The Lazy Eye

We’d spent a long summer at the Rarh last year, scraping through several volumes of scribbled text, sketches, and transcripts. Sometimes, when the electricity went out, we hung out at the town’s only bus stop with snacks, looking at the colored lanterns on dinghy boats tied up at the riverfront. I had become somewhat of an ethnographic tourist over those few weeks in the field, routinely stopping at shacks that sold thin ribbons of sticky candy pulled into strange, delightful shapes of all colours, before our supervisor eventually sat us  down to write up our field notes and findings. This was also when, for the longest time, I would sit with a barely legible copy of Khusrau’s Khamsa, with translations pencilled in above the printed lines and margins of the text, grappling with the impossibility of arriving at a definitive version. Indeed, to do so would spell the end of translation and beget the translator’s first disappearance from the textual and the social. From  discour...