Lost (and Found?) in Translation
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Tin House, 2024)
Reviewed by Sarah Linville
As one might expect from the title, Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga is a book that is challenging to interpret. It is rife with unreliable narration, cultural misunderstandings and barriers, and even drug-induced tangents that make it nearly impossible for the reader to determine what is real and what is not. And yet, despite the narrative’s inability to arrive at a definitive account of what did and did not happen, Xhoga poses intriguing questions about how cultural differences complicate perceptions of both reality and morality.
Misinterpretation is set primarily in present-day New York City. The story follows an unnamed first-person narrator who is a first-generation immigrant from Albania. Her age is never specified, but it seems she is somewhere in her 30s. She works as a translator, oscillating between translating boring product manuals and interpreting for the clients that her agency assigns her. The first client we meet is Alfred, a Kosovar immigrant who endured unimaginable torture in his home country before he escaped to the U.S. The narrator is hired to interpret Alfred’s therapy sessions. However, she struggles to find the boundary between her professional duties and the personal connection she feels to his story. The true nature of the trauma the narrator experienced is never fully revealed, nor are the specifics of Alfred’s experiences, but it is clear his stories resonate with the narrator, even causing her to experience similar nightmares. When he confesses his romantic feelings for her, even though he has a pregnant wife at home, her muddled response calls into question her own professional and personal integrity. It also highlights the intimacy that language builds, especially when paired with similar cultural backgrounds in a foreign context.
The connection between Alfred and the narrator is brought into relief through the characterization of the narrator’s husband, Billy. Billy is an American film professor who does not seem to understand much of his wife’s past. He also does not seem to understand much of her present. Over a weekend he plans to be out of town, the narrator invites another one of her former clients, the Kurdish poet Leyla, and a friend to spend the weekend with her, as Leyla is being stalked by the cousin of an ex-boyfriend and is hoping to throw him off her trail. However, Billy comes home early and is so put off that these women are staying in his apartment that he punches a hole in the wall. At first, it seems that Billy is a toxic, overbearing man who makes no attempt to empathize with his wife or her clients, but as the narrator’s credibility erodes, this interpretation becomes more questionable.
Despite her husband’s protests, the narrator continues to entangle her personal and professional lives. In response, Billy leaves for a while, first staying away for a few weeks before accepting a six-month artistic fellowship in Hungary, where his primary responsibility will be to “guard” a historic bridge. While he is gone, the narrator hatches a dangerous plan to stop Leyla’s stalker from following Leyla. As she makes more questionable decisions, her own interpretation of her life, her responsibilities, and her husband’s actions also becomes less and less reliable.
Fundamentally, Misinterpretation is about the narrator’s journey to understand her role in life amidst her quest to be understood. Billy’s background prevents him from fully understanding his wife’s experiences. Even when he meets up with the narrator in Albania later in the novel, he finally catches up with her when she is visiting a resort town in southern Albania rather than in her hometown of Tirana. Even if he had come to her home context to reconcile, he explores a very different country from the one the narrator and her parents grew up in. Albania was perhaps the most isolated communist dictatorship in the world in the second half of the twentieth century, known as “Europe’s North Korea,” and went through massive financial upheaval due to pyramid schemes while the narrator was growing up in the 1990s and 2000s. It is not Billy’s fault that his own childhood was so different from his wife’s, but he doesn’t seem to ask the right questions to bridge the cultural divide.
Despite their more similar backgrounds, the narrator’s translating clients also do little to understand the narrator or her past. Even as the narrator drops everything for Alfred when he calls and though she puts herself in dangerous situations to protect Leyla, they don’t make an effort to understand her or her needs. When she visits her agoraphobic mother at home in Tirana, it is clear that her home country can no longer understand her, either—she takes her mom to a hip new tapas bar for lunch, and her mom brings a piece of homemade boiled chicken with her “just in case.” It seems impossible for the narrator to blend her previous Albanian identity and her current New York translator identity into something that coheres.
Xhoga draws much of Misinterpretation’s conflict from her own experience as an Albanian immigrant to New York. In an interview with Electric Lit, Xhoga sheds light on some of the most pronounced cultural differences that lead to the narrator’s misunderstandings. For example, in Albania, it is much more common for parents to live with their adult children and their families— she says, “the idea of boundaries is much more pronounced in American culture.” This also helps explain the narrator’s compulsive behavior around helping her clients—she has fewer boundaries, in general. Xhoga comments on this difference through the thoughts of her narrator, too. When Leyla comes to stay with her after her husband has left on his research trip, the narrator contemplates what it’s like to help struggling people, thinking “An old friend of mine, who had once won a scholarship at a prestigious European university, would avoid her Albanian compatriots like the plague, especially the struggling ones. They’re sticky, she’d tell me” (125).
The most obvious way Xhoga explores these cultural differences is through the misinterpretations between the narrator and Billy. However, she also demonstrates them through multilingual writing. While she wrote most of the first draft of the novel in English, in the interview she reveals that during the editing process, she also rewrote certain passages in Albanian before translating them back to English. “Initially, I didn’t have a lot of the sentences that you see in Albanian. They were in English. My editor said, ‘Let’s have more sentences in Albanian,’ so I started having more sentences in Albanian, and it changed my perspective of the text, in a way, because then I started looking at other sentences in English and thinking, ‘What would they sound like if they were in Albanian?’ And then I started thinking, ‘What would this whole novel be like if it was written in Albanian?’”
Readers who don’t speak Albanian will have difficulty spotting which sentences were initially written in Albanian, but Xhoga also includes some translated Albanian expressions. Just before Billy leaves on his trip, for example, the narrator thinks “something about his face reminded me of an Albanian expression—Nje ftyr I ikte, nje ftyr I vinte—A face would leave and a face would come. He seemed uncertain about something” (105). This expression perhaps captures the confusion the narrator feels about Billy’s feelings in that moment, but something is definitely lost in translation, as the full meaning of that expression is never revealed. Through moments like this, Xhoga places the reader in Billy’s position: close to the narrator’s inner life, yet unable to fully comprehend it.
Through all these misunderstandings, the idea of who is right and who is wrong in a given situation becomes more difficult to ascertain. Does Billy truly have anger issues, or is he just frustrated that his wife keeps crossing his boundaries by being too intimately involved with other people? Is the narrator being empathetic toward immigrants and asylum seekers who truly need outlandish help to survive, or is she doing it for the sake of being understood or feeling needed? Does Leyla make the best choice for herself in the end, or is she signing up for a different sort of abuse? Despite these blurred lines, Xhoga’s point is not to promote the idea that there is no right or wrong way to live—instead, it’s to elucidate the “why” behind the misinterpretations that exist between people trying to do the right thing. In doing so, she somewhat ironically aims to create more cross-cultural understanding:
“I hope they find commonalities with their own lives, even if they’ve never heard of Albania, or they don’t know what is on the map. No matter what, I hope that they read it and they realize, ‘This person has such a different culture, and their background is so different from mine, but I feel like I can relate to them.’ …I mean, that’s why we read, right? So that we can realize that we have enough things in common with each other.”
Xhoga’s purposefully confusing narrative structure at times prevents her from fully achieving this goal—it is difficult to empathize with a character whose account of events can’t fully be trusted. However, these places of probable misinterpretation make the novel so interesting. In the end, Misinterpretation resists any singular moral takeaway, but it does offer space for reflection on what is necessary to bridge cultural divides in an increasingly globalized world.
Sarah Linville earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
