She Translated My Poems Into Her Language
I heard my own lines come home in sounds I couldn't read.
The first time I heard my own poem in Malayalam, I cried at a bus stop in front of eleven strangers. I know it was eleven because I counted them afterward, one by one, the way you count anything when you need to climb back into your own body.
Eight months before that bus stop, I had posted a poem called My Grandmother's Hands on a community wall for poets. It was two in the morning and posting a poem felt slightly less dramatic than texting an ex, so I chose the poem. It was about exactly what the title promised: my grandmother's hands, the turmeric stains that never fully washed out, the knuckles swollen like ginger root, the way she pressed dough flat with the heel of her palm as if she were forgiving it for something.
Most comments on poems are kind and forgettable. Nice imagery. This touched me. Then, three days later, a comment from someone named Devika: "This is my grandmother too. Different country, same hands. May I ask what yours cooked when she was angry?"
What a question. Mine cooked rice pudding when she was angry, badly, on purpose, so we would all know. I typed that. Devika replied that hers cleaned the fish herself when she was angry, and the whole house went quiet out of respect for the knife.
We messaged for weeks. She lived two hours away by train, taught chemistry to teenagers, wrote poems in Malayalam that she never showed anyone, and read poems in English the way some people read scripture, slowly and twice. When we finally met, it was at a cramped cafe near the railway station, two coffee cups between us on a table so small our elbows kept apologizing to each other. She was shorter than I expected and laughed louder than I expected, and within an hour she asked the question that changed the whole shape of my writing life.
"Can I translate your grandmother poem? Into Malayalam. Just for practice."
I said yes... the way you say yes to things you assume will never happen, the way you say we should do this again to someone at a party.
Three weeks later, a voice note arrived while I was waiting for the 42 bus. Fifty-eight seconds long.
No text before it, no text after it... just Devika's voice, low and careful, reading something in a language I could not understand a single word of.
Except... I could.
That is the part I still cannot explain properly. I did not know the words but I knew the poem the way you know a family member from the back, at a distance, in a crowd. I heard the line about the turmeric arrive because her voice dipped exactly where mine dips when I read it. I heard the dough being pressed flat. I heard the ending, the image of the hands going still in a hospital bed, because Devika's voice went almost to nothing, and the recording held four full seconds of silence before it ended, and she had chosen to leave that silence in.
My own lines had gone somewhere I could not follow and come back wearing different clothes, and they recognized me anyway.
That is when I cried in front of eleven strangers, and one of them, an aunty with three cloth shopping bags, patted my arm without asking a single question, which is its own kind of translation.
Translation is not carrying words across a border. It is proving the border was never really there.
I texted Devika something incoherent and grateful.
She replied with a single line: "There is something I should tell you."
Here is what she told me, over the phone that night, in a voice she kept steadying like a cyclist on gravel. Her mother had suffered a stroke the previous spring. The stroke took the left side of her body and, more cruelly, it took her English, the language she had learned at forty for her bank job and her daughters' report cards. English went dark like a wing of a house... Malayalam stayed lit.
So Devika had been going to the rehabilitation ward every evening and reading to her. Newspapers bored her mother. Prayers made her cry. But poems worked, and Devika had run out of poems she loved in Malayalam, so quietly, without telling anyone, she had started translating the English ones. Mine was the fourth.
"When I read yours," she said, "about the hands and the dough, my mother lifted her right hand. The good one. And she did this." Over the phone I could not see it, so she described it: her mother had pressed her palm flat against the blanket, the heel of the hand pushing down, once, twice... Kneading. The first purposeful thing that hand had done in weeks that was not gripping a physiotherapy ball.
"Your grandmother taught my mother's hand to remember," Devika said.
"I thought you should know your poem has a job now."
I have received two or three genuine compliments about my writing in my life. Everything else has been politeness. That sentence, your poem has a job now, is the only one I keep where I keep important documents.
After that, the translations became a rhythm. I would write, she would carry the poem over, her mother would receive it. Poems about family worked best, she reported, and poems about memory, because her mother would interrupt them. A line about a courtyard would surface a courtyard of her own, and she would fight her slow mouth to describe it, and the speech therapist said the fighting was the therapy.
My poems were not medicine. They were bait.
I have never been prouder of anything.
Devika started teaching me words in exchange. Not useful words. She refused to teach me useful words. She taught me kaikal, hands. She taught me the word for the specific sadness of a house after guests leave. She taught me a word she claims means the smell of rain on hot ground and I choose to believe her. People talk about friendship across languages as if it were a bridge you have to engineer. It is not. It is a door you find already open, and the only work is walking through it carrying something worth giving.
Last winter she convinced me to enter the grandmother poem into a monthly poetry contest, and I only agreed on the condition that the submission note credit her, because by then I no longer believed the poem was entirely mine. It did not win. Devika said her mother wants the judges' addresses, and that she is cooking rice pudding, badly, on purpose.
Her mother can say short sentences in English again now. Small ones, expensive ones, each word paid for in months. When I finally visited them in June, she held my hand at the door for a long moment, turned it over in her good hand like she was checking fruit at the market, and delivered the longest English sentence she had attempted all year.
"Same hands," she said... "Different country."
And I understood that I had been translated too.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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