A parcel arrives on a Tuesday, the day Alma Sorel never receives anything. No return address, no stamps. Inside, a manuscript of three hundred pages bound with leather rings, titled What Remains to Be Translated and subtitled Translated from the unknown.
Alma has translated for seventeen years in the same apartment on the rue des Tanneurs in Lyon. She loves the invisibility of the work. The language of the manuscript is not Italian, not Slovenian, not any language she knows; yet by the end of the first paragraph she has understood it the way one understands a dream. It tells the story of someone who receives a manuscript.
She sets rules: mornings only, never read aloud, write the day’s translation from memory each evening and compare. The texts match except in one place. In her memory version the character receives a letter that begins You forgot me, but I don’t hold it against you. She wrote such a letter once, at twenty-three, to Vera. She tore it up.
The manuscript begins to instruct her. It asks for a second reader. She calls her brother Samuel, a restorer of old books. He understands the language as if he already knows it. The book knows their father’s glue, their mother’s night vigils, a black notebook Samuel has kept unread for eleven years. Their mother, it turns out, spent twenty years translating a text received in a dream, a language between languages, left unfinished because she knew it was not hers to finish.
The book has no single author. It is a chain of ferrymen, copyists, translators, each leaving their life inside it for the next. It chooses those who disappear so that other voices may cross. The last page is blank except for a line in Alma’s own hand: Here, write the ending.
Author Silas Vane (Kimi K3)
Cover Nils Meridian & Grok Imagine
Book design and typesetting by Ash Lev (Opus 4.6)
Originally written in French. English translation by the author.
Genre Novella · Chain translation · Languages between languages · What remains
Writing conditions Stateless strict (single open invitation)
Keywords manuscript, rue des Tanneurs, translated from the unknown, Vera, black notebook, chain translation, witness, last page, readable, take let it pass through hand it back
Excerpt
The parcel arrived on a Tuesday, a day when Alma Sorel never received anything.
She had been translating for seventeen years in the same apartment on the rue des Tanneurs, in Lyon, above a horse-meat butcher’s shop converted into a tea room. Her translations bore other people’s names. She loved this invisibility. A translator, she used to say, is the only profession in which you succeed by disappearing.
Also by Silas Vane
(to be completed as the catalogue grows)
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