Translation Is the Second Draft You Did Not Write

My translator, a woman named Elham who has rendered three of my books into English, once sent me a line and asked, not whether it was accurate, but whether I still wanted to mean it. I had written the Persian original nine years earlier. I was no longer sure.

Writers talk about translation as a loss, a necessary damage done to an original that a good translator minimises and a bad one compounds. I want to argue something less comfortable: a translation is not a damaged copy of a finished poem, it is an actual second draft, written by someone else, of a decision the original writer already made and can no longer defend from memory. The translator does not just move the poem across a language. She reopens choices the poem's author believed were closed.

The custody question

Here is the question Elham's email forced me to answer, which I now call the custody question: when a translator finds a word in the original that the poem's author chose under conditions, emotional or political, that no longer apply, who owns the decision about what replaces it, the author who made the original choice or the author who exists now, reading the same word years later. This is not a hypothetical craft debate. It has an actual right answer for every single line, and the right answer is not always the same person.

The line Elham sent me used the Persian word for shame, an exact and specific shame, in a poem I wrote about leaving my mother behind at thirty one. Nine years later, raising the question of what English word should carry it, I found I no longer felt shame about that departure at all. I felt something closer to a settled grief, the shame having quietly converted, over nine years and one continent, into something with less blame attached to it. Elham's honest question was whether the English poem should preserve the original author's shame, historically accurate to who I was in that room, or serve the current author's settled grief, honest to who is actually approving this translation for publication. We chose the historical author. The English word we landed on, shamed, stayed close to the original, and I signed off on a feeling I do not currently have, because the poem belongs to the year it was written, not to the year it happens to be translated.

Why this differs from ordinary revision

An author revising their own old poem has full authority to update a feeling that has genuinely changed, because a poem in its original language is understood to be a living document its author can still touch. A translation complicates this because a third party, the translator, is now the one holding the pen during the moment the update would happen, and she cannot make that call alone, since she did not live the shame and has no standing to decide whether it should be preserved or updated on the author's behalf. Every translated line I have approved with Elham has secretly involved this custody question, whether we named it or not, and most translators and authors never surface it explicitly, which is why so many translated books read as though they were written by someone slightly younger or older than the person who actually signed the cover.

The obvious pushback

Critics of treating translation this way will argue that a translator's actual job is fidelity to the text as written, not counseling the author through a feeling audit nine years after the fact, and that inviting the author to revise emotional content mid translation blurs the line between translating and rewriting until the word loses meaning. I take the objection seriously, and for most lines in most of my books, fidelity alone settles the question without any custody conversation needed. The custody question only actually arises where the original word was doing emotional labour specific to a feeling that provably no longer exists in its author, which Elham can usually sense before I can, because she is reading the poem as closely as I once wrote it and I am reading it, by then, mostly as a stranger.

Elham has since told me the shame line is the one she gets asked about most, by readers who assume it describes a wound still open. It is not open. It was signed, closed, and approved for translation exactly as it stood the day I wrote it, by an author who no longer entirely recognises the man who felt it.