ACT Reading — Literary Narrative — Drill 2

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the novel The Interpreter's Garden by Kwame Asante-Boateng (©2021). My uncle Felix did not believe in wasting words. In thirty years of Sunday dinners, I had heard him deliver exactly three opinions: that rice cooked in broth was superior to rice cooked in water, that professional basketball had declined since the mid-nineties, and that a man who apologized too easily could not be trusted. Beyond these, he offered silence, and the silence had weight. He had been an interpreter for the United Nations for twenty-two years, working in Geneva, Nairobi, and finally New York, where he settled in a third-floor apartment that smelled of cedar and old paper. His job was to render one language faithfully into another—not to translate word for word, he had explained to me once, but to carry meaning across. The distinction had seemed trivial when I was twelve. By thirty, I understood it was the whole problem. When I came to stay with him after my divorce, he said nothing about it. He made up the spare bedroom, cooked jollof rice, and passed me the remote control. In the evenings we watched the news together, and he would occasionally gesture at the television when a politician spoke—a small, dismissive movement of his hand, as if brushing away smoke. I understood this to mean that something was being lost in translation, that the words being spoken and the meaning underneath them had parted company. I stayed six weeks. In that time, Uncle Felix told me, unbidden, only one new thing: that the hardest part of his work was not the languages themselves but the pauses. Every speaker, he said, paused differently. Some pauses meant thinking. Some meant grief. Some meant that the speaker knew what came next and was gathering the courage to say it. The interpreter's job was to know which kind of pause it was and to hold that space faithfully rather than rushing to fill it. I thought about this for a long time after I returned to my own apartment. I was not sure whether he had been talking about interpreting at all.