Counterpoint

I am a translator. It’s how I make my living—and how I’ve made my way in the world. The second came before the first. Even as a child, my second language offered shelter and escape, helping me voice all I couldn’t say in my mother tongue—from a safe distance, in a borrowed identity.

To this day, I live between two languages. I don’t deny my native one — it's the language of the everyday, of existence itself. But there is also the foreign tongue, acquired through great effort, layer by careful layer. It still surprises me. It shows me things about itself, about me, about the world. It opens windows, my first language, intimate and pressed close to the ribcage, cannot unbolt.

I am a translator, and I’ve made my bilingual existence a currency. My linguistic toolbox is rented by the hour — sometimes by the syllable. My duality is broken down into commas, periods, dashes, and quotation marks.

As a professional, I am meant to mute the soundtrack that plays constantly in my mind. Become a clear channel for someone else’s thoughts. Yet sometimes, as I read the text I must translate, a quiet doubt arises: Is that how I would have said it? I silence it. Or try to. But sometimes, the voice in my head — oddly enough, in my foreign language — drowns out any external narrative.

She sits across from me, the author who has hired my services. She carries a title, a label that can't begin to contain her ambition. It’s a title I’ve never dared claim for myself, though I’ve always looked up to it.

Over the phone, she eagerly described her book—an anthology of anecdotes and worldly wisdom from her travels with her banker husband, interwoven with memories of her maternal grandfather, from a forgotten town in Transylvania on the eve of World War II.

She settles into my frayed living room armchair, posture upright. To her, I am merely a conduit — a bridge to her voice in another tongue. I am not meant to have a voice of my own. And yet, I need her no less than she needs me. This work is my livelihood. And, at times, my pride.

She places the manuscript on my desk, her hands manicured, her nails gleaming with wine-red polish. I read the opening paragraph. The text is bloated, overwrought, like the bangles clinking on her wrist. She shows not a hint of doubt — not in its quality, nor its necessity.

Perched on the edge of her seat, taut with anticipation, she can’t wait for me to finish reading.

“A one-of-a-kind combination,” she declares, like a marketing pitch rehearsed to perfection: “personal journeys, family roots, global insights.”

“And the highlight,” she adds, her ample chest nearly swelling out of her blouse, “authentic Yiddish pearls—from home.”

The foreign-language soundtrack in my head screams to hand her manuscript back. To tell her I’m not the one. Another translator, more seasoned than I, might do her greater justice. But my first language, the practical one, whispers otherwise. And it will not relent.

We agree on a fee. She is generous—more than most writers I’ve worked with—and unlike them, she can afford to be. She has one condition: she’ll pay whatever I ask, so long as I give her exclusivity and devote myself entirely to her manuscript.

She chatters excitedly about a literary agent in New York, a friend of her husband’s, whom they met at a war relief fundraiser. Since then, she says, he’s been emailing her regularly and is eager to read her book.

She talks about striking while the iron is hot — in exactly those words — and then turns to me: “How do you say that in English?”

I tell her.

She nods, impressed, as if I’d coined the phrase myself. Then she veers into a monologue about the importance of such a text and its contribution to combating rising antisemitism.

I try to listen, but the internal soundtrack drowns her out. My head throbs, my temples pulse. She offers me an advance—enough to allow full focus on her project—an offer I cannot refuse, not when rent is overdue and bills keep piling up, indifferent to the whims of employers and their porous timelines.

I nod, sign the dotted line beneath my printed name, and try to muffle the rising din in my mind. But the music is already swelling inside me.

Thankfully, she rises, extends her weighty hand to shake mine. The deal is sealed. Now all that’s left is to beg the soundtrack for mercy. Just long enough to finish. Just long enough to get paid.

At first, I manage. As always, I work in the quiet mornings on the small balcony of my apartment, nestled among potted plants I tend, laptop open, coffee at my feet. I cherish these hours, when the space is mine alone, and no one else claims the narrow strip of balcony on the second floor, at treetop height, overlooking the patchwork of city backyards.

My flatmate and I live in different time zones. Sometimes it feels as if we share a space but belong to separate shifts of life. She and her partner stay up deep into the night—talking, watching shows, cooking—emerging only in late morning, when my day is already in motion.

Some nights, I lie in bed, listening to their world: the sweet, cloying smoke curling under my door, their laughter rising and falling, interrupted only by the rhythmic creak of bed springs against our shared wall.

She calls me a nun. Tells anyone who’ll listen that I live alone, cloistered in my world, and that since she moved in, no man has entered my room. I don’t bother correcting her. I couldn’t explain it if I tried. My language of love speaks in the other tongue — the foreign one.

It is soft, lyrical, exalted.

Not like hers — coarse, sensual, local.

None of this bothers me, so long as I have a window of time and a sliver of morning light. On the balcony, with dappled light filtering through the leaves at eye level, it feels as though the world slows its pace. The shadows haven’t yet stretched across the opposite wall. The sun is still deciding whether to rise in earnest. Shadows haven’t yet lengthened across the neighboring wall. The sun still hesitates to burn. And I surrender to the contrapuntal dance in my mind.

I have work — and I take pride in it. My reputation wasn’t built in a day. I earned it through years of precision, attentiveness, rephrasing, and the endless search for the right cadence. But who knows how long I can keep doing this. The software tools are already here. Tireless. Unwavering. Soundless. They do what I do—faster. Perhaps even better.

My work inches forward in Sisyphean rhythm, each day pushing the boulder of meaning up the same slope. She calls every few days for updates. I feel distracted, like I’m shortchanging her.

At her request, I send a sample — a single page I’m working on. Each time, we fall into a futile argument over a minor word or bland expression, she insists on defending as if it were the pillar of her identity.

But she’s the client — she pays. And I, the conduit, comply. I tailor my powers of flattery to match the metrics of the machine tools she so admires, proudly aligning herself with the cutting edge of technological advancement.

Yet night after night, the soundtrack in my mind gains strength. No longer a murmur, no longer a distant beat at the edge of thought—but a full symphony demanding the spotlight. I lie in bed, body weary, eyelids heavy—but my mind bristles with thoughts not entirely my own. They arrive in the foreign language. Not my native one—the one in which I account for my life, negotiate words—but the second, the one that carved itself into me, until it began to dream my dreams.

The soundtrack whispers. Then it cries out:

You could write better than that.

This isn’t translation—it’s erasure.

Why bury yourself beneath her voice?

I toss and turn. Try to sleep. But the words leak out of me. I fight it. I must rest — I have a name, a reputation, an obligation, a contract I cannot afford to break. But the symphony crescendos.

At last, I give in. I step out onto the balcony under the cover of night, into the hush of the trees. My flatmate and her partner left hours ago. No telling when they’ll return.

I open my laptop. For a moment, the soundtrack pauses, listening. Waiting for me to speak. The screen lends its glow beside the generous light of the moon. I sit—and for the first time in so long, write my own words. In my voice.

I devote myself to the page as if falling into the arms of an old, patient lover.

The symphony in my mind—polyphonic—surges and spills across the screen. Beneath the moon’s soft flood, I can’t stop. The words pour out, and pour, until nearly dawn.

Morning breaks — sharp, unyielding, like a verdict.

My head is heavy. My eyelids fall of their own accord.

But my heart sings.

And then I remember.

The client.

The manuscript I swore to complete.

I hesitate.

Part of me still wants to believe I can carry on as before. Be the conduit again.

But the symphony still plays at full force.

At last, I open one of the tools she so admires. I paste in her original text. Click “Translate.” Watch as the lines appear—soundless, swift, effective.

She won’t know.

She won’t feel.

And perhaps—that’s exactly what she wanted all along.

I hover over the button.

Trying to weigh them side by side—my hard-won professional integrity, shaped in silence and care, against this newfound inner voice now trembling in my hands.

My thin, native, pragmatic voice warns: Don’t throw it all away for a fantasy. The odds are slim.

But fatigue drowns logic.

My fingers move of their own accord.

And I click “Send.”

My inner soundtrack falls silent—precisely at the moment of truth.

The translation sets out—precise, efficient, voiceless.

Maybe she won’t know. Won’t feel.

Maybe she’ll read it and smile, and think I preserved her spirit.

And maybe I, too, in some quiet, deafened way,

will never truly know what I lost there—

or what, perhaps, I found.