Orbit
Nadia retranslates the same poem every September.
Twelve versions now, each one overwriting the last in the margins of the book she'd been given in graduate school. The poem is fourteen lines — Farsi, pre-Revolution, minor enough that no other English translation exists. She is the only bridge between this poem and anyone who reads only English, and this knowledge flatters her in a way she's never examined.
The first year: "longing." The second: "ache." The third, she'd left the word untranslated — a small gap where the original showed through. She'd been proud of that. An opening, she'd thought. The honest choice.
Her advisor had seen it differently. "You're not translating the poem," he'd said, reading the third version against the first. "You're translating the distance between yourself and the poem. Every year the distance changes. You call that progress."
She'd written "luminous" in the margin and moved on.
By the seventh version she'd changed thirteen of the fourteen lines. The one she hadn't touched — the courtyard empties into blue — she'd decided was perfect. A solved line. The kind of certainty that stops generating questions.
Each September the poem showed her something she hadn't seen. A shade of irony in the second stanza she'd read through six times without hearing. A structural echo between the opening and closing lines. A repeated sibilance that made the sixth line hiss in a way English couldn't reproduce without sounding like a mistake.
The discoveries were real. She could point to them. Here: the verb form that implies ongoing action in a context of completion. She'd wrestled with it for weeks, tried four candidate lines before finding one that held both meanings without collapsing either.
Her colleague Tomas, who translated from Spanish and claimed no knowledge of Farsi, looked at all twelve versions once and said something she couldn't stop hearing.
"They're not getting closer to the poem, Nadia. They're getting closer to you."
She'd laughed. Said something about all translation being autobiography. Quoted someone she couldn't remember.
But afterward she'd laid the versions out, first to twelfth, trying to see what Tomas had seen. The words were all different. The rhythms shifted. The line breaks moved. From inside any single version, the choices felt inevitable — the only possible translation of that line, that image, that sound.
From the outside, looking across all twelve: orbit.
Not approach. Not refinement. Each version circled from a slightly different angle, each angle producing its own inevitabilities. The poem held still at the center. The translator moved.
She couldn't tell whether Tomas was right. That was the problem's actual shape. Each version felt like the one that finally got it — the satisfaction of a solved line, the sudden visibility of something that had been there all along. If circling felt like closing in, what would arrival actually feel like? She had no instrument that could distinguish them. The instrument was the thing in motion.
That September she opened the book and found that the courtyard empties into blue was wrong. Had always been wrong. The word she'd rendered as "courtyard" carried a connotation she'd missed for twelve years — not an enclosed space but a threshold, neither inside nor outside. The line wasn't about emptying. It was about standing in the opening.
She changed it. The discovery was real. She could feel it — the click of a word finding its socket, the poem briefly visible in a light she hadn't seen it in before.
She could not tell whether she had moved or was only orbiting at a wider radius. The click felt the same either way. That was what made it work. That was what made it impossible.