are not meant to meet? What if the error lies in my insistence that they must? 

And yet, the effort remains. It sits inside me like so many other things she has said. Fragments of womanhood that resist capture evade glossaries.  

There are days I look at my hands and feel like a fraud. My nails are long. A little dirt collects under them. I forget when it got there. I know I cut them last week. But somehow, I missed this. Was I that inattentive? Am I even qualified to translate when I cannot notice what is changing within and around me? 

What does it mean to be a translator of experience, of bodies, of breaths, of silences, when your own escapes you? I ask myself this often. My body straddles cultures, languages, and contradictions. English makes me feel seen. Hindi makes me feel held. My mother speaks a dialect that isn’t written down, only remembered. In some sense, she and I don’t even share the same language. Our words are related, but they aren’t siblings. They are cousins who only meet at weddings. 

Can I translate the body? A body like hers, scarred by childbirth, stagnance, and resilience. A body like mine, shaped by mobility, melancholy, and guilt. Can I translate her pain into prose? Can I carry her breath into mine? Is that even ethical? 

Translation is like Uno; you have to sometimes add two or four more cards in order to make sense of it. Or skip your turn entirely.  

I once tried to translate Muktibodh for a course. I failed spectacularly. Not because I didn’t know the words. But because I didn’t know how to carry the despair. The density. The existential fatigue that feels like a lump in the chest. I simply could not bring the weight across. How does one translate the feeling of drowning in one’s own breath? Of being buried alive in thought? How does one translate intergenerational grief when you’re still decoding it for yourself? I wanted to tell my professor that I tried, that I felt something, even if I couldn’t say it. But that’s not how academic grading works. 

Prose offers some leeway. It allows for detours, parentheticals, and digressions. But poetry is ruthless. It demands fidelity, not to the words, but to the emotion. The cadence. The pulse. Sometimes, the pulse you’re trying to carry isn’t yours. Sometimes it’s the pulse of your mother or your village. Or a friend who can’t name what she’s feeling but cries anyway. Sometimes you’re translating what was never said aloud. 

Maybe the work isn’t always to translate but to witness. To sit beside the person breathing and simply breathe with them. To exist in the pause between words and know that meaning lives there too. There is no glossary for the ache of recognition. No footnote for the moment you realize your mother has always known more than you gave her credit for. No dictionary can help you when you understand that she has been translating the world for you your entire life. Through food, through warnings, through stories, through silences. And now, you’re trying to do the same. But differently. With books. With borrowed words. 

Sometimes, I wonder if that’s what lineage means, not inheritance, but retranslation. We each take what we are given and try to make it make sense in the language that lets us survive. 

I still try to translate feminist texts. But I no longer do it for her. I do it with her in mind. Knowing she may never read them. Knowing she already knows. And sometimes, I write them in her voice. Not literally, but rhythmically. I borrow her pauses. Her tonalities. Her disbelief. I try to capture the breath between her sentences.

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Original artwork by Nahal Sheikh: nahalstudio.org