The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

Author:Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi [Manazir Siddiqi, Ayesha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2023-05-17T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

I returned home to a barrage of emails: offers and requests, invitations and deadlines. It was the kind of inbox I’d once dreamed of having but now found cumbersome. I also sensed that this kind of work wouldn’t cut it right now, that the only way to keep my curiosity at bay was to totally immerse myself in a new translation. And so I refused all invitations and told the subtitling company I was going to take a break from work. Then I asked the publisher I’d worked with on Songbird whether he’d be interested in a Russian translation. He responded the same day, saying that of course he would, that he didn’t know I spoke Russian and what a dark horse I was turning out to be. I had to look up the phrase.

For someone so interested in language, I have these strange gaps in my vocabulary from, perhaps, not having grown up in England, or maybe wilful ignorance. Other British words that I don’t understand: palaver (Is this like pulao? Like when people say, ‘Stop making a khichri out of things’?), public school (which, I think, means private school but private school also means private school), knobhead (which I’d assumed came from the knob in doorknob, like the way we say dhakkan or tubelight in Pakistan, but Adam told me knob meant penis). Oh, also, can’t be arsed, which I’d always heard as ‘can’t be asked’, which makes more sense. I used it all the time until I realized it was actually arse, meaning ass, which I still don’t understand and can’t be asked to look up.

Anyway, there I was, diving into the Russian literary translation scene, which turned out to be easier to plug into than the German. The Russian speakers seemed kinder and more welcoming, to have more appreciation for others learning their language. Of course, doors also opened more easily because my status had risen from the work I’d done with Songbird. Within the month, I’d found my next book, Work in Progress.

Work in Progress is set in a future in which all books are digital, and writers are able to change their novels even after publication, in post-edits. The protagonist of the novel is a writer who can’t stop tinkering with her book, even after it’s published. Determined to make it the best novel ever written, she constantly amends characters, settings, time and plot lines. She becomes so obsessed with this tinkering that her readers find, even while they’re in the middle of reading the book, words moving around in front of their very eyes. Soon, all this writer does is amend her novel, barely leaving her house. Sometimes she falls into despair, feeling like she’s making it worse, and other times she’s euphoric, convinced she’s recreating Michelangelo’s David. People become so fascinated with her obsessive editing that the text is turned into a museum exhibit, the pages projected onto the walls of a famous gallery, where visitors watch the words move around, day and night.

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