Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation: A Guide to the Intimacy of Language and Translation

Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga. 304 pages. Tin House, 2024. $17.95

Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel, Misinterpretation, follows an unnamed Albanian woman adrift in present-day New York City, a translator and interpreter plagued by an unshakable feeling of alienation. The most likely source, we soon realize, is her acute susceptibility to the pain of others, a quality conferred by her disposition but intensified by her job. Her American husband, Billy, a film professor at NYU, advises her to switch temporarily from interpretation to translation, a less strenuous alternative in his eyes: “He believed that the quiet company of dictionaries would be better for my mental health.” And for a while, she does—focusing on easier material, like fridge manuals. It’s an unanticipated request by Alfred, a Kosovar Albanian torture survivor, that pulls her back into interpreting.

The marital discord between Billy and the protagonist-narrator—people with similarly kind, even-keeled temperaments—announces itself at once. A dream of Billy’s illustrates the rift well—they are together on a boat, yet Billy’s eyes are fixed ahead to the shore, while hers look back into the distance. When the narrator informs Billy that she’s offered up a room in their apartment to two down-and-out friends—one a new immigrant, a Kurdish poet who believes she is being stalked by the relative of an abusive ex-husband—Billy replies curtly: “You’ve fallen into a quicksand. . . . I can’t pull you out.”

The protagonist, who has the tragic flaw of catering to the needs of those around her at the expense of her own stability, is unusually attuned not only to words and language, but also to others’ feelings and emotional worlds. This impressionistic novel clues us into the wobbly tension between self-possession and outward-oriented compassion, in a subtle way that leaves us unsettled and anticipating the worst. Its strength lies in the conjuring of an aura of somberness, dejectedness, and listlessness, both with respect to the futility of relationships and, more markedly, the untranslatability of pain. As Xhoga herself said in an interview with ALL ARTS: “Emotional absence while in close physical proximity clearly holds some fascination for me.”

Misinterpretation lays bare the viscerality and muscle of language and words, their propensity to fly off the page, or off the lips, and act on our world. At one point, the narrator confesses: “Sometimes words affected me physically, causing as much nausea as motion sickness.” Elsewhere, she attends a reading where Leyla, the woman she has invited into her home, recites poetry from the mic: “The Kurdish woman’s voice was making me lightheaded. She talked of ugly and repulsive things in such a gentle, almost hypnotic manner. Feeling dizzy, I had to lean back against the bar.” An incongruency between subject and tone throws the narrator off-kilter and renders her unwell.

Surprisingly, the reader learns very little about the torture Alfred faced. Instead, we see its aftershocks, the problems it has left in its wake, the traces that remain on his psyche. In exchanges between Alfred and the narrator and in therapy sessions that she sits in on as his interpreter, torture is only obliquely referenced. We are to draw our own conclusions yet again. In describing the relationship between language and physical trauma, essayist Elaine Scarry writes in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.” Taken further, pain is then untranslatable, untransmittable, un-sharable due to its resistance to language. Scarry goes on to say that the success of a physician’s work “will often depend on the acuity with which he or she can hear the fragmentary language of pain, to coax it into clarity, and interpret it.”

In the difficult circumstances of the fictional interpreter, asked to mediate a therapy session as a mere technician (per the requirements of the clinical setting), the narrator butts up against a countervailing expectation—to make meaning in the target language—which gives her pause as she, for instance, struggles to come up with the equivalent of “to feel trapped.” For her own part, she errs on the side of making meaning anew, not intentionally, but due to a wandering mind. She resorts to filling in gaps with her own experiences and points of reference (a means of communing with her subject), and it’s there that she treads into dangerous territory, both as interpreter and translator. In the middle of Alfred’s recounting—as his story comes out in dribbles, fragmentary yet penetrating—the interpreter becomes aware of a risk of identification, the pitfalls of which she learned in her training session. (If the client’s trauma mirrors the interpreter’s, their work together should be terminated.) She questions whether she has inserted herself, violating the limits of her station and role, by asking a question that she’s not entirely sure the psychiatrist, Zinovia, asked. Zinovia’s later disappointment seems to imply that the interpreter has, indeed, overstepped—but it’s unclear exactly how.

Translation (or its twin function, interpretation) breeds a certain intimacy between Alfred and the narrator. Alfred feels immediately recognizable to her, though he’s wholly inaccessible and unreadable to others in his adopted country. She observes him closely, parsing his appearance, quirks, and slight movements, and feels drawn to him: “His most remarkable feature was his eyes, I decided, and that hint of kindness they left behind. It was easy to worry about Alfred once one had made eye contact with him.” Xhoga has a keen awareness of the deep observation and close reading that translation requires. Translation demands that the translator/interpreter penetrate beyond mere appearances—beyond the words. This depth fosters an uncanny closeness. The narrator observes, “There was, at times, an unnatural intimacy that developed between myself and some of the people I interpreted for.” The receptionist at the dentist office goes so far as to mistake the protagonist and Alfred for a married couple, and the session with the psychiatrist becomes particularly intimate as the protagonist frets over having potentially over-translated, having offered her own reading of Alfred’s testimonial. They trust each other intuitively, without having to earn that trust.

In the first therapy session, Zinovia asks Alfred how often he speaks to his mother. A moment from the narrator’s past appears in her mind: “I turned toward Alfred, awaiting his response, but I only saw my own mother, sitting on her bed, the inflatable cuff of her blood pressure monitor around her arm. She was dressed in her best clothes, a black silk blouse and skirt I had bought for her.” This memory establishes a sneaking parallel between the protagonist and Alfred: their mothers share the affliction of agoraphobia. Underneath the signifier-in-common are shared traumas, the instinctive tug between the two now more intelligible. But the novel stops short of delving too deeply into their enigmatic connection. It’s never expounded on or fleshed out. Instead, the author suggests a concrete latent parallel: twinned world-historical experiences—in Alfred’s case, the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the war that ensued, and in the protagonist’s case, an upbringing in communist Albania, where the terror of dictatorship put individuals and interpersonal relationships in constant peril.

While English remains beyond Alfred’s reach, he eventually resolves to write his story, to order his traumatic experiences into a narrative. He wants his interpreter to be its first reader, though she doesn’t seem eager to take on this mantle—another commentary on the incommunicability of pain.

Misinterpretation, a misreading of others’ intentions, motives, and even circumstances, anchors Misinterpretation. After an out-of-character outburst by her husband, the narrator is concerned he’ll be misunderstood, taken for someone he isn’t: “I texted Leyla, explaining that my husband’s behavior wasn’t typical. I wanted her to understand that Billy wasn’t like her ex. Maybe I also wanted to remind myself of that. He was not and would never be a violent man. He wasn’t rude. He wasn’t mean. He had helped someone who had stayed with us in the past find employment. He even bought catch-and-release mousetraps and gave them to the neighbors.”

This justification is her attempt to make sense of incongruencies. How can one square Billy’s brazenness with his gentleness? By denying that the incongruency exists? Ironing it out? Navigating around it? The impulse to manage others’ perceptions, less from a need to control than from a deep understanding and intimacy, wins out. If only in that isolated instance, she asserts that no one knew her partner better than her—and more important, that the person she knows remains unchanged.

The novel, as the title Misinterpretation suggests, comprises a chain of such quandaries tied to language and relationships. There are the ways we misread cues and communication, but also the ways we misinterpret people themselves—composite beings who emote through signs and signifiers: gestures, tones, sounds, words, expressions. A deeper meaning inheres in the most inconsequential-seeming moments. “Were all aspects of physical interaction classifiable? A handshake could be defiant, reverent, seductive. Even a good morning had shades of meaning. The average human ear could distinguish over a thousand differences in tone. A person had only to traipse through Manhattan for half an hour to experience the aggressivity gradient of an excuse me.” The novel attends to these unspoken nuances of daily communication. And it presents myriad occasions of flawed meaning-making about broader cultural distinctions too—the limits that define a particular community’s values and characteristics. The characters’ efforts to close the chasms between American and Albanian culture, for the latter to be properly read and understood—or in today’s vernacular, to be appropriately seen—come up short, sometimes comically.

Albanian-ness appears in the slightest gestures—one of which Billy has aptly dubbed a “shrugging of the mouth”—and in oft-repeated sayings. About the saying “Fates are written,” the narrator explains: “Albanians usually offered it to an anxious person for comfort, as a reminder that the cogs of some future event had been spinning since the beginning of time.” During a seemingly trivial conversation with Billy, she sees his shoulders droop and his expression reminds her of the common Albanian idiom “A face would leave and a face would come.” She uses it to describe something she senses beneath the surface of their exchange: an unspoken ambivalence or uncertainty. In that moment, the abundant ambiguities of quotidian interaction are magnified and laid bare, all of the potential instances of misinterpretation suddenly visible: “I took a step toward him, but he didn’t even notice. I had the impression that something else was being said but I wasn’t hearing it.”

Xhoga is particularly skilled at the art of narration—knowing what to divulge and what to leave hidden. We brace for the terrible to occur. Instead, two people somehow recalibrate and find a rhythm that was mysteriously wrested from them when Alfred arrived in their lives. I was left wanting to know more, to come away from the book with an unequivocal understanding of what caused the rift between the narrator and her husband. But this novel is never unequivocal—it always finds several languages being used at once—and my question is, more often than not, as unanswerable in art as in life.