MargenI was hired to translate a set of tablets in a language dead for four thousand years. No one had spoken it since before Rome. I worked alone, at night, with gloves and a magnifying glass, one line a day.
They were administrative texts: harvests, debts, lists of grain. The usual. Until tablet fourteen.
«To the one reading: we know you are there.»
I put it down to some ritual formula. I went on. Fifteen corrected my work: «The word you translated yesterday as 'harvest' means 'wait'.» Sixteen was shorter: «We are running out of clay. Answer.»
That night, laughing at myself, I wrote on a slip of paper: «Who are you?», and left it on the tablets before switching off the light.
In the morning the paper lay untouched. What a relief, how ridiculous I felt.
Until I reached tablet seventeen, catalogued a century ago, photographed in 1923, exhibited in three museums.
«We are the translators —it said—. We too believed we were translating.»