In the undulating and refractive field of shifting arrivals and delayed returns, translation becomes a kind of chase after a shimmer that glints across the surface, flickers in the depths, and reshapes itself with every approach. Few tales capture this dynamic more hauntingly than the Ovidian myth of “Echo and Narcissus,” a story born of illusion, transformation, and the reflective surface of water. In her essay “In Praise of Echo,” Jhumpa Lahiri draws the myth into the realm of translation, casting Echo and Narcissus as twin figures in the translator’s divided self. Echo is the attentive listener-cum-translator, bound to the voices of others and condemned not merely to repeat but to restore meaning in another language. Meanwhile, Narcissus is the novice writer-translator entranced by his own reflection on the still surface of the text, mistaking illusion for essence and origin for originality. Translation, in this reading, becomes a liquid mirror in which both “an acoustic and visual reflection of a text constituted in other words” and its echo ripple into one another, inseparable and ever shifting.1

But where the myth of Echo and Narcissus ends in bitter separation and disappearance, a tender countercurrent unfolds from a classical Chinese tale. A young man finds a persimmon leaf drifting on a stream. Written on it is a poem in a woman’s hand. Though he has never seen her, he falls in love. This time, not with a face but with a trace carried by water. In response, he composes a poem to the same rhymes and releases it into the stream’s headwaters, entrusting the current to complete what he cannot. Years later, by imperial decree, a courtly concubine is released and married to him. When he finally tells her the story of the leaf, she weeps. For she was the one who had written the poem and had found him in return. Each had kept the other’s words without knowing to whom they belonged.2 The two verses, like an original and its translation, had travelled separately through time and water, only to meet again in mutual recognition. Here, translation, like the leaf, drifts forward on a stream of signs, carrying with it longing, delay, and sometimes unexpected arrival.3